Abstract
This article describes how the happenstance discovery of my mother’s 1950s Windrush Generation suitcase, led to a devised cathartic ritual theatre performance and a reimagining of my past future present. Acknowledging the suitcase as a heritage object, I hoped to safely locate myself with inter- and transgenerational trauma, and dialogues about racism in relation to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. First and foremost, this work is informed by Dramatherapy. It also holds in mind the research of Jungian analyst, Brewster, on ‘archetypal grief’, and the socio-political activism of Sharpe’s, ‘wake-work’. Its conclusion is twofold: First, that with the use of the suitcase within ritual theatre performance, alongside the devised metaphoric story and character of Black, I was able to accrue a significant means of resilience to meet with effects of racism worthy of further investigation. Second, that the performance provided a deepened dialectic and cathartic experience between performer and audience above and beyond cerebral language. Three stand-alone performances of ‘Being With Black’ took place at the British Association of Dramatherapists Conference at the University of Chester in September 2018, and later at the University of Roehampton, London in February and March 2019.
Keywords
Introduction
Metaphoric images are its [each life’s] first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors. (Hillman, 1997: 40)
New landscape
Dear Reader. I invite you to this wide-open landscape and meeting place so that you may come to understand something of who l am. I sincerely hope that you and I may locate each other. I do not mean the individual you but the collective patriarchal and Western you of academia. I want to let you know that at the intersection of Artist, Dramatherapist, Black British woman, and the child of parents from the Windrush Generation; the language and world of institutions such as academia can feel like a cold and foreign place. A landscape that may insist I give up something of who I am. A danger is present that I may be misunderstood, misinterpreted, not believed, or confirm some false archaic belief about Black people and cast further shadow on the Black experience. I fear it may be a dark and lonely place. A place that takes me away from the colour and warmth of my home landscapes. I say this to make it clear from the start that themes of feeling unsafe, institutionalisation, and of being excluded, resonate deeply with effects of racism. In this regard, I find myself metaphorically and imaginatively calling upon my inner warrior to prepare to do battle with a dominant culture from which I am often alienated. Fighting to be heard in my own voice and language. Listening and moving to Bob Marley’s album ‘Survival’. Calling upon my ancestors to stand with me. That said, even here with my first excursion into the exclusive landscape of academia, where I insist on being heard within performance and the written word, I have also begun to recheck my own prejudices. I am with yet more nuance. I am learning to let go of binary black and white assumptions about ‘you’ and ‘us’, by which I mean those who would seem to be ‘allowed’ to enter academia and those who are not. I am learning to challenge the limitations of language and to embrace the metaphor to delve beneath centuries old symbols, power structures, and realities of colonial racism. I am beginning to reap rewards from the rigour and resistance required to walk barefoot and upright in this foreign yet appealing landscape. I am becoming attuned to the psychological resources necessary to make this landscape safe, and of my body’s need to communicate somatic knowledge of historic and present day racism being played out by colonial motherland. Further orientation at the start of this article is necessary in presenting something of the back story that led to this work, and where it sits within Dramatherapy and wider psychological contexts. I will therefore outline: what I mean by personal drama, the happenstance discovery of my mother’s Windrush Generation suitcase, the importance of safety when working with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the necessity to work within the parameters of Dramatherapy’s ritual theatre and performance, the related research of Jungian analyst, Brewster (2019), and the equally relevant socio-political activism of Sharpe (2016). I conclude with key post performance ‘notes to self’ about the processes encountered. Finally, I want to say that this wide-open landscape also speaks to the broad lens of this article, as a necessary starting place, to honour and contain the potency of this much needed dialogue, and as aid, as I come to discover the next pathway to pursue.
The Play
And so dear Reader, as you prepare to disembark, I want to welcome you to my I-land. I will be guiding you through some searching terrain, towards what for me is the magical destination of performing Being With Black, which here you are invited to actively imagine. This solo piece of devised theatre consists of three short acts. The first as choreographed movement with a long length of Black West African funeral fabric, that speaks of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The second is my mother’s story, told in her own words, about her migration from the West Indies to Britain. The third and final act sees the title character, Black, return to make a direct address to the audience. This interconnects the present day Black experience, symbolised by the Generation Windrush suitcase, with my West African ancestors who were enslaved. In between each act I meet with the audience as Dramatherapist, to extend an invitation to engage with a creative expressive activity to facilitate dialogues about racism; with responsive images, movement and key words rather than cerebral language. Black appears throughout this article with extracts of her poetry by way of walking alongside me, as she now often does, to help me navigate the realms of my past future present. She begins with the following poem:
Drama
I am what one might call a theatrical Dramatherapist. Shakespeare’s larger than life archetypal characters are my first theatrical loves. Jungians as well as Shakespeareans may agree that we humans cannot seem to help, but act archetypically. If as Shakespeare’s melancholic poet character surmises ‘all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’; Dramatherapy provides a space that is rightly theatrical, as we seek to understand how we perform our lives and play our parts in the universal dramas that interconnect us. I embrace the use of my dramatically inclined voice and body to meet and work with myself and others. I was a professional actor and storyteller before becoming a Dramatherapist. My voice and body speak of the Shakespearean actor in me, as well as my African-Caribbean ancestors. I say let the body speak, for the whole body is language! I reject the often cut-off Western cerebral brain and head. I am for the metaphor to better describe nuanced human experiences. The metaphor resists literal and binary interpretation, and ‘can shape the way we see the world’, as discussed by the writer Geary (2012), and I also suspect, the way we move through it. Metaphor is the lens that Dramatherapists utilise with clients to work with their story or personal drama, as a therapeutic intervention. Professor Seymour (cited in Jennings, 2009: 27–34), points us towards the many other ‘scholar’ Dramatherapists in ‘Anderson-Warren and Grainger 2000; Jennings 1992; Jones 2007; Pitruzzella 2009’, who all argue as Seymour does, that ‘drama is a fundamental part of being human’. This is not a new notion but rather as Seymour goes on to state, ‘communities and individuals have always found ways of theatricalising life experiences’. In ‘Drama as Therapy: Theatre as Living’, Jones (1996: 112), tells us, ‘for most forms of theatre and drama, in all cultures, the body is the main means of communication’ and that ‘embodiment in Dramatherapy involves the way the self is realised by and through the body’. One does not have to be an actor to benefit from Dramatherapy, only human. Dramatherapists use metaphor and performative experiences to enable dialogues over and beyond cerebral language, in a kind of active meeting with our clients. This is the basis from which I will share my own personal drama; within devised ritual theatre, and performing Being With Black, with my mother’s Windrush Generation suitcase. While I trust this work will speak to the wider Black experience, it is not an attempt to speak on behalf of others. It is a personal account of trauma connected to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It is an attempt to meet with myself and others in ‘an honest personal encounter’, as Seymour (2009), says Dramatherapists must, ‘remain constant’.
Windrush suitcase
To those affected by the ongoing political Windrush scandal of 2017, I am so sorry. As the politician David Lammy (2020), reflected in the Guardian newspaper, the plight of Black British citizens ‘wrongly’ deported to the West Indies and separated from their British families, is ‘scandalous’. In 1948, Black British subjects from the West Indies on board the Empire Windrush responded to adverts placed in local West Indian newspapers by the then British Government, to help rebuild Britain after the Second World War. My mother was sent to England, aged 17, in 1964, as part of the latter Windrush Generation. The only object that accompanied her was a small attractive trunk-like suitcase that put me in mind of a period drama. The suitcase had been in my parent’s attic for over 50 years. It made an appearance now as part of my parents’ preparation and long awaited return to St Vincent and the Grenadines. Before that, the suitcase had belonged to my maternal grandfather. He had also left the then British island of St Vincent, to work in the then Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. Now, the suitcase is synonymous with BBC archive news footage of passengers disembarking the Empire Windrush. The ship docked in England only once though other ships soon followed. England is where my mother met my father. England is where my sister, myself and my brother were born. I had no memory of ever having seen the suitcase, yet here it was at the family Christmas of 2017, transporting me overseas to the history and movement of my ancestors. I had graduated from Dramatherapy Training at the University of Roehampton only a year earlier. Holding my mother’s suitcase in my hand, a sudden wave of emotion arose from my stomach. Gut. Feeling. Felt sense of the yet unspoken trauma I intuited my mum must have experienced saying goodbye to her parents, alongside the ‘trauma of displacement and relocation’ the historian Professor Gilroy et al. (2018) talk about. My siblings and I would also soon be separated from our parents. They, unlike some of the Windrush Generation, were at least choosing to return ‘home’, as they had always referred to St Vincent. Seas. Current. Recurring. Yet even my parents longing for their ‘home’ country was nuanced. They had come to depend on inheritances from colonial motherland, such as the certainty of structures like the National Health Service. Having arrived in Britain themselves as teenagers, their entitled citizenship and inevitable attachment, meant they had also come to embody Britishness, in ‘walking’ like the ‘English’, as they are reliably informed, by local Vincentians. St Vincent, at only 150 square miles, is a stunningly green mainland small island, covered in hilly lush forests and black sands, as opposed to golden. The rich volcanic soil is due to La Soufrière volcano, as named by the French, who were the first colonialists. La Soufrière’s eruption in 1812 was later reimagined by Turner, and exhibited at Tate Britain (2018), which I visited. The collective trauma that accompanied colonialism, aptly symbolised by the volcano and directly rooted in the Transatlantic Slave Trade is still held in much of the landscape. In my view, it is also held in the psyche of those like myself, descendants of the West African people forcibly taken to the Americas, as this part of the world was once named. Suitcase. Heritage. Crying. I excused myself from the living room. I knew my parents would not immediately understand the reason for my tears as I clutched my mother’s suitcase. Crying resists language. I was with my childhood response. To Black. Sorrow. Pain. Trauma. Not knowing. Knowing. I had acquired the title of ‘the dramatic one in the family’ when I was very young. My parents had wisely sent me to a weekly Speech and Drama class from around aged 4–15, in part because of my ‘big’ crying. The suitcase was throbbing with an energy that was now in my theatrical body. I accepted its calling. It represented everything I did not know about my mother’s and my father’s migration story, as well as something about my ancestors that had once again been activated. I asked my mum’s permission to use the suitcase in a performance. I did not know the extent of why and how I would use it. My crying had cued ‘other ways of knowing’ (Broomfield, 1997: 55). I needed to bring to the surface what it was that had been activated in my inner world. Dramatherapy would act as my guide. I had to be prepared to dive into the inter- and transgenerational trauma, of two historically interconnected islands, via the Transatlantic Slave Trade; into that trauma that is inherited and carried down the ancestral line, and that which comes through the collective experience, as discussed by Alleyne (2019). Indeed, in Menakem’s (2020) transcripts of his e-course that addresses ‘racialized trauma’, he supports the view that such trauma can appear in the body and psyche of the descendants of those who experienced the trauma firsthand. He proposes that trauma may manifest itself in actions, feeling states, dreams, distrust and fears about loss of self-control. There was no doubting that Britain had wielded an unfair power over the first South American Indian people, subsequent Black Africans, and the Vincentian landscape. With the ongoing Windrush scandal and those being unfairly deported, it began to occur to me that perhaps the relationship with one’s colonial motherland, was bound up in a kind of insecure attachment, like a mother who is nuanced and not readily accessible to her distressed child. I was in danger of being overwhelmed by socio-political tides of rising racism, in society and Parliament, where the narrative seem to be, Black people were no longer welcomed.
Not safe
Something is wrong! I am not safe! How can I survive this? There have been times, such as the ongoing Windrush scandal, when my body resonates so completely with racist happenings, historic or present day, that a deep inherent sorrow, rage, or sense of injustice is activated. Like a tsunami. In those moments, I feel as if I will never stop crying. I have had this very human response, though perhaps more pronounced than some, since I was a child. I might be moved to operate in a state of hyper alertness. Compelled to express myself dramatically, or not to express myself at all. I might feel a sense of utter helplessness. Seek out cultural home comforts, such as West Indian people, lovers, food, music, rum to numb or to be with the pain. I might perform some ritual I saw my elders do when I was a child. These feeling states and actions are far away from cognitive thought and language. They are about heritage and survival. I imagine them as a direct line to my ancestors. Contrary to earlier musings, there is a kind of power that kicks in when one is impelled to disassociate, or metaphorically cut the head from the body as a coping mechanism and survival mode. Here, the cut-off Western cerebral brain and head has its uses in enabling my bodies’ natural primal responses. For a moment, I imagine my head as British and my body as African-Caribbean. Perhaps this is a form of internalised racism, or madness. Head mostly given superiority over body in the Western world. Body fighting with head to be heard, and then in one fell swoop decapitating itself. Such is the nuance and difficulty of outing inner dialogues about Blackness and Whiteness. If I were to only ruminate on my dead and murdered ancestors, like Shakespeare’s ‘mad’ Queen Margaret, I would also be attributed with some stigmatising mental health diagnosis. Though apparently, being Black, with effects of ‘racism and discrimination’, I am also nearly seven times more likely than a White person to experience psychosis (Fearon et al., 2006: 7–8). These recurring dialogues are ongoing for myself as a practising Dramatherapist, and in the thinking about those I work with; primary aged pupils with their multiple diagnoses excluded from mainstream education, and women with mental ill health and or at risk of the criminal justice system. Both groups much maligned and stigmatised and overrepresented by members of the Black community as confirmed by the research ‘Ethnicity, Race, and Inequality in the UK’ (Byrne et al., 2020). This leaves many of us open to misunderstanding, and a present danger of being removed from society and institutionalised, trying to navigate the loss of our freedoms, again. We may love colonial motherland, but we may also wish some of her institutions, dead. Shakespeare tapped into notions of attachment, as well as madness, and the universal themes and archetypes that took hold with empire, colonialism and the Slave Trade. Having been cast as both Queen Margaret and Prospero as a professional actor, my engagement with madness, and magic, predates my time as a Dramatherapist. The Tempest is precisely about the taking of another’s home or island. Caliban, whom we are told is Prospero’s ‘slave’, is mourning the death of his mother when his soon to be colonial master arrives on the island. In his grief, is it any wonder that Caliban has difficulties navigating a new language? Caliban does not ‘understand’ why in learning to speak the same language as his master, a replacement for the loss of his mother and his home, would not also lead to his eventual freedom. The universal theme of power in the Tempest is symbolised by Prospero’s magic, as well as the archetypes of master and slave. There is also the sea. Jung says (1951: 177) ‘the sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives’. I have always been drawn to the sea. The initials of my name spell SEA. My middle name given in honour of the British Queen. Karade (2018) reminds us about those Nigerian Orishas and Deities with a strong connection to the sea. Dramatherapists, being trained, can source their ‘magic’ or embodied practice, from any sign that holds energy for them or their clients. When one is caught between two cultures, and a timeline and power structure, inextricably linked to loss and pain, the search for freedom and self, is paramount? Dramatherapy’s relationship to theatre as suggested by Mann (1996: 2) reminds us that ‘both theatre and ritual contain familiar concepts and the relationship to actor, shaman, or Dramatherapist, is instrumental in an exploration of issues, a willingness to suspend disbelief and enter into a world created and facilitated by the imagination and creativity’. In this work, I was ‘performing’ a therapeutic intervention on myself. In the process of devising and performing a piece of ritual theatre, I hoped to accrue enough resilience to meet with profound effects of racism. The clinical psychologist Russell (2015: 26) quotes Freud when she informs us ‘the seeds of resilience are often to be found in the pathology itself’. To enable my urgent inner dialogues, from the grip and fear of pathology aligned with racism, I needed a place where I could feel safe enough to dig deep and re-imagine a wide-open landscape. I also needed others alongside me, to bear witness with ‘radical empathy’ (Sajnani, cited in the work of Sajnani, 2010: 190), to the healing ritual I was preparing for myself. Those others would inevitably, and perhaps necessarily, hold some trace of the historic coloniser.
Dramatherapy and ritual theatre performance
For dramatherapy, a theatrical influence may help therapists to restore their ability to address people’s creativity rather than taking into account mainly their distress or their pathological sides. This may allow therapists to get in touch with their own inner sources of creativity, using this influence as a means to learning more about themselves and their clients, allowing themselves to be open to unforeseen developments of their progress and preventing the risk of hindering people’s liberty. (Pitruzzella, cited in Jennings, 2009: 107)
Distance
With my propensity for high drama and big emotions as child, I had acquired the sense that a stage was to become my safe space long before I became a Dramatherapist. Of course, a stage can also be a place of great exposure. As an actor, I experienced this as a necessary part of the process, a rite of passage, which was witnessed and invited by the audience with their agreed presence. A stage, however makeshift, being boundaried and contained, is also permission giving. It was for me the space where self-confidence was rehearsed and nurtured every Saturday morning in my Speech and Drama classes, often quoting Shakespeare. Later, having become a professional actor, I continued to experience myself in various dramatic guises that I could learn from, on and off stage. The actor turned Dramatherapist, Jennings (1998), who gave us Embodiment, Projection and Role, as a theatre-based developmental paradigm on dramatic play in childhood, surmises that, ‘this is the paradox of drama: that I come closer by being more distanced’. Acting has always elicited therapeutic value in enabling me to indirectly interrogate my many diverse parts. Mitchell (1990: 15–17), who was instrumental in establishing the Dramatherapy MA at the University of Roehampton where I trained, tells us that Stanislavski’s ‘method acting’ technique, employed by Peter Brook, incorporated drawing upon the actor’s ‘emotional memory’. Mitchell goes on to say, ‘there was a sense of catharsis, as the performer integrated their life experience into the inner life of their character’, when observing Brook’s rehearsal room. I am undertaking a creative journey much like a method actor might in endeavouring to bring an imaginary character to life. I was as Mitchell put it, in ‘rehearsal’ for ‘a greater stage’ that is ‘life’. In ‘The Couch and the Stage’ (2008: 223), Landy talks about providing a ‘cognitive bridge’ between ‘the drama and non-fiction reality’. In my devised story, the title character was to be based on those issues that felt relevant to, and provided distance from, my own personal drama. While I held Black in mind as an actor might; as a Dramatherapist, I remained aware of the psychological processes encountered. I needed to feel safe when embodying the character of Black, who for me represented the imagined experience and trauma of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As well, I had to have space and distance to notice and accrue any potential psychological benefits. I was to be my own therapist and client, as well as deviser and actor. Autonomy of a kind. I was not entirely on my own. The penultimate day of rehearsals saw a friend and colleague support me in being my eyes, when I could not see for crying, to tell me what she could or could not see in my performance of this imagined life. Here, I am with a kind of complex sorrow, around my need to say in this article, for the benefit of the reader, that my dear friend is White. In being prepared to go to the creative source of my pain, to release its capacity to change, I had given myself a journey of heroic proportions, and I wanted to come back inextricably changed. Russell (2015: 15), in recognition of the importance of resilience to meet with emotional pain and recovery says, ‘resilience is in the very least a potential waiting to be discovered and brought out’. I was seeking to gather enough theatrical material for the devised story that would distance, and thereafter illuminate. Being With Black would serve as metaphor and symbol for the final and most potent phase that was to become a cathartic ritual theatre performance. As Mann (1996: 4) allows me to reiterate ‘symbols provide an emotional distance between a client’s inner and outer space which is imperative if healing is to take place’. I prepared to go to the creative source of the pain, under guise of metaphoric story and character, with my mother’s real-life suitcase.
Return
The suitcase was to become a kind of ‘transitional object’ (Winnicott, 1953: 10) in its representation of my mother, and something beyond her that I was experiencing as individualised magic. Not only was it a family heritage object, from which the trauma had outed itself, but even with its pain, or perhaps because of it, I had sensed almost immediately, that the suitcase would become a personal talisman, that had already begun to signpost me to an ancestral place of potential healing. You must return and get it, said Sankofa bird to the little girl who struggled to locate herself. Get what? She said. Whatever it is you are seeking, Sankofa replied, how else might you come to know yourself?! This is the wisdom of the Ghanaian myth translated from Twi language (Berea College, 2020), that reminds us to look back to the past for insight and knowledge. I was to return to a past that had seen the loss of millions of Black lives. The African Holocaust Society (2020), in their work on the legacy of Slavery, also defer to the Swahili word ‘Maafa’, meaning ‘great tragedy’. Was it really possible for a suitcase to take me to this place, and how could I be sure of a safe return? The North American Association asserts that Dramatherapy is ‘an embodied practice that is active and experimental’ and can provide an approach to achieve ‘catharsis’ of the sort Emunah (1994: 10) talks about striving to achieve with clients. My own work as a practising Dramatherapist ordinarily includes a space where storytelling, play, dance, tears and laughter are invited, witnessed and joined by the group or individual client, as a therapeutic and energising experience. Stories, universal themes and archetypes arrive from what is present with the client. I attribute my ability to facilitate this in the therapeutic space to my background in theatre, and my culturally embodied expressive self. I am empowered by the similarities between my work as a Dramatherapist and aspects of my West Indian and West African heritage. I am thinking of traditions such as oral storytelling, mask, carnival, and in particular the rituals held around death. As part of this work, I took a so-called ‘Heritage’ DNA test that confirmed storytelling was indeed integral to my ancestry, and inherent in the part of West Africa that my ancestors were from. The Caribbean ‘Nine Nights’ ritual, brought to life in the Royal National Theatre’s 2018 production of the same name, written by Natasha Gordon, privileges the process of grief with all its nuance. Family and friends of the deceased share stories, food, music, tears and laughter, until such a time, the ninth night, that the spirit of the dead is said to be freed. Funerals can be described as a time and place to express and embody grief for the dead, and for the living, to move on.
Ritual
Here then for me, is the similarity between funeral as ritual, inherent in my culture, and Dramatherapy’s ritual theatre practice. Both provide and facilitate a theatrical boundaried space to meet with dramatic issues. I hoped in daring to meet with my life and death issue, to return with a sense of restored or accrued resilience, and an experience of ritual and catharsis that my ancestors had cued me to know was an essential part of my being. I have always felt my ancestors alongside me; as a puddle at my feet, walking behind me in a chain gang connected via belly buttons, as a tunnel through my heart, the sense of being followed, or just with a knowing that I could call upon them to summon their magic and strength when required. Rebillot (1993: 16) says, ‘Ritual is a doorway through which we move from the ordinary world into another dimension . . . a threshold of consciousness’. In ‘Call to Adventure’ (1993: 41), he lays out the ritual drama structure of the ‘Hero’s Journey’, about which is said, ‘the process is to incarnate, to dramatize the story with your whole being: body heart and mind’. Humans have evolved all sorts of imaginative ways to process their inner dialogues; including the use of objects, visual images, stories, music, and performance embedded with ritual, and embodied practice. Mitchell (1998) tells us ‘theatre of self-expression’ is ‘concerned with examining the very nature of theatre and healing’. Dramatherapists learn to become adept to the many active ways the whole body attempts to communicate and heal itself. Emunah (1994: 44), says ‘dramatic ritual can often communicate that which cannot be expressed through language alone’. She also reminds us that in early human societies ‘drama and healing were inseparable’ (1994: 21), and that, theatre was used as a kind of social prescription to necessitate collective cathartic experience. Today, in a ‘return’ to the use of creativity as medicine, Arts therapeutic interventions are being socially prescribed within our communities by the National Health Service (NHS, 2016). Just as we innately recognise archetypes and universal themes by virtue of being human, we also recognise the ways in which we instinctively can support our healing. Landy (2008: 18) tells us, ‘the origin of archetypes, according to Jung, lay in the collective experience of all humankind and could be read in people’s expressive actions and artefacts’, thereby allowing us to deepen our attachments and understanding of what it means to be human. At the heart of my ritual performance would be my mother’s suitcase, a family heritage object. ‘Heritage object’ is the phrase that emerged as I began to work with the suitcase and thought about my ancestors, those living and those who had long since died. Death as reality, and archetype, may fill us with dread, but it is somehow made more bearable through ritual and active engagement with what we fear our own inevitable deaths may look like.
Archetypal grief
It would be impossible to enter a discussion regarding the traumatic grief and the highly emotional state of women of colour without considering slavery itself, and the environment that has raised emotions to the level of archetypal grief. (Brewster, 2019: 28)
Survival
I am a survivor. I know this because I come from a line of African-Caribbean people who survived slavery. My tears are fire water. They release and add fuel to the fire that is my grief. I grieve over the bones of my ancestors. I wonder about the emotional and physical pain held in my DNA and skeleton. The Jungian analyst, Brewster (2019: 15) also tells us, ‘the exceptional life of enslaved children imprinted on them the mark of those who had seen the worst violence of human nature’. I ask myself why this violence is played out again and again even today. Of course, I understand this is how trauma performs itself, playing down the generations of one’s own line, and interconnected collective experience. Sometimes with the same archetypal and historic props of torture. Cutlass in the Caribbean. Knife in England. Whips in Parliament. Gun in America. Only when it is faced, by all those concerned, descendants of victims and perpetrators, can the re-occurring nature of DNA, the codes of inter- and transgenerational trauma, be broken. My fire is depleted. Weakened by the persistence of racist systems and structures outside of my body, as well as in. Perpetrator not willing or unable to meet with his depravity, shame, pain and burden. Inner and outer worlds collide. I am beaten. Alone. Dying. But I am a survivor. Brewster (2019: 22) states that ‘rituals are necessary to strengthen the psychological and spiritual essence of the individual as well as community’. In Dramatherapy, the ritual theatre space is a liminal transformative space that privileges the power of the imagination to re-imagine. Landy (2008: 249) tells us ‘it is possible to re-enact past events in the present as a means of affecting the future’. I am sure my ancestors knew this. Not only did I have to meet with traumatic effects of historic racism, I also had to meet with imagined and or real descendants of the perpetrators, and potentially present day perpetrators of racism. They could not help but be represented by those members of the audience who were White, and the majority in Dramatherapy trainings, and wider academic psychology departments. It occurs to me that processing the violent deaths of one’s ancestors, and in my own case, members of my extended family, is as much about surviving the traumatic nature of those deaths, as it is about grieving absence. I think about Doreen Lawrence as Windrush Generation, as mother, and ‘mother’ as archetype. With all the nuance, interconnections and resonances of historic and present day racism, the black hole of my Black experience, was looming. The socio-political environment was heavy like a mire, muddied with collective salt water crying. Brexit had brought with it a rise in racism (Opinium Research Survey, 2019). There was also the ongoing Windrush scandal, Black Lives Matter (2013), and the Me Too (2006) campaign, which incidentally was started by the activist Tarana J Burke, a Black woman, not a middle class, White, Hollywood actress! As well as saying goodbye to the respite that came with Barack and Michelle Obama in 2017, I now had to be vigilant to racist backlash that came from the newly inaugurated Trump. There was also the insidious rhetoric of many of our British politicians harping on about days of Empire. Confused, racist, collective, societal pain, risked activating survival modes in many of us. Black and White people were crying about their imagined past future present.
Crying
If . . . we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meaning (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening and consciousness) . . . in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue new ways to live in the wake of slavery . . . to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. (Sharpe, 2016: 17–18)
It is difficult to talk about the Transatlantic Slave Trade for many reasons. One reason is the presumption made by some that slavery bears no relation to the present day Black experience. It does! Another reason is that dialogues about racism risk one being re-traumatised, stigmatised, data-rised, and talked about, or to, in a ‘foreign’ language. Sharpe, in her book, ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’ (2016), says, ‘in the United States, slavery is imagined as a singular event even as it changed over time, and even as its duration expands into supposed emancipation . . . it was rather a singularity’ (2016: 106). My body speaks of the experience of slavery, and yet this experience was not mine. Toni Morrison (1987) says in the foreword of her novel, Beloved, ‘to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way’. I was seeking to meet my audience human to human, with my somatic embodied language of slavery. The language used by those who did not have this precise experience was not allowed, welcomed or required. A shared language and landscape would have to be found. It would have to exist in a wide-open meeting place. This language, it has since occurred to me post performance, was one of catharsis and crying. I knew I would cry during the performance. I had always cried as easily on stage as off. I had not thought about whether I should expect tears from those in the audience. They came in floods. Crying for me is a creative response, as well as a physical and emotional one. A way of speaking without words. In her ‘Crying Book’, Christle (2019: 56–57) who is not Black, says, ‘as far as words go, crying is louder’. I take this to mean that crying is somehow more dramatic or theatrical. Christle gives credit to Sharpe as her ‘teacher’ when she talks about a perceived difference between ‘white tears’ that are ‘shed by a white person who has been made suddenly aware of systemic racism and her own implication in white supremacy’. Christle goes further adding ‘white tears’ can be ‘a form of defence against an imagined aggression, a way of shutting down a conversation the white person finds hurtful’. I find it almost impossible not to cry when another human body is crying, except when it comes from a child, then I am able to restrain myself, and promptly step into ‘mother’ as archetype, one of my many parts. The first cry of a child often comes in the arms of mother, this is surely the reason when crying in adulthood, we may still find ourselves yearning for them. Attachment to ‘mother’ is generally recognised, whatever our cultural heritage. A clinical understanding is integral when training to become a therapist in the learning about theories of attachment. When I had the honour of seeing and hearing Fanny Brewster (2019) speak about nuanced experiences of her Jungian training, I was able to capture a thought-whisper from my head and heart. It was a sudden realisation so shocking to me, even now I hardly dare write it. I do not yet entirely understand it. I think it is a feeling of unprocessed and confused sadness, guilt, and or shame. Here I must breathe and pause. Why was it, while training to become a Dramatherapist, and learning about theories of attachment, I always found myself, visualising a White baby child? As if I, or babies like me, did not exist? Crying again. Trying to catch my breath. Brewster (2019: 15) says, when discussing Bowlby’s theories of attachment, which she rightly describes as ‘influential’, that the ‘unique features of enslavement’ are not addressed. Where was I? Where was my mother? My father? The collective trauma, violence, separation, dislocation and loss, of 400 years of the Transatlantic Slave Trade? Where was colonial motherland, who in one long period of time ‘needed me’ and in the next ‘sent me away’ with cold words, no crying, just legitimised, politicised, pathologised, colonial language. Brewster (2019), Sharpe (2016), and fellow Black women Dramatherapists, in Maynard (2018), and Lepere and Milangeni (2020), all speak to the importance of this work for restoration and reparation of the Black psyche. I am learning to let go of a kind of attachment to my pain, and the self-belief that being Black means I must somehow bear it.
Notes to self
Through time and place . . .
When an actor forms an attachment to the role he or she is playing, a kind of magic can happen on stage. The character that has been shaped from the actor’s imagination and emotional memory, can feel as if it’s taken over the actor’s body for a time. The actor has a visceral sensation of observing the character using or sharing their body. In this way, a character can leave its mark, like an imprint, with the ability to put one back in touch with those parts of oneself, that resonate with having lived another life, albeit the life of a character on stage. Black has similarly affected my psyche. She came into being as I worked with a long length of beautiful, black, West African fabric, traditionally used to make funeral garments. I had used the same cloth in a ten minute process theatre piece at the end of my Dramatherapy Training. Looking back, this was the first outing of my inner dialogue, or to put it another way, the conception of Black. She would then gestate in my womb, my stomach, my gut; and arrive in my mother’s suitcase. I had purchased the fabric from my local market, which was also the precise area where the first Windrush Generations had settled. I had formed an unshakable attachment to Black, as surely as those first Windrush passengers had to Britain. Black is standing barefoot and upright when the audience enter the space, holding her suitcase, sometimes looking back, waiting to take her first step on to a new landscape, with ritualised movement and soundtrack of African drumming. Stepping out of role, and out of the performance area, with inevitable waves of historic and present day racism, to meet the audience human to human, I was with relief. Mindfully stepping back into role as my mother, with the suitcase, to share the story of her arrival to Britain, from a letter recently written and placed inside it. As Dramatherapist and researcher, I am wondering whether, metaphorically, my mother’s suitcase ‘contained’ the personal stuff of trauma, and Black’s, the collective experience. I am in a place of not knowing. Having invited the audience to respond after the first and second acts, with spontaneous creative expressive activity, before Black’s return and final address, I invite them to step into and across the space, to view the third act from a new perspective. With improvised movement, a sense of reverence, mostly silent, and as if undertaking an unspoken ritual of their own, I witness the audience move across the space. Being With Black was a powerful theatrical meeting and exchange. The suitcase had taken all of us through time, space and racism. At the end, in asking the audience to feedback one keyword only, the most extraordinary shedding of tears came, in all three performances. Together and separate. Sometimes, I cried alongside Black members of the audience. At no point were either my tears, or those from any audience member, explained or interpreted. It was as if in the feeling and seeing of my personal drama acknowledged, resonated by and with, Black members of the audience, archetypal grief was welcome, and given its place.
It was like crossing a threshold . . . entering a sacred space . . . I remember the suitcase . . . it seemed like the performers’ presence and tone allowed the words and images to bypass the thinking function and went straight into the feeling . . . and from that moment on, tears started to flow . . . it felt overwhelming but somehow necessary to let that emotion move me . . . like a sort of release . . . I was transported by the poetry, the black cloth, the textiles, the smells, the sounds. (Dramatherapist member of audience, 2018)
Beautiful Black universe
Born from beliefs, memories, and imaginings; I saw Black as having lived many lives through a process of reincarnation. She is past future present. Black is warrior. She was Yemoja, the Nigerian deity and Orisha, who in the myth is said to have swam alongside Transatlantic Slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies. Black was Sankofa, symbolising ‘return’. She is the woman I have long seen in my daydreams, standing on a block, naked, waiting to be sold in a British harbour. She is the ‘homeless’ woman I once saw and recognised something of myself in. She/I frightened me. Black is all woman. Witch. Feminist. Lover. Mother. Ugly. Strong. Vulnerable. Beautiful. Difficult. She is the memory of meeting my paternal grandmother in St Vincent for the first time, aged three. Formidable, upright, and barefoot. She carried a basket on her head with the wares she had grown in the rich volcanic soil of the island. Her mother would have experienced remnants of the Slave Trade in 1834. As did my maternal great-grandmother from India, taken to St Vincent as an indentured labourer, replacing the Slave Trade.
I was deeply moved to consider my own heritage in relation to that of the performer . . . The intimate nature of the piece invited me to consider what was witnessed on the level of woman to woman, person to person, and being Black was one rich and full aspect of the person performing. (Dramatherapist member of audience, 2018)
New language
Imagine a wide-open desert. Two men walking towards each other. There is something about them that speaks of early man. One is Black. The other White. Way off in the distance they cannot yet see this difference between them. Instead, it is their shared human form that draws them towards each other. The sun is bright. As one nears the other, their difference is now clearer. Then they are entirely consumed by notions of individual survival, and an innate knowledge that it is only a shared language that will ensure they each survive. This image arrived first when writing my masters dissertation, and thereafter it’s been reoccurring during the process of writing this article. It goes some way to attribute this in part to what Toni Morrison called the ‘White gaze’ (1998), I often had the sense that someone was looking disapprovingly over my shoulder; the presence of a dominant culture intruding on the process of finding the voice and language that would honour what I was sharing, keep me safe, and allow me to be recognised. I am still communing with Bob, having moved from his album ‘Survival’ to ‘Talking Blues’. Bob’s voice for me is sentient and essential language that speaks of heritage, history acknowledged, warrior stance, mystic vibes, humanity and healing.
Old Empire
As I work towards my conclusion, Williams (2020), author of the British Government’s official Windrush Lessons Learned Review, is quoted as saying ‘racially motivated legislation’ can be traced back to ‘the 1960s, 70s, and 80s’. Perhaps it should have said ‘can be traced back to days of empire and colonialism’. The Runnymede Trust in their Windrush Lessons Learned Review submission (2020) also point to a ‘hostile environment and related legislation’ as recently as ‘2014 and 2016’. It also states, ‘Black people have rarely been heard in public debate’ and ‘there are few if any influential national or even local institutions that represent Black people’. I still wonder about those passengers on board the Empire Windrush in 1948. Carrying their migration stories in their suitcases. The word ‘Empire’ subliminally reminding them of their places, and what they’d come from. I wonder when it occurred to them, that their ancestors, had also boarded British ships. Some thrown overboard, alive, and taken by the sea, as damaged, worthless, or dead cargo. Not human. Just as Shakespeare saw Caliban. From centuries old master, to post Second World War colonial motherland. Perhaps the Windrush passengers imagined throwing their traumatic ancestral memories into the sea, for the sake of their new hopes and dreams. I might never have known my mother’s or my father’s migration story, but for the appearance of the suitcase, as treasured family heritage object. I did not know my mother did not want to come to England. I did not know my father had travelled to England by sea. I am a middle child, communing with the Middle Passage, that Transatlantic slave ships took, from Britain to West Africa, the Americas and the West Indies. Back to Britain. With me. Across times, seas, and embodied memories.
Woke
A few weeks after the final performance of Being With Black, I awoke from a dream in which I was apparently on trial for ‘acts of resistance’. I was standing in front of some kind of ‘wise council’, that I myself had been a member of, and was now awaiting judgement from. Earlier that day, in the ‘real’ as opposed to ‘dream’ world, I had attended another Post Slavery-Syndrome Conference. As a result, I had taken away a distinct feeling of unrest. A speaker proposed that Black people were often in a state of hyper vigilance, due to an innate sense of feeling unsafe. As I grappled with this notion on my way home, the effort required not to draw attention to my inner rage was immense. The crooked old man from the nursery rhyme came to mind, as I tried to stop what I was feeling inside, from spilling out. I attempted to self sooth with Bob in my headphones, and a rum in my local. I was a survivor. I had done my ‘Black work’. The show was over! How dare someone suggest I did not feel safe! I woke around 3 am still with the rage, now with the dream also, and wondering what my so-called ‘acts of resistance’ looked like. Was it resistance to acknowledging something in my unconscious? Was it a socio-political stance I had taken in my dream? In the dark proceeding awake hours, I began to remember occasions when I had been subjugated, felt unsafe, and unable to call-out racism. Memories tumbled out of my head. Memories as recent as Dramatherapy Training. As early as primary school years. Always a deep sense that something beyond me was very, very, wrong. And then, tight, stiff, neck again. Safer to step into cut-off Western cerebral brain and head, than African warrior body! Or was it? Pause. Out in the ‘real’ world I had always been the picture of ‘civility’ and ‘politeness’. I had the Shakespearean voice to prove it. Now I felt I was probably experiencing personal and collective trauma in those moments, with ‘slave’ as archetype, internalised racism, and or necessary psychological survival modes. ‘Woke’ (Sharpe, 2016), from a ‘dream’, and now very much in the ‘real’ world, I wondered if I would ever have the language to describe the nuance of institutional racism to my colleagues at Roehampton where I now worked, teaching the Therapeutic Stories Unit. I sat up in bed. I intuited that if I stayed with the metaphor of the ‘wise council’, Black could help me through this newly conscious state. Her response came as the spoken word poem at the start of this article. I would later share the same statement as a keynote speaker at a well-being event, at Roehampton. Black was enabling me to resist institutional racism, and to meet with my own resistance about stepping into a place of direct, honest, loving, activism. Together, Black and I, were and remain, powerful.
Magic
For me there was Black Magic in my mother’s suitcase. The suitcase is now mine. It is in my sight daily. Upright. Sometimes opened. Mostly closed. Treasured. Furnished, with brightly coloured cloths, plants, smells, and a tall African carving. Returned. Surviving. Catharsis. Ritual.
Conclusion
Now, I see it was inevitable in performing with my Windrush Generation suitcase I would also need to write about it. To evidence it. To have it recorded. To credit, and give something necessary, to the Dramatherapy community, and wider institutions. To acknowledge the deepened understanding that could only have emerged from the interconnected nuance and illuminating process of writing, the power of the written form alongside performance to speak my truth, be a kind of matrix, make me cry, and be courageous with the life and death issue of racism. I now know I was also seeking a kind of validation, as well as asserting my right to be seen and heard. I wonder if this is about humanness or Blackness. Whichever it is, the writing, questioning, search for location, constant going back and forth, words and ideas erased that somehow remain; have also been a means to transformation. This wide-open landscape has allowed me to go where I needed to go in furthering my exploration of self. There are of course more questions. I do not yet know what the next pathway is to pursue. Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to focus more on the healing, with catharsis and ritual. I see possibility in what I am calling heritage object work. Perhaps, there is also a desire to delineate and learn more about my ‘personal’ and the ‘collective’ trauma, the inter- and transgenerational, though that prospect frightens me. I understand and have compassion for my resistance to academic and pathologised language which has not always served Black people. I sense important work is required, in relation to ‘mother’ as archetype and attachment theory, from the perspective of slavery and colonial motherland. I am indeed a theatrical Dramatherapist. I may always long for and need a stage. I hope this work will contribute and encourage more dialogues from and about the Black experience, its beauty and its pain, to meet with institutional racism. I trust the reader and myself have been able to locate each other.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to clients, students, and colleagues for enriching the learning, my Supervisor Dr Emma Ramsden for her unwavering support, and my parents for trusting me to hold and share their story.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.