News (old posts, page 818)

How I unlearned the internalised prejudice I had as a Black woman – one braid at a time

I decided to ditch my sleek, neat hair for chemical-free afro styles and noticed how differently I was treated. Changing my hairstyle has never just been about fashion – what it symbolises culturally runs far deeper

At the start of 2023, a couple of months after a trip to Jamaica with friends, where we spoke extensively about our hair, I made my first new year resolution in more than a decade. I was going to try a wider variety of hairstyles. For most of my 20s, I had two styles: long, dark, medium-sized box braids (where hair is divided into square sections, and each is then braided into a single plait) or, very occasionally, a weave. Now, I decided, I would switch things up – whether trying a new colour, length or type of braid.

This may not seem groundbreaking but for me it genuinely was. It was never just about hair, it ran deeper than that. I had come to realise that my own understanding of stereotypes about Black women had been learned from years of experiencing microaggressions: from comments on how good my English was, despite being British, or being followed around supermarkets by security guards – as well as seeing how women who looked like me were portrayed on TV. Without my knowing, on some level, I had become increasingly conscious of the “vibe” I was giving off, before I even spoke. This, in turn, had influenced my hair, dress sense, and, at times, my very behaviour. I wanted to break free from internalised prejudices I didn’t even realise I had.

Continue reading...

A Saudi journalist tweeted against the government – and was executed for ‘high treason’

The death of Turki al-Jasser was the first high-profile killing of a journalist since the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi

The tweet posted by Saudi journalist Turki al-Jasser in 2014 was chillingly prescient: “The Arab writer can be easily killed by their government under the pretext of ‘national security’,” he wrote.

On Saturday, the Saudi interior ministry announced that al-Jasser had been executed in Riyadh, for crimes including “high treason by communicating with and conspiring against the security of the Kingdom with individuals outside it”.

Continue reading...

From Joyce’s death mask to Bono’s sunglasses: a look around the Little Museum of Dublin’s grand curiosities

This people’s museum is crammed with curios donated by Dublin residents. A major facelift has added a library, archive and exhibition on ‘fearless women’

There are certain museums around the world that go beyond their role of housing artefacts and somehow seem to act as portals to the past. The Frick Collection in New York and Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris both hum with a timeless energy that transcends the exhibits on display. The Little Museum of Dublin is also such a space.

Within seconds of ascending the stairs of this beautiful four-storey Georgian townhouse at 15 St Stephen’s Green, a different era appears to take hold. The modern world disappears and I imagine myself back in Georgian times, when this red-bricked terrace was built along with so many of the beautiful squares and parks throughout the city centre.

Continue reading...

S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc review – Throbbing Gristle’s gender-challenging tabloid-baiter

Sympathetic docu-biography centres on the conceptual artist deemed ‘too shocking for punk’ who inadvertently spawned the industrial music genre

Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: “he”, “she” and “they” are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The “P-Orridge” surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there’s also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well.

Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influentially coined the term “industrial music”, a term later to be borrowed without acknowledgment by many. They were, in the words of Janet Street-Porter, shown here in archive footage, “too shocking for punk”. P-Orridge formed a new band, Psychic TV, in the 1980s, and then also formed a group of likeminded occultist provocateurs called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. (The film tactfully passes over how very annoying that spelling is.)

Continue reading...

A moment that changed me: I stepped into the boxing ring – and decades of quiet anger lifted

As I punched and shouted, I knew I didn’t have to be demure, delicate or diplomatic. I could be as fierce as I wanted. Those three minutes set me free

On meeting me, you would never guess that I used to be an angry person. I’m talkative, sociable and self-possessed – but for nearly 20 years I lived with a quiet fury. It started with my parents, whose strict conservatism restricted everything in my life: what I ate, what I wore, where I went, what I thought. As immigrants from Bangladesh, they believed that control was the best way to protect their daughters, but it suffocated me.

I had to fight to go to university – for all the things that men in my community were given as a right. At first, my anger felt ambient – mild and ever-present – but it became something harder, more bitter, when I was pressured into an arranged marriage at the age of 24.

Continue reading...