The pop-up Front Room
VICTORIA KINGHAM attends a Hastings Book Festival ‘pop-up’ event at Sugarpie Honeybun’s on London Road, St. Leonards, on Friday 11 August
Michael McMillan with Tola Dabiri at Hastings Book Festival
Michael McMillan is the creator of one of several iconic rooms on permanent display in East London in what is now called The Museum of the Home. ‘Our purpose’, states the Museum’s website, ‘is to reveal and rethink the ways we live, in order to live better together’.
British white society has progressed (at least in part, though many would argue otherwise) from the Windrush days, the ‘no coloured’ notices that greeted West Indian people looking for a place to stay, to live, to work. Dr. McMillan, English-born child of St. Vincentians, gave a talk based around the recent enlarged augmented publication of his 2009 book, The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home. Through an examination of the objects in the typical front room and their wider implications, from the crocheted antimacassars to the piano (played or unplayed), from the limited access rights to the radiogram, his talk described aspects of the lives and living space of the migrants of the Caribbean Diaspora.
RESPECTABILITY
For him, growing up in Hackney, the front room of the house became a symbol of respectability. You went there rarely and had to be on your best behaviour. The décor may well have included Joseph Lynch’s painting Tina (not to be confused with Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl, equally resonant), hung next to a framed picture of a (white) Jesus. There might be a plastic pineapple ice bucket, definitely a radiogram, and formal family photographs. These rooms, he discovered, were similar everywhere where he had recreated this exhibit, with added characteristics of the particular society. In Curaçao, for example, the exhibit was intended to be transient but, surrounded by a line of salt that local residents were too superstitious to touch, it stayed in place for two weeks.
Through the objects in the room and their associations, the ‘backdrop of fixed time’, his book explores issues common to the West Indian immigrant population everywhere. He invokes the ideas of post-colonial critic Stuart Hall, anthropologist Dave Lewis, and many other artists and musicians of the migrant Diaspora, in a discussion of the experience. The discussion encompasses ideas of Blackness, of race, of class, of identity, of the encroachment of the street, of cleanliness and godliness, of the idea of being photographed as objects (as though you were in the National Geographic).
LIVING WITH HISTORY
In my experience the Front Room concept is not unique to the West Indian Migrant community, though its wider connotations may be different or less. My grandmothers on both sides, and my mother, had a Front Room with limited access. My mother was a second-generation Jewish immigrant, but I remember plenty of homes in my youth owned by wholly indigenous families who nevertheless had a similarly-designated space. I always assumed that this was, as much as anything, about the aspirations of the lower middle class, a ‘best’ room, a smart room for special occasions and entertaining guests, including the pineapples and the Tinas ( and the radiograms, and toilet rolls with frilly dresses on. Clearly these objects were not central to, or indicative of, their wider experience in the same way that McMillan describes the migrant culture. But surely some of the objects were about fashion, about keeping up with the Joneses, the importance of demonstrating possession of a painting or a book in a society where a good education had only recently become a right rather than a privilege?
McMillan quotes James Baldwin: “History is not in the past. We carry our history with us. The past is in the present.” For him, the Front Room space, Stuart Hall’s “cultural translation of the colonial”, signifies an oddly conservative space in West Indian immigrant life, one understood by general society. Does the permanent museum installation help us, post-covid and post-Brexit, to ‘live better together’ as the Museum curators hope? Time will tell.
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