Please outline for our readers your process when writing a script compared to writing a poem or an academic piece?
While working on my doctorate, I spent a lot of time engaged with heavily academic, critical writing. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of writing historical fiction. The beauty of historical fiction is that I have the opportunity to employ my intellect as well as my emotions – there’s both poetry and politics involved in my playwriting.
To celebrate 400 years in Bermuda, you have written a play entitled Emancipation: A Love Story. This performance takes the viewer into a work of historical fiction with seven scenes that draw from historical accounts. Scene One: An Angolan Village, mid 1400’s takes us back to the origin of our beautiful island home. Please elaborate on the connection between Africa and Bermuda.
I learned about some fascinating research by Boston University professors Dr. Linda Heywood and Dr. John Thornton which indicates that the first generation of enslaved Africans brought to Bermuda were likely Angolan. This disrupts the impression we’ve had all along that few Africans came directly to Bermuda; and that we descend more from a mixture of West African tribes and language groups. Although most Bermudians of African descent are now a heterogeneous mix, the idea of this Angolan connection – of being able to pinpoint a specific country and people where our origins lie – was important to me. I imagine that it might also be important to other black Bermudians.
10 million Africans endured the Middle Passage from Africa. Scene Two: A Slave Ship, Mid-Atlantic, late 1600’s takes us through the horrors of life aboard a slave ship. Please provide our readers with a glimpse of Scene Two.
“See me now, my love. I am the faceless Angolan who crosses over without hope of return, and nowhere in my generations can I see a place that resembles the home where my heart is from. See me now, and do not forget to tell her: the earth in my village births plants that have no equal under the sun. The soil is rich and dark, and in some places close to the river, the earth crumbles into a beautiful clay.
“I was one who fashioned this earth into useful things – the planting of cassava and yam, the molding of ceremonial bowls sometimes used by Papa Gumba in the naming rituals. I was one who crushed and sprinkled pepper, keeping the worms from harvesting the fruits of our collective labours. These simple and reverential tasks shaped the hollows of my day. See me now, and do not forget to tell her that the women in my village called me daughter, and loved me for my efforts. In this village that I shall never see again, my mahogany skin was both a thing of beauty, and as unremarkable as the sky.”
Scene Seven: Bermuda 2009. Where is Bermuda today?
I initially had gone an entirely different direction with the conclusion of this play, which I rewrote following the violence in the lead-up to the Bermuda Day holiday. I wanted to explore what the legacy of slavery really meant in a contemporary context where so much of the violence experienced by black Bermudians is being perpetuated by our own. My academic work over the years reflects an interest in traumatic events, and the possibility of recovery for individuals and communities who seem defined and limited by the events of the past. I also wanted to explore the limits of our responsibility to each other, the fine line that sometimes exists between supporting someone through crisis and enabling unacceptable behaviour. The final scene of this play really has to do with personal responsibility, and my feeling that as a community we have to figure out how to step into the future – no matter what. |
