CALEB FEMI: EXCERPTS OF JOURNAL ENTRIES
Caleb Femi — poet, film-maker, photographer, and London's first young people's laureate in 2016 — shares extracts from his own haunting diary entries, written the night of Grenfell and two nights in the subsequent months.
14th June 2017 This morning, I wake up to the tweets and posts about a burning tower. I am reading the posts as if they are in real time: 11pm “that estate next to...” , 1am “this is horri...”. I am watching it in the present, from the future. People are burning and dying and I am in the future, stuck. And so I do what the helpless do when they first realise they are helpless, I cry. I cry and keep scrolling, watching more videos and the tears smudge my sight so I can only hear the people and the night. The screen of my phone bends away from me. Stop, I can't show you more. But I force it to because I can’t sit alone with this grief. (In the present, every time I write grief on my phone it auto- correct asks if I mean Grenfell, have I written Grenfell enough times it has registered it as a familiar word or is this how collective mourning works). My mind is a rolodex of all the fires I have seen on the estate I grew up in, but I think, this will be it surely, this is the turning point where everything changes, where people will listen and laws will change and trucks will come loaded with solutions. (I am in the future and nothing has). What is there left to do, I am learning the map of hate like I am learning the map of a lover. I know now what is means to truly hate. But I do not know who I hate: is it the man who commented ‘I would actually feel bad for him if he didn’t sound like such a roadman...' under a news clip where a resident boy talks about losing his friends and neighbours, demanding answers from the Government? Or is it the Government or is it the News channels sap- ping on the ripe mourning fruits of the poor?
3rd September 2017 There are many nights where I have dreams that the Earth rolled her oceans over and decided to start again and as I sunk into her waters I think, good for you. They have learnt to make a business out of tragedy, and now even death is powerless. In another clip, there is a black guy talking about how he almost died in the fire and how a little boy, an immigrant man and others died in the smoke and I am angry that people get to see this, people who don't give a shit get to see this, get to listen to his trauma like pub chatter.
16th October 2017 My people, my poor people, my browner people, my other people who are not seen as people, they do not inspire moral shame in those who govern this place, this is a song I have come to know too well. If those in the higher seats of the high places don’t note Grenfell as a mass murder, as gross incompetence, as a final warning, as regression of Humanity then they should, (at the very least, since they all watched it from their windows) take note of the nature of a spreading fire: if the bottom burns then surely with time the top too will succumb to the flames.
Words Caleb Oluwafemi
Artwork Henry Miller Stirling