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When he shot us, he used to give a speech. We stood straight: four of us or sometimes more, shoulder to shoulder, against a white backdrop in a studio in a warehouse down near the docks. It was cold. We stood for hours; we were not able to speak. Looking ahead. He said, look as if you have come from another world wearing your ancestry on your back; as if you have come to show us the way. The clothes were put on us. The clothes itched with “better than” like the promise of a politician’s smile; the accessories were sometimes simulations of our childhood hats and scarves and grandmothers’ shawl so laughed at for smelling at school. All we had worn as children now cast off; the new clothes were nothing like where we came from. They were made in the countries our fathers had grown up in, our mothers called home, before they journeyed west.

He knew none of us would ever be seen again except through his version of us; he did not care to explain this. He was always intense; we thought angry. In his rare quiet moments he would take one of us aside and say, try to look more enlightened. Get that vision of the world you desire, the world to come, the world you dream of into your face as if you have seen it already. I want to smell the memory of your mother’s cooking coming from your eyes. To another, he would lean close, twirl our hair and our hat bobbles on strings and whisper, let us be earnest even while we are guilty. The guilt he felt at the possibility of making art out of suffering, at making art. Successful photography in this world, he said is made by single individuals with no hunger for connection. We knew even then that no individual wants to go hungry yet to feed for only oneself is to precipitate our own starvation. In the mid- to late 1990s, capital infused the curation of individual hunger. The bigger, louder, more colourful, more looming over industrial towns whose roads were built by the brand, the more the artist wanted to complicate his advertising with more high-contrast artifice. 

We were paid to wear brightly coloured hats and look straight ahead. He saw us as single beings, the limit of his imagination. We were not. He shot us as if together in material culture but always to keep us from each other; our different skins held our separate organs; he shot our pig hearts and labelled them of colour. His statements were empty of meaning; he said they meant whatever people wanted them to mean. People looked at the images. They talked about the images and the brand. They did not buy the bright jumpers, the bright hats.

It was absurd to us; we were always a single being. We kept that quiet. We kept that to ourselves as our vast families had in the boats they arrived in, in the land they left or were enticed, call it taken, from. We could lament that now but instead we rage from love, but quietly and in writing. We understood as we stood there, without speaking, without turning our head that when others perceived us they would do so with individual eyes, if they bought the clothes they thought they could be like us. They did not know we already loved them. Without the clothes. We did not keep the clothes.

While he worked and we stood, getting cold despite the acrylics and the coats and the elastane wool, he hung billboard images of his other work at the far end of the bunker. These images he offered for us to focus on. In counterpoint. Some of them might have featured our ancestors and cousins, our friends and lovers. The images were of a person suffering with AIDS, refugees spilling over the sides of boats. He put them there to hurt our eyes into shining. We interpreted this gesture as his way of saying: mea culpa. (This was before the fire at Rana Plaza, where part of us was born. He did not shoot that. We are mercy, but do not forgive him.)

We were in between the two worlds he shot – the rich and the poor. And we were the children hanging in the balance. But making a line from boat to hat only serves to say: you too could escape the uncivilised crush, and stand shoulder to shoulder in the bright synthetic global; you must wear the costume to present you and to pass – for the higher you go the rarer the air.

This was not our philosophy. Our cells merged as we never talked out loud about it. We stared straight ahead, and speculated symbiotically that he might take his own life.

We had a name: glissant. A whisper in his name. Aboard a boat named after a white Queen, he spoke about the first boat crossings, which carried cargo not considered human. The first humans. They spoke of diaspora and its unity and where it lies. We looked into the middle distance at images of refugees falling from boats. Later, we read claudia rankine presenting manthia diawara asking glissant about that first enslavement, and what being pushed on to a boat in that context meant. In the chain of connection rankine makes the white chains break. rankine presents diawara asking glissant what the point of departure would mean. glissant answers, “It is the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.” We took this as our beginning and whispered his name as our own – see how we glissant!

That was the beginning of us. This is our origin story. We come from no village of individuals in bright hats. There is only one of us and we are everywhere. We are many. The kids of the middle world were meant to see themselves in each of us, but even they saw the lie. They came from small towns, or were on day trips to the cities. Regular brown-skinned, shade-skinned, tan-skinned neighbours who would never make it onto a billboard or a witness a genocide or sail the seas as refugees, though meant to consume both states. In England’s schools, the 14-year-olds were learning Shakespeare, while NATO bombed Belgrade, as the word “genocide” came into common language for the lives of Muslims killed in Bosnia. As Kashmir was under sanctions and brides died on their wedding days while men were disappeared. There was a dome being built; there was an emphasis on cool; the poultry industry was deregulated and cows burned in fields; we prayed at school every morning and our bodies and faces, our eyes and noses, our hair, our hair, our hair advertised bright hats. What is the point of such juxtaposition? The representation of reality becomes our lived experience in such contexts. Seeing the images on the billboards, in shop windows or on the covers of newspapers while going down the town centre with our mates in our own clothes, trying on cheap silver bangles and stroking velvet jackets and sniffing on incense in the shop run by a woman who had once been to India and thinking of the grandmother who will not come to England because of what she lost in 1947 before getting home in time for tea and homework and being at school. The servicing of that everyday life requires iconography: the boat, the border, the drowning child, four or more models in bright hats. We knew nothing about the mane only knew the artist-photographer, apparently. We were meant to represent the promise that we can all join the club through capitalist miscegenation, by buying a Peruvian-inspired hat, an Afghani-inspired scarf, a Cornwall life jacket-inspired coat. The clothes made us almost the same, but highlighted our difference. The suggestion always contained and safely prohibited because we were dressed that naked we might share in each other (we did so anyway). Was his work with us, and then with apes. and sick people and monks praying with soldiers a reproach, a warning or a reminder, a confession?

Those who looked up to us were too young to have their own money so they could not buy him absolution. In many small towns, there was no Benetton, only the billboard, only us. We modelled the styles for money, (we did not keep the clothes). The kind of world travel he spoke of we had not done, though our mothers had journeyed across the world to have us here. When we left the bunker we were given copies of Lonely Planet as a parting gift.