‘No Straight Answers’: Writing in the Margins, Finding Lost Heroes

Abstract

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance, representing an Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British, and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social, and cultural), their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John's case is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry, and prose. Like Britain's most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics to represent universal themes and to centralize black women's experiences. With subject matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing, and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets, including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lennie James, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams. She is the editor of Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008), a collection of plays by black British dramatists.