MANGROVE

MANGROVE is the first instalment in this distinctive series. Drawing on the conventions of the courtroom drama, McQueen tells the true story of the 1970 trial of the so-called Mangrove Nine.

The Mangrove was a restaurant opened in Notting Hill by Trinidadian immigrant Frank Crichlow in the late 1960s, when the area was still home to a large Caribbean community. It quickly became the heart of local life – something the largely white police force took exception to. A spiral of systemic racism and police violence led first to protest and eventually to a trial in which those defending the Mangrove and the Black community found themselves in the dock.

The conventions of the genre allow McQueen to dissect the mechanisms of prejudice and violence at successive levels of power, and highlight the power of self-determination and the ability to defend one’s own cause on the part of the accused and activists. Black citizens are not reduced to the role of victims here; they fight skilfully and passionately for justice.

In 1973, Bob Marley recorded the song SMALL AXE. One of its lines – If you are the big tree, we are the small axe – serves as a kind of motto for McQueen’s anthology. The story of the Mangrove Nine becomes one such blow of the axe against the great tree of systemic racism.

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Text: dr Karolina Kosińska