Ship Time — or: When I nearly got run over by my own creative curiosity

“The world you live in … is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world”

Deepak Chopra in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

This website came about as an avoidance tactic – and let me pause to acknowledge the ‘dance’ in the centre of ‘avoidance’...

After I was made redundant a couple of months ago from my zero hours role at YoungMinds I really needed to find a new flexible role that fits around my other commitments including a part-time job in West Yorkshire. But I couldn’t face any more job hunting especially in a world of AI and Gen Z where I feel increasingly out of place – so I spontaneously decided instead to put all that energy into creating my own place, that little island of sovereignty where I can set things up so I can fall back into place.

That wasn’t without challenge because my island still swims in a large sea of productivity, achieving and competition so if I wanted to generate some work from it I’d have to do some self-marketing with it and that is not my strong-hold. I am decidedly Gen X.

But as I was snooping for the best fitting website template it all fell into place and suddenly became a creative project – that’s familiar territory, I know how to not-handle that but be handled by it because if I trust it enough, creativity always takes care of itself. Suddenly I had the right colours, the motto wrote itself and as I decided to pick a slightly unusual selfie as my headshot, I started to realise that I can still be myself, or, in fact, I better be myself to stand a chance at standing out: I’d call it “finding my visual voice” for my website that aligns perfectly with my professional approach.

As part of it I wanted to bring in some of my collages that I do in my creative life and that’s where the whole quote with the ship came in and, then, the collaging and overlaying of nautical elements and seascape. I loved it and it really floated my boat; I worked myself daringly and creatively through my other pages then, one day, when I felt there was nothing more to perfect, I pressed the launch button and made it public.

Not even a week later did I suddenly realise that I had totally outmanoeuvred myself: I was reading the soul work that is Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” where she speaks about the wake not just as the mourning period of keeping watch with the dead, and not just as wakeful and woke but also as the waterscape that follows a ship – and it is her metaphor for the aftermath of the enslavement of millions of Black people over centuries. And like this water current that is churned up in the immediacy of the moving ship and spills and spreads and travels into space, the aftermath of the enslavement of Black people travels into space and time. And we are still in the middle of it – Christina Sharpe describes is as a “pastness” or “… a past that is not a past, a past that is with us still... that river, that time, that place, are still present; the air around that ship is as disturbed as it has always been” (p62) and calls it “ship time” (ibid.)

As I was reading my way through this book, I felt increasingly haunted by the images of the “ghosting” ships (p55) by their “hauntology” (NourbeSe Philip quoted by Christina Sharpe, p38) and increasingly sick at how playfully I had used the image of the ship on my website as an invitation to embrace change when for a large number of people on this water-rich earth ships carry such a weight, such a loss and such injustice. It’s like the very words by Deepak Chopra came true for myself: my perception of ships had changed entirely!

Naturally, I went into panic, first, and wanted to re-create my website straight away but I actually didn’t have time and also no idea how to. So for a few days I just had to sit with it, all the while continuing to read Christina Sharpe. I had this growing sense that, truly, nothing is “innocent” or, maybe better put, so many things have been and are made complicit in the injustices of the transatlantic slave trade: the sea has been made complicit, ships, wool (that I love spinning in my textile time and that has been spun into hard-wearing scratchy cloth in cottage industry production across Wales to be then shipped across the sea to worn by enslaved people on plantations), copper – and with that all the people that worked in those industries and nature itself.

By the time I reached the point in the week where I had opportunity to redesign my website I wrote a poem instead – avoiDANCE. I’ve submitted it to a social justice themes issue of an online poetry magazine and will share it here if it gets published.

But I also decided, for the time being, not to change my website but to own my complicity and also, as a white skinned person, to own that privilege that I was able to think of ships purely as a playful metaphor, that they haven’t touched my family history in any such way as they do people who are racialised Black. That ships have been a major tool at the hand of white skinned people to oppress, exploit, extract and expand. And maybe that doesn’t mean that ships are “guilty” of anything but that they carry the ghost print and to this day we can’t not see it otherwise we are the guilty ones.