Six Plays By Black and Asian Women Writers

About the editorKadija George is a literary activist, editor and publisher. Of Sierra Leonean descent, she read West African studies at Birmingham University, then became a freelance journalist, specialising in black arts, black British Literature and women's issues. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the Centreprise Literature Development Project as the Black Literature Development Coordinator and set up the newspaper, Calabash. She left there in 1998. In 2001, she became founder and managing editor of Sable magazine. Kadija has edited anthologies of black writing, including Burning Words, Flaming Images (1996) - poems and stories from writers of African descent; IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), co-edited with Courttia Newland; and Write Black, Write British (2005). She is also the series editor for Inscribe, an imprint of Peepal Tree Press. Her first full collection of poems, Irki, was published in 2013. She has worked on projects with adults and young people, including one for the Commission for Racial Equality, and has been Writer in Residence for Vision Quest in Atlanta, US. She organises The Sable Writers' Hot Spot - trips for writers abroad and established Sable LitFest in 2005. She teaches creative writing and journalism. Her own writing appears in various anthologies and has been broadcast on radio and performed at a number of venues. She is a George Bell Fellow, Kennedy Center for Arts Management Fellow, and General Secretary of African Writers Abroad. She has won various awards for her work, including Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement (1994), and Woman of the Millennium (2000). Kadija George lives between the UK and the USA.Performance Rights Information A HERO'S WELCOME: The Agency Ltd MY SISTER-WIFE: Rochelle Stevens and Co RUNNING DREAM: Curtis Brown Ltd. MONSOON/SONG FOR A SANCTUARY/LEONORA'S DANCE: Write to the Author (c) c/o Aurora Metro Books

"The essence of theatre, according to Stuart Griffiths, lies not in the word so much as its ability to affect us, touch us so that we feel pleasure or pain, force us to identify with it by reflecting something which has significance to our life... Black theatre in Britain is surviving. Though few plays have made it to West End stages, productions on the fringe have had continuing success. These plays attract a predominantly Black audience and contain all the elements of the greatest drama: symbolism, language, conflict, rhythm. This is popular theatre at its best using every means necessary to awaken residues of oral traditions buried in the depths of the race memory." Valerie Small, The Importance Of Oral Tradition To Black Theatre (1993)"The new writing initiatives of the late 20th century grew out of a need to haul white elitist (male-dominated) theatre into a multi-cultural world wherein the plays staged were more accurately reflective of surrounding society, demographically and culturally... After the funding decimation of many Black and Asian theatre groups in the late 1980s, the cultivation of writers from marginalised social groups comprised an aspect of dismantling institutional racism... As May Joseph has pointed out, it was not until the late 20th century that 'the absence of Black women as subjects with agency' was challenged and countered by the work of black women playwrights. The importance of including and perpetuating indigenous Black British drama in the mainstream theatrescape can be neither underestimated nor over-emphasised. It provides a key cultural site wherein ethnicities and experiences who may not otherwise meet are directly exposed to each other's cultural practices... Black drama exposes mainstream (predominantly white) theatre-goers to aspects of Black British cultural input that is as indigenous to contemporary British cultural identity as that provided by white playwrights. It provides Black audiences with authentically rendered cultural representations which have not as yet been able to develop a flourishing continuum in Britain's cultural psyche." Deirdre Osborne, A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights (2005)

• Introduction 5 Kadija George The Importance Of Oral Tradition To Black Theatre 10 Valerie Small A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights 15 Deirdre Osborne The PlaysA Hero's Welcome 23Winsome Pinnock Monsoon 70Maya Chowdhry Leonora's Dance 95Zindika My Sister-Wife 143Meera Syal Song For A Sanctuary 204Rukhsana Ahmad Running Dream 242Trish Cooke