Episodes

  • all my poems are sad n*gga poems with Ben Ellis

    all my poems are sad n*gga poems with Ben Ellis
    Oct 21 2025
    Today marks eight years since Busy Being Black first came to life: on 21 October 2017, I produced and hosted an event called Forbidden Fruits, anchored by a conversation about love, intimacy and belonging among queer Black men. I couldn't have known in that moment how much I would need this space. Ben Ellis is a poet—and a poet in the way James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and René Ménil meant it: one ordained to dive into the unconscious and awaken the rest of us with their marvels. I am stunned and struck by the energy of Ben's poetry, his vulnerability, his rage. I am enlivened by his sensitivity, his heartache and his desire for peace of mind. I am grateful to honour my own thresholds by bearing witness at the gates of his. If you enjoyed this conversation, you'll enjoy the ⁠Black Marvellous⁠: a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude and life. — Chapters 00:26 Are you avoiding your own emergence? 02:04 The ordination of the bard: 8 years of Busy Being Black 12:43 Ben recites Pansies 16:32 All my poems are sad n*gga poems 24:19 There is no word for depression in my native tongue 29:25 Who is served by the performance of our grief? 33:16 Ben recites Milkshake 37:09 Can we reclaim any spirituality from within the religions that have harmed us? 47:23 I am Black first and Black also 51:00 Ben recites To Orlando 53:37 Peace of mind 55:55 Every gesture is a prayer when you know who you are — Thank you: This episode includes wisdom from ⁠Candice D'Meza⁠, ⁠Rev. Jide Macaulay⁠ and ⁠Bayyinah Bello⁠. If this conversation resonates with you, there are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The songs 'Busy Being Black' and 'Baptism' were created for Busy Being Black and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter, and Dylan Halverson, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 mins
  • our miraculous hearts with Phoebe Boswell

    our miraculous hearts with Phoebe Boswell
    Sep 21 2025
    A tender meditation on grief, healing and courage with multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Boswell, who creates portals that return us to our miraculous hearts. You can surrender to Phoebe's paintings at Ben Hunter Gallery in London until 12 December. For more on how this conversation and Phoebe's art have landed in my life, head to @busybeingblacktube. The heart-rending composition in this episode is by bassist Gregg August, commissioned by Phoebe Boswell, and is included with Phoebe's permission. If you enjoyed this conversation, you'll enjoy the ⁠⁠Black Marvellous⁠⁠: a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude and life. — Thank you: If this conversation resonates with you, there are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or contribute towards production costs. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    58 mins
  • Black duende with Mojisola Adebayo

    Black duende with Mojisola Adebayo
    Jun 25 2025
    Inspired by Afrosurrealism, surrealist philosophy and the archetypal imagination, the Black Marvellous is a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude and life. Who better than Mojisola Adebayo to remind us of the adventure and irreverence of Black artistry, during and beyond times of crisis? In this conversation, which originally aired in February 2023, Mojisola takes us on a journey from Goldsmiths University to Antarctica, to space and back again, to explore how we utilise performance to challenge the sanctity of whiteness, what an orgasm-seeking space odyssey tells us about the world-changing potential of queer Black pleasure, and how the reanimation of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks prompts us to consider our own genealogical and cosmic immortality. — Thank you: If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 mins
  • a life worth writing about with Kuchenga Shenjé

    a life worth writing about with Kuchenga Shenjé
    Dec 31 2024
    You’ll no doubt have heard of and read Kuchenga Shenjé's debut novel, The Library Thief, which brings together her passions for history, mystery and rebels; and you’re likely to have felt the warmth and humour of her writing in publications like British Vogue and Stylist. In our conversation, we explore how she came to the transformative decision to pursue sobriety, her hodgepodge approach to her spirituality and spiritual practice, how the deferred dreams of her mother and grandmother have shaped how she enjoys her life and what she’s learned from the characters in her novel and daring women across history about what it means to live a life worth writing about. You can find out more about Kuchenga here. Thank you If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 mins
  • rehumanising the Black meme with Legacy Russell

    rehumanising the Black meme with Legacy Russell
    Dec 10 2024
    I’ve been invigorated by Legacy Russell’s ongoing inquiries into how we come alive together. Whether she’s encouraging us to think expansively about the connection between marine life and Black agency under duress, or pointing us towards the liberatory possibilities at the intersection of our bodies, genders and technologies, her work is evidence of her desire and drive to live in a world in which Black folks thrive. We explore how an investigation into visual culture helps us appreciate and reckon with the role Black people have played in shaping the modern world, our responsibility as global and digital citizens to harness the internet to collectively push forward what our shared future looks like, and what we learn from what it means to really live—or to not live—from the ancestors who refused to survive the Middle Passage. Legacy's first book, Glitch Feminism, explores how we find liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology; her second book, Black Meme, shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world. Both are available from Verso Books. Thank you If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 mins
  • a posture of improvisation with Maleke Glee

    a posture of improvisation with Maleke Glee
    Nov 26 2024
    How do we engage with and sustain Black cultures, communities, histories and futures outside of the extractive infrastructures and institutions that thrive on Black death and disposability? Maleke Glee is a curator and scholar of cultural sustainability who offers go-go music as a wonderful working example: a genre and sonic landscape native to Washington DC, with an insular economy that supports self-taught and formerly incarcerated musicians. Our conversation today also explores the spiritual work that undergirds Maleke’s ongoing research into and preservation of go-go music, how initiatives for Black inclusion within art world institutions often stifle ongoing efforts to sustain Black vernacular cultures, and how a closer relationship to ugliness helps us queer what it means to embody and pursue Black excellence. Thank you If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 mins
  • our stories told by us with Angelina Namiba

    our stories told by us with Angelina Namiba
    Aug 26 2024
    Angelina Namiba serves as a possibility model for effective and sustained engagement with those vulnerable to HIV. When she was diagnosed in the early 90s, she immediately set to work to understand why Black women were being left out of national efforts to combat the spread of the virus, and she participated in and assembled groups of women committed to raising the voices of women living with HIV globally. She is a titan within England’s HIV advocacy movement and she has worked for almost 25 years to promote and advocate for the involvement of women living with HIV in forming and informing local and national HIV strategy and policy. Today, we explore the resilience required to sustain our advocacy when our lives are systemically undervalued and the ongoing need for cultural competency within the NHS, which despite being built on the backs of Black women, still leaves so many Black women to suffer in silence. Angelina shares the mnemonic device she created to help women remember their rights when engaging with healthcare practitioners, and the role literature, storytelling and book clubs have played in bringing her and others like her together to effect systemic change. Angelina reminds that in the face of anti-Blackness, homophobia and misogynoir, it has always been us looking after us. Recommended reading: Our Stories Told by Us by Angelina Namiba Queer Footprints by Dan Glass Thank you If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • sustaining our thriving with Dennis Carney

    sustaining our thriving with Dennis Carney
    Aug 12 2024
    Dennis Carney is an elder whose respect among our community needs no justification nor explanation. Among much else, he led the now-closed Black Gay and Lesbian Centre in Brixton, and he has worked for 25 years as a therapeutic practitioner, supporting Black gay men to love themselves more deeply, hold their emotions more gently and show up in the world more fully. We explore his involvement in the Stop Murder Music campaign, the internationalism of Brixton’s Black Gay and Lesbian Centre and the creation of “Let’s Wrap”, the UK’s first-ever discussion group for Black gay men, which was hosted at London Lighthouse, the leading hospice and charity for people living with HIV. We attend to the history of the long 1980’s, and Dennis shares his advice and insights on what we should pay closer attention to about that fraught, traumatic and generative period of our collective history. Dennis shares how his disillusionment with the efficacy of protests and marches helped recalibrate his energy and efforts towards self-empowerment within our communities, and we broach the ever-important topic of intergenerational conversations, including what we learn from each other in our efforts to get free. Dennis reminds us that love for oneself and community, especially within a world so primed for lovelessness, has a singularly motivating power that supports us in being the change we hope to see in the world. Thank you If this conversation resonates with you, here are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or ⁠contribute towards production costs⁠. The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 mins