Handsworth Songs is the response of the Black Audio Film Collective following the Handsworth riots that broke out in the Birmingham suburb populated mainly by immigrants in September 1985.

Longtime conflicts with the local police, an increasing number of arrests of young black males due to then extended stop and search laws as well as unemployment, poor housing and the general industrial decline had all been contributing factors to social tension that finally burst into violent clashes, looting and arson. Two people died during the riots, plus a number of severe injuries to both sides.

While official rhetoric and mass media coverage depicted the rioters as criminals hinting at their racial background or ethnic origins, the BAFC facing this rhetoric needed to find and develop new forms and narratives to counter and problematize mass media representation of these riots in particular and of race and ethnicity more generally.

The images we see in Handsworth Songs are therefore clearly intended to break free from the restraints of documentary realism. At the same time, the film not only combines its documentary footage from the riots with archive material from the 1950s and 1960s, the scenes at display could also easily stem from one of the riots that had shaken England since the late 1970s, as with the Notting Hill Carnival 1976, the Brixton Riots 1981 or the unrests that had sprung out in other cities, too, in 1985. Police violence had led to the shooting of Dorothy “Cherry” Groce in Brixton and the death of Cynthia Jarrett in Tottenham 1985.

All these events painfully testified to the immense gap that had opened up between the white majority’s discourse on „Britishness“ and the daily experience of all those who, by the end of the Seventies, had come of age as the offspring of the ‚Windrush’-generation. Having been born in post-war Britain, at least most of them, these children of parents who had come to England from the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent and Africa had not longer been willing to tolerate racial oppression.
Thus the riots of Liverpool, Brixton or Handsworth only crystallized the experience of deep resentments from white British society: a feeling of discrimination, marginalization and suppression, exercised by state power that decided on who’s in and who’s not. This institutionalized racism rested on fixed categories of „same“ and „other“ and on who had the right to speak out and should be heard and who produced only senseless noise. At the heart of liberal realism, supposedly free of archaic impulses and openly racist views, had expandingly grown a newly clothed racism, even as in the consensus-based order of the days a certain „multiculturalism“ had itself realized.
This novel kind of racism had been expressed for example by Margaret Thatcher when she made her infamous statement in 1979 that the old Empire “might be rather swamped by people of a different culture” and this were going to stir the hearts and minds of her country fellowmen. No less harmful words uttered Sir Richard Bell while watching some newsreel images of the Brixton riots in 1981: „If you look at their faces… I think they don’t know who they are or what they are. And really, what you’re asking me is how the hell one gives them the kind of sense of belonging young Englishmen have?”

These and other words marked a whole generation that by now felt trapped in history, fueling the desire for an affective counter-memory. This counter-memory had to intervene in the official rhetoric of historical continuity and national identity. Young British Blacks, many of whom had grown up by the 1980s, had not only been confronted painfully with the complacency of a regime in power that was convinced to stand on the right side of history but also with the contempt of an imagined community they apparently did not make a part of.
The formation and imagination of a counter-memory offered the BAFC and others a tangible opportunity of dissolving the intertwinings of past, present and future while at the same time redistributing their roles and places that had been prescribed for them by Thatcher’s ‚Englishness’ (thus following the idea of a „distribution of the sensible“ as laid out by Rancière, intervening in what one could call the aesthetic productions of social relations). To undermine this logic and their representations, the BAFC had to invent forms and narratives that were apt to resonate with the fears and anxieties of a generation and would primarily through their affective qualities object to the alleged consensus and give voice to its differand. Forms and narratives that would generate new relations with the past, a past that had given birth to oppression, inequality, exploitation and discrimination, but had also grown inwardly, as an eerie, hardly binding past that had inflicted its wounds on any sense of national identity or community.

SOUND AND MUSIC IN HANDSWORTH SONGS

As much as the collage of images it’s the music and sound used in Handsworth Songs that contribute to an overall intriguing effect of the film. The way the images and the soundtrack go together are proof of the film’s experimental form as well as of its redistribution of the sensible, subversing the idea of ‘Englishness’ from which so many of Black British youth felt excluded. One striking example is the use of Mark Stewart’s and Andrew Sherwood’s dub-infused cut-up version of Blake’s And did those feet in ancient time, one of the most popular poems in English language and widely known as Jerusalem.

Taking their turn on Jerusalem, Mark Stewart & the Maffia resurrected its spirit that had been buried while becoming the unofficial hymn of Britain’s glory and relocated the poem to what Madeleine Byrne calls „its original mental-space of political protest and defiance“.

Instead of hailing out to English nationalism, Blake had felt the urge to defend individual freedom against any form of social suppression making Jerusalem the stand-in for an utopia of truly freed individuals bound by solidarity as their political imagination. In stark contrast to this utopian idea, however, the reality of Blake’s own times, the formative years of modern capitalism, showed “no sense of Jerusalem in the dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Age“. Accordingly, throughout the film, we repeatedly find images that hint at the long history of forced and cheap labor as one of the driving factors behind the development of capitalism and British wealth.
Against the attempts to identify Blake’s Jerusalem with the ideals of the British empire, therefore contesting any notion of patriotism in Blake’s own poem, Kate Maltby further suggests to see here (nothing) but a „a stonking parody of Napoleonic Era nationalism.” According to her, Blake was far more troubled by an ongoing suppression of the individual spirit that came along with the rise of nationalist ideas finally leading to the years of restoration politics throughout Europe.

The track can therefore be understood as articulating a concept of ‘Englishness’ from which ‘Blackness’ is indispensably a part of, appearing as the only possible form by which to fulfill the original intention of Blake’s revolutionary poem. In the film, along the sounds of Jerusalem Dub, we see some newsreel images and clips of the Birmingham riots, making the track a strong political statement: the utopia of a land of “pasture and green” as envisioned by Blake’s poem now crushed under the disturbing and disordering reality of unrests grounding in racial conflicts, social tension and exclusion.

Moreover, the use of Mark Stewart’s Jerusalem Dub illustrates the BAFC being deeply embedded in the era of post-punk, sharing its attitudes. A lot of the music from that time broke up fixed categories such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ culture. Listening to the way the voices are looped or the seething electro-acoustics filling the space, it becomes clear, that, apart from its obvious references to the dub universe, Trevor Mathison’s sound design is not least influenced by groups like Cabaret Voltaire or Test Department.