via Steve Johnson / unsplash
What‘s it like to listen to and speak into the wind of history, to write into the echoes of the past? For me, it’s been a black and white archive with streaks of technicolor. My current project JOURNEY(S) represents a multidisciplinary work of oral history, cultural study and experimentation that has taken me down the path of a rainbow–faint, bended and undefined. Some days are clear blue, as wide and expansive as the sky, while others are a deep and mysterious purple or a lush, fertile green. The colors depend on the story.
Next month, I’m premiering JOURNEY(S), in partnership with Black Women Radicals. As I prepare to unveil the short-form narrative anthology, I have to look back at the process that has led me here. When I first got started, earlier this year, the only crayon in my box was the one I borrowed from poet Ntozake Shange. In the mid-1970s, her production For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf introduced audiences to the breakthrough concept of the choreopoem. This hybrid form of literature and performance merged the movement of dance with the language of poetry, in a way that paid both homage and elegy to Black women. Provoked by Shange’s unconventional use of poetics, I saw For Colored Girls as a departure point for JOURNEY(S). However, instead of incorporating choreography, I chose to combine documentary interviews with original verses to compose what I call a docupoem.
On March 8, 2022, International Women’s Day, I debuted the half-hour pilot on KPFA, a local radio station in the Bay Area. Back then, there was just one JOURNEY and that narrative trip centered entirely on my mother's story. Beginning close to home, I wanted to capture what it was like for her, in the early 1970s, migrating from her birthplace Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to my birthplace Washington, DC. Both a personal and creative inquiry, that first foray was my attempt to locate how we got here, literally and figuratively. My mother’s voice guided me, as I unpacked my cultural baggage and considered my inheritance.
After launching that pilot, I got a grant from HumanitiesDC and adapted the project into a short-form series. Then, I traveled to Addis and recorded the oral histories of six other women, from my community, who had taken the same journey as my mother. (A couple of whom decided to reverse course.) Cumulatively, their first-hand perspectives and shared experiences speak to a broad web of connections and intersectional themes that are meaningful to me, from family life and identity to migration, displacement and memory. In post-production these last few weeks, I’ve whittled down each woman’s interview to five episodes that are roughly five to eight minutes a piece. Sifting through the recollections of the narrators, I felt like an emotional sieve, separating particles of the past and examining their contents closely. In the space between their voices, I find my own reflection. Or, perhaps, a refraction.
I showed rough cuts of select episodes to one of my writing groups. One of the early listeners flattered me tremendously by comparing JOURNEY(S) to Daughters of the Dust (1991). The independent film written and directed by Julie Dash follows three generations of Gullah women from South Carolina, who contend with northern migration. A cult classic, Daughters is a tribute to Black womanhood that, decades later, is still referenced in pop culture. Having my work associated with another seminal production is both humbling and catalyzing. Since conceiving the docupoem as an audio-based project, I decided to change course and add a visual component that illustrates the women’s narratives on screen. With a wealth of source material at my disposal, including the interviews themselves, hundreds of archival photos, stock images and media provided by female visual artists of the Ethiopian diaspora, I’m reimagining the shape and form of JOURNEY(S), once again.
I assigned each of the five episodes in the anthology to a different animator, curious to see how each artist would interpret and articulate a particular story, while maintaining visual context and consistency. (Subscribers, scroll down to get a special, behind-the-scenes peek at storyboard scenes for JOURNEY(S).) All the animators were provided with access to the same raw materials and given similar creative direction. Being a lover of paper collage, I asked them to create that aesthetic with a moving, 2D-style video scrapbook, wanting to contrast the nostalgia of black and white with accent colors. And, here, again, I took my cues from Shange. In For Colored Girls, she designated anonymous names for her characters–Ms.Green, (who Shange, herself, played in the choreopoem’s debut performance,) Ms.Red, Ms.Blue. I, too, gave each narrator a chromatic distinction. (My mother’s is yellow.) Additionally, I anonymized their faces on-screen, (but not their identities), along with the face of nearly every person portrayed. Aside from protecting people’s privacy, my aim was to also blur the lines of individuality and, hopefully, let viewers see a kaleidoscope of Black transnational women. In Addis Ababa and Washington, DC, and in every place and time in-between.
I’m thankful to my foremothers for paving the way for me. It’s because of them that I’m able to complete JOURNEY(S). My literary and artistic predecessors–Shange, Dash, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and so many others–have been fierce stewards. Like phenomenons of light, they pass through me, before moving on to the next medium. Shange, especially, has taught me structure and fluidity, how to color brilliantly outside the lines. And, it’s this sense of lineage that lets me deviate and remix, that places my work in conversation with all those who came before and all those still to come.
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