for TheBody
An intersectional retrospective on how the fall of Roe v. Wade is only the latest entry in a catalogue of failures to protect Black folks’ bodily autonomy.
“While I was living in my own alternate universe, many of the people around me were putting on performative displays that devolved from righteous fury to betrayals of their own Main Character Syndrome.”
Seeing Double: Double Consciousness as a Black Theatre Practitioner
for Howlround Theatre Commons
“Ekemini Ekpo applies W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’ to the experience of performing Blackness for a predominantly white audience that may or may not be interested in disturbing the primacy of their own lived experience.”
“On one hand, there was a morbid prescience of rolling black-and-white VHS tape of a Black person’s violent death some twenty years before cell phones began to fulfill that purpose. And yet…what does forcing an audience to add to their mental catalog of violence achieve?”
Empire State of Disillusionment
for Black Girl Times
A personal reflection on moving up North after a lifetime in the South.
“In that moment, I was not a person; I was a part of the architecture of the bodega, no different than the fluorescent lights or stocked shelves.”
Improving Black Women’s Sexual Health Means Rejecting Respectability Politics
for TheBody
The impulse to side-step sexuality entirely in order to avoid sexual violence makes sense. The trouble is that it does not work.
“Both ‘ashawo’ and ‘fast’ are used to cast Black women’s sexual behaviors in a denigrating light, as if Black women are uniquely sexually voracious. There is no way to qualify how harmful being stereotyped as constantly sexually available has been for Black women all over the world.”
The Exhausting, Endless Black Trauma-Art Feedback Loop
for Mental Hellth
Learning to opt out of creating art that perpetuates depoliticized Black trauma narratives.
“Like anyone else, we experience pain and trauma moving through the world. And as artists, we are expected to recall, reproduce, and repackage that pain in the form of some sort of artistic expression, both for financial solvency and recognition of craft. But because we are Black, these traumas are often racialized. And because we are Black and subject to the bevy of stereotypes, ranging from invulnerable to inhuman, these traumas are rarely recognized.”
Lifting up each other, Lifting up ourselves
for The Public Theater
A conversation with Ekemini Ekpo and Public Theater staff for Women’s History Month.
“Most of the time, this love was wordless; it was clear in the smiles that weaved their way through the interviews. When words did arise, they were those such as ‘joy,’ ‘passion,’ and soul-fulfilling. When describing the primacy of theater in her life, Kendall Allen noted that ‘it does often feel like, theater is like my other air…there’s this metaphor where it’s like, ‘if you’ve been living your life inside of a pool, you won’t notice that you’ve been swimming your entire life.’ And so, I feel like theater for me has been like swimming.’”