Onyx Magazine

22/07/2024

we’ve been away (more on that sooon) but while we’ve been gone our favs sweet-thang have been reaching out for communal support to make issue 8 of a reality 🫂✨

with the crumbling state of the arts funding landscape, supporting one of the very few dedicated Black print spaces is critical more than ever. we stand behind sweet-thang as another radical black-owned print space archiving our creative voices with depth, authenticity + care.

are 4 days away from their deadline to reach their goal, if you back the survival of black radical indie print spaces in the UK pls donate however much you can and or share! 🖤🫶🏿📚

17/01/2024

'No words can adequately describe what onyx has been through since our last edition. Currently, It seems as if the world is constantly swallowing itself in a series of emergencies that demand so much resilience and afford so little processing time. People are simply swept from one tragedy to the next without necessary pause, crucial reflection or coherent strategy. The current zeitgeist expects us to maintain consistent levels of attention, time and energy across multiple traumatic events without direction, relationality or deep thought. Waning under such circumstances is inevitable. At the current time of writing, onyx has not produced a publication in three years.

Many Black organisations crumble because the inner teams are so busy extending outwards towards a community that needs them that they burn out. Hearing Dr Beverly Bryan speak in a Zoom interview with Jade Bentil about pushing back against the frenetic rush found within Black organising culture stood out as a lesson for us. Ceaselessly moving is a mistake. In our Fallow Years, we decided to rest and seeded our subsequent dreams into strategies.

On Wednesday, 15th February 2023 (two years since III: TRANSCEND), we received an email from Baobab Foundation UK informing us that our application had been successful and we'd been awarded £145,000 over five years for funding.

It is revolutionary for a young Black indie publication to be operating salaries of £29k for four full-time positions paying Black creatives a minimum of £290 for creative commissions. The latest formation of our core team is comprised of four dark skin, trans and q***r Black creatives being salaried above typical industry rates. We are continuing onyx's mission of carving out a radically Black creative oasis in a white liberal literary desert. We are forming projects and publications that we believe to be critically life-sustaining.' We cannot wait to introduce ourselves. 🖤

12/06/2023

🚨NEW SHOW ALERT!🚨

Our film and theatre editor chats to and two of the lovely ladies who are starring in the upcoming ‘School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play’ which debuts at the THIS WEEK!

They discuss this show’s place in the teen girlhood canon, playing West African women on stage and the fun they’ve had throughout the process.

22/01/2023

‘when i picked it up, it blew me away.’

we’re so touched by the beautiful responses and warmth you greeted us with at oxford yesterday! selling out at our first stall of the year and seeing the excitement on the faces of the black creatives we met made the 3hr journey in the fog worth it!

thank you to our 10 new patrons who have joined the rest of our loyal miners and are helping us to continue commissioning Black creatives during a cost of living crisis. your support has never been so needed. the whole team are so touched.

look out for our spring event & join us in the mines through our patreon if you too would like to support our vision of paying and caring for black creatives!

last pics are chief & film & theatre editor doing ‘we sold out?!’ poses bc we were so gassed! 🖤

what kind of spring event would you like us to hold? comment any ideas below! ✨🌱

20/01/2023

we’re easing into the new year with our first event! catch us at zine fair event tomorrow. our editor in chief will be talking about zines as a destabilising form to accessing publishing with our favs . this is event will be hybrid and available on zoom as well as in-person. the panel discussion begins at 2pm and we’ll be at out merched out stall until 4pm! if you’re around in oxford come say hi 🖤✨

23/11/2022

Luca Guadagnino’s newest offering Bones and All with star on the rise Taylor Russell and Hollywood it boy Timothée Chalamet is out in the UK today. Our guest contributor Shaznay Martin gives us something to … sink our teeth into 😉 on the Onyx blog (link in bio). Using concepts from Freud and bell hooks she explores ideas of craving, consumption and Black female gaze. Chew it all over on our blog now!🌟

27/10/2022

Set against the backdrop of Harlem during a precarious period between the tail end of its eponymous Renaissance and the beginning of the Great Depression, this play has still never felt more timely. Our Film & Theatre editor reviews ‘Blues For An Alabama Sky’ running at the National Theatre.

26/10/2022

last saturday you got together and joined us and for a immersive and formative discussion about integrating ways of rest & resistance into our daily creative practices.

you closed your eyes with us and imagined your creative practice as soil, aided by the cups of compost we tucked under your seats, we asked you to imagine the intolerable climate around your creative practice; what it is that is draining the land, and what does your creative soil look like in its healthiest state. how can you tend to it to get there. you wrote down these imaginings on the handouts and pens provided.
grrrl read pasages on resisting capitalism to you from Undrowned. she shared ’s journey through the pandemic and the burnout of navigating creative organising during increased and performative visibility. we shared what we learnt and how we survived the pandemic.

we talked about our fallow year and what we gleaned from it. we discussed how to fold these lessons of rest into daily acts of resistance to protect ourselves and our processes. you asked us so many good questions. you told us at the end that the experience of this event was completely healing.

thank you for coming & for those of you who were too tired to make it, well done for not coming. we hope you rested. we will be making the presentation into a blogpost on our website with the powerpoint slides so you can still access the imaginings we did together.

the space was beautiful and filled with such a loving and authentic energy, in typical fashion we filtered out the function incredibly late and fully rejevanted. thank you to everyone who became a patron and bought a magazine. thank you for playing and laughing and listening. thank you to all the Black creatives who closed their eyes and imagined something powerful enough to counteract this constant burnout alongside us, we hope you are remembering what we shared with you about looking after your creative lands.

‘with love. lots of love.’ - 🖤🌱

15/10/2022

Last Friday our Editor-in-Chief went to Bloomsbury to do a live radio interview about our event ‘Resisting Through Rest’ which will take place in seven days!

We’ll be talking about how we utilised tool of rest to protect our creativity and survive the pandemic with fellow Black indie ! If you’re a Black creative who is tired of being tired we can’t wait to share what we’ve learnt with you!



**Resisting Through Rest is brought to you as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2022**

05/09/2022

10/08/2022

‘When I say I am working to push the trans agenda at Onyx, June laughs knowingly. We are meeting for the first time virtually but their easy smile and gentle disposition over Zoom make it feel like I am catching up with an old friend. The Burmese-Italian 28-year-old juggles multiple personas, it seems: a curator and producer for a fashion gallery by day, a freelance journalist on the side, and a co-producer of a trans healthcare fund.

The creation of oestrogeneration by the active mind of a person who refuses to sit still quickly becomes apparent. “It all happened really quickly,” she says. “One week, the Guardian published this really transphobic article. Then the day after, actually on the same day, [they] published an article [about Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue] that was really trans-friendly and inclusive. The BBC did something very similar, and it made me really mad, the fact that I, we had to rely on these publications which are transphobic to make our voices heard.’

Our wonderful History & Politics editor .exe sits down for a touching and heartfelt interview on trans love and liberation with the founder and director of for our latest blog post! 🏳️‍⚧️🖤

Link to the full interview is in our bio!✨

08/08/2022

Three seasons in (with a fourth on the way) and 25 Emmy nominations just this year Succession is still the TV show on everybody’s lips. From shifty Shiv and ruthless Roman, to not-so-killer Kendall and everybody’s favourite cousin Greg the show is host to a barrage of despicable characters. Most heinous of all is the cruel and looming patriarch, media mogul Logan Roy who keeps a watchful eye over every part of his empire and his children firmly under his thumb. Why, then, do we enjoy watching these obscenely wealthy, awful people dupe, double-cross and scream abuse at each other every season?

Guest contributor, explores what draws us into the darkest parts of Succession that keep us watching. Click on the link in our bio to read more!

26/07/2022

Thinking Black is a Black UK-based community organisation focused on equipping and empowering a new generation of young Black student voices. Every year they run their annual Afro-Caribbean Tyler Essay Prize for Black state-school students aged 11-18 and select a winner. In collaboration, Onyx agreed to publish the winning essay and is proud to present the 2021 winner Rebekah Forte’s essay response below.

www.onyxmagazine.co.uk/onyx-blog/thinking-black-black-womanhood

Thinking Black is a Black UK-based community organisation focused on equipping and empowering a new generation of young Black student voices . Every year they run their annual Afro-Caribbean Tyler Essay Prize for Black state-school students aged 11-18 and select a winner. In collaboration, Onyx

18/07/2022

Kiara Mohamed Amin () is a softly-spoken Somali, q***r and trans artist with daffodil tattoos that gently vine his neck. Living and working in Liverpool, he defines his artistic ethos as a vision that ‘works towards Black liberation and Black dreaming,’ and talks about his calling to create work that is ‘anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-cis-hetero-normative.'

Thanks to our patrons, we were able to travel up to Liverpool earlier this year to catch his latest exhibition SCOUSE REPUBLIC at . Consisting of a touching short film, powerful mural and ancestral offering, Kiara maps a journey to wellbeing amidst the fatigue of systemic oppression through traditions of ancestral reconnection.

Click the link below to read our review!

https://onyxmagazine.squarespace.com/onyx-blog/scouse-republic

SCOUSE REPUBLIC was shown from March 10th -April 10th, 2022 at OUTPUT gallery and has since finished its run but is available to view online.

26/05/2022

New verse from our Poetry and Fiction Editor , who in ‘[ANAGNORISIS]’ offers an ekphrasis of Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ (pictured above) alongside reflections on recognition and loss.

10/04/2022

still your favourite clutch xx

05/04/2022

As the Islamic holy month of Ramadan commences, our Film & Theatre Editor finds the softness in Black Muslim Love through her viewing of This Is Love. A documentary by in partnership with which explores and celebrates the love stories of Black Muslims in the UK.

22/03/2022

In our latest blog post, Film & Theatre editor reflects on her viewing of Red Pitch 🔴⚽🥅. Tyrell Williams’ theatrical debut at the has garnered much-deserved rave reviews for its authentic, tender and hilarious exploration of friendship, football and gentrification. Head to the link in our bio to read all about it. The run ends this week so grab tix whilst you can!

18/03/2022

Happy almost weekend! 🤩 Onyx Magazine and are collaborating to commission two Black transfeminine writers across both platforms to be published in April. The theme is open: your piece can be about politics, romance, mental health, friendships, employment, music, food, historial, or anything you’d like it to be. It can be any form of non-fiction writing, an essay, opinion piece, review, first-person story, interview or whatever other format you’d like to bring forward. 🖤🏳️‍⚧️
Send your pitches to [email protected] and [email protected] by Sunday 27 March at 11:59pm

09/03/2022

Breaking through the neoliberal confines of celebratory ‘days’; (which capitalist structures use to commercialise us) our favourite anarcho-aromantic Saint-Saens wishes everyone a Happy Valentine’s Day today (March 9th) with his reflective piece on Valentine’s.

In our latest blog post he breaks down his own experiences with love, the whole capitalist matter behind Love Day, and why Valentine's Day still manages to mean so much!

Link to read is in our bio!

23/02/2022

“Who I am is not seated in my ability to prove who I am.”

For History and Politics, ‘When Queerness Is Not Enough’ is a heartfelt and personal investigation by Seven Hudson of the ways in which aestheticised and white q***rness have failed, centring the hope and community they have forged for themselves in spaces of growth and love. Considering the limitations of stasis and focus on labels rather than the expansive potential of the identities themselves, Seven reflects on their own experience coming into themself and this continuous process of growth. 🏳️‍⚧️🖤

20/02/2022

A perfect Sunday quote from our latest blog post interview with .davies.man_ . Here Euphemia describes rest as not only necessary but foundational for her creative process.

11/02/2022

As the theatres reopen their doors to the public, our Film & Theatre Editor reflects on her viewing of Talawa Theatre Company's Run It Back. An explosive performance, bringing rave and the spirit of Carnival to the theatre, this latest piece considers what it means for Black theatre goers to watch performances created by and for them.

03/02/2022

It’s re-publication day for the Toni Morrison’s 1983 short story ‘Recitatif’; a tale of two girls - one Black and one white - who grow up together in the hands of the state and continue to navigate their relationship through various states of nostalgia and racial tension. Their races are never revealed throughout the plot and as such remain a central point of debate. Editor-In-Chief reviews what impact Recitatif has for us today and what Toni Morrison might have been trying to highlight in her refusal to identify the race of either character. Link in our bio!

Thank you to for the advance copy.

23/01/2022

First commission call-out of the year! If you’re a Black trans person based in the UK who’s interested in free books to review or respond to in paid articles for our History and Politics section and editor .exe, this is the place for you to send your tings 😌✍🏾

12/12/2021

In a two-part series in History & Politics, Tsitsi B looks at the disjunction between political and civil rights, and socio-economic status in the western nation state model and questions how protests would be shaped if they were as much about the racist economy as they are about racist political identities. Exploring the limits of our own activism and thinking about a technological shift to virtual realities, they think about how we would tackle persistent social problems in our current states.

09/12/2021

Throwback Thursday to the wonderful Tosin Akinkunmi's () very first art showing at BBH London a couple weeks back! We love following the journey and development of our writers and artists! Congratulations Tosin – the first showing of many many more to come!

07/12/2021

With the festive season here, Art & Fashion editor has compiled a list of Black created Greeting Cards that add artistry and bring humour back into card giving.

The days of boring designs, dead jokes and colouring in the characters to make them brown are gone. Discover artistic creations that you can frame or repurpose for your 2022 vision boards, alongside puns that capture the quintessential Black British humour.

Image: Hood Greetings