Author, performance poet and filmmaker from Liverpool, Malik Al Nasir, talks about the ways in which we can liberate our minds from society's conditioning, and by corollary, liberate ourselves. He speaks about his book, Letters to Gil, a memoir of his years of abuse in state care and how mentoring by poet, musician, and social justice activist, Gil Scott-Heron, changed his life.

“In Britain we were being bludgeoned into believing that we had no right to be anything other than what they told us to be and sought to make that a self-fulling prophecy. It’s only when you have insight that you can understand the structures of society and how they’re being deployed upon you that you recognize how it manifests itself within you, and you have to do what the Last Poets use to call – dewestoxification. It’s about unpicking everything they’ve implanted in you because if you don’t think freely and independently, then you become a surrogate for their ideas." - Malik Al Nasir