 Okay, so I'd like to introduce Carlisle Brown, who is going to take over and come on up here. So you can, and then I'll pass the mic. So we're going to be on microphones so that we can, we're recording this, we're live streaming, so it's kind of a new addition to the intimate experience we're about to have in this room. So I'll take it over, Carlisle. It's on. Oh, okay. We're on now. It's on. So we're just waiting for, are we waiting for Mabula to join us on this? We will see her on the screen. Is that, so we'll wait for her. Okay. Well, I guess, yeah, I guess Mabula will know what it is we're talking about. So, yeah, I guess I could start. You know, the question is, what is the question? What is the African diaspora? What is Afro-Atlantic culture? And of course, it's in context of this festival we're having, which is about a specific program, you know, that I initiated about playwrights in the African diaspora. It comes from my, I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and my people are Geaches, Gullah people they call them, and sometimes like rice eaters. And we're always aware of why we were there in Charleston, South Carolina, because Europeans did not know how to cultivate rice. And, you know, we always knew that we most likely came from the people who were from what was called the Green Coast in West Africa. The language, there was a language, a patois kind of, you know, hyphenated language that these Charleston Sea Island people spoke, which was called Gullah. And it contains new, we probably came from the Green Coast, because many of the words that were mixed into Gullah were Mende and Timne words, which were people from that Green Coast. So we knew we were African, and of course that propelled, you know, the family life, the Charleston people that migrated to New York, you know, were followers of Marcus Garvey, and believed in, you know, their political philosophy was Pan-Africanism. And sort of what that means is that your identity is more expansive when you identify with being black people of the Atlantic Basin. It means that you understand that your people were enslaved from Africa and collectively all of us, and so those people that we, our ancestors, the ancestors of all the people born in the Atlantic Basin in the New World, you know, products of the Atlantic slave trade, and we know that that enterprise financed the Western world. So it's a larger way of looking at your identity, and it is really not so much biology, but an idea, right? So that doesn't mean like all black people are into this or even know that, but, you know, in the Camargo program we're looking for people who lean into this social, political, historical phenomenon that made the world we live in. And those people that use that in their scholarly research and in their art, you know, sort of embrace that as a truth. And I think that we know that the transference in culture of what comes from Africa and it's transformed into the New World, when we look at music, dance, religiosity, that connection is obvious. But I wondered how that was related into the narrative and particularly performance when we're talking about cultures that originate which are all cultures in written language and, you know, the writers are sort of grios that tell the story of the people that have a very kind of interest in it. So it's a different way of looking at the world. And this young lady here, the author we take care of alone was one of the first fellows in which we have these sort of conversations about Afro-Atlantic culture in theater which is a Western art form. And we, you know, we promised people that we would give you a place where you could explore your craft, your voice, your Africanness in a beautiful Mediterranean environment without the white Western games. That is without, because just kind of way we exist in the Atlantic world actually and politically we use a white lens to communicate in the world. And so this is a place where, you know, black people did not have to, artists did not have to explain themselves, represent an entire world but, you know, to just, you know, do their art and express themselves in order. And so we found out that like the work was really different. You know, when people, you know, when these people came here, you know, from the diaspora, they shared this identity, this Afro-Atlantic identity, but they were different. They were from different places, they're different cultures, spoke different languages. And, you know, Amy Boiler was just getting started, we're getting into context of what you know about like Camargo, you've heard my spiel, you know what I must have told them, right? So, you know, to kind of bring this all together, so I'll try to just wrap up what my, you know, how this thing started, my idea, the things that we discovered, I discovered things all the time, right? And it was, we said, well, like, how do we make these, you know, we invite artists, where do we find them, how do we, you know, get them, where do we send these applications for the call, right? So you think of the Atlantic slave trade and, you know, that geography, you're like, well, that geography is gone, you know what I mean? It's so, you know, just exactly how do you find their people, how do they connect it? We finally asked the artist in an essay to just define what Afro-Atlantic culture was into themselves. And we, first time we got four artists from Africa and four from the states. And Zaza here was one. And, and then, well, we'll meet them and we'll get into sort of what the rest of the story is and maybe, okay. I'll do this and that'll be enough for me. Okay. You know, Zana Bojala was a scholar playwright, a portrait photographer, her academic and creative works have been conveyed through fellowships at the Sundance Theater Institute, Institute of World Literature, Harvard University, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, Highest Theater in Munich, something in French I can't read. House of Writers in Switzerland, she's a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. She's the author of award-winning plays, Onions Make Us Cry, Holy Night and My Sultana is a Rockstar. Zala was a post-doctorate researcher and lecturer at the University of Basel in Switzerland and she is one of the principal investigators of the Sacral Architecture Africa Project. Her scholarly interests include the Afro-Atlantic, iconic criticism, the history of criminology, criminal anthropology, and material culture. How about that? And Mabula, who is in France. And Mabula, I just say your last name for me again, please. Sumahoro. Sumahoro, okay. She's Associate Professor at the University of Tours and President of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating black history and culture. She started Bennington College, Bernard College, the Bard Prison Initiative, Columbia University, a visiting professor of Mellon Arts Project in 2002. She, I can go on, but she's written this wonderful book. Black is the Journey, Africana, the Name. So Mabula, can we start with you and you can tell us... Sure, Caroline. Tell us, how would you define Afro-Atlantic culture? Wow, that's a big question. I would immediately use the plural form Afro-Atlantic cultures. Many sites that constitute this black Atlantic space, let's say. Many sites, many populations, many histories. They are for many cultures, right? But we are talking about this global space that, as you mentioned earlier, that is born out of the modern era in history, that is born out of the forced displacement of enslaved Africans, that is to say people of African descent that did not define themselves as African at the time, people who came from various groups and sites and communities of the African continent and that became black outside of the continent, right? So this scattered and dispersed and forcefully moved population from the African continent to the Americas, developed wherever they ended up in the Americas, cultures that simply were perhaps at first extensions of their old ways, the ways that they had developed and practiced in their places of origin, and then those old ways were mixed, combined, transformed by the other cultures that they encountered once they reached the Americas. So these other cultures might be a mix of various African cultures from those various African groups that I have just mentioned, and then there was also the encounters with European cultures. There were also encounters with Native American cultures, and this can constitute what we can today call this global Afro-Atlantic culture, all cultures, as I said. So the ways people have, I don't know, cooked, the ways people have prayed, the ways people have expressed their spiritualities, the way people have buried their dead, the way people have considered and imagined their futures, the ways people have managed to stay alive or not to stay alive, all these things would constitute the cultures of this black Atlantic. Yeah, it's like a gumbo. It's like a gumbo. The gumbo is the writing sample. Yes, definitely. How would you express it, Sada? Well, it sure is a hot pot. It's a rhizomophic make-up. It's constituted of several features, one interesting thing is about it not being fixed. I do agree with Mabula in the sense that I wouldn't refer to the Afro-Atlantic culture in the singular for the fact that it kind of homogenizes very distinct features that are very important to highlight in terms of the different kinds of diasporas and also the historical contingencies that led to the displacements or movements, be it voluntary or forced. So it's kind of hard to have one definition to something that could be seen through a lenticular length, lenticular in the sense that it has multiple realities, each of them as important as the other. But then with this movement as well, we have all sorts of diasporic entities that are all sorts of movements that come through either diasporic entities such as refugees, these are more recent ones, refugees or people waiting to be defined as political status in terms of indigents in different forms depending on the conditions that led to their displacements. Well, you know, that the Komago program, the program that we're in resulting in this, you know, it's so expansive, right? Yes, it's very difficult. There's certainly like a lot of sort of mysteries that isn't specific and it's fluid. You know, it's always moving and it's always changing because of that and one aspect of the culture sort of influences another and it makes something new and it happens all the time and it's filled with these, the thing that I've always been fascinated with is it's filled with these kinds of mysteries about how did that thing from over there get over here, right, you know, in terms of a thing that was like meant to be oppressed somehow ends up over there, right? And nobody's, you know, there are all kinds of things. You find like some old brother in Alabama, he's called the cane, right? And somebody says, pow, that looks just exactly the cane. And he says, what's your ruble? You know what I mean? So that, you know, it is filled with that kind of mystery and in terms of, you know, the elements. So you wrote a play out of Komago, which was, I think, clearly a diaspora play, but it wasn't like, it wouldn't say it was a black play, like we would, you know, say in America, you know, it had quite other sort of dimensions. So if you were to say about your play, you know, what aspects of it carried the Afro-Atlantic kind of dimensions? Well, thanks. There's just a character who is African, who has encountered an intermixture by his choice of moving from Africa to Europe for studies and ended up being an astrophysicist in Europe and discovering things. I also wanted to highlight the fact that we have all sorts of diasporic entities and people often refer to or often think of the diaspora in the form of a community or groups of people and not individualized as such. So I really wanted to kind of focus on an African on a lone journey that mixes with other cultures in a way that is sort of symbolic as well. Of course, while thinking about existential issues such as gerontology or loneliness at the end of one's life and bringing memories of Africa with him. That's interesting because I don't think, for me, it's not just the character, it's the whole thing. Oh, you're both on the same page. What do you think about Zinabu's play in that regard? No, I think that Zinabu's play is really about as she just explained. I want to say rehumanizing the people of African descent through that particular character because if we're talking about blackness and particularly if we're talking about this afrodisporic space, we need to remember that the very constitution of this diaspora was born of a disaster. This is the basic definition of a diaspora, right? A scattering that follows a disaster. In the case of people of African descent, the disaster was the transatlantic slave trade. And part of that diasporic process, in the case of people of African descent, was the process of dehumanization, the invention of those large groups, Africans, black slaves, inferior people or enslaved people, I should say, inferior people, people with no soul, people who are all similar, people who have become, I don't know, goods, possessions, right? So I think that the exploration in the contemporary world by Zinabu of somebody individual who comes from that ancient but still very present background and that manages to regain or perhaps Zinabu is trying to draw the attention of the audience to the unique dimension of a human being. And this is why I was talking earlier about prehumanization. The invention of those large categories have contributed to the erasure of singularities. Somebody might be described as black, somebody might be described as African, but that's only one dimension of somebody's life, right? So I think that it is also important to deal with, you know, the products of the history that we are interested in, the products of the cultures that we have mentioned tonight. But those people, even though they belong to those new identities, they also remain human beings. And that implies a large spectrum of complexities, of paradoxes, of contradictions, and their own desires, their own trajectories. And I think that this is what the play seems to be interested in, to tell somebody's life. And just because somebody is black doesn't mean that they don't have their own narrative and their own particular experience. And that matters, too. Otherwise, we get lost in the diaspora and the group, in the community, in the racial categorization. Yeah. Well, you know, I, you know, speaking as a playwright, I see the whole... She just walked out the door there, but there was a writer here, a local writer, a friend of mine who talked about that play just in terms of its dramaturgy, right? That it is just not... And I worry about the writers and plays that have here is just, you know, this whole notion of dramaturgy. There are a lot of mysteries in this play, right? You know, which the play has no intention of answering, right? You know. But it is only the character's relationship, their faith in those kinds of mysteries, which just kind of premates what I see as a spiritual quality of the play, which does not exist, you know, in average American plays, which don't take the time to sort of signify that thing. You know, there are things about that, which seems to attract artists that I know I'm aware of, you know, in a way of storytelling, you know, which it doesn't even really have to be about blackness or whatever. It has sort of an African-ness to it, like I say, like the gumbo thing. You know, one of the things that we want to say, you know, the thing about the white gaze is sometimes the cop is in your head. You know what I mean? You're going like, oh, what do they think? You know, how will they sort of like kind of respond to that? And when I look at the critical world, like, why people tend to, the Western critics tend to put a lens on it which makes them comfortable, which makes them know, makes them say, well, I'm the smartest one in the room. Well, I know where this place should go to Broadway or kind of whatever. And this is something that just limits and plagues writers of color, you know, whatever diaspora they come from. And that's one of the things that we wanted to probe in the culture of diaspora and look at that in terms of work. Is it like, what is that thing that comes from you no matter what shape it is or sort of what, you know, what kinds of, and in your play, I find, you know, these mysteries, you know, you know, I'll tell you, you know, like we were sitting around and we said, he's the Panopticon, you know, so what the hell is that? You know, but, you know, his response, his need for the Panopticon is really a human thing that we could understand. And your play kind of gets beyond the, you know, every time we would go in his play we'd say like, oh, what the hell is that? What are you doing? So we look for the action. Like what is the action in the play? You know, what are they trying to do with humans? Are you trying to get attention or are you trying to insult them? You know, what is that sort of human thing? And it always came through. There's the play right there, you know? And I just, that was the thing that I, I don't know, what's your response to that? Does it sound like I'm insane? No, you don't. No, you do not sound like you're insane. But another thing I wanted to add to that was the idea of transfers. When we talk about transfers of bodies, it's not just bodies but ideas. There's something called corporeal semiology that we embody knowledge that comes through. So with most of the things that these characters have in common would be things they carry within themselves, things that are not tangible, that cannot be seen nor understood from anyone else but people who have lived, have had lived experiences of such transfers. And when you talk about things moving as well from one point to the other, I think about, I work with diasporic objects for instance from West Africa to, to elsewhere, several elsewhere. And in terms of how things take on newer meanings or have added meanings onto them, objects, people, ideas evolve or keep evolving in the diasporic space. So here within this tiny configuration of a nursing home or an older people's home, we have the characters, you know, influencing each other, changing metamorphosing through their different experiences and what comes through would be what they embody which is the diasporic experience. They have left, they have various homes to go through life, collecting just like rolling stones that gather must from different, from different points and in a way the identity or the identification of each character is really totally unfinished as they go along, which is also what the diasporic entity, wherever they are, wherever they are from, continue to hold like it's nonstop, it just keeps moving and through that, I think it's just this kind of chaos, this kind of unsettling feeling that makes up a diasporic character, a diasporic culture or a diasporic object, for instance, that moves from museum to museum, that makes, and people perceive them differently as well. So I would come back to the lenticularity in looking at things as well and this can be through different lenses. Each character is seen differently by an audience member, I've heard people interpret Yusuf's character differently in a way that even makes me as a writer wonder, oh really, so that's what this is about the character. So like you said earlier, the idea of reading them through and through is impossible because that's what the diasporic condition does to any diasporic entity because there's no fixity, there's nothing that's constant, you just keep revolving, evolving and having several iterations to your person and your thoughts and your ideas. So in a way it comes off as somewhat schizophrenic where you're one thing one minute and you're another thing the next minute. So it's kind of interesting because I live that life as well as someone who has multiple realities in the sense that I have Africa, I have West Africa, I have Nigeria, and I have Brazil, I live in Switzerland and I move around quite often. So the idea of home too is an illusion, it's an illusion theater, it's an illusion in a way that you know it becomes a bit muddled up sometimes where you begin to wonder and when people ask where you're from, where is home to you? I begin to wonder depending on who's asking I give them the answer they want and it's even for me too, I ask myself that quite often and I've come to realize that well there's no answer to having a fixed identity. Maybe that's not the quest, maybe it's the search that's the point. I wonder if you would talk a little bit about your experience in terms of language that we talked about before, when you say that my mother's, my mother tongue is not my mother's tongue and how that disparate thing relates to language, your experience with language. So I think my experience with language might be similar to what Zinabu has just described. These perpetual movements, these displacements, these reconfigurations, also this question, the centrality of the question of home, that is to say the question of origin, the point of departure, the point of expected return, right? It's not simple when you're talking about that in the case of the history and the cultures that we're interested in, the point of departure might be obvious, but even the concept of Africa is not so very obvious concept, right? Are we talking about Africa the continent or are we talking about all the different polities that have existed throughout the continent since the beginning of times, right? Africa itself as a term is really an idea, right? And sometimes even an ideal, so that would be the point of departure. But once the movement begins, we never know where it's going to end, right? And so these trajectories are also, are going to be the trajectories of people, of communities, but of peoples, I should say, but they're also going to be the trajectories of languages, right? So languages will be lost, will be transformed, will be reinvented, will be regained lost again, right? So I wrote in the book about my individual particular relationship to my mother tongue, right? And so my mother tongue is Jula from West Africa and Jula in particular from the Ivory Coast where my family is from. But Jula is a language that I do not speak, that I've heard all my life, but being born in France, being surrounded by French speaking people, I think that the French language took over the Jula language. And I cannot say that I never heard the Jula language, as I said, it's simply that it lost, it was defeated by the French language. And then comes another language that I select that I choose as an individual when I start traveling. It's the English language. The English language becomes unexpectedly a sort of language of freedom. The language that I choose that I select that I pick, a language that is convenient, a language that is widely spoken, a language that places me in communication and exchange conversation with other communities from the Americas. But it's most importantly, I believe, a language that is devoid of, you know, any emotional attachment, if not mine as an individual, right? The English language allows me to stay away from French matters and to stay away from Ivorian and Jula matters. It's not the language that I have lost. It's not the language that I'm supposed to speak, but I don't speak. It's not the language that connects me to some ancestry whose origins has been troubled because of that movement, right? So because of all these things, this is why I said, oh, this is why I came to the conclusion that I have a mother's tongue, I have a mother tongue, but I do not speak a mother tongue and that the language that I speak the best is French, but France is not my mother, right? And because of that configuration, I found refuge, I found solace, maybe, in another language that I took possession of and that is a little distant and disconnected from, you know, the existential, historical, and cultural tensions that we are discussing. So this is what it means. I don't speak my, I don't share the language spoken by my mother and by my parents, but my parents do speak French and I speak something else too. So it's, again, this back and forth between the collective and the individual and what you manage to do with this chaos that is not, I don't think that should not be solely understood as a negative thing. Maybe the diaspora can be the home. Yeah, you know, I actually, well, yeah, I actually think so, you know, that are... Maybe you want me to clarify, perhaps? Yeah, yeah. The movement, the in-between, the constant evolution, the fluidity, the fluidity, that can be the home too. And that can be more comforting than the idea of simply having lost and trying to go back to something that will be forever lost. But just because it has been lost in that manner, it doesn't mean that it has not evolved in other manners. So I made my peace with this question of home and home is the motion. Is it emotion? Motion. The motion. It's the motion. Yes. Right, right. That's right. Yeah, it's, that's, you know, what's that brother from Juneberg? He said it's not the size of the waves, it's the motion of the ocean. You know, that kind of makes it work. Well, you know, you know, of course, this idea of, yeah, you know, migration, I mean, like, you know, always moving, you know, a transcends, you know, class and circumstances and kind of conditions. And, but throughout human history, of these sort of moving someplace and changing and reinventing yourself is, you know, is a kind of a creative dinism that like, you know, moves the world in a forward direction, hopefully in the arts in terms of a positive direction. And I think, you know, understanding, understanding your place in that is your own place. I mean, you know, I find when these writers become the commargo to be, you know, listen to it for it to be okay to be who you are, you know, it seems to be a thing which is not, you know, accessible to everybody. You know, it seems to be, you know, the people from the diaspora talk about it in similar ways. You know, we're like, we talked to some French playwrights there who talked about it and we feel like they had, you know, any spaces, you know. And, but yet, like, Denver had a very different way to, people had different ways to deal with these problems than certainly I would. People had ideas that were effective that didn't occur to me in a million years. And there was so much to learn from each other about ourselves. And to be able to kind of, you know, not have to have any rules or kind of confines. It was just because we, you know, trusted each other. There seemed to be that idea, that embrace of whatever Atlantic culture was just had us greedy to see each other with love and acceptance. And yeah, just a great time and we made great, you know, great art, you know. And for me, like, you know, what things can we pick up that we can replicate this? Yeah, and if I might add something to what Marvola said about chaos and the unsettlement that comes with, you know, the being, with moving around. I'd just like to add that the African diaspora has a particular conundrum that it deals with in terms of color and how the black body navigates this wouldn't be how any other body navigates these spaces, which adds a layer of challenges to the idea of being human. You talked about dehumanization earlier, Marvola. And I think about the concept of the human that has not been quite all inclusive, not everyone is sort of qualified to be considered human. And it's something Gilroy talks about infrahumanity being human but not quite human, not human enough to have access to certain things. And it is quite glaring even with today's movements and migrations and all of that, especially in times of humanitarian crisis, which bodies are the last to be considered even if they were on the priority list which they often are not, they would be probably the last to be considered in any form of evacuation. We see that with the different wars going on and how black bodies seem to be the least considered bodies when it comes to evacuation or even border crossings. Well, you know, I hear what you're saying but I guess like sort of like what I'm saying is, you know, the fact that like, well, from my gut of people I never felt that way, right? I mean, I was oppressed, you know, I wasn't the problem. I mean, you know, I was like a human being so I never, I don't, people are made to feel that way perhaps but I've never felt that way. And you know, jeez, get over with these names. Hunter, Charlene Hunter Galt, you know, who used to be on, I don't know many of you remember, used to be on PBS for like, you know, many, many years. She was one of the black students that like, you know, integrated the university of Georgia, right? And she had, there were just, I think, about two young ladies who were there who were, you know, integrating and the guys were like in town but they lived in apartments, you know, they had to put them up somewhere in the university of Georgia and she was saying that like, you know, at this book she had just written she was at mixed blood. She had a, you know, a talk back with the audience and they said, well like, what, you know, was it terrible? She said, well, you know, they didn't really want me to be with them. You know, so, you know, they put me in an apartment, you know, and they didn't want to eat with me so that apartment had a kitchen. You know what I mean? And she said, you know, it was actually, I didn't really want to be with them either. So it was actually, you know, pretty nice. You know, it was not terrible. And so, and she said, well, were you afraid? And she said, no. Because my history protects me. Right? And I mean, the continuity of these people that are moved around, the continuity that they are people like you, that they're something that they shared, that they survived, is something that can also be integrated into the movement. What you have to do. Because that's what we have to teach each other. How to survive. How to contend with these struggles. You know, how magnified they might be. I do agree. One kind of works towards mounting these challenges. You know, but they are there. Especially in such situations now where you have lots of migrants from Saharan Africa and Africa in general. Where there's a lot of dehumanization going on, especially with them. They are seen as just things that are not what's being bothered about. And when you think about the African diaspora also, it's also thought of in terms of black bodies, which I talked about recently. And it brings to mind I think it was in the 1980s, this song was released by Peter Tosh. As long as you're a black man, you're African. And recently I've had to Does anyone know that song? African by Peter Tosh. And I think about that as well and think about North Africa and the Berbers and how Africa and blackness are sort of interchanged in a way. And Mabula, you talk about that in your book. Why not the black diaspora for instance and why African? Definitely blackness is associated with what we're talking about. African diaspora. But then, not all blackness is associated with that. I mean, it's really something you subscribe to. It's an idea. So, not all black people are painted with that brush and there's some people that in Bahia and Brazil that are African, that are white as somebody, the whitest person in this room. So it is expansive. There isn't any kind of simplistic answer to it. I guess what I'm staring at is looking at it through a qualified and a little corner that has to do with making art. Right? And how that shapes us. And I think for one, part of making art, the art that we make, which is the most influential culture in the world exists because of that resistance. Without that resistance, there would be no blues. There'd be no muddy waters without cars or anything without responding to those oppressive conditions. It's quite interesting. What do you say about that? I would say, I agree with what you just said, Carl, but I would say that it's not only responding to this domination and this oppression. It's just by simply being and by meaning to be independent of the problems that produces the beauty and the treasures and that produces the resistance. But not the resistance that locks anyone or any community in the gaze that you mentioned so many times, rightfully today. But just to express oneself freely despite the constraints, despite the collective gaze, to reaffirm constantly again and again someone's humanity, some collective humanity and that is what has produced beauty, right? I totally agree with you, but I would simply not frame it as responding. It's just people being constantly said, you're not a human being, you're not worth living, you're not worth being saved. You are going to die first, right? This is what negative racialization creates, who gets to live, who gets to die, right? And who would be in the priority list or not the priority list. So despite this environment on a daily basis, reaffirming, reasserting your humanity, I'm human, I'm human, I'm human and I play music, I write plays, I write poems, I sing, I don't know I work, I'll be a handyman or I'll be into crafts, whatever it is and the way I want. Because this is you're trying to make me or you're trying to make us something that is simply not true. You're wasting or using all that energy to drill into our brain that we are not human. But that energy that you spend on doing that is the very proof that we are human. Otherwise you wouldn't have to design all those strategies and all those methods and all those laws and all those various treatments to dehumanize us. It would be taken for granted. When we talk about the African diaspora and the first encounters between Europeans and Africans there was no doubt about the humanity of the people who were established on the African continent. There were treaties, there were negotiations there were, you know, authorization there were business transactions even, right? It's only when the trade developed and increased that there needed to be some legitimization of that of those increasingly in human transactions particularly through the Middle Passage, right? To pack people in that manner like that was the novelty. So you need to bring some philosophy in you need to bring a discourse you need to convince yourself that the way you are transporting human cargos through the Atlantic has not affect those populations because they are not humans. But at first when you needed to get those enslaved people, you signed deal you had contracts you were dealing with kings, queens or the heads of the various politics and there was no question about the humanity of the people there. It was never. So this dehumanization is a process is a construction and it has this is when I come back to you this is what has always been contested and this is what has always been proved wrong. People have behaved like human and they I don't know for some reason that domination has fueled the creativity as if to it's as if it had become an act of despair to in urgency reaffirm your humanity and that has fueled the arts. As you know I spent 20 years of my life being a sailor of 19th century sailing vessels and I've given a lot and I've given a lot of thought about the mechanics of the slave trade and if you look at the maritime world in the 19th century it was the driving economic force kind of in the planet and so when you think of depraved or dehumanizing people they are those people that did that kind of oppression for money it was capitalism it was the way of the world. People who breathe was complicit in the trade it made enormous amount of money like oil today it was everywhere and of course part of that suppression of that is it says something that's pretty horrible about all humanity again just the way in which slaves were put into slave ships and it's like a long story the insanity of when the British for some reason they abolished the slave trade by doing a buyout for the planters which wasn't paid out until 2017 I mean that is when the British abolished slavery they had to pay out they buy out the planters that's how it went that was the only way it was going to work they paid them for that they took a loan from the Rothschild English people for more than 100 years to pay off that debt and it just had that's how much money was involved we talk about reparations you couldn't afford it so I think if you're aware of that history at least you can hold yourself up if you're not saying that the non-humans are the people who are doing this to me and that takes communication and knowledge I mean the other thing that I've learned from the slave trade a friend of mine wrote a pretty book it's called Black Jacks about black sailors in the 19th century this enterprise like the sailors who work they would take anybody they didn't care you're black or white or whatever your job was just horrible just anyway they just poured these human goods you know across the Atlantic but it was sophisticated it made sure that it put people of different language groups in the same cargo hold so they had no means it was always thinking about social control for the dollar that was always the sort of thing and the mechanism gave rise to like ship building to solve the problems of maximizing the people that should pack in so my perspective comes from I think if we look at the Atlantic slave trade we know that enterprises not the thing that is conveyed like the happenstance thing that happens once in a while that it is our influences I don't know what I'm saying well I don't know where you're at I wanted to talk but would you like to discuss no more about this thing which is obviously expansive I find it really interesting so you know both of you guys are involved in artists and supporting artists when we came to Casis you were part of the AfroFest in which you were dramatizing all these plays well plays by plays by the African diaspora so tell us a little bit about that experience and what Eva Dunbar is trying to do so I think the idea in Casis was really about the idea was to have people in conversation and people being able to listen and read listen to one another, read one another and accept everyone accept each one particularly particular circumstances backgrounds specificities local cuisines if I may say we're talking about this global ensemble that the African diaspora is but within that global ensemble there needs to be attention paid to the local experiences and in those local experiences the individual experiences just like Zenebou mentioned earlier or did in her work so I think that in Casis it really was about adopting or recognizing to a certain extent a common language or common grammar but also leave space for everybody's let's say positionality everybody's particular location everybody's imaginaries everybody's as I said circumstances and it was about finding a balance where there would be room and where there would be no strict boundaries that would exclude anyone on this I don't know on some type of imagines black beige of honor or I don't know we don't want to reproduce those categories that systematically leave people out and it was also and I think you touched on it a little earlier Carla it really also was about freeing people escaping the gaze finding their voices feeling free to express whatever they had to express not overthinking or not being scared about fitting in the diaspora or I don't know challenging or upsetting some white gaze just to reconnect and reunite and authorize the validity and legitimacy of their own voice so Cassie and the Camargo Foundation being such strikingly beautiful sites and places that you know that foster I don't know artistic expression or you know it really was about fostering an environment that would give birth that would produce those expressions but expressions as free as possible so the diversity the variety the different angles the different you know tastes that's precisely what diaspora is and this is precisely what I think that the cultural diaspora program is doing the diaspora does not unite in similarity it unites in the dissimilarities it unites in the recognition of the diversity people are in this together not because they are alike yeah well it's happened it's happened twice and you know that's a money thing but it's happened twice thank you I'm writing about another Afro diasporic entity character a Brazilian artist called who lived in an asylum for 50 years and created very beautiful work while he was there and I'm writing a play in his honor because he was very he was a very dynamic character who believed that he heard voices telling him to document the world through things he found since I work with material culture I thought that was really brilliant there's a museum in his honor in Rio de Janeiro and he was also very poetic in the way he spoke he was majestic so I'm writing a play based on his life and his works that's what I'm doing now and I find his life fascinating and to bring it back to the African diaspora he had never visited he never visited Africa in his lifetime but he always had memories of an Africa he never visited and this was quite visible in his in the art he created he made his ideas of the map of Africa for instance and also used ships as a symbolizing ideology for his art and it's beautiful you should look him up he gave a couple of interviews and you can find them on youtube but in Portuguese and I'm working on that now and it's almost finished so it's all about the African diaspora for me it's very beautiful by the way the version of the script of images of his art is fantastic thank you very much and I would also add that the diasporic individual is also somewhat universal in how they leave and how they interact with other cultures other people other things images for instance so it's learning how to leave as one goes along I understand what you mean about universal I find that in art at least in writing I find that a dangerous dangerous concept because often it means universalism dominant culture like what happens to them what happens in their world represents kind of everything and it's kind of a complicated word because in terms of creating at least the narrative you only get to the universal by getting into the specific just what Mabula says about what is local what is of interest what is down here in the world of your own nitty-gritty in terms of writers from the diaspora work is said to be not universal for reasons that we cannot understand when they are kind of people you know it's like a cold word or like it's growing up or you know so that so I didn't mean it, it's just like when you said the word I was like what? I think if I may say even though I'm not hearing the questions from the audience the discussion is around this notion of universalism I think that what Senabu is doing in our play is very interesting because creating characters who are contemplating the end of their life right? who are contemplating death or who find themselves themselves in a nursing home that is universal and that will like that approach and contemplation of death is a shared like universally shared common experience and that does not or perhaps that might help the audience to remember that you might be black or you might be African or you might be from this black or African diaspora and just like anybody else you're going to die or just like anybody else you're going to have a reflection on the life that you have led that's universal and that the life you have led you will have led is of course shaped by the particular circumstances of the particular affiliations that have that you have encountered throughout your life but I think that this is I mean the setting of Senabu's play itself is great in that manner is great in that manner just wanted to comment on the video introduction that really set the stage for the play and understanding your point of view so I'm glad you found it thank you so very much because it's something I discussed with Carl Isle about for the video and he thought it would be a good idea to integrate it it's something I made from years ago and I was cleaning out my old laptop and I found it and I thought to share it with Carl Isle since he was working on this play oh look what I found this has started from a long time ago and then he thought no we should we should include it and I have this idea that we should end up a bit it was just a school project and it was a long time ago and he said no we wanted it that way so that was how the video came came about to becoming part of the play it wasn't an initial idea to have it in there she didn't say I screened my play it doesn't say that in the beginning of the script well you know I thought it was just a really innocent thing it would be interesting for the audience to see the sentiment of the writer and who the writer is particularly in this festival and then sort of see the play it seemed to like segue together pretty good so I thought it was really complimentary information and then of course it was it's kind of very meditative and gentle and stuff like that and the play opens Richard going into the raising seas and then we blast along with the play that moves quite crisply you know there's the way the energy and the movement of the play it's really quite nice and now it goes around it's not a very long play but the way it trajectory's at the end of the life and I don't know says what it wants to say but you know highlighting who you are you know losing to do new work and sort of highlighting who the author is in the context of the play and how she felt this that was good right you guys like that right actually it just made me think in terms of not only gives insight into the author but then it almost it gives a life span and so starting with what that young person which these gentlemen at one time were a young person and had passions or things they loved and so you get a whole life span also not the gentleman give their own lifespan but it also I think adds to that I was thinking about this question I was thinking about the proposal and wanting to kind of come back and root it into the specific right of the diasporic of the Afro-Atlantic and thinking about how I see that considering how Karla you mentioned that it may not be what we may consider a black play in a conventional sense and by that I took to understand as perhaps featuring black actors or a black cast and that was what I took from the comment you said earlier but to me for instance one scene that stood out to me a lot was the reading of the blood and seeing the geographies within the blood and there's something there very special because as Yusef and Munso are gazing at this dripping of blood and in it seeing these geographies Bajran is confused what is it that they're seeing as if they must be mad and to me there's something I guess perhaps epistemological here with regards to how there's a certain knowledge there that may not be evident or legible to someone who's not quite tuned into that who may not be looking for that and to me I guess the Afro-Atlantic epistemology if we're going to put it that way with those kinds of special moments and another poetic layer that I appreciated was this aspect of Yusef gazing into the stars and having that internal fear of the Panopticon of being surveilled yet himself being someone who gazes cast not at fellow humans but into a search to the light to Noor and that is something also that I was thinking about as Yusef's life comes to an end and to me to me it's clear that the play is suggesting that that search for Noor is complete now Yusef has returned home the ancestors may be welcoming him home those sorts of elements to me are Afro-Atlantic diasporic elements that I saw to appreciate that you need to see in a way that isn't going to be a in your face a black play that with an all black cast if that makes sense I guess it will also serve in the manner of the storytelling just the way you just said you associate Yusef your convincing with the relationship between his Panopticon and his astrophysicist just things in the play invite you to imagine strapping on what they mean and then we turned out we found out that fits if you want I mean it's kind of open in that way we would do things like what we would say but then when you played the scene if you played what the characters were doing it all became clear and then you could do it no matter what it meant except what it meant to you it was a way for you to engage in the play in terms of how you saw it but it still had this movement about these characters it starts with the baptism we want to get baptism and that's the plot that's where the trouble begins they get baptized they get sick one of them dies but there's a real yosh journey that follows that you can enter into just the thoughts and I think for me it comes from this African writer who just has that kind of imagination just like you said about the guy who dreams a quicksand how do you aspire to somebody and so your play is kind of like how do you respond to somebody who sees the world in this way that is just as much about seeing a piece of art because it comes from a person that's why AI doesn't work we make art we as people make art for other people and it's individualistic and this play is like that it's unique it's universal but it itself is a thing of itself and that thing has diasporic influences which I think if we had a school studying that for manuscripts we could probably say that they are similar elements that we could pick out and describe I'm an artist, not a scholar but I read things I think did you want me to respond to that hey you know it's an open room you could say anybody could say whatever you want because I think we're out of time I see someone signaling okay well thank you because I do feel like much of the play would be part of who I am like you say as much as I don't like to feel that vulnerable and put myself out there which is why I didn't want the video out but now it's out and yeah there are several ways of being diasporic in the world and all three characters are diasporic characters I don't know if that came through as well so that was one thing they all had in common as well and as a diasporic entity myself I share in some of those some of those worries as well and some of those complications some of those schizophrenic moments of questions that do not have answers to them and it's just the way we roll well you know it's one of the things maybe why there are critics and other people that look at people's work I mean some of it's subconscious you don't know it in there but like walking backwards to Tuba that's sort of the idea it evokes things that you just don't find another it creates another tapestry without having some monologue about what's going on Tuba the relationship the spirituality what home means the way Bajaran describes home with these simple things like his great father's beard on his cheek and stuff like that you know you know that makes as much of a world as a plot and the world is fresh and different and interesting and I would say that the conditions why I if it is diasporic thing is that the conditions in which we explore and share and these questions that we're asking of when we apply that to narratives I think they're very different they're very new they're very expansive because one of the things is at least what I see in Camargo when we get together we're like people just like what Bajaran says I like to talk to people who's thinking what I'm thinking you know what I mean the way in which we sort of share each other and that we're curious about each other and we have to accept each other's differences complexities in order to have this conversation and we're very willing to do it so the basic thing that sort of happens is the whole duality thing we don't even notice it anymore right you know like my way of the highway this is that right or wrong that's just become something that's not of use to us and that's kind of I think that evokes the kind of narratives that the world views and I think we are those people are the ones to give it to write it like this so I'm sorry thank you so much for thank you for being here thank you thank you thank you we love you I love you too thank you and enjoy the rest of the conversation and congrats on the festival Caroline and the whole team thank you