A Meditation on Migration

From the beginning of this project, the gallery that has enticed me the most has been the Money Gallery. For a start it’s the quietist – many people are so enchanted by the live amphibians and reptiles that they don’t notice there’s anything beyond. Even better, the way through was blocked during most of the project due to building work, so you had to know which back stairs to go up. It’s also one of the least interpreted galleries, which in tandem with the quiet makes it a good space for meditation.

But it’s more than that. Right from the beginning I sensed that you couldn’t think about migration without thinking about money, although this was so much a gut feeling that I’ve struggling to find the rational bones of it.

Certainly from the earliest history of our species, people have travelled to to find the things they need or to exchange things. That much is obvious. None of our ancestors found food or water or shelter by staying in one spot. But there must have been a time when they began to farm and build and store when they began to travel less.

From the start there was someone who filled their knapsack and crossed the mountains – or filled the barrels that filled their boat and crossed the sea. Who knows what proportions of need, greed or curiosity motivated them, but it seems something as fundamental to our human species as the Deaths Head Moth making its journey North from Southern Europe each year.

So from being a people who moved around, we become a species where just some of us move around. Just as we become a species in which just some of us build, and just some of us farm, and just some of us raise children. But those people that move round are fulfilling that function for all of us. They’re bringing us things we need, they’re selling what we’ve got a surplus of, and they’re sharing information about the world.

Now of course we’ve divided the labour even more. There are a dozen other groups of people that move the stuff we sell and buy, and even more that share the information round. So we all get to be a little more still and everything comes to us. And the people that travel come to sell us their labour rather than their goods. But is there really that much difference. The beans we buy from Kenya aren’t just beans. They are the labour of the people that planted and nourished them, picked them and flew them to us. Our phones are the often cheap labour of the people who mined for minerals and assembled them (and I’m a bit sketchy about the rest to be honest!).

The second part of this argument comes from a different gallery. I spent some time speaking with Phil the entomology co-ordinator talking about insect migration. There are a lot of butterflies and moths which used to just visit us seasonally – but which now stay here all year round and breed here – because our climate is getting warmer.

Is this a problem I ask? Do they compete with our native species, many of whom are under threat? Is there anything we do about this? I’m a Botanist by trade. I know about Oxford Ragword and Japanese knotweed. Phil pointed out that by and large our efforts to control insect species backfire on us. Pesticides usually end up killing or damaging the insects we don’t want to damage. Biological control hasn’t turned out to be as clever as we thought either – think how cane toads, introduced to kill insects that fed on the sugar cane have become a pest themselves in Australia and the Caribbean.

And of course it makes perfect sense. If we want to stop this happening we have to deal with global warming. If we want to protect our native insects we have to look after their habitats.

You probably don’t need me to draw the line back to human migration. Human beings have always moved around. Now many of us don’t, it’s money that moves as our proxy. Underlying those movements of people, desperate of hopeful, is the movement of money around the globe. Yes, it’s because of war too, but peel back the grotesque veneer of war and someone’s being impoverished and someone’s being enriched.

Building walls and dragging people kicking and screaming onto aircraft are as pointless and self-defeating as introducing cane toads.  If you want to balance out migration, you have to balance out global financial inequality. And funnily enough as you do so, you’ll probably do help balance out the carbon dioxide level and save a few polar bears into the bargain.  

Aaaargh Dinosaurs! with Dommy B

Dominic who's been such a help on this project, reflecting on my writing with me and working with me on my performance, has a new show touring - and coming to Salford on September 23rd. I haven't seen this one but Dom's shows are well worth watching, with plenty of giggles for grown-ups as well as children.

Weeks 31-33

The posts are getting fewer and farther between and soon this page will be archived and replaced with this one: http://juicefromspace.blogspot.co.uk That's mostly because the main thing happening at the moment is me hammering away on the keyboard and learning my lines.

In the meantime, there are a few things you should know: there's a preview of the show at the museum on Wednesday 26th October, the teacher's pack has been drafted and is ready to be reviewed by Tania, my colleague at Sustain Education, and we've a filming day with Jason booked next month to create films of two of the poems to be featured on youtube.

So here are the details of that preview - also featured on the Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space page. Please do book as numbers are limited.

Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space

Wed 26 Oct

11.30am - 12.15pm & 1.30-2.15pm

A new poetry performance from Helen Clare, about exhibits from around the museum; where they came from and the journey they’ve made. There will be happy poems, sad poems, gory poems and fun poems – and opportunities for children to join in and create too.

Find out about the giant carved tusk, a moth, bloodworms, a man who was murdered and left to rot in a bog, a Greek God, Stan the T. Rex, and an ancient rock from outer space. 

For children aged 8-12 and their parents/carers

Free, book on mcrmuseum.eventbrite.com or 0161 275 2648

Week 27-31

Today, as I chatted to Jenny on reception I stood feet, possibly inches away from the woman who unwrapped one of the mummies on display in the Ancient Worlds gallery. I ought to make that the over-arching metaphor of this blog, but in truth I mention it just because it's so unbelievably cool, and even though I don't really like the mummies I find it exciting in a way that's almost certainly uncool.

It's also been a notable day today because it was Debbie's last day. Debbie's been a crucial part of the project since the beginning helping to facilitate my needs and support the production of materials for the Learning Team. She's going back into school to work full time as a secondary Drama teacher. She'll be great! Good luck Debbie!

We met in the cafe for celebratory cake but Debbie was a bit green around the gills after her leaving do last night so Cat and I tucked into Red Velvet cake.

It's been a while since my last blog, not because I've been doing nothing but because we seem to have reached the stage where there's a lot of beavering behind the scenes.

We retrialled the Trading Words activity with one of our schools and edited that - so that's more or less finished. I've also worked on teacher instructions for turning the children's sentences from the activity into a class poem. And the Dinosaur egg activity is also now written up. Hopefully a member of staff is going to take a look at some of the design elements because that's really not my strong suit!

Dominic and I have been working hard on the script - which is now a script - with words and staging and everything. We had a really productive rehearsal session on Tuesday. I think I've got away without jokes - although there's a new dinosaur poem about Stan the T,Rex, which is fun, if not actually funny (I think it's funny, mind you, but that's not a guarantee of much!)

My next job is to make an axe so that I can brandish it during the Worsley Man poem about a man who was murdered, probably sacrificed sometime in the 2nd century AD and spent the next couple of thousand years pickling in a Salford bog. It'll be made of foam rubber and spray paint so no children should be harmed during said brandishing.

I also need to find music - I'm having music! Something exciting to start things off with a journeying theme and something electronic for the meteorite poem. It seems strange to accompany the 'oldest thing you'll ever see' with such modern sounds - but of course we do receive radio waves from space - check out this video from NASA with the sounds of space. Again, so cool I'm decidedly uncool about it.

Week 26

The show is starting to take shape. Here's the map of the poems showing the different themes and working out the transitions between each one.

Between the six poems there are 5 opportunities for other objects. Beside the quilt these are taken from a museum project in which the children chose their top 10. The ones I've decided to use are: The Chameleon (who lives in Madagascar like the Golden Mantella) and who at the museum occupies the next door tank); the Wolf (who forms part of The Nature Discovery section which houses a fairy tale collection of  animals - and a giant ant - to entice younger visitors) Stan the T. Rex, and a mummy case.

Although these five objects don't have poems they give opportunities for discussion, poetry games and story telling. I'm working on a story about a wolf and a boy who travels to find him, based on a Native American story

Then I need to think up some jokes....

Week 24 and 25

Photo: Manchester Museum on flickr

"Follow the poems. They have the answer." Well of course they do, but it took my friend Christine, writing from her hospital bed to show me the way out of my quandary - even though it perhaps was not her job to fix my problems just at that moment.

And she was right. Six of the poems fit immediately together - they are the voices of objects talking about different kinds of journeys - the Benin tusk, the Meteorite, The Death's Head Hawk Moth, Worsley Man, Hermes and the Golden Mantella Frog. Dominic also suggested that we use "Who are these souls at my breakfast table" - a poem that looks at all the people involved in making the food that we eat - as an opener.

It occured to me that all these poems answer the question "Where do you come from?" as well as "How did you get here?" Thats a good unifying principle for starters.

I have a couple more jobs, as well as a little more editing work. One is to do a mapping exercise looking at the connection between the poems. I like this sort of thing - paper, post-its and coloured pens, maybe even fancy tape, spread all over the floor.

The second job is to look for other things in the museum which haven't got poems but still have connections and form part of the narrative. Dominic suggested that the quilt with all the quotes from immigrants might have this role. The found pantoum I wrote may well be a little grown up and, as the phrases repeat with the strange claustrophobia of the pantoum, too difficult to hear.

There's also another poem on the way. On Friday I spent some time talking about buckles with Bryan Sitch the archeology curator, which was fascinating. One of the things we talked about was how ornamental and bejewelled brooches marked out people's status. He told me about sumptuary laws preventing people of lower status from wearing certain things even though they might have made the money. Here's one: "no knight under the estate of a lord, esquire or gentleman , nor any other person, shall wear any shoes or boots having spikes or points which exceed the length of two inches, under the forfeiture of forty pence." Anyone who's ever been stopped for driving too nice a car will know what that's about!

What's really nice about this is that it's almost the anti-migration poem, in that all the other poems have been looking at the journeys of things - but this one's about one of the forces that stops flow and movement - in this case social mobility. This is how people are pinned in their place.

So we didn't quite manage Buckles and Butterflies. But we have got Brooches and Moths. And then no more poems!

Week 22 and 23

Photo: Manchester Evening News.

I'd like to stop now please. I've had a great time and I've written lots of poems I'm pleased with. I've done the stuff that's for me, and I've now got the difficult job of forming that into something for other people. To be honest, I'm feeling slightly clueless!

The next job is to somehow make the poems into a narrative. I'm thinking it ought to be a series of conversations with the objects, but beyond that it's hard to see. Then I'm going to be working on performance skills with Dominic - which will be pushing at the edges of my comfort zone.

I also need to create a teachers' pack around the show. I've already got a few ideas for activities but I need to work out how to write them - and then they've all got to be cross-referenced against the national curriculum. Oh Joy!

In the meantime I've been catching up on admin - making sure the midpoint evaluations are written up and seeing what photographs we already have and fighting with Powerpoint to make a visual representation of the Nonsense Verse activity.

So I've gone from feeling quite smug to feeling as if I've hit a brick wall. The real work starts here! So I'm sorry I've no exciting news for you this week. But here's a pretty picture of the museum.