The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)dentity in the Work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay.

Two of Britain’s foremost contemporary Black poets, SuAndi and Lemn Sissay also 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. I argue that Sissay and SuAndi literally and literarily perform themselves into being through trans-generic methodologies; cross-fertilising traditions of poetry in performance, dramatic monologue and confessional, to 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.