What is Dawn Dublin Curious About?
We spoke to Black Butterfly Founder Dawn Dublin to find out what has ignited her curiosity…
Dawn at her community space, Hattons Yard, St Leonards-on-Sea
“I think I’m just curious about everything, but especially the things which are often not said or seen.
I’ve always been curious and I’m lucky that my parents encouraged my love of reading and constant question asking. From a young age, I recognised that there were a lot of historical stories which were either missing, or had been rewritten, from conventional school / library books. Also, it seemed to me, that a kind of magic happened with adults who somehow ignored obvious historical inconsistencies / inaccuracies and also even allowed the adoption of violent phrases into mainstream vocabulary.
Referring to historical innacuracies, there are scripts / texts / images regarding the sophisticated civilisations and societies which predate European histories, but somehow in Western society, the civilising of Europe is ascribed to the Greeks and Romans, despite the fact that they learned so much from African (especially the Greeks at the University of Alexandria), Middle Easten and East Asian cultures.
I can’t remember the books which took me down the rabbit hole or pre-European civilisations, but once I was there, I couldn’t unknow or unsee it. There was a book called, The Flood, I think, which gave interesting information about possible signs of water erosion on the statue of the Egyptian ‘Sphinx’ (25,000+ yrs old), possibly corroborating stories of a great flood. That story led me to read further books in order to validate or reject the idea. Either way, for my young mind, it was an interesting lead into archaeology, historical narratives, myths & legends and historical research.
Regarding the Greeks, here is a more recent video by PBS regarding ‘Archimedes Screw’, which provides some info about the wide belief that the infamous Hanging Gardens of Babylon had a sophisticated water system using giant screws, all of which predated Archimedes by centuries
Regarding vocabulary, isn’t it curious that so many phrases in English have normalised the use of violence, e.g.
• kill two birds with one stone,
• blown away,
• trigger warning,
• shoot from the hip,
• a slap in the face,
• break a leg,
• you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, etc.
I was always curious about how a society which so easily normalises violence could also be the self-proclaimed civiliser of foreign cultures - colonisation and later, leader of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Somehow, the magic of adulthood meant that colonisation was not an issue, if it meant lots of ‘new’ discoveries and wealth and put Britain firmly on the map. Myths & legends!
