COMING OUT AS A BLACK ESSEX GIRL by Elsa James

As the world witnessed the brutal murder of George Floyd in the USA, followed by the staggering 'Black Lives Matter' protests, the ugly truth about Britain's past and the everyday struggles of black people is being called out and seen for what it is. 

I wrote this piece originally last year as part of the Essex Girls Liberation Front (EGLF) takeover of a local magazine in Essex called Trawler and would like to share it here in this place again as I contemplate, what I believe, is a period of transformation in 2020 living as a black woman in Essex.

At 7 am a week before the print deadline for this piece, myself and my colleagues in the EGLF, Syd, Sarah, Jo and Ciara had a conversation through email finalising the text to be included in this issue. Whilst having my shower, an hour or so later, it suddenly dawned on me how valuable it could be to include my journey to claiming to be a black Essex girl, even though I knew that as a person with dyslexia, trying to fit in a piece of writing into my already busy schedule, would be a mammoth task. Nevertheless, I thought the significance of telling this journey could prove to be particularly beneficial for young black girls and women in the county - to celebrate defining this new ‘black space’ in what has historically been a white girl’s narrative.

I moved to Essex from London with my partner and our eldest daughter, aged three and a half, in March 1999 but my ‘coming out’ began some nineteen years later. In fact, I can name the exact date - Sunday 11th March 2018. But first, let me take a step back to a couple of years ago.

Forgotten Black Essex: Princess Dinubolu, Photo Amaal Said

International Women’s Day, Metal’s headquarters, Chalkwell Hall, 8th March 2017. As part of a varied programme of events, discussion panels and readings highlighting some of the issues faced by women in Southend, Syd led a panel debate she titled Hooray up She Rises – What shall we do with the Essex Girl? looking at how we should move forward with our county’s prevalent stereotype. It was at this event that some black women from Congo, South Africa and Zimbabwe said they knew ALL about the Essex girl back home. I remember thinking about this a lot afterwards, as it was a reminder of how embarrassed I was with my association of being an Essex girl. However, it was from this event that EGLF was born, as Syd quickly rallied up a group of women to think about tackling the stereotype at the next Village Green festival (a local arts festival organised by Metal Culture in Southend) in July later that year. Understanding the enormity and seriousness of the task ahead, I became one of the ‘Frontiers’ - wholly immersed in campaigning to change the dictionary definition, challenging the prejudice, pitching ideas and making ambitious plans.

In the months following Village Green, I started my first solo project since leaving art school. I was interested in making work that would respond to stories of black presence in Britain prior to the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. Working with a historian specialising in black British history, I created two short films about two black women who spent time in Essex - one during the 1700s and the other in 1908. Their stories profoundly resonated with me. However, what astonished me most was that records of their stories were just sitting in our national archives, which seemed to me to be overlooked or simply not recognised as significant. I decided to call the films *Forgotten Black Essex, which were originally screened at Chalkwell Hall on 22 February 2018.

Forgotten Black Essex: Hester and Hester Woodley, Photo Amaal Said

A few weeks later on the morning of the Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Center in London on Sunday 11th March 2018, without a second thought, I decided to wear our newly designed T-shirt with the words - This Is What An Essex Girl Looks Like emblazoned across the front. As I walked around the festival people stopped me and I had numerous conversations about the ridiculousness of the stereotyping of Essex people. When I got home later that evening I sat down and took stock of my predicament, bound up in the stigma I had absorbed myself in.

Here I was, a black woman, walking around London announcing to all, ‘I AM AN ESSEX GIRL’. And yet, I was embarrassed - ashamed to tell people I lived in Essex, ESPECIALLY black folks in London, who would look at me as if something might seriously be wrong with my decision to live here. I got married in the county but I was clinging onto this idea that London was everything - even though all of my critical thinking and work I conceived as an artist was made residing in the county. I had just honoured and paid homage to two extraordinary black women who were indeed part of the history of Essex. And, I had two daughters.

At that moment I decided it was time to claim and champion ‘this space’. Time to make something positive, liberating and proud about being a black woman in Essex. I thought about both historical and contemporary movements and spaces for celebrating black womanhood - Black Girls Rock, Black Girl’s Picnic, Black Girls Festival, #BlackGirlMagic and coined the term, “Black Girl Essex.”

I had a conversation with my eldest daughter, who at the time was aged twenty-three, about her thoughts regarding the newly coined term and her views on the Essex girl stereotype. She revealed to me for the first time several traumatic stories she had experienced during her teens, juxtaposing her black identity in white Essex. One of which was the time when her cousin told her that his white girlfriend, with whom he lived with in London, was ‘blacker’ than she was because she was growing up as an Essex girl. My daughter had gone through an identity crisis that I was unaware of. How could it be that a county could have such a strong impact on a young person’s identity? Upon hearing her stories I made the decision to explore what other black folks in Essex might be going through for themselves, with their children and whether they had gone through a similar crisis.

Last summer, I got the opportunity through a four-month residency at Firstsite gallery in Colchester, to host a series of discussions with young and older members of the black community in Essex. The discussions, not only form the basis of a new film I created titled **BLACK GIRL ESSEX: Here We Come, Look We Here, but also for the first time these conversations with the black community in Essex, will form part of the digital sound archives at Essex Record Office.

Still from the film BLACK GIRL ESSEX: Here We Come, Look We Here by Andy Delaney

Hosting these discussions really opened my eyes, but more so with the young black folks who all seemed to have struggled with their identity at some point. Even though I think it’s possible that young black folks in any suburb or remote part of the country could struggle with their identity in the same way - I do believe Essex is particularly unique here. As Tim Burrows explained in his recent Guardian article The Invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature, he noticed that ‘people on TV often laughed at the very word Essex’. The county had come to signify ‘a land of crass consumerism’ as well as being ‘scorned as the crudest, stupidest symbol of Englishness’. Essex was also, Tim goes further to say, ‘painted as a hotbed of bigotry, the place where white people moved to escape parts of London that were no longer white enough for them’.

But surely these myths live somewhere, right?

In all of the discussions I hosted, people came away saying that they had never thought so deeply about their black identity and living in Essex before. Some even fed back to me that they found the discussion therapeutic. With this in mind, I am currently thinking about how I could extend and develop this important space for black folks in Essex.

Still from the film BLACK GIRL ESSEX: Here We Come, Look We Here by Andy Delaney

*Forgotten Black Essex opened at the Beecroft Gallery (Southend) as part of the exhibition ‘This Is What An Essex Girl Looks Like’ in November 2019. The exhibition is due to remain open until 17 October 2020 (however since March 2020 the gallery has been temporarily closed due to Covid-19 pandemic).

**BLACK GIRL ESSEX: Here We Come, Look We Here was on show in Super Black, an Arts Council Collection National Partners exhibition, at Firstsite Gallery (October 2019 - January 2020).