‘They still call us drosters’: performing the memory of maroons and slavery with formerly-incarcerated men in Cape Town

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on The Maroon Project, a series of poetry and performance workshops at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum with a group of previously-incarcerated ‘Coloured’ men. The project facilitated a process of Spillerian interior intersubjectivity toward a self-authorship that could ‘speak flesh’ by placing the carceral system under scrutiny against the legacies of slavery, positioning participants to engage with the memory of drosters – or runaway slaves. Interview data is poetically transcribed to analyse participants’ experiences of the workshop process and the culminating stage production, Maroon, which performatively blended historical narratives with personal experiences.