Imoinda Workshop Report
The workshop was held on the 7 November 2009 at Goldsmiths and although numbers were a little lower than expected, it was a productive and inspiring day for all students who attended. As the theme of this AHRC project is Beyond Text; we not only managed to go “beyond text” through the various academic presentations on art, drama, orality and myth, but went beyond England’s geographic borders and time zone through the virtual medium of video calling.
Flying across Grecian skies, Dr Mina Karavanta joined us from Athens, to give the plenary lecture. She explored the connections between classical and post-colonial texts as a way of better understanding Imoinda as a critical re-writing of Aphra Behn’s Oronooko. Central to her paper was a “praxis of critical revisionism”; a means of devising critical strategies to re-read the historical past in order to think about the present; while it is a fact that the past can never be corrected, nor can it reveal itself in the way it truly happened, intellectual excavation of the past is necessary for purposes of better understanding the past.
Journeying by ship from the Caribbean to Europe, like Imoinda does in the text from Africa to the Caribbean, Dr Joan Anim-Addo delivered an insightful personal piece on her migration from Grenada to England as a young girl. She spoke of what creative spark this gave her writing. “Every writer has to be a dreamer,” she said; one has to be curious and imaginative enough to create an alternate reality to their present.
In some ways, our workshop strategy could be described as ‘curious and imaginative,’ connecting in the spaces and places through the virtual. By this we mean our speakers from Italy and the US who joined us via Skype and live video conference facilities provided by Goldsmiths. Suffice to say, everyone, including some of our sceptical academics, were in awe of the unending wonders of technology that managed to connect us to Trento and New York without any hitches... At least not on our side of things as shall be revealed much later, below.
Joining us from Trento, Italy was Dr Giovanna Covi. As one of the Italian translators of Imoinda, she saw the symbolic importance of having a Creole libretto published in Italy as an attempt to break the Eurocentric stronghold as the producer of knowledge. Dr Covi also discussed the ‘impossibility of translation’; how some raced words and their meanings are untranslatable from English to Italian. For example, when the political phrase “Black is Beautiful” is literally translated to Italian, it means something else entirely; la nero bello might refer to a dress or the colour black as beautiful but not in reference to Black people. However, through art and drama, Dr Covi argued, the act of representing the unrepresented and discursively censored voice of Anim-Addo’s Imoinda, becomes possible.
Travelling against the impossible....London morning traffic; Dr Raimi Gbadamosi managed to arrive on time for the workshop and his paper invited us to imagine Imoinda as we saw her in our own reader’s minds rather than what he, as a visual artist might construct. Having worked on Imoinda for many years, Dr Gbadamosi forged a special relationship with the characters and he,
“enjoy[s] the pleasure of having my mind devise what people within the text (ought to) look like, what spaces smell like, what it means to be the objectified, and what each person sounds like. I cannot see the faces of the people I have come to know, but I recognise them time after time again, in the faces I see around me based on the parameters I have set for them.”
He suggested that the process of imagining and interpreting as a reader is a creative process that gives personal familiarity and creative licence to the reader to construct Imoinda as they feel. Doing so evokes emotion, sentiment, thought, internal and social debate, wonder and introspection in a way that possibly engenders imaginative alterity in a world where images are often rigidly constructed for us, not by us.
True to the theme of journeys, which marked this day; after lunch all workshop attendants journeyed from a lecture room in the Richard Hoggart Building to the Prokofiev Room in the Rutherford Information Building where we were transported, via live video conference to New York City. Speaking to us from SUNY Geneseo were Professor Maria Helena Lima, Mssrs Glenn L. McClure and Alan Tirre. After a very warm welcome and introductions; McClure and Tirre spoke about the performance of Imoinda by the Rochester School of the Arts (SOTA). They spoke about the processes of musical composition and casting; according to Mr McClure, the composer, he wanted to tell a story musically and in so doing would add another storyline to an already multi-faceted tale. The music chosen was a blend of cultural sounds; musical instruments from West Africa, the Caribbean and Europe so as to connect all parts of the Trans Atlantic world. There were also symbolic sounds used; certain melodies to represent the character. In the 1st Act, West African instruments and music were used in order to place the narrative of slavery as beginning in Africa rather than on a ship on the Atlantic, as is often taught in the classroom.
Speaking on casting, Mr Tirre told us of their decision to cast colour blind because slavery is everyone’s history not just Black history. Further to this; some of the students could relate to Imoinda’s story on a personal level having fallen pregnant at a young age. The students worked tirelessly for almost a year rehearsing and the SOTA press team managed to secure them a top-fold of the page of a widely-read city paper. After having gotten the virtual audience excited about the performance, the New Yorkers attempted to show us a taped scene of Act 1. Unfortunately the DVD would only give picture but no sound and after several unsuccessful attempts by their IT person, we had to settle for the soundless images.
While this technical glitch could be interpreted as a momentary reflection on Dr Gbadamosi’s paper on imagination as the virtual and aural site of the tale, Professor Lima’s presentation was something of a conversation with Dr Covi; as she also spoke on the subject of opera, the establishment and language, albeit from an entirely different perspective. Professor Lima argued Imoinda must be read as a neo-slave narrative which challenges the ground of opera in Italy and invites the audience to re-think opera. It also asks of the audience and readers to re-consider the literary terms we use; to think of ‘neo-slave narrative’ (Bernard W. Bell (1987)) as opposed to ‘slave texts’ which were written during the slavery period whereas Imoinda is a contemporary re-invention of the past and a re-positioning of previously non-positioned, gendered figure. Professor Lima also challenged us to think of the term ‘enslaved Africans’ as opposed to ‘slaves’ who are not imagined as human and were subject to physical, emotional, and spiritual cruelty, sanctioned by religion, philosophy, and the law which governed the notion of being human.
After Professor Lima’s paper; New York IT informed us that they had not been able to resolve the technical issue so we would re-watch the silent clip and then listen to its audio. The scene was on the ship; the set was well-constructed and the costumes well-chosen. The starlit background set the ambience for a long journey to a far off land and when the music played afterward; the fusion of European and African music brilliantly underscored this. The singing and the music was wonderful to listen to and watch; despite the fragmented viewing, there was an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience some of whom asked about the possibility of seeing the full show. Mr McClure promised it was in the mail.
On that high note, we wrapped up our day of journeying through academic disciplines, exploring creative worlds beyond text and going beyond physical borders. We gave a vote of thanks and appreciation to our speakers from England, Greece, Italy and the US and special thanks to the Fabulous Fabio who filmed the day’s proceedings. We were also grateful to those who’d attended and hoped that the day had inspired them to find their own ways of ‘imagining’ Imoinda so they could write their abstracts which would develop into papers for phase two of our “Beyond Text” project.
WOW Project Team, November 2009