Travelling with Imoinda: Art, Authorship, and Critique

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.” 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.