🔥🌍🔥🌍🔥 BIG OIL IS THE POISON: ACTION IS THE ANTIDOTE 🌍🔥🌍🔥🌍
➡️ Live literature event with Lemn Sissay OBE, Nikita Gill, Nikesh Shukla
➡️ Global Majority writers call for end to Big Oil 🛢️
🕓 FRI APRIL 15TH, 4-6pm
📍Tate Modern Bankside (map)
📛 Be part of this live literature event never before seen on London’s streets, co-hosted by XR Writers Rebel, legendary spoken-word night TongueFu and Hot Poets.
📛 We know climate collapse is racist (don’t believe us?). Our oil-addicted culture disproportionately affects Black people, indigenous lands and communities of colour. That’s why BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) writers are calling on Big Oil to stop production NOW.
2012 London Olympics poet Lemn Sissay, Costa Award winner Monique Roffey, Ted Hughes poetry award winner Raymond Antrobus, as well as performance poets Dizraeli, Patience Agbabi, Zena Edwards, and writers Nikesh Shukla, Courttia Newland, and more, have come together to perform new work, live poetry, and speak truth to power.
This is a spoken-word action, free to all, no sign up. It follows the Easter Friday march, so come after! Because of the impacts of police action on BAME individuals, *it is low-level risk of arrest*. Spread the word, be part of the change.
LINE-UP (subject to change!)
4.00pm Liv Torc (Hot Poets), Chris Redmond (Tongue Fu) and Liz Jensen (Writers Rebel)
4.10pm Zena Edwards
4.15pm Inua Ellams
4.20pm Patience Agbabi
4.25pm Sarah Winman
4.30pm Maggie Gee
4.35pm Greg Normington
4.40pm Nikesh Shukla
4.45pm Joe Dunthorne
4.50pm Liv Torc
4.55pm Liv & Chris set Audience Poem
5.00 pm Alex Lockwood
5.05pm Nikita Gill
5.10pm Raymond Antrobus
5.15pm Courttia Newland
5.20pm Monique Roffey
5.25pm Dizraeli
5.30pm Liv reads Audience poem
5.35pm Lemn Sissay
5.45pm Chris, Liv, Monique wrap up and thanks
5.50pm End
The group of writers is calling for an end to fossil fuel production and Big Oil’s outsized impact on people of colour. Research over the past decade has consistently shown Black people, indigenous communities, and people of colour, are disproportionately affected by climate collapse. This is often due to their economic disadvantages of living in more climate-affected areas, urban heat islands, as well as polluted and resource-depleted neighbourhoods. Climate collapse also affects non-Western countries more significantly with extreme weather events, floods and droughts, especially across Asia and the Middle East.
Monique Roffey: “We have a small window of time left to act. Direct action is the only answer to the massive damage fossil fuels do to our planet and have done over a hundred years, or more. We must adapt to green energy and now. As writers, we must speak out, speak truth to power, amplify this message as best we can.”
Courttia Newland, co-writer of the BBC series Small Axe and author of A River Called Time, who is also performing at the event: “I’m involved because honestly I feel like fossil fuels need to be a thing if the past. I grew up beside the A40 Westway. My kids go to school in one of the most polluted areas of East London. Reduced fossil fuel consumption, with the aim of making it zero, is the only way to combat the numerous ills they bring to the world. They are many other ways of making energy for ourselves, we only need to be prepared to make the sacrifice.”
The Nigerian-born poet Inua Ellams: “It isn’t complicated. There are better, cleaner alternatives out in the world. Oil needs to recede, so they can proceed.”
*ACTION IS THE ANTIDOTE!*
Questions? Get in touch.
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