Aston Elaine, Harris Geraldine (ред.). Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
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116 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
stirred in large cauldrons by witches and vampires, visible, like those
secret signs of the underground movements, agitating, remaining
behind masks, in the dark holes of aporias, never really to actualize, be
recognized, punished or tamed.
Notes
1 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p.13.
2Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), p.26.
3 Joseph Roach, ‘Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square’, in Harry J. Elam,
Jr. and David Krasern, eds, African American Performance and Theater History:
A Critical Reader (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
pp.101–13.
4 D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), p.27.
5 See Bette Bourne, Paul Shaw, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, ‘Belle Reprieve’, in
Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.149–83.
6 José Esteban Muñoz, ‘The Future in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and
the Performance of Utopia’, in Donald Pease and Robyn Weigman, eds, The
Future of American Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,
2002), pp.77–93.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, G. H. Von Wright, ed., trans. Peter
Winch (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p.32e.
8 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003).
9 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards
an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp.127–88.
10 Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen
Drama, 2001), pp.203–45.
11 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans.
Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p.2.
12 Quoted in Richard Meyer, ‘Have you heard the one about the lesbian who
goes to the Supreme Court: Holly Hughes and the case against censorship’,
Theatre Journal, 52 (2000): 543–52, p.551.
13 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and
Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p.102.
14 Josette Féral, ‘Performance and theatricality: The subject demystified’,
Modern Drama, 25 (1983): 170–81.
15 Peggy Phelan, ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
Reproduction’, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993), pp.146–66.
16 Diana Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
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The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes 117
17 Jill Dolan, ‘Performance, utopia, and the “utopian performative”’, Theatre
Journal, 53 (2001): 455–79, p.460.
18 Elfriede Jelinek, Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen (Köln: Prometh Verlag, 1987).
19 Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the
Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994).
20 Parker, Rousseau et al., eds, Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
21 David T. Evans, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
22 See Reno, ‘Reno: Rebel without a pause: Unrestrained reflections on
September 11th’, http://www.citizenreno.com/indexrebel.html, viewed 6
December 2004.
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8
Africa Lives On in We: Histories
and Futures of Black Women Artists
SuAndi
‘The keepers’ is my term for, and my way of introducing, the artistic
voice of Black women that gives expression to familial and cultural
ancestry. In Africa we call it Sankofa: to look backwards in order to look
forwards. Native Americans call it Neshkinukat: one who has relatives.
Both suggest the ‘keeping’ of community, history and tradition, a fabric
of ancestral links threaded through contemporary living. Sometimes
lost, always changing, these ancestral threads are kept alive particularly
by women through their traditions of oral history.
Juliet
She likes the emptiness
Bringing space onto the platform stage
Of where she remembers.
Toning lights, so as to not
Tint the memory
Of the profit making productions
That so many laboured on.
Can’t change what is,
Has always been,
Nowhere else to go,
How, what, could we,
We have no choice but to follow
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Africa Lives On in We 119
In the steps of mother, father, brother, sister
Both grandparents
And sometimes a great granddad.
She moves through the darkness of what was.
And hears again the voices.
The complaints
Asides:
The women’s smuttiness of the young unskilled labourer
Still a boy, working as a man.
Here, north and south came together
In sweat encased tombs of toil
And outside the towers
Belched out a haze of things will get better
But they didn’t.
In the end, they all died
Some in their time
Some in their prime
Before they should have.
Some left clasping cheap gold chains
To watch the idle days ahead
And from their seat in the audience
They timed the slow but determined
Crumbling.
The last time the whistle blew,
They heard it.
The last gate to clank close
They witness it.
The last chimney to darken the sky,
They saw it.
Until the steel of silence fell
All around them
And only the odd streetlight glowed
A memory
She stands now in its hazy embrace
Shadowed by missing walls
People
Machines.
Bringing up yesterday
To tell us how she
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120 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Daughter of the south
Growing in the north
Remembers.
(© SuAndi 2005)
Sistah-in-Arts
Juliet Ellis is a Black
1
artist who lives and produces Live Art in Manchester
in the north of England.
2
She has the loudest laugh on earth and I consider
her to be a Sistah-in-Arts. When we get the chance to meet and chat it is
inevitable that we talk about clothes, men (well boys), food, body shapes
and the arts. We discuss where we find our work sits or how we try to find
a place in the arts when a dominant few are determined to keep us out.
Juliet’s work is anything but linear and because of this she sometimes
frowns when I say that we create work that tells stories, our stories.
Juliet isn’t sure that her shows work in this way. Her latest piece, The
Meeting Place, is part of a major body of work, an Autobiography in Five
Chapters. In an exploration of the uncanny forces of dreams and memory,
The Meeting Place seeks to challenge the boundaries of perception. An
emotional landscape of human resistance is realized through a combination
of film and live performance; Juliet’s delivery of the piece is both unnerving
and dark. The work tells those audiences with the imagination and the
‘eyes to see’ that Juliet’s present self is also trapped in the industrial past of
England’s great city of steel, Sheffield. She doesn’t dwell on racism. She
doesn’t want racism to be the focus of her work in an issue-based way,
even though this is very much a part of her experience. Rather, The Meeting
Place tells how it was for this particular Black woman, wandering the streets
of a city whose pulse was tempered by the factories that soared above it.
She visits Sheffield in memories and dreams to gather up her family
and to laugh, her voice echoes through the crumbling, derelict half-erect
structures of the city’s past. For some, this landscape offers ugly
reminders of a collapsed economy that left men idle on street corners
and mothers worrying about how to keep home and hearth together. It
suggests hardship, the hardship of low wages, and too long a day’s toil.
But Juliet was a child in those days. She remembers the noise of the
factories as they emptied in the evening. The musty odorous smell of
the workers she passed as she played in the streets, and the magical
intrigue the buildings held for her as she paused outside gates that
restricted her entry. Maybe in another life she worked there, for truth to
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Africa Lives On in We 121
say, her voice has the power to soar above the clanging noise of any
production line. Maybe.
Story-telling, self-exploring and performing
As with most writers, story-telling, or as my mother called it ‘blatant
lying’, came naturally to me early on in life. For me, the everyday was
too, too normal. In my naivety, I thought of my family as being especially
boring and oh so normal! I longed for something more exotic, something
that would make the other kids listen to me. In time, but only in time,
I would realize that I had this already. I had it from my father’s bloodline.
I had Africa.
But before I made the link between me here and my family over there,
I worked my way through (and out of) other possibilities. Shirley Bassey?
3
Too loud. When she sang her mouth opened as far as the racist images
of Black mouths with thick lips. Eartha Kitt?
4
She was too sexy, not at
all like the kittens I played with. Too much the oversexed image of Black
women. I didn’t feel I belonged to either, but what did I, this half-woman
with a child’s mind, know? So I invented a visiting cousin with skin so
dark it shone like ebony. They had to be visiting England for all my
Manchester cousins are mixed raced like myself and though we all have
different skin tones they are without exception more brown than black.
It would be many a long year before I realized that my linkage to Africa
was more than the colour of my skin – that Africa is in my genetic
memory: the way I walk, the carriage of my head, the need for ritual in
my life and, most of all, the retelling of stories.
Juliet and I are different whilst at the same time we are very much
the same.
Juliet and I are not alone. So many Black women artists are self-
exploring in their performances. Telling stories of an immediate past that
has resonance with hundreds of years ago and in doing so we are
celebrating our position globally and locally as Black women.
Racism and celebration of self
When I began to lose myself in African-American literature it only
served to open a deep wound of wanting for a ‘steep stoop’ on which
I could sit shelling green beans as a long list of celebrities from the poet
Langston Hughes to Sacthmo (Louis Armstrong)
5
and Malcolm X
6
dropped
by. When it was these folk found the time to write, make music and
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122 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
change the world didn’t occur to me at the time, and as I had no sense
of the geography of the United States I didn’t stop to figure out how
they could be dropping by so many brownstone residences. I am not
trying to say that the writers were fibbing, as my mother would have
said, but what did trouble me was the absence of hardship, the absence
of the white man with his racist laws and brutal oppression. It would
take me years to understand that even with a life trespassed by race laws
Black families get up, plan their day and see the time through from
sunrise to sunset.
Racism does not position us in society. We achieve out of rebellion. We
push back boundaries and obstacles that are built by racism. We must be
creative in order to live above the limitations of racism. We have to tell
our stories so that globally our children will know them, and so that the
ancestors know that even though we have drifted so very far away from
our first village of Africa we have never forgotten the griot rituals.
7
My own writing took many years to develop from its initial base of
the poet telling stories, those sometimes, blatant lies that my mother
would scold me for, into a literature archive of my time. I try to allow my
writing to evolve from where I am in order to give me directions towards
where I aim to be in the future. But in all of this, it is important that the
writer concentrate on the history she lives and is not ‘burdened’ by
the race issue.
Borrowing Kobena Mercer’s
8
phrase ‘the burden of representation’,
Stuart Hall has drawn attention to and questioned the artist’s need to
represent the Black community.
9
The problem, as Hall perceives it, is
how to get away from the idea that a Black artist has to speak for a
whole race. ‘If the phrase [“burden of representation”] has any meaning
at all’, Hall explains, ‘we now have the burden of struggling on two
fronts – to gain access and visibility, and then, within that, for different
meaning of the black experience, which can never be unitary.’
10
Hall’s
argument is echoed in the performance and writing experiences of award-
winning playwright and actor Kwame Kwei-Armah.
11
Kwei-Armah’s
success with his debut play Elmina’s Kitchen at London’s National Theatre
(2003), which attracts predominantly white, middle-class audiences,
could be seen as gaining the kind of visibility that Hall argues for,
though at the same time, risks being (mis)read as the ‘quintessentially
black’ play. ‘Somehow we’re so tribal’, writes Kwei-Armah, ‘that they’ll
just go “Oh that one’s for the black audiences, so we can miss that
one”’.
12
Kwei-Armah insists, however, that he is not writing primarily
for Black people but about the truth that he knows: ‘I do not attempt
to speak as a representative voice of Black communities.’
13
He explains:
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Africa Lives On in We 123
As a writer I simply want to tell damn good stories. As a Black-British
writer, I’m interested in creating narratives that celebrate my cultural
inheritance while challenging negative stereotypes.
(Interview, Elmina’s Kitchen)
For Kwei-Armah this necessarily involves ‘reclaiming Africa’ and
acknowledging his West Indian roots at the same time as refusing the
history of slavery, ‘an illegitimate act’ that he doesn’t wish ‘to
carry...into [his] every day life’, his future (Interview, Elmina’s Kitchen).
Similarly, I see that many of my friends and colleagues locate their
identities in their cultural heritage, as in Jamaica, Trinidad, India and so
on, and so far across the globe it evidences that to describe any people
of colour as a minority is the biggest joke of all.
Speaking for myself, I am quite comfortable being Black British. As
the daughter of a Liverpool Mother and Nigerian father I meander
between cultural tags including Mixed Raced, Black British, Nigerian
and simply Black. It is the Black that I am most comfortable with which
might, well, seem ironic because my most successful writing has been
based around my white mother and through her ‘voice’ the exploration
of racism on family life.
14
Returning for a moment to my early story-telling that my mother
called lies. At first I simply told stories. Stories I believed filled in the
gaps which I found in the family home. But was it as crude as all that?
Were my stories possibly the weaving of tales, weaving interwoven with
odd facts, imaginary people who replaced certain folk who were missing
or who I would have preferred gone? Was I, still an aspiring teenager,
simply putting a gloss on the worn everyday painting of life? Maybe the
early acting out of characters and roles, and the evolution of all this
into multi-layered characters of myself were carved out of the memorized
images of the woman who had scolded me?
In fictionalizing the past if not the present, I did not realize, for a very
long time, that I was planting roots for the future. I was putting down
foundations, sturdy ones from which pathways could be walked, to
avoid the potholes that I had tripped over and sometimes fallen into.
I did all of this without knowledge. Knowledge came later from the
constructive criticism of others.
I would begin to learn that there were many others like me. Thousands
of writers, women writers, Black women writers who were on a
sojourn from the past to the future. Writing ‘her-stories’ to give voice
to those who had been silenced. Voices screaming to get out. Humble
voices, strong brave ones, voices without the accent of class, mouths
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124 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
full of Ebonics. All of them women’s voices, creative and enduring in
their labour.
‘Getting Black right. Right?’
The Arts for me are a school of learning as well as an arena of resistance.
One of the many things I have learnt and resisted through the Arts is the
way Black Arts get positioned and represented – especially by funding
bodies. I am not alone in this view. The Manchester-based playwright
Sonia Hughes, for instance, writes:
I keep thinking I don’t write from a Caribbean/British perspective, my
work just is. But time and again it keeps biting me on the arse. I have
stories to tell and the stories come from who I am and what I know
and what I’m trying to find out about who I am and what I know. I try
to illuminate the silences we have between ourselves.
I do write from a Caribbean/British perspective, I was just scared to
acknowledge it in case it was thought of as folksy, community – not
art. But it is.
15
Hughes expresses the fear shared by many Black artists regardless of the
genre of their work. This putting down of Black art has been a battleground
for all of us working out of the United Kingdom. The ever-changing
arena in which the arts infrastructure places our work has only served to
further frustrate our creative endeavours. In the last 20 years we Black
artists have been named as ‘Multicultural’, ‘Ethnic Minorities’, for the
briefest period of time ‘Black’, then elevated (or so they claimed) to
‘Cultural Diversity’ and then hammered down again to the anagram of
‘BME’ (Black Minority Ethnic).
At the National Black Arts Festival held in the United States at Atlanta
Georgia in 2004, the ‘Post-Black’ Visual Arts Panel held a round-table
discussion about whether African-American artists have a special
responsibility to deal with race in their work. Whilst African-American
artists (artists of colour) of the 1920s made work that was rooted in their
African past, some new-generation artists no longer feel the necessity to
work ancestry in this way. As a concept ‘Post-Black’ is meant as an
elastic term that can take in Black artists whose desire is to be freed
from the ‘burden’ of representing race issues. However, different views
on this obtain. Michael Harris, Black British playwright and ‘Post-Black’
panellist in Atlanta, argued the need for an artist to have a ‘cultural
rootedness’ that he (sic) can build on in whatever way he wants.
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Africa Lives On in We 125
In making his argument, Harris quoted from Karla Holloway’s Codes of
Conduct (1995):
‘Act your age, not your color.’ I turned only slightly; but just enough
to make certain I had not imagined these words – that they had actually
been spoken by someone and had not slipped away from a distant
childhood memory.
16
Harris explained:
Even in Black communities, Black was a negative signifier; an indicator
of discredited conduct, ethics, and appearance. We were inscribed
and circumscribed by our color – by how we looked! There simply
was no way out because Blackness, unlike Jewishness or Irishness, is
primarily visual (though certain speech is thought to symbolize
Blackness as well).
17
On the other hand, there are those artists who rebel against the nega-
tive of ‘Blackness’. Consider, for example, this statement from Kojo
Griffin
I am not trying to ignore my cultural heritage. I would like to expand
what a Black artist can deal with...I want to deal with commonality
in human behaviour. Besides. What can I add to the canon of black
art that hasn’t already been said?
18
Yet a Black cultural heritage is hard ‘to ignore’. As Hughes points out
(see earlier), as much as she tries not to write from a Caribbean/British
perspective it just keeps filling up the page.
There are those who (critically) question the concentration of
energy on the past coming from many different Black communities. It
is often linked to the why-don’t-you-leave-slavery-where-it-happened-
in-history view. I have some sympathy for this view, although not,
I would stress, on the subject of slavery itself. But, as more and more
of the arts and culture in Britain gets engrossed in ‘yesteryear’, I worry
about how this takes on a (dangerous) nostalgia for the past: oral
projects, celebrations or acknowledgements that link to sovereignty,
war, discoveries and achievements, that have little to do with Black
histories. We can’t afford to leave our histories behind. The importance
of telling our stories is not just the release of a creative flow. It is
filling the voids of history otherwise tomorrow will be tainted and
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