Ordinary Rapture

It was in Kinshasa in 1982, in the week after the first great Sapeur uprising that I witnessed a starving man bite off his own finger as he bit into bread handed to him by an aid worker.

He barely flinched before fainting.

Conscious self harm would later become a statement amongst young people in countries where the greatest adversity was poverty of spirit rather than gruelling physical poverty. But the end result was no different.

The Sapeurs were of course right, what the people of Kinshasa and people everywhere needed in their times of deprivation, was to feel exalted, to feel their spirits soar.

That they chose to do this through defiantly extravagant dress was an act of transcendent rebellion against the indifferent earthly laws that bind us. “Glamour not grain!” they shouted as they stumbled starving and beautiful through the bare, dirty streets.

When I returned to London I saw the East End market stall owners selling knock off fashion as entrepreneurs of salvation, every cheap glitzy handbag and pair of fake jewelled sunglasses a stained glass window into the soul.

It was not the outward appearances that mattered so much, it was the light they shone inward on lives that were often dull with struggle and ordinariness.

If you don’t believe ecstatic rapture can be bought for £5.99 you’ve never been poor enough.

Analogue social post: toilet door, cafe in Thirroul