Little Harmony, Plenty Colon

Attention, music lovers. Charlotte Gill brings thrilling news:

Decolonise Choir Workshop 

I knew you’d be keen.

Decolonise Choir is a choir for people of global majority. This project is supported by Decolonise Fest, a festival by and for punx of colour focused on programming alternative and punk musicians of colour. Decolonise Choir was formed by community musician and organiser Ishani Jasmin, aiming to create a space for our global majority community to experience the joy, the resistance, and the healing of singing together. We aim to use collective song and songwriting to exist and to coexist. 

Naturally, all this healing and coexistence, all this righteousness and resistance, necessitates certain rules, indeed a manifesto:

As Ms Gill observes, one eyebrow slightly raised:

No discrimination will be tolerated in this choir for people of colour only. 

Ah, but, you see, it’s “the radical act of collective song.” The “radical act of joy.” And the radical act of shunning white people as some kind of moral contaminant. How the time must fly.

Readers intrigued by the prospect of shaping the tapestry of their collective sound, via “somatic practice,” “singing and healing together,” and “co-creating an anthem,” can savour the results of all this radicalism below:

You may now resume your humdrum, dreary, non-decolonised lives.

Update, via the comments:

Nikw211 asks, not unreasonably,

Who is making them so miserable that they need to seek joy in a city in which the majority of the population is the Global Majority and a minority the Global Minority?

And so what is this act of joy an act of resistance against?

Certainly not the subsidised community spaces they rehearse in… Or the Arts Council England, Local Council or Mayoral grant funded Tara Theatre they perform in.

Indeed. It’s a head-scratcher.

However, as the only racial group being explicitly excluded is Old Whitey, the obvious inference is that the cause of all this alleged misery and “trauma” is the party being excluded. As if the mere proximity of People Of Pallor would inhibit and befoul any creative endeavour, any glimmer of “joy.” Given the minority status of white people in London, it seems a bit much. And ever so slightly ungrateful.

And it is, I think, worth noting that the nation’s capital, where these dramas of “resistance” unfold, has in my lifetime gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%. Yet it would seem that even this dramatically downsized white devil population is, for some, still too burdensome and oppressive.

A cause of “collective trauma.”




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