“The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)dentity in the work of SuAndiand Lemn Sissay” in Charlie Armstrong, Sean Crosson and Anne Karhio eds. Contemporary Poetry in Crisis

Two of Britain’s foremost contemporary black poets, SuAndi and Lemn Sissay perform autobiographical monodramas that intimately dramatise their odysseys to self-knowledge through retrieving and paying homage to their respective mothers’ struggles - in raising or rejecting them - in a hostile surrounding society. The term monodrama (both SuAndi and Sissay play characters), rather than solo performance or Dee Heddon’s autobiography in performance, acknowledges the complex fusion of forms and traditions. Their trans-generic methodologies cross-fertilise traditions of spoken-word poetry, dramatic monologue, and confessional techniques. As conduits for their written texts, SuAndi and Sissay literally and literarily perform themselves into being. Their physical bodies articulate the texts (visually and verbally) and the body politic which has inscribed their social identities in racialising and gendered ways, is de-scribed and re-written. Both poets produce an experiential aesthetics that testifies to the tenuous and often troubled routes to self-worth that confront indigenous black Britons both socially and culturally.