This year Nottingham writer and archivist Panya Banjoko celebrated fifteen years as head of the Nottingham Black Archive: a community project that enlivens black cultural history in Notts. We caught up with Panya to talk about her residency this summer at the New Art Exchange and her long career as one of Nottingham’s foremost creative individuals.
Notts writer Panya Banjoko is a difficult-to-define-creative; throughout her life her work has spanned both poetry and historical archiving to an equal degree, especially ever since she founded Nottingham Black Archive, which celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2024.
“It’s so muddy that even I, at times, don’t know what’s going on, because one feeds the other,” says Panya. “Sometimes the poetry is more dominant and I’m looking for a way into a theme, to write, and at other times the archive is dominant and there’s a photograph, a pamphlet, or an interview with an elder that will spark the poetry. Even if it’s not in terms of the content of my work, I’m still very much aware that as a black writer here in Nottingham, I am standing on the shoulders of the other black writers and artists that came before me. I also need to leave behind a legacy. “
Nottingham born-and-bred, Panya found her way into a long-and-storied writing career after developing an interest in Rastafarianism and poets like Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze as a young adult. A lot of the driving force behind becoming a poet, she says, was being told at a young age that she couldn’t, and believing that it was her choice to write good or bad poetry. It was also a dissatisfaction with the status quo that led to the founding of Nottingham Black Archive (NBA) fifteen years ago. Hoping to preserve the histories she’d heard growing up from her community elders, in 2009 she completed an MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.
“I embarked on the MA hoping that it would open the door for me to work with museums and share my skills and expertise in how they would diversify their collections and their offerings, but that wasn’t to be the case, as the museum sector is very incestuous,” says Panya. “People in the community like Len Garrison who was the director of the ACFF: I’m building on his work. But fifteen years ago nobody was taking black history in this city seriously, and by nobody I mean the mainstream heritage sector.”
Since 2009 the NBA has made its name as one of our city’s most beloved cultural resources, holding photographs, articles, newsletters, books and political letters dating back to the 1940s, laying out Afro-Caribbean oral histories and those of Black community organisations in Nottingham. To mark the grand anniversary in Summer 2024, The New Art Exchange provided Panya with a residency at their brand-new purpose-built artist’s studio, where she launched an anthology: Seeds of Resistance, which collated the poetry and art of creatives linked to Nottingham with some of the NBA’s most notable artefacts.
“I wanted to create something that was special, memorable and resonated with as many people as possible,” Panya says. “It looks back at one of the first anthologies produced in this city: CHROMA, which stood for chronicle of minority artists. That organisation was set up in the 80s to bring African, Caribbean and South Asian communities in a shared goal of amplifying their art, also mobilising on a literary level against what was then, and still is now, to an extent, a very exclusive literary landscape. I wanted to celebrate work produced by contemporary artists and artists from the past, and share some of the literary history, which is why there is a chapter focusing on the various organisations like TURBO and the ACNA, showing that although the status quo didn’t necessarily support black art and artists back then, the actual community did.”
Something’s going wrong somewhere in this country if we’re still producing people who can’t see the value of people from different cultures being here and contributing, because we have contributed, then and now
The result of Panya's ambitions is a thought-provoking collection of words and visual art with a kaleidoscope of artistic styles and themes. There are many different viewpoints from many different writers in Seeds of Resistance, from the fragmented imagery of poets like Stanley O Ayodeji, to the impassioned, socially conscious proclamations of others like Manjit Sahota. The visual art displayed inside the book is also just as diverse, encompassing collage, oil paintings, and sculpture photos.
“When I contacted the artists and the poets I didn’t say there was a theme. The only thing I said was that this anthology marked fifteen years of Nottingham Black Archive and was to celebrate artists in the city,” says Panya. “I was also surprised that the poetry and the work all gelled together really well. It looks as though I knew what I was doing! For me that was an indication of the fact that these are issues that are pertinent to black people now. Poets were writing about these themes back in the 80s and they still are in ‘24.”
Panya’s own poems included in Seeds of Resistance aren't the ardent edicts for social justice that people sometimes associate her with. Instead, they’re on the more abstract, impressionistic end of her writing, seeming to capture those ephemeral moments at which we might become intensely aware of the way-that-the world around us is.
“My work is broad. Right now, I’m working on a collection that is about love and relationships. I don’t only write about social or racial injustice or writing stimulated from artefacts in the archive,” says Panya. “The work I do write about social and racial injustice, I write for myself. I’m not writing it to educate anyone or sway anyone. I’m writing it for my own mental health and sanity. If I don’t put those things down on paper, then they’re in my head.”
Nevertheless, back in the 1980s and still today, it still seems that racial justice and a consciousness of black history emerges more from individuals and grassroots communities than truly at an institutional level. For Panya this is an indication that progress she’s often hoped to see is still slow.
“We want to see black history being seen as world history, that black history is more than slavery that this is then reflected in terms of the school curriculum and university curriculum, and how the museum sector presents its objects and artefacts. We’ve had about four counter protests to the EDL here in Nottingham, I’ve been on two of those. Something’s going wrong somewhere in this country, if we’re still producing people who can’t see the value of people from different cultures being here and contributing, because we have contributed to this country then and now. Those are the issues.”
To browse the Nottingham Black Archive and hear about upcoming events and projects head to their website below. ‘Seeds of Resistance’ can be bought from Fives Leaves bookshop, Old Market Square.
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