Presented as part of HOME's Orbit Festival, this was Selina Thompson's cri-de-coeur for recognition, acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, but above all remembrance. At the age of 25, she left her home in Birmingham to travel on a journey to her ancestral homes in an attempt to exorcise her past and lay her troubles to rest. Thompson told us that although she has lived in Birmingham all her life, she is adopted and her adopted parents are from Jamaica and Montserrat, whilst her real parents were enslaved people from Ghana.
With the intention of making a documentary film about her dual 'homecoming' she took along a female filmographer on what seemed like a very long-winded and over-complicated journey. She told us of travelling first through Europe before boarding a cargo vessel under the Italian flag sailing all around the western coastline of Africa before docking in Ghana. Her journey then was a flight across the Atlantic and fro Jamaica she came back to the UK via South Carolina USA, and another boat journey across the pond. However, we learnt that her first sail to Ghana was anything but a happy and pleasant one, and by the time they landed on Ghanaian soil she was forced to allow the camerawoman to come back home.
For Thompson though the journey was one of self-discovery, of necessity, of coming to terms with her triangular heritage (where one length of the triangle is African, one is Jamaican and the third is English). Using a large block of rock salt crystal as a visual metaphor she used a sledgehammer to break this up into smaller pieces during the performance. The story she told was heart-felt and passionate, and the visual imagery striking. She has always felt caught in a void between her UK upbringing and her black heritage; and this performance was I am certain, therapy for her.
We must never forget who we are and where we came from [Europe is awash with black blood - the glories of Europe have all been built upon the suffering, death and war of black nations] but we must also move forward and rejoice in the privileges that we are afforded too. Her message is that things have changed, are changing, and yet, even now as she travels, she experiences hatred, prejudice and racism and so there is still a long way yet to travel.
Sadly a couple of things let this performance down slightly. First of all some of her speaking was too quiet and didn't carry to the back row of the small auditorium. Secondly her face remained unlit for much of the play, and I am certain that was not intentional.
A passionate and eloquent tale of a journey of not just self-discovery and self-identity, but a slow, deliberate and considered lecture on the attitudes of our time.
'Where are you from?' - 'No, where are you REALLY from?' is what she gets in the UK. In Jamaica it was 'Where are you from? Do you have family here?' But, Thompson asserts, really no-one need really ever ask, 'Where are you from?' when the subtext is, 'You're a foreigner aren't you!'
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 25/10/18
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