‘Rebuilding Troy in Hammersmith’ took place in November 2024, as part of the UK wide Being Human Festival which invites and supports researchers in the Humanities to engage with local communities up and down the country (https://www.beinghumanfestival.org/). It was also the next step in the joyful and inspiring partnership between Myth and Voice and Catherine Davidson, which started at the book and writing club she has been running for years at the West London Welcome centre for migrants and refugees. A posting on that joint Myth and Voice workshop at WLW can be found further down in this Reflective Journal menu.

We started early, building the experience in the interstices of our busy programs. Catherine introduced me to Auriol Herford, who generously opened her Kite community art Studios in Shepherds Bush for us, and to Lucy Richardson, who teamed up with Catherine to support the impromptu writing activities, drawing from their joint experience of running the Writers in the Dark community initiative in west London. As this year the festival was celebrating Landmarks, our broader framework was the mythical war and city of Troy, encapsulated by the Greek poet Homer in big battles, blood and gore, larger than life, mostly male, warriors. But that afternoon in Hammersmith, our community of storytellers entered the ancient story at the point when the proud city of Troy had just been reduced to ruins by the Greeks. Our opening scene featured the Trojan Women huddled together at the beach, in an anxious wait for their journeys to the unknown to start: three of Catherine’s drama students performed with urgency and flourish extracts from contemporary women’s writing, bringing the women of Troy to life in this hour of utmost need.

But Hammersmith has been the home of migrants and refugees for many generations. ‘Women of Troy’ continue to arrive in the borough to the present day. Our hope was that, drawn to the immersive storytelling, our participants would also feel inspired to honour and speak for the ‘women of Troy’ that may have touched their life or the life of someone near them, or simply for that ‘Trojan woman’ who they might know of or imagine that lives in a street nearby though they have not yet met them.

With the dramatic readings having released us into a shared space of empathy and imagination, it was obvious that our participants were ready to inhabit the stormy beach that gave (poor) shelter to the women’s despair. Auriol encouraged us all up to experiment with broad, brave, unselfconscious strokes, and send our gaze far into the distance, as if through a window, to the big horizon beyond the beach – a first tentative look at, and an invitation to consider, the women’s precarious future. ‘Each woman’s beach’ was then placed alongside all others, a collage and a reflection of the women huddled together at the shore staring impassively at that very horizon we had sketched.

Auriol then led us to turn and study each other, capturing our features on see-through sheets: a wonderful, symbolic enacting of care and a simultaneous offer of a caress to the woman of Troy whose face we were attempting to sketch on paper. This tactile engagement seemed to bring each one of us closer to their adopted character and to each other – a gesture of togetherness, and an acknowledgment of the singularity behind every set of eyes, and nose and mouth that was traced with the brush.

And then the various storylines converged and our community of storytellers came together as each one of us, in their own time, walked up and pinned their adopted woman’s portrait on the wall. We lingered over this wall of faces, observed and talked about them, keen to keep the memory of the many suffering women of Troy – and of all ages – alive in our minds. And then we were ready to give them a voice.

Catherine and Lucy led us on this burst of free and spontaneous writing. We first tried to give voice to our woman as she was sitting on the shore, by the ruins of her city. The beach was right in front of us and it felt like we could hear and we could see around our adopted figure and far into the skyline and the angry sea. We wrote in silence and then we chose a favourite line or two to gift: so we approached again the Trojan Women’s beaches and offered our lines, with a heart-felt sense of com-munity based on the gifts we were bringing to this collective wall. We read one another’s offerings, we talked, we drank tea and we took our time in the company of the women of Troy and of each other.

We then returned to writing but, this time, we changed the timescale. We wanted to try and stay loyal to our women beyond the moment of acute crisis, after the ‘stage lights’ have been lowered and the world’s attention has moved on. So, each one of us followed our woman to her new life, five, seven, or ten years down the line. We wanted to create a moment of hope for her and make it real, filled with details: where was she now? What was she doing? Who was around her? What does she hold in her hands? Again, silence spread in the room for a bit as people retreated to their own mental spaces. And then we mingled again in front of our memory wall, with our favourite lines in hand, giving voice to the women, keeping company, pledging loyalty, to ancient and modern migrants, far and nearby.

I am very grateful to Catherine, Auriol and Lucy for putting their trust in Myth and Voice and very much hope this is just a beginning. I also very much hope that I will get to see again at least some of our community of storytellers; there were those who came from nearby, others from further afield in London, and few from beyond. A few used to live locally but have now moved. Someone came because they saw a notice on their neighbourhood’s Nextdoor online neighbourhood noticeboard and were intrigued; some were drawn to the ancient myth itself, some looked forward to free writing, others to art making; someone used to work in community projects and this rang a bell. That afternoon, we all built together something much more powerful than the sum of our own art and writing; and conversely, our wall of memory was powered by – and powerful due to – our many, singular voices, making contact with one another before receding again to our various worlds and pathways. I hope the happiness of this fleeting power of togetherness makes us all keen to keep seeking out such magical, temporary spaces to act, and bear gifts, in community.