INTERVIEW: Juice Aleem

Juice Aleem / Illustration by Emily DoyleWords & illustration by Emily Doyle

It’s the beginning of Birmingham’s short-lived heatwave. Tilt, the pinball bar, has its doors open and the clatter of the machines echoes into the street. The table is laid out with marker pens, various notebooks, and a black coffee. Juice Aleem arrives and orders a stout.

Juice Aleem has been a key figure in the Birmingham hip hop scene since the mid-nineties. He’s fronted Big Dada collective New Flesh, hosted for Ninja Tune, and collaborated with Coldcut, Hexstatic, and Adam Freeland. 2016 saw the release of his album, Voodu Starchild, and a book on Afrofuturism. He is a director of B-Side Hip Hop Festival. This weekend, he joins Sid Peacock’s Surge Orchestra for a performance at mac to launch Surge in Spring II Festival.

“It’s my first time performing with Sid,” tells Aleem. “We’ve done a few things in the past, like me reviewing some of their gigs. I became aware of them around the time they were doing a tribute to Sun Ra, and I’m quite a Sun Ra fan and someone was like ‘Oh they’re doing this and maybe they could use you and you could meet Sid and you might like this…’ So, that was a two or three years ago and since then we’ve kept in contact. This is part of the culmination of that.”

The performance is titled ‘Rivers of Love’. It’s a reflection on Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered fifty years ago this week in Birmingham.

“We thought a lot of people are going to concentrate on the negatives because it wasn’t the exactly most happy time,” explains Aleem, “so instead of that, let’s look at the positives of the time. Some of them are obvious, some are less so. The country that my father came to, and then my mother later, from two different islands in the Caribbean – when they came here, a bell pepper was something that was hard to get hold of. A bell pepper, as innocuous as a bell pepper is – it’s not spicy, but it only grows originally in certain parts of the world. It has to have sun, it has to have certain types of soil – and it wasn’t here in great amounts. I’m not saying people didn’t know what a bell pepper was, but it wasn’t in every meal. Like on a basic level, there’s a Caribbean food shop just there. We’re sitting here drinking beers and coffees and things. These kinds of beers and coffees in general don’t come from this country. But you know, we all drink coffee. We enjoy these things day in day out.”

“In a way though I understand his speech. I understand some of what he was getting at, though it’s very right wing. The funny thing is, it was Enoch Powell that actually made the call to bring people over here, that’s what people don’t understand. He was the main person to say ‘Hey, Nigeria, India, Jamaica, Trinidad, come over here, come help.’ He was important in that call, and afterwards he was like, ‘ah…’ And that’s what the speech actually entails. It wasn’t necessarily saying don’t come, it wasn’t necessarily saying you have to go home now, but it was saying you have to wear a bowler hat. He talks about how people speak, and learning to speak the Queen’s English. I’m paraphrasing here but like, ‘if you’re going to be here, be here like us. Don’t be too… dark’”.

Sid Peacock’s Surge OrchestraWhen asked about the value of looking back at Enoch Powell’s speech, Aleem is quick to argue it’s cultural importance. “You have to analyse the past. That should be the reason we have history, not just to pass tests. I’m gonna quote Malcolm X: he says that most of the education we have is not an education, it’s an indoctrination. History especially – especially especially. 

I think by now we should have learned some kind of lesson about invasion of people’s land and privacy, ownership, cultural hegemony. I think history is very important, and it’s important to address in it in an artistic manner. It’s incumbent upon artists to do something – you don’t have to be the most knowledgeable. You don’t have to be Public Enemy. You don’t have to be Bob Dylan. You don’t have to get yourself arrested, but at least address certain things within your understanding of the world. Whatever your issue is, whether it’s just being allowed to skateboard in a certain park – that’s your politics.”

Aleem’s own politics are rooted in the Afrofuturist movement. The author of 2016’s Afrofutures and Astro Black Travel: A Passport to a Melanated Future, he is eager to explain the label.

“I think Afrofuturism – let me say straight off, I’m not concerned with that title. It’s just a name for an idea or a concept or an emotion, and we often give things names that we can’t necessarily contain within those letters. It helps people understand… like the film Black Panther. I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘I get what you’re on about now – I’ve just watched Black Panther and I get it’.

Why did Picasso become a better artist by studying what they call primitivism and cubism, by going into African culture? The standard of European cultural so-called superiority is all based on African precepts. Mathematics, archaeology, language; it’s all from a dark skinned person somewhere, usually a dark skinned woman, funnily enough. So, then feminism features in, and intersectional feminism.”

While we talk, I’ve been making sketches for a portrait of Aleem. He looks over at what I’m working on and asks if he can sketch me too. Producing a case of markers, he gets to work. Aleem’s art style is a reflection of him – bold, unapologetic, but always endearing. It echoes eighties comic books, a recurring topic in our conversation. I ask why he feels drawn to the medium.

“I love Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,” tells Aleem. “Marvel not only made superheroes, they also took existing heroes because these aren’t owned by any copyright anymore, so you’ve got thousands of years of stories that you don’t have to pay for. You put Thor, the god of thunder from Norse mythology, you put him in to the premier superhero group of the sixties Marvel Comic Company, and this is perfect.

Superheroes already exist in mythology. One of the first heroes in East African mythology, where some people speculate we get the word ‘hero’, is Heru, or Horus. He’s already a superhero by virtue: ‘Oh my parents are kind of like gods, and I did this and I conquered that and I came back from death…’ Well, you’re a superhero. If you explain an angel to somebody without using the word, it would sound like a superhero. In west African mythology you have things called the orishas which are like gods, spirits, but lesser than the supreme. They have different attributes, this one can control the water, this one can do that. We would call those beings superheroes. 

Since we’ve started calling superheroes ‘superheroes’, there’s been a lot of wars. Comics came to the fore particularly in the forties and fifties, times of world war. There’s a need in the human psyche to be saved. And as we’re, in a general, less religious, in the Judeo-Christian monotheistic sense, we might not call for Jesus anymore or Jehovah… we may call for Superman. We may call for Spiderman. And again, these archetypes already exist. Spiderman, Anansi, you know where I’m going. Superman is Kal-El – in Hebrew, ‘of god’. They’re already there.”

Juice Aleem is a font of knowledge on the lineage of the superhero archetype throughout civilisation. I ask him if it’s role within the Afrofuturist movement is a healthy one – does African/African Diaspora culture deserve a more varied representation in the future?

“I think Luke Cage is a representation of the black everyman,” answers Aleem. “Obviously, the everyman that got put through a chemical process that gives him bullet proof skin and super strong muscle strength, which obviously happens to most people… Actually, as much as I down it a little bit, I think that’s what Black Lightning’s good for. He’s got powers, but he’s very much a school teacher. I think that’s the problem with the programme. All the crescendos of the story are based in almost too normal a storyline for an African-American family. For me, personally, I’m happy to escape that. Do I need another story about black gangs, black-on-black violence, drug dealing? I think I might have seen that already. 

That’s why Afrofuturism is important to me, more interesting, because it flips a different switch in your brain. Even if we consciously want to be friends with everybody, we are subconsciously going to be sexist. We are subconsciously going to be misogynist. We are subconsciously going to be homophobic, or racist. There’s certain things in our upbringing, in our society that are going to trigger us. And that’s why I think it’s important to do things that are going to challenge us, not only in our documentation but in our experimentation.” 

Juice Aleem and Surge Orchestra present ‘Rivers of Love’ at mac on Saturday 21st April. Doors open for the mac Theatre at 1pm, with ticket priced at £10 / £9.10 – for direct event information and online ticket sales, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk/event/surge-in-spring-ii-juice-aleem-and-surge-orchestra

For more on Juice Aleem, visit www.juicealeem.co.uk 

For more on Sid Peacock and Surge Orchestra, visit www.surgeorchestra.com

For more from the mac, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

BPREVIEW: Screening Rights Film Festival @ mac 26.10-01.11.17

BPREVIEW: Screening Rights Film Festival @ mac 26.10-01.11.17

Words by Heather Kincaid

Returning for its third year in 2017, Screening Rights Film Festival is Birmingham’s international festival of social justice film –screenings features from around the world, with Q&A sessions and panel discussions on the themes and issues they address.

Held at mac, Screening Rights Film Festival 2017 will run from Thursday 26 October until Wednesday 1 November – with ticket deals available for people booking multiple screenings. For more info, including venue details and online ticket sales, click here

According to the Screening Rights Film Festival website, ‘The need for heartfelt films about the depths of human adversity around the world has grown enormously in recent decades’ – as the festival organisers seek to inspire and develop debate by shining a light on filmmakers responding to major contemporary concerns. At the heart of the project is the question of the potential for film, both drama and documentary, ‘to affect, or even effect, personal, social and political change’, whether by informing, provoking, moving, inciting action, connecting people or simply bearing witness to events.

Emerging out of research conducted by former University of Birmingham film lecturer Dr Michele Aaron, Screening Rights Film Festival has spent the last couple of years steadily establishing a place in the city’s cultural calendar. With Aaron having recently taken up a post at Warwick, this year the festival has been helped by the joint support of both universities, as well as a base at mac Birmingham.

Ghost Hunting @ mac 26.10.17 / Screening Rights Film FestivalBuilding on her long-held interest in the ethics of film and spectatorship, the project was originally kicked off by a symposium on ‘Screening Vulnerability’, beginning as an event series co-organised by Aaron and PhD student, John Horne. In 2016, it expanded to encompass twelve films screened in five different venues. This year, however, the focus has narrowed again, with just nine films being shown at mac. It’s a little smaller then, but the greater simplicity afforded by a single, centralised location might well work in the festival’s favour in terms of attracting audiences.

Unsurprisingly, the films being shown at the Screening Rights Film Festival reflect the organisers’ specific areas of expertise and investigation, as well as being influenced by hot topics on the global sociopolitical stage. Dr Aaron has described how, in recent years, her focus has shifted from writing about “power and ethics of representation and spectatorship in relationship to, principally, mainstream English cinema,” and towards a more outward-looking approach with an interest in film practice, often collaborating with filmmakers and community groups.

Among the manifestations of this change has been an intensive smartphone filmmaking course delivered to university students from the West Bank with the help of Palestinian youth advocacy agency, Sharek. Tramontane @ mac 26.10.17 / Screening Rights Film FestivalThe best short film to come out of that ‘Tammayaz’ scheme was screened at last year’s Screening Rights Film Festival, alongside Mohamed Jabaly’s and Abu Marzouq’s Ambulance. Meanwhile, John Horne’s PhD thesis concerns the ‘western’ spectator and the ‘Arab Spring’. Accordingly, films from and/or about the Middle East feature prominently on this year’s programme, making up a total of six out of the nine films being shown.

2017’s line-up includes the documentary Ghost Hunting, in which Palestinian director Raed Andoni confronts his demons head-on by recruiting a team to help him build a replica of the Israeli interrogation centre where he was held at the age of 18.

Drama Tramontane follows the struggle of a young Lebanese man to uncover the truth about his origins and identity after discovering that his ID card is a forgery; while Raving Iran sees two DJs forced to make a choice between home and family or moving abroad to pursue their passion for forbidden ‘Western’ music.

In The Other Side of Home, a Turkish woman raises questions about identity in a moving, personal tribute to the still-denied Armenian genocide of 1915; in Mr Gay Syria, the crowdfunded debut feature of Ayşe Toprak, a group of LGBT Syrian refugees kick back against intolerance in Turkey.

Raving Iran @ mac 01.11.17 / Screening Rights Film FestivalThere’s also Notes to Eternity, a more ‘impressionistic meditation’ on the Israel-Palestine conflict, centred on the lives and ideas of prominent thinkers and Israeli policy critics Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Sara Roy and Robert Fisk.

Another area of interest for the festival’s creators has been depictions of illness, madness and even death on screen. Among Aaron’s more recent projects, for example, has been the Life: Moving exhibition, comprising a series of films created with residents of Erdington’s John Taylor Hospice, lately displayed at Birmingham REP as part of a wider UK and international tour.

This year, Screening Rights Film Festival has joined forces with Flatpack Assemble to present a screening of Jennifer Brea’s Unrest, which charts the director’s own experience of living with ME, otherwise known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Jaha's Promise @ mac 29.10.17 / Screening Rights Film FestivalDespite the fact that thousands of people worldwide independently attest to similar symptoms, medical science has so far failed to offer any explanation for the condition, leading many to conclude that it is purely psychosomatic. In an attempt to conduct some investigations of her own and potentially change attitudes towards the illness, Brea connected with fellow sufferers, piecing together her film from recorded Skype interviews, iPhone footage and professionally shot vérité.

Coinciding with mac Birmingham’s ongoing Women and Protest season (13 September – 26 November), Jaha Dukureh also uses personal experience as a springboard for her film Jaha’s Promise. Now based in the US, the activist began her life in Gambia where a significant number of girls are subjected to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) during infancy. Having been cut at just a week old, Jaha herself did not discover the truth or what it would mean for her until she was married to an older man at the age of 15. After having a daughter of her own, however, she vowed to return to her home country to confront its deeply embedded culture of FGM, whatever the cost.

Finally, Nick de Pencier’s Black Code uses The Citizen Lab’s 2009 exposure of global internet spy ring ‘Ghostnet’ as a starting point for a chilling exploration of 21st Century surveillance culture. In an unnerving trailer that combines archive footage with satellite imagery and CCTV-style shots, Citizen Lab director Dr Ronald Deibert describes the highly detailed and growing “digital exhaust” produced by Internet users and how three developments – mobile devices, social media and cloud computing – have resulted in “the most profound change in communication technology in the whole of human history”.

But this isn’t just a case of emails being intercepted: there are hints of cameras and audio devices being hacked and switched on unbeknownst to owners, and documents being extracted from hard-drive storage. “This is where Big Data meets Big Brother,” the trailer concludes. Prepare to leave feeling a little paranoid…

Unrest – @ mac 27.10.17 / Screening Rights Film Festival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZ1_-7KOS4

Screening Rights International Film Festival is at mac Birmingham from Thursday 26 October until Wednesday 1 November – ticket deals are available for people booking multiple screenings. For more info, including venue details and online ticket sales, click here

For more on Screening Rights Film Festival, visit www.screeningrights.org

For more information about mac Birmingham, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk