トレーシー・エミンの「ストレンジランド」に戻る

My first connection with Tracey Emin’s work was through her video piece, Why I never became a dancer. It shows grainy footage of her hometown, Margate; the cliffs, Mario’s Coffee Parlour, flashing arcades, fish and chip shops, the sea. Emin’s voiceover tells the story of competing in The World Disco Dance Championship as a young teenager in 1978. She describes the freedom she feels when she is dancing, until a group of older men she has slept with start chanting “slag” from the audience, forcing her to flee the dancefloor. The film ends with the words, “I’m leaving this place, I’m out of here, I’m better than all of them, I’m free,” followed by the names of the men who have hurt her. There is a final shot of Emin as an adult, dancing to You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester in a red shirt and cut-off denim shorts, 90s pageboy haircut swinging around her face.

This deceptively simple film encapsulates so much of what I love about her work. She pulls humiliation from the past and exposes it in the present, transforming it into power. She is direct about sex and her adolescent body, subtly acknowledging that these boys took advantage of her, yet her unflinching description and her refusal of shame gives her control. Through her dancing, we understand she has left her hometown behind and made a better life for herself. 

At 19, this piece of work took hold of me. I had recently moved to London from a sad city by the sea, clutching the dream of escape and leaving my past behind. I wanted the city to transform me, and Emin’s video spoke to that wish; the tingling thrill of becoming someone new. I bought Strangeland in the gallery bookshop and consumed it in gulps. Emin wrote about her working-class childhood and adolescence in Margate, her Cypriot heritage, her life as a young artist in London. She described her failed abortion, her addictions, eating disorder, appetite for sex and fun. Sticky with blood and vomit, her work was an act of daring; to want, love, fear, dance, fuck, live. In writing about her own body and experiences, she deemed them worthy and meaningful, claiming life and art as her own.

“I’m leaving this place, I’m out of here, I’m better than all of them, I’m free” – Tracey Emin 

While I was reading Strangeland, I started working at The Golden Heart pub in Spitalfields, run by renowned East End landlady Sandra Esquilant. In my first week at the pub, Emin herself appeared, slipping casually behind the bar. She said, “Sandra told me to get myself a Guinness. Can you show me how to pour one?” Some of the YBAs lived locally in Shoreditch. Before the area was gentrified, they had rented art studios in old industrial buildings, and now owned properties worth millions of pounds. I clung to my job there, believing that Sandra, Emin, Sarah Lucas or Gilbert & George had the power to transform my life, setting me free.

During my years at the pub, I grew increasingly frustrated. I was in proximity to art and glamour, yet I had no real access to that world. I had grown up during Blair’s New Labour government, when neoliberal ideals promised mobility for working-class people, if we, as individuals, worked hard enough. Emin symbolised that dream; a girl with no money from Margate, who had turned up in London, “with £20, a holdall with some clothes and two David Bowie LPs” and became one of her generation’s most renowned artists. She was brash, brilliant and bold, elbowing her way in.

I graduated from university in 2013, in the depths of austerity, in an increasingly impenetrable London. I was tired and disillusioned, and the wrench of leaving my working-class family and community behind in Sunderland hurt me in ways I had not anticipated. I found the promise of neoliberalism to be a myth. I couldn’t afford rent or food and I ate little, crashing my boyfriend’s house share, my belongings in a pile in the hall. I made myself smaller, frustrated by those wealthy artists, who had profited from Blair’s financial boom in the late 90s, yet now publicly endorsed the Conservative government and weren’t always kind to me. I knew that Emin understood how it felt to be a young woman from a difficult place with no money and no connections, filled with longing and self-loathing, uncomfortable in her own skin. I wanted her to acknowledge those feelings within me, to look me in the eyes, just for a moment, but she never did.

Fifteen years have passed since my first encounter with Emin and her work, and now I see that period differently. The worthlessness I felt did not come from inside of me. It was a result of gender, class and regional inequality and the sheer impossibility of making a life in London for myself; cruelty turned inwards. Yet, those experiences were formative, and they made me the person and writer I am today. My novels are about what it means to grow up as a working-class woman in neoliberal Britain, believing I needed to transform my life and blaming my body when that seemed impossible, storing anger and class shame inside my own skin. 

The final line of Strangeland is “don’t be afraid to take the past head on” and re-reading the memoir now, this message is clear. As a teenager, I wanted to impose my own narrative on the book. I wanted it to prove the possibility of outrunning myself and I wanted Emin’s personal validation, which she could not give me. Writing my own novels was a mode of facing my past and shaping my own power. I unpicked and untangled my history, so that I might live within my own body more easily, and now I can see that Emin taught me this first.

“I knew there was something better. There was an outside – an outside of me” – Tracey Emin

This summer, I went to Margate with some friends. We ate at an Italian restaurant in an old ballroom, the original staircase descending into the middle of the room. We sat at our table and Emin herself appeared, walking down the stairs as if striding onto a dancefloor. I watched her hail a taxi and disappear into the night. After dinner, my friends and I went dancing. I spun beneath a disco ball, thinking of Emin in her silky red shirt. We went to the beach and stayed there until dawn. In her memoir, Emin writes, “I knew there was something better. There was an outside – an outside of me. And somewhere that wasn’t Margate. I owe so much to the place I grew up, mainly because it is so beautiful. And what is so fantastic and beautiful is the sunset, and that is free.” I watched the dawn colours leak into the sea and thought that maybe none of us escape, not really. But I was wrong about freedom, which is not about running away, but feeling secure enough in who you are to return. Freedom comes with holding onto yourself; brash, brilliant and bold.

Strangeland: A special 20th anniversary edition by Tracey Emin is out now (Sceptre, £20) and Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater.

My first connection with Tracey Emin’s work was through her video piece, Why I never became a dancer. It shows grainy footage of her hometown, Margate; the cliffs, Mario’s Coffee Parlour, flashing arcades, fish and chip shops, the sea. Emin’s voiceover tells the story of competing in The World Disco Dance Championship as a young teenager in 1978. She describes the freedom she feels when she is dancing, until a group of older men she has slept with start chanting “slag” from the audience, forcing her to flee the dancefloor. The film ends with the words, “I’m leaving this place, I’m out of here, I’m better than all of them, I’m free,” followed by the names of the men who have hurt her. There is a final shot of Emin as an adult, dancing to You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester in a red shirt and cut-off denim shorts, 90s pageboy haircut swinging around her face.

This deceptively simple film encapsulates so much of what I love about her work. She pulls humiliation from the past and exposes it in the present, transforming it into power. She is direct about sex and her adolescent body, subtly acknowledging that these boys took advantage of her, yet her unflinching description and her refusal of shame gives her control. Through her dancing, we understand she has left her hometown behind and made a better life for herself. 

At 19, this piece of work took hold of me. I had recently moved to London from a sad city by the sea, clutching the dream of escape and leaving my past behind. I wanted the city to transform me, and Emin’s video spoke to that wish; the tingling thrill of becoming someone new. I bought Strangeland in the gallery bookshop and consumed it in gulps. Emin wrote about her working-class childhood and adolescence in Margate, her Cypriot heritage, her life as a young artist in London. She described her failed abortion, her addictions, eating disorder, appetite for sex and fun. Sticky with blood and vomit, her work was an act of daring; to want, love, fear, dance, fuck, live. In writing about her own body and experiences, she deemed them worthy and meaningful, claiming life and art as her own.

“I’m leaving this place, I’m out of here, I’m better than all of them, I’m free” – Tracey Emin 

While I was reading Strangeland, I started working at The Golden Heart pub in Spitalfields, run by renowned East End landlady Sandra Esquilant. In my first week at the pub, Emin herself appeared, slipping casually behind the bar. She said, “Sandra told me to get myself a Guinness. Can you show me how to pour one?” Some of the YBAs lived locally in Shoreditch. Before the area was gentrified, they had rented art studios in old industrial buildings, and now owned properties worth millions of pounds. I clung to my job there, believing that Sandra, Emin, Sarah Lucas or Gilbert & George had the power to transform my life, setting me free.

During my years at the pub, I grew increasingly frustrated. I was in proximity to art and glamour, yet I had no real access to that world. I had grown up during Blair’s New Labour government, when neoliberal ideals promised mobility for working-class people, if we, as individuals, worked hard enough. Emin symbolised that dream; a girl with no money from Margate, who had turned up in London, “with £20, a holdall with some clothes and two David Bowie LPs” and became one of her generation’s most renowned artists. She was brash, brilliant and bold, elbowing her way in.

I graduated from university in 2013, in the depths of austerity, in an increasingly impenetrable London. I was tired and disillusioned, and the wrench of leaving my working-class family and community behind in Sunderland hurt me in ways I had not anticipated. I found the promise of neoliberalism to be a myth. I couldn’t afford rent or food and I ate little, crashing my boyfriend’s house share, my belongings in a pile in the hall. I made myself smaller, frustrated by those wealthy artists, who had profited from Blair’s financial boom in the late 90s, yet now publicly endorsed the Conservative government and weren’t always kind to me. I knew that Emin understood how it felt to be a young woman from a difficult place with no money and no connections, filled with longing and self-loathing, uncomfortable in her own skin. I wanted her to acknowledge those feelings within me, to look me in the eyes, just for a moment, but she never did.

Fifteen years have passed since my first encounter with Emin and her work, and now I see that period differently. The worthlessness I felt did not come from inside of me. It was a result of gender, class and regional inequality and the sheer impossibility of making a life in London for myself; cruelty turned inwards. Yet, those experiences were formative, and they made me the person and writer I am today. My novels are about what it means to grow up as a working-class woman in neoliberal Britain, believing I needed to transform my life and blaming my body when that seemed impossible, storing anger and class shame inside my own skin. 

The final line of Strangeland is “don’t be afraid to take the past head on” and re-reading the memoir now, this message is clear. As a teenager, I wanted to impose my own narrative on the book. I wanted it to prove the possibility of outrunning myself and I wanted Emin’s personal validation, which she could not give me. Writing my own novels was a mode of facing my past and shaping my own power. I unpicked and untangled my history, so that I might live within my own body more easily, and now I can see that Emin taught me this first.

“I knew there was something better. There was an outside – an outside of me” – Tracey Emin

This summer, I went to Margate with some friends. We ate at an Italian restaurant in an old ballroom, the original staircase descending into the middle of the room. We sat at our table and Emin herself appeared, walking down the stairs as if striding onto a dancefloor. I watched her hail a taxi and disappear into the night. After dinner, my friends and I went dancing. I spun beneath a disco ball, thinking of Emin in her silky red shirt. We went to the beach and stayed there until dawn. In her memoir, Emin writes, “I knew there was something better. There was an outside – an outside of me. And somewhere that wasn’t Margate. I owe so much to the place I grew up, mainly because it is so beautiful. And what is so fantastic and beautiful is the sunset, and that is free.” I watched the dawn colours leak into the sea and thought that maybe none of us escape, not really. But I was wrong about freedom, which is not about running away, but feeling secure enough in who you are to return. Freedom comes with holding onto yourself; brash, brilliant and bold.

Strangeland: A special 20th anniversary edition by Tracey Emin is out now (Sceptre, £20) and Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater.