Sir Steve McQueen has requested I tell you a specific story. Warning: it has nothing to do with him. It’s my personal go-to “proof racism exists in the UK” story, the one I dig out from my past in response to “Things aren’t so bad in this country”. I’ve told it before, but who am I to deny McQueen, the Turner Prize-winning visual artist and Oscar-winning director, who last year received a knighthood for his services to art and film? Besides, after the events of last year and speaking to McQueen, I’m beginning to see the tale from a different perspective.
I was six years old, watching cartoons with my two-year-old brother in our conservatory on a January evening. Two undercover police officers knocked on our door. “Where are your children?” they asked my mother, the only adult in the house, as my father was away for work. After some questioning to check the officers’ identities, she gave them an answer. “Get them out of the conservatory,” they said. “We think they could be in danger.”
Panicked, she ushered us upstairs. The officers sat her down and showed her photographs of racially motivated lynchings. The village’s vicar had contacted them, concerned after death threats directed at our family began appearing on the church’s doors. They’d then found more threats against us online, apparently serious enough for them to feel they needed to park outside the pub opposite our house and keep watch overnight. Unbeknown to me, they also kept watch outside my primary school over the following weeks, in case a racist tried to kidnap me at lunchtime.
When I asked why the police were at our house that night, my mother told me they’d come to warn about ghosts in the village, which was situated on the outskirts of Hull. It’s a weird feeling growing up believing a frightening lie, only to later learn the truth is much more terrifying. Eventually, we simply stopped going to church.
“It’s beautiful – not beautiful, it’s horrific – but beautiful in a way,” starts McQueen, after hearing my account. Beautiful is not an adjective I would have ever used to describe this story. But while its content may be distressing, I’m realising it’s not the anecdote itself that’s “beautiful”, rather the meaning and power it holds. “To tell you guys about ghosts, because then you understand the real horror of it. To make it into a fantasy in order to make it palatable, because the real horror would just do your head in.”
McQueen elects to keep his camera off for our Zoom call, but I can sense his brain whirring as he speaks. Occasionally, I hear him tapping on a surface while searching for the right words. This, I think, is what makes Steve McQueen tick: stories, ones he hasn’t heard before, that perhaps inspire deeper thought.
While preparing for this interview, I came across a quote from Gillian Flynn, his writing partner on the 2018 thriller Widows. “He can get very giddy and excited about things, which is pretty adorable,” she told Vanity Fair. Now I’m beginning to understand exactly what she meant, although I wouldn’t call this particular exchange adorable. The right word is fascinating. I’m listening to his mind work in real time. “People need to hear that,” he says. “OK, what else do you want to ask me?”
Well, a lot of things, but we should probably talk about Small Axe, the series of five films that aired on the BBC towards the end of 2020, filling in cinema’s historical blind spot of West Indian life in London between the 1960s and 1980s. The series brought such stories to light as that of the Mangrove Nine, a group of black activists who were tried for (and eventually cleared of) inciting a riot at a protest in response to the police targeting The Mangrove, a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill.
It was a historic trial, with two defendants – British Black Panthers leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe and writer Darcus Howe – choosing to represent themselves. Ultimately, the judge admitted that the proceedings had “shown evidence of racial hatred on both sides”. The fact that no one with the power to do so thought this story was worth retelling until McQueen is astonishing.
“As far the black community was concerned, this was kind of a reminder of vindication. Sometimes in order to know your future, you have to know your past,” he says of the series as a whole. “I think a lot of white people, possibly, were ashamed [while watching it]. I know they were, because people wrote to me.” He tells me that Leroy Logan, the police officer who John Boyega plays in the series’ third film, “Red, White And Blue”, received a letter of apology from an old colleague who’d never spoken to him but knew of the racism he endured. “This is after thirty-fucking-five years.”
I ask more questions. McQueen talks about his pursuit of truth in art: “We have an idea of who we like to be, but I’m interested in who we actually are.” He explains how the pandemic and Black Lives Matter might inspire a renewed interest in art: “I think there’s going to be more thirst for understanding.” And he touches on his upcoming project, The Occupied City, a documentary about Nazi occupation in Amsterdam, where McQueen has lived since 1997, based on a book by his wife, cultural critic and historical writer Bianca Stigter: “This is a 17th-century city that wasn’t really bombed, so you can see where things were happening. Even on my street, there was a gentleman who was hiding and, in order to pay for his keep, gave silent drumming lessons to the [house’s] occupants. These are beautiful stories.” There’s that word again: beautiful.
After all that, to my surprise, he’s still thinking about my story. “How does it make you feel about your own existence?” he probes before we say goodbye. Boy, is that a big question.
Think there's no value in confronting our history? Watch Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
Small Axe: Mangrove shows how little and how much racism has changed
Small Axe: Red, White And Blue reveals how deep the cracks in our justice system are
