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Fran Lock<\/strong> exposes the hypocrisy, classism and elitism in contemporary liberal attempts to edit, erode and police working-class participation in the arts, and she calls for the radical, systematic democratisation of culture.<\/em><\/p>\n Here she goes again!<\/strong><\/p>\n Over the last few months I have been asked to contribute to or participate in four separate projects exploring working-class creativity and voice. Being the Millwall FC of the London poetry circuit (no one likes me, no one likes me, no one likes me, I don\u2019t care) it\u2019s a rare pleasure to be taking part in anything, but these<\/em> projects are exciting in very particular and important ways, in that they are conceived and driven by<\/em> working-class people, and that they extend the possibility of an expanded and polyvocal concept of community. This is timely. And it matters to me enormously on a personal as well as a political level. It should matter to you too.<\/p>\n It\u2019s timely, and it matters because the old rhetorics of representation and cultural inclusivity have often led to a selectively edited picture of working-class identity in literature and the arts; a situation in which one or two \u2013 usually white, usually old, usually male \u2013 voices become icons and ambassadors for a complex network of cultures and experiences. To give a recent example close to my heart: it didn\u2019t matter shit one to me that Simon Armitage became Oxford Chair of Poetry. Nothing against Simon Armitage, as a poet or a person; he\u2019d more than earned his right to be there as far as I\u2019m concerned. What is troubling about his appointment is the way in which it has been uncritically trumpeted as a triumph of working-class representation. And it\u2019s not, it\u2019s really not. A post-war northern male version of working-classness is one of the few acceptable faces of working-class identity permitted to proliferate across mainstream media platforms. This is deliberate: the poetry\u2019s distance from the material realities it describes presupposes and encodes a nostalgia, a looking back that defuses potential threat (social or poetic), softens the language of experience, and makes safe what might otherwise be challenging to the cultural status-quo.<\/p>\n Don’t mention the word class!<\/strong><\/p>\n This creates a dangerous situation, and here I think about something that the trade union leader and activist Bob Crow once said in response to a shitty tabloid heckle about how his taking a holiday in France was somehow antithetical to his left-wing politics and his working-class \u201ccredentials\u201d. What do you want? Crow asked, for me to spend my holidays crouched under a bridge reading Das Kapital? This makes us laugh, but it\u2019s also telling about the bind in which working-class cultural creators continually find ourselves: expected to conform to and to constantly perform a very narrow, very specific version of working-class identity. Power elites pick their icons and ambassadors with care, using them as standards against which to weigh, measure and validate our <\/em>authenticity. We are expected to relentlessly enact somebody else\u2019s idea of what we should be. And if we\u2019re not being and doing that, then we are found to be \u201cinauthentic\u201d, we are dismissed, and our exclusion from any meaningful cultural conversation about class is effectively engineered.<\/p>\n This<\/em> matters, because the people traditionally holding the purse strings, controlling the presses; the people responsible for funding us and publishing us, are the same power elites who decide what constitutes a valid working-class voice, and an acceptable working-class identity. Arts Council England, for example, has nothing to gain from supporting people and projects who challenge or threaten their traditional business model, and most major publishers are wary of a working-class poetics that openly and explicitly acknowledges the politics of its own oppression. To have your work \u201cout there\u201d in any meaningful sense, to secure the invaluable financial assistance by which a creative project lives or dies, is to accept that your work, and that you<\/em>, as a person, will be mediated, filtered and enmeshed, by and in the machinery of a grossly unequal hierarchy. By this method we are compromised. We tailor and shape our voices and ourselves to fit their image of us, and our working-classness is depoliticised and de-fanged through an act of caricature. By this mechanism is the triumph of working-class representation transformed into the tool by which working-class participation in the arts is edited, eroded and policed.<\/p>\n When I hear arts and poetry organisations talking about the importance of \u201caccessibility\u201d, and of writing in \u201cthe language of the people\u201d it drives me absolutely bat-shit. Firstly, because who says \u201cthe people\u201d shouldn\u2019t find poetic difficulty stimulating and inspiring? And secondly because my poetry is<\/em> perfectly fucking accessible; it\u2019s the way in which education circumscribes and abbreviates working-class imagination that\u2019s at fault, the way poetry is taught in schools, hand in hand with a hidden curriculum that tells kids like me this is not for you. <\/em><\/p>\n The onus shouldn\u2019t be on the poet to limit their field of expression to cater to the imagined ignorance of people who were never given the opportunity to understand or enjoy poetry in the first place, particularly not when the poet herself is from those same social margins. The pressure should be on governments, funding bodies, and on the same organisations making these asinine pronouncements, to implement real, radical systemic <\/em>change to the way resources are allocated, to the way <\/em>poetry is taught, to the provision of not merely equal but fair<\/em> access to creative cultural participation.<\/p>\n Co-opt their language before they win the argument!<\/strong><\/p>\n When I hear organisations and publications bigging up the \u201caccessibility\u201d of a particular artist, text or movement like that\u2019s the be-all and end-all of existence, what I<\/em> hear is the desperate attempt of an out-dated and culpable power elite to absolve itself of responsibility for the grinding inequality and misrepresentation that faces working-class people as<\/em> a class within the arts and literature. What leaves a truly special<\/em> cat-shit taste in the mouth is when the language of radicalism is used to prop up the status-quo, usually at the expense of the communities and movements whose fearless campaigning and artistic activism generated this language. What is worse is when they use the deployment of socially conscious buzzwords as a way of silencing criticism.<\/p>\n For a prime-rib example of the former we need look no further that ACE\u2019s recent publication of the mildly nauseating \u201cCultural Democracy in Practice\u201d<\/a>, which appropriates and misapplies the language and concepts of the Movement for Cultural Democracy<\/a> without ever once acknowledging the relationship of cultural value to the exercise of power and authority.<\/p>\n ACE’s vision of Cultural Democracy in Practice<\/em><\/p>\n Despite Cultural Democracy\u2019s absolute embeddedness in ideas of class struggle, ACE\u2019s document ignores class altogether and minimises the relevance of race, gender or age to cultural participation. It has been suggested that ACE\u2019s paper is more about shoring itself up against probing questions surrounding equity, distribution of power, and the redistribution of funds, than it is about challenging or changing these things. In other words, ACE has co-opted community engagement in order to perpetuate the economic and cultural status quo.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a wonderfully perverse bit of manoeuvring here, and it\u2019s typical of the systems inside of which art and literature are expected to operate. An organisation \u2013 in this case ACE \u2013 pays vocal and public lip-service to the idea of \u201ccultural democracy\u201d or \u201csocial inclusivity\u201d, or any the hell else other thing, without ever acknowledging or altering the inherent inequality at the heart of its deep structures. Rather, the language <\/em>of radicalism and social justice is cynically exploited to legitimate that organisation\u2019s attitudes and behaviours, and any criticism of the way they interpret or deploy this language becomes a de facto criticism of the things for which those words and phrases stand. An organisation that wants to present itself as progressive, equal and inclusive, can then<\/em> wheel out one of its safe icon-ambassadors as a kind of human-shield: look, we can\u2019t be institutionally racist, sexist, or classist because here is a black, female working-class spokesperson, and if you criticise us, you criticise that person, and if you criticise that person it is you<\/em> who is racist, sexist, and classist.<\/p>\n Pretty sneaky. Sticking with poetry and class it\u2019s easy to see how figures like Armitage function like the One Black Friend of the idiot who just made that unspeakably racist joke: his mere presence categorically proves<\/em> there is no problem with systemic classism in the arts, and that absolutely no one has to take any responsibility for the shit they say or the things they do.<\/p>\n But there are so many<\/em> difficulties inherent in bringing any<\/em> kind of systemic critique to bear upon either the arts in general or the \u201cPoetry Community\u201d in particular. It\u2019s a small community, after all. Insular, pretty incestuous even, and the exercise of applying analysis has a way of making waves few at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder can afford. Dissent is neutralised by creating dependence (the elites run everything from major presses, to courses, to competitions) and ensuring complicity (we need to play nice to get our work out there, to keep our heads above water), which ultimately compromises our credibility as critics.<\/p>\n Either that, or the act of criticism in invalidated via the expedient route of dismissing the individual critic. There\u2019s an awful Catch-22 here which goes something like this: if you are un- or under-published, if you have little by way of formal education, then you forfeit your right to be taken seriously and your criticism amounts to nothing. However, if you are<\/em> published, and you are <\/em>educated, then you have no right<\/em> to complain, your criticism is so much empty histrionics \u2013 worse, you are biting the hand that has so consistently fed you.<\/p>\n We need more acceptable faces of feminism!<\/strong><\/p>\n We see evidence of this tactic in the media\u2019s treatment of \u201cinstapoet\u201d Rupi Kaur, and the serial twitterstorms and social media fallout that followed her publication by Simon & Schuster late last year. Because Kaur was continuously touted and positioned as the \u201cvoice\u201d of young women of colour, her work single-handedly credited with making poetry \u201caccessible\u201d and exciting again, removing it from the \u201civory towers of academia\u201d and giving it back to a hungry general populace, to criticise Kaur\u2019s poetry was to be racist, misogynist, or some kind of grotesque elitist snob. But it requires only the bare minimum of analytical effort to unpick this tangled tapestry of bullshit. Who, after all, was doing all this touting and positioning? Kaur\u2019s agent, maybe? An elitist mainstream media? Her publisher? Look closer and Kaur\u2019s publication and subsequent rise to stratospheric poetry-stardom emerges as a manipulative marketing exercise.<\/p>\n To acknowledge that doesn\u2019t make a person a snob, or a racist, or a fucking misogynist. It makes a person somebody who cares deeply that marginalised women and girls have better representatives and poetic role-models than Kaur and her pallid, directionless pap. True, her subjects are vital, necessary and engaging, but that doesn\u2019t make her poetry good. If we don\u2019t demand rigour and richness of ourselves or our so-called \u201crepresentatives\u201d, we impoverish ourselves as cultural creators, we promote a dangerous underestimation of ourselves as artists. We have to ask ourselves why Kaur is picked up and promoted at the expense of other, better young women writers of colour, of which there are so, so, so many. Go to Rap Party<\/a>, or to one of Out-Spoken Press\u2019 live nights<\/a>; take a casual scroll through the archives of Peter Raynard\u2019s Proletarian Poetry<\/a>, read Arshi, Mahfouz, Shire, Osman, Minamore, Lola, Allen-Miller, Miguel, Sur. And understand that what Kaur represents is the co-opted and compromised \u201cacceptable face\u201d of feminism, a commodified, consumer-friendly feminism with the edges rounded off, a feminism that nods vaguely in the general direction of all that besets us without ever offering a meaningful challenge to or analysis of those forces.<\/p>\n Typing the above has made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I understand the importance of sisterhood and solidarity, and I don\u2019t particularly enjoy trashing other people\u2019s work. But I\u2019ve been wondering lately if a desire to be \u201cnice\u201d or \u201csupportive\u201d isn\u2019t killing the necessary work of criticism. Should the fact that there are so few working-class women poets, and even fewer working-class women poets of colour mean that I\u2019m bound to support even those writers whose poetry is hackneyed, misguided or unhelpful? This isn\u2019t a rhetorical question, it\u2019s a genuine and pressing one. And I understand that art is subjective, and that Kaur\u2019s poetry isn\u2019t for <\/em>me. It has a right to exist, and I\u2019m glad, I guess, if there are young women out there who get something from it. But \u2013 and this is a big but \u2013 isn\u2019t it possible that young women would get more from any<\/em> of the other artists I just mentioned? What would happen if they were given the opportunity to meaningfully choose? If media coverage and publishing trends did true justice to the sheer depth of diversity that exists in contemporary poetry, rather than fastening on to one or two commercially viable cash-cows and milking them dry? It\u2019s the disproportionate emphasis on a couple of big safe names that bothers me. It\u2019s tokenistic and it\u2019s patronising, and it\u2019s limiting to our collective voice, and it\u2019s diluting to our collective dissent.<\/p>\n Let Coke democratise culture! Let them eat McDonalds!<\/strong><\/p>\n Discomfort abounds for me in poetry. Discomfort abounds for me in other areas too, but poetry has the upmost sweetness and meaning to me, it\u2019s the sea I swim in, and so those<\/em> anxieties are the most vivid and acute. Poetry fulfils this role for me largely because \u2013 and this is another of my oft trotted hobby-horses, so bear with me \u2013 poetry, as an artistic medium is so sublimely suited to the material conditions of working-class existence. Growing up, to do literally anything else: paint, act, sing, learn an instrument, play a sport, required time and resources neither myself nor my family could afford to commit. To write a poem all you need is an eye, a voice, and something to scratch your rage out on.<\/p>\n Unlovable labour, by Steev Burgess<\/em><\/p>\n Its method of production suits a population mired in the wretched life-consuming hell of poverty and unlovable labour. It can be practiced alone, anywhere; you don\u2019t need pricey tuition, you get better by doing it, and who, after all, is more attuned to the music of your own experience than you? Growing up, I also felt a tremendous need <\/em>for poetry, its immediacy and urgency spoke to me in ways prose could not reach; it bypassed the banality and circumlocution of everyday speech and made me feel emotionally connected to people and places far beyond the narrow confines of my life. It was both a way of expressing and understanding my daily experiences, and of escaping them to somewhere different, somewhere better. And so I feel powerfully that poetry is ours, by right and by necessity both.<\/p>\n Which is why this sense of discomfort pervades. In the past year I have seen poetry used to advertise everything from building societies to mobile phones, from Coke, to McDonalds. Fucking McDonalds. And I\u2019ve followed the online debates about how this is actually a good thing: poetry is the language of the people, it\u2019s not some precious, rarefied medium that needs to be kept, protected and unsullied from the grubby hustle of commerce. It\u2019s democratic, I\u2019ve been told, and anyway, who died and made me moral arbiter of \u201cthe scene\u201d? What right do I have to judge the decisions of others? People have got to eat, and you can\u2019t claim to support working-class poetry then shit on working-class people who are selling their art to survive. Right?<\/p>\n Yeah, okay, up to a point, but I don\u2019t know whether reducing art to a shitty little cash-nexus is really such a staggering victory for cultural democracy. And look, I guess it\u2019s fine if you want to contribute a poem to an institution or a product that manages to avoid abject moral bankruptcy, but, and I feel this is true in the case of the Nationwide ads especially, what you\u2019re selling isn\u2019t just the poetry, it\u2019s yourself, the poet, it\u2019s your working-classness; you\u2019re allowing this building society to co-opt your \u201ccredentials\u201d as a signifier of their <\/em>authenticity and integrity. You\u2019re using your heritage, your history, your bloody accent, on someone else\u2019s behalf. Nationwide isn\u2019t us. It isn\u2019t grossly exploitative, and it\u2019s owned by its shareholders, but it still isn\u2019t us. It\u2019s \u00a32.3m in chief executive pay\u2019s worth of not us in fact, and this in a time of mass unemployment, stagnating wage growth and in insanely hyper-inflated housing market that\u2019s making it difficult for most of us to eke out an existence.<\/p>\n The employed poor, by Martin Hayes<\/em><\/p>\n I think what bothers me most, though, is the way in which the ghosts of working-class history are summoned up in the service of this financial product. Unfairness is acknowledged, but in the most cursory way possible, as if poverty and suffering were a force of nature, something that just happened to people in the bad old days, not something done <\/em>to people systemically and systematically, deliberately, continuously, still.<\/p>\n But shit, Nationwide are not actually terrible, so who am I to pick holes in other people\u2019s choices? You\u2019ll grant me I\u2019m on safer ground with my other examples, right? McDonalds, I mean, catch yourselves on, what a crock. If I read one more article about how \u201cpopulism is good\u201d or \u201cit\u2019s bringing poetry to a wider audience\u201d I swear I\u2019ll blow a gasket. Firstly, because this isn\u2019t poetry, it\u2019s something cooked up by an ad agency pretending<\/em> to be poetry, and secondly because this isn\u2019t populism, its cod-populism, it\u2019s a corporation riding poetry\u2019s coat-tails to position itself as your mate, in order that it might more effectively peddle its deep-fried patties of eyelids and arseholes, sawdust and spit.<\/p>\n Poetry, the way its rhythms encode and invite intimacy, its direct address, its person-to-person quality, these things are hijacked by the God-awful \u201cjust passing by\u201d ad. The rhymes are reminiscent of McGough or Mitchell without being written by either, delivered by Neil Morrissey in a suitably blokey brogue. These signifiers of working-class identity, working-class poetics are tactically exploited to legitimate this shitvert, and position McDonalds as essentially inseparable from everyday working-class experience. As a working-class person I call bull-crap. We deserve better. Even if you can bypass the animal cruelty, and their stellar contribution to world-wide deforestation (I can\u2019t, but that\u2019s just me), McDonalds are still incredibly exploitative of their working-class employees, and historically one of the most aggressively anti-union<\/a> chains in the fast food industry. Their food is also linked to malnutrition and obesity<\/a> among the poorest communities worldwide.<\/p>\n And yeah, I will eventually stop flogging McDonalds, but as a corporation it\u2019s just so beautifully illustrative of the way not only working-class culture, but working-class identity is appropriated, distorted and exploited by corporate capitalism.<\/p>\n I think what grinds me most about that crappy advert is its chummy tagline: \u201cThere\u2019s a McDonalds for everyone\u201d. Everyone. Like there\u2019s not a version of my existence that isn\u2019t bound up with and tied to their substandard fast-food. As if they\u2019re somehow emblematic of, or synonymous with my culture. I don\u2019t know, you can over-think these things, but that \u201ceveryone\u201d still grates. I fear it\u2019s probably the same \u201ceveryone\u201d that thrilled to the Olympics and its community-disrupting corporate-sponsored descent upon London, and the same \u201ceveryone\u201d that lined the streets to wave flags with feckless abandon at the spectacle of another Royal spawning. \u201cEveryone\u201d. Because if they can\u2019t co-opt you and manufacture your consent, they edit you out of the picture, out of the dominant narrative. I am so entirely sick of being edited out.<\/p>\n The middle class is just better at acting!<\/strong><\/p>\n This brings me back \u2013 somewhat less than neatly \u2013 to the arts and literature in general, and to poetry in particular. There\u2019s a vision of working-class culture at work in these spheres that I can only describe as blinkered, monolithic and homogenous. Sorry, I\u2019ll rephrase that: blinkered, monolithic, homogenous, and <\/em>ubiquitous. This shit is everywhere. And once you\u2019ve seen it, you cannot unsee it, it\u2019s in every advert, every book or television show. It follows you around out the corner of your eye, a very bad case of Baader-Meinhof complex.<\/p>\n I noticed it first in the vox-pops, those little segments of the news where some poor beleaguered reporter has to go out and canvass the general public, get their take on the burning issues of the day. Why were the working-class people they picked to interview invariably inarticulate? Or ignorant? Or prejudiced? Maybe because most populations are inarticulate, ignorant and prejudiced in ways and for reasons entirely unconnected to class? At first I was able to tell myself I was being paranoid. But then came that slew of shit social-safari television: Benefits Street<\/em>, Can\u2019t Pay? We\u2019ll Take It Away!<\/em> and my own personal b\u00eate\u2013noire, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. <\/em>Here we come, the undeserving poor, an eternal cast of either criminals or victims, an undifferentiated mass of scrounging, skiving profligates. I\u2019d see this and I\u2019d think about my childhood, about the lives of my family and my friends, and I\u2019d think: okay, but where\u2019s the rest of it? Where are we?<\/p>\n Programmes like Benefits Street<\/em> and Big Fat Gypsy Weddings<\/em> are problematic in so many ways, but chiefly, I think, for the way in which they present carefully \u2013 and highly selectively \u2013 edited footage as documentary fact. Because how do they choose which families, which \u201ccharacters\u201d, and what stories to film? And how is the way in which these stories are framed, and cut, and scored contributing to a skewed and generally inaccurate representation of working-class people? Further, and more germane to this discussion, what kinds of narrative are these portrayals propping up? Whose interests do they serve?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s face it, when we appear in the mainstream media at all it\u2019s generally in the form of cynical copy-paste poverty porn, and this is absolutely strategic. It\u2019s a way for our cultural elites to have their cake and eat it: they\u2019ve included <\/em>working-class characters and working-class voices, they\u2019ve included<\/em> working-class lives, and working-class experiences, and for this they earn a nice big box-ticking pat on the back. But they\u2019ve included them within very narrow, tightly circumscribed parameters: striver or scrounger; the bluff northern male or the brassy cockney blonde; the swaggering black yout\u2019 in a gang, or the fist-fighting congenitally sexist pikey.<\/p>\n This kind of phoney representation extends to fiction too, and I\u2019ve lost count of the times I\u2019ve sat through some middle-to-upper-class actor doing us pikey in different voices until I wanted to punch holes in concrete. They put us on like working-class drag in order to to flex their hip credentials, to win awards and plaudits for being socially aware, and worse, they do this at the expense of real working-class actors with just as much talent, who don\u2019t have the recourses to compete in the incestuous, nepotistic snake-pits of film and television.<\/a> Further, cultural expectations of the working-classes have been so successfully engineered, that we are no longer trusted to be the authors, spokespeople or archivists of our own experiences. Instead I\u2019ve got Brad Pitt in Snatch<\/em>, Michael Fassbender in Trespass Against Us,<\/em> and the always heartwarming news that everybody\u2019s favourite posh twit Benedict Cumberbatch is going to play Mikey Walsh\u2019s father in a forthcoming screen adaptation of Gypsy Boy.<\/em><\/p>\n And poetry\u2019s the same. And I spent such a long time hearing that my voice and my background were unacceptable, that they were things I\u2019d have to minimise in order to \u201cget on\u201d, only to catch people doing me back at me, ventriloquizing me and my life, rocking up to my stages squatting in my postcode, forcing the rent up, garnering right-on points from my edgy poverty but bearing absolutely no responsibility towards the communities and cohorts they\u2019d come crashing into. It pissed me off so much, in fact, I wrote a poem about it.<\/a><\/p>\n And you know, there\u2019s what you\u2019re allowed to say, and then there\u2019s the way in which you\u2019re allowed to say it. It isn\u2019t that poetry has a problem with the working class, but it only wants us in certain venues, in particular enclaves whose borders it can effectively police, keeping us away from the business of \u201cserious\u201d cultural labour. \u201cSlam\u201d, for example, is increasingly hyped as \u201cthe poetry of the people\u201d, imposing a false dichotomy between page and stage, and drawing an ugly, somewhat arbitrary dividing line between \u201celite\u201d and \u201cstreet\u201d. This is patronising, disingenuous and gross. For all the paraded \u201cright on\u201d status of slam and spoken-word, it too has its regular staple of middle-class practitioners. And to assert that it accurately or completely represents working-class poetry is to pretend that there is one singular definitive voice of working-class experience. This is arrant nonsense.<\/p>\n![\"MQ](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/MQ_pi_04-2016_map.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Fran](\"images\/culture\/CM_Misc\/Fran_Lock_unlovablelabour_2.jpg\")
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