Vanessa Kisuule is a performance poet based in Bristol. She has won over 10 poetry slam titles including Farrago Schools Out Slam Champion 2010, Bang Said The Gun Award, Poetry Rivals, Next Generation Slam 2012, Slambassadors 2010, and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam in New York. She is currently the Bristol City Poet for 2018-2020.
In this poem, which is a spoken word piece, she reflects on the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston on June 7th 2020.
Edward Colston was an English merchant and Tory Member of Parliament, involved in the slave trade. He later came to be regarded as a philanthropist, as a result of donating money to charitable causes which supported those who shared his political and religious views, especially in his native city of Bristol. In 1895, 174 years after Colston’s death, a statue designed by John Cassidy was erected in the centre of Bristol, to commemorate Colston’s philanthropy. It stood for 125 years, until 7 June 2020, when the statue was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbour by demonstrators during the George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom.
I’ve chosen this poem today as it’s a wonderful example of how poetry, unconfined to the classroom or history, can be a powerful response to the world around you. There is much to say about any text that endures the passage of time. We often study poems that were written centuries ago. How often do we study poems written yesterday?
P.S. I’m struck by a line from The History Boys by Alan Bennett today. Hector, an old schoolmaster preparing his students to apply for Oxford and Cambridge, reflects on his own application to University and how he was so affected by the grand old buildings of the elite universities. He states: “Cloisters, ancient libraries
I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”
