Abstract
‘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.
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Notes
See Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth Lindenborg, eds, Black Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163–72.
Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (National Theatre, London, May 2003) won him the London Evening Standard Charles Wintour award for ‘Most Promising Playwright’ and the play was also nominated for the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards for Best New Play of 2003. Touring regionally in 2005 at major urban city venues, with Kwei-Armah in the leading role, Elmina’s Kitchen is also scheduled for a run in London’s West End.
My mother’s experiences of Liverpool family life from the 1940s through to the 1980s are dramatized in my solo performance, The Story of M, commissioned in 1994 by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and published in SuAndi, ed., 4 for More (Manchester, Black Arts Alliance, 2002), pp.1–18.
Yvonne Brewster, The Undertaker’s Daughter (London: Black Amber Books: 2004), p.69.
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© 2006 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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SuAndi (2006). Africa Lives On in We: Histories and Futures of Black Women Artists. In: Aston, E., Harris, G. (eds) Feminist Futures?. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554948_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554948_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-4533-4
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