The notes below accompany my performance exhibit, ‘Being Slaggy’, currently showing at Camden People’s Theatre.* The notes in the exhibit are handwritten, they comment on the works of poetry, prose and the drawings and objects that are displayed alongside them. I wrote them quickly as a way to share my in-the-moment thinking about the works on display; I kept the mistakes and spelling errors that I made in the initial drafts on the handwritten cards. I have corrected them below.

This work explores the following questions:

• What does it feel like to be designated as ‘slag’ in the contemporary culture?
• What is the relationship between class, sex and desire in the cultural figure of the slag?
• How can creative writing serve to mediate the space between scholarly research and lived experience?
• What are the possibilities for presenting creative writing as performance?
• Can the use of performance techniques through space help poetry to perform in ways beyond spoken word?

Leopard Print

It’s incredible how the semiotic charge of icons carries, whether you understand their origins or not. Leopard print became popular through the twentieth century, from the 1920s, when stars like the dancer Josephine Baker wore animal prints. These apparently alluded to an ‘animal magnetism’, and resonated with a wider cultural relaxation of sexual morals that continued through the twentieth century.

            The fuchsia leopard print displayed here is charged with the heady joy of grim pleasure that Sophie Heawood calls, ‘the pure joy of being a slag’.

On Frames

I notice how the act of framing gives the poems a solemnity at odds, sometimes, with the mood I’m trying to create.

            Suddenly, sucked of lightness and humour… they are saying more than I meant to say, more emphatically…

Drawing

Drawings, doodles and sketches have been a way of passing the time during moments of pause and boredom (on hold; chatting to mates on the phone; waiting for a bus), My sketches are fast and rough, often expressive of some unresolved emotion or desire.

            Here, I’ve tried to capture the energy and crudity of my expressive drawings…exhibiting them gives a sense of purpose not really congruous with their creation.

Giggling

In a 1983 essay, the writer Angela Carter offers an analysis of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, where she argues Alison’s giggle is a rare moment in literature when a male author refuses to take male desire seriously. She describes the power of the giggle, which, she writes, is ‘rarely heard [in literature]’… ‘because it expresses the innocent glee with which women humiliate men in the only way available to them, through a frontal attack on male pride.’

Being Single

Much of the material here was created during a long period when I was not in a relationship. In my research, many of the women I’ve surveyed have described how the word ‘slag’ is used as a means of control and coercion. As a woman without a partner, indulging your sexual desires, displaying your longing, letting anyone know that you want more than you have, can be read as excessive, opening you up to a sense of slagyness…to accusations of slaggyness by others….

Rap Trilogy

Here, I have taken lyrics and images from three of my favourite rap songs. Each song works with sexist tropes and language. I have taken some of this language and written poems from the perspective of a young women at the end of a relationship, taking back power in one wat or another. You can access the tracks via the QR codes at the bottom of the poems.

Long Shadows

This recording was made in Woolwich, south east London, where I was born and raised. I now live there again after years away. This is a chapter from a work-in-progress novel that follows two teenage girls growing up in 1990s south east London. Like the other works in this exhibit, the novel explores class feeling, sexual culture and notions of ‘being slaggy’. By drawing on my lived experience as well as historical research and popular culture I worked to build a world for readers that feels like Woolwich in the 1990s.

Jackie

Jackie was a weekly magazine for teenage girls published in the UK between 1964 and 1993. The feminist sociologist Angela McRobbie has described how the magazine offered ‘an ideology of adolescent feminity’ (1978).

            My character Jackie is a working-class south east London everywoman, coming of age at the end of the twentieth century. She is a way of representing the experiences of my friends and me as we grew up – making sense of ourselves in a stew of family, social politics and tastes that marked our class positions.

9/11

The poem ‘Dove’s Wing’ is about the events of 9/11 as they impacted me — an at the time 17 year old, growing up and experimenting with my sexuality. Perhaps because it happened as I came of age, ‘sexually awakening’, – but I always felt this event as a powerful tragic charge, that also seemed to charge my sexual encounters and relationships. I love Jennifer Wallace’s book Tragedy Since 9/11, which captures the enormity of this event, and inspired this poem.

Writing by Hand

At school, we spent years learning to write by hand, perfecting our own script, which I always felt was an expression of each of our inner selves. To read a handwritten text requires a deep engagement with the physicality of the author — a commitment to understanding the writer on her own terms.

            Just as framing adds formality, handwriting gives personality and a sense of rushedness, of ‘draft’ version, of immediacy. It changes how we read, and what the thing we read means…

*The exhibit was also shown at stage@leeds at TaPRA2023, held at the University of Leeds.

**With many thanks to: The Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths University of London. Billy Beswick, Anne Beswick, CBC writers’ group (particularly Amy and Jess), peers and tutors at The Poetry School, Kelly Green, Andie Mills, Katie Gardner, Jess Rowland, Alice Clarke, Steve Ansell, Matt Harris, Joslin McKinney, Kathryn Singleton, Juliann Pichelski and the whole team at CPT – and special massive thanks to my love and main man, Darren Xuereb, I’m yours.x x

The poem ‘Serving Officers’ first appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace; ‘The Blues’ and ‘Longing’ first published in Harpy Hybrid Review; ‘Slip Up Number Five’ in the Euonia Review. With thanks to these publications for supporting my work.