Yula Burin – Rest in Power
Yula Burin – Rest in Power
Our beloved sister, Black feminist, Yula, died on Tuesday 2nd March at 8 PM. Her brother, Petrus, and a small circle of friends were with her when she died. She had been suffering from kidney cancer since last year.
Yula became a devoted and longstanding member of the Feminist Library collective, having first joined us when she participated in the Librarians for Tomorrow project in 2010. She had many many other interests, including Black feminism, Black women’s health, feminist history, the politics of technology, community radio, and collecting and archiving feminist material.
Here are a few paragraphs from Sarbjit Johal, a good friend of Yula and a great portrait painter who presented an exhibition of her portraits at Women’s Studies Without Walls at the Feminist Library a few years ago:
Yula was a Black Feminist Writer and Activist. Her transformative poetry has the power to make you dream of another world. The political piece she wrote, with Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, ‘Sister to Sister: developing a Black British feminist archival consciousness’ for Feminist Review special issue on Black British Feminisms, Volume 108 Issue 1, November 2014, is still being read today by University lecturers, Women’s organisations and even Housing Rights groups across the world.
She was committed to ending violence against women and girls and helped organise the annual Million Women Rise march. She was passionate about the need for a space for women to talk and express themselves. At the Lambeth Women’s Project, she created a catalogue of the materials in the library for women, developed a project to train BME women in Radio production and Journalism, and set up a Black women’s support group to combat isolation.
It was very important to her that Black women should document their history. This is why she worked at the Feminist Library. Yula had studied a BA in Combined Arts and was also interested in the expression of feminist ideas in different forms. As a Radio producer and presenter at the ‘X Marks the Spot and Studio Voltaire’ she recorded and edited interviews with photographers and artists who through their work were exploring Identity.
Yula’s BA in psychosocial studies combined with her communication skills must have been invaluable when she decided to dedicate her time and energy to empowering Black Women to transform their lives. This led to her working for the Edge Fund and being an active member of their Race and Ethnicity group as well as the Women’s group.
Yula had so many interests it is impossible to list them all here, and yet she managed to encompass them all in her activism and in her wonderful mind. She was active in Black women’s health, in feminist history, in the politics of technology, in environmental issues and workers’ struggles. She researched black women’s herstory, was involved in decolonial environmental politics as a member of Decolonizing Environmentalism and the Marikana Solidarity Collective. She looked at space, place and time and their impact on the black female self and psyche, and was developing a psychogeography rooted in the black female experience.
In amongst it all she also loved playing the guitar, listening to music, watching films, and spending time with friends.
She will be greatly missed by everyone who knew her.
As Sarbjit said, ‘There was so much more to say…. I promise I will do that with my paintings….’
Ursula Troche adds, ‘Now we need to find all the pieces of Yula’s activism: she presented a paper at the Black British History Conference in Bristol, in April 2016. She was in the Otolith Group, and presented at The Showroom – an art space for cultural productions in London. I also remember her mentioning giving a talk at the Women’s Institute. Yula undertook so many lines of enquiry that were oriented at facilitating liberation. It’s our duty to follow her footsteps, her pen on paper, and her lines of critical thought.’
Many of Yula’s friends are keen to gather together fitting tributes to her, which could consist of a book of her writings and poetry, a collection of her radio programmes, a reel of her video performances, and, of course, a library of her books and papers.
To enable this project to go forward, please consider contacting Sharon at YulaLove@mail.com with offers of financial donations, and copies of any poems, articles, photos, and so on you would like to donate.