Travelling with Imoinda: Art, Authorship, and Critique

Abstract

Travelling with Imoinda:Art, Authorship, and Critique Joan Anim-Addo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Joan Anim-Addo Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 570] This article raises questions concerning art, authorship, and to a lesser extent, critique, specifically in relation to my opera libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name, written in 1997, given a first rehearsed reading in London in 1998 and first published in 2003 in Italy. Considering the scale of the art involved in this full-length work of music-theater, in terms of writing but also in relation to performance, I am interested to reflect upon what keeps those of us, black women especially, who find ourselves as artists woefully under-resourced in our diverse locations, nonetheless committed to developing that which seems at times to be an impossible practice. In the process of reflection, I borrow from the seminal Black British visual artists’ exhibition by black women curated by Lubaina Himid in 1985, the notion of “the thin black line.”1 For this purpose, the “thin black line” resonates ideas about resistance that retrospectively and disturbingly evoke 1980s Britain with its indifference or hostility to that which might yet be referred to as black arts practice. Addressing the question of commitment, I propose to consider desire in this context as perverse (in practical terms) and readily conjugated with commitment to highlight black arts practice as a perverse commitment. In this light, it is useful to be reminded that perverse commitment speaks also to the persistent, albeit largely dormant—and I contend still dominant—view of black arts practice in the diaspora. Notably, for example, Dame Janet Suzman, actor and ex-wife of Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the National Theatre, London, declared: “Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare” (Alberge and Brown). Readily discerned in this statement is a belief system that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideas of G. W. F. Hegel who posited that the “Negro” stands outside culture and “the history of intellectual, technological, moral, and cultural progress,” which in Michelle Wright’s words is “guided by the Absolute of reason.” She also reminds us of Hegel’s comments on the slave trade, “that slavery was most likely the only way Africans would learn to appreciate freedom and thus develop into subjects” (Wright 8). Later pseudo-scientific thought only aggravated that discursive reality which the “Enlightenment” had begun to produce. Following such enlightened tradition, Suzman adds further that “[theatre] is not in their [black] culture” and clinches her explanation with “Just as their stuff is not in white culture.” She states categorically: “Theatre is a totally European invention, as is tragedy. Other countries don’t do tragedy. It’s an invention by the Greeks.” Should it not be considered perverse on the part of black artists to persist in writing for the theater—especially theater considered high art—in the face of such clear-cut cultural battle lines drawn by (white) cultural gatekeepers in the diaspora? [End Page 571] Suzman is quoted at length because she articulates freely the substance of that which must be resisted by black artists. I underscore, too, the black artist’s propensity towards resistance or the “thin black line” (Himid) which in effect functions as intense engagement with a process of re(member)ing, as June D. Bobb refers to it with reference to the poets Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Thus, to write Beloved, Toni Morrison has also felt the need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to, in her words, “the interior life of people who didn’t write [their history] (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)” and to “fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left” (Morrison 183). In addition, perhaps especially within the diaspora, there are levels at which the compulsion to act upon what is known though not always acknowledged as “shared knowledge,” as Glissant writes of it, is overwhelming. About Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name My idea for Imoinda was...