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Mum went to their dances and Soho clubs, they liked her lighter skin and looser hair

she says she felt ugly until African men told her she wasn’t

you should see what she looked like back then

a cross between Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge

so yeh, really ugly

Mum hoped to spend their first date going to see a film and then on to her favourite spot, Club Afrique, right here in Soho, she’d dropped enough hints and loved to dance to highlife and West African jazz

instead he took her to one of his socialist meetings in the backroom of a pub at the Elephant and Castle

where a group of men sat guzzling beers and talking independence politics

she sat there trying to act interested, impressed by his intellect

he was impressed with her silent acquiescence, if you ask me

they married and moved to Peckham

I was their last child and first girl, Amma explained, blowing smoke into the already thickening fug of the room

my three older brothers became lawyers and a doctor, their obedience to the expectations of our father meant I wasn’t pressurized to follow suit

his only concern for me is marriage and children

he thinks my acting career is a hobby until I have both

Dad’s a socialist who wants a revolution to improve the lot of all of mankind

literally

I tell Mum she married a patriarch

look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s

and your point is?

you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it

I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women

she says human beings are complex

I tell her not to patronize me

Mum worked eight hours a day in paid employment, raised four children, maintained the home, made sure the patriarch’s dinner was on the table every night and his shirts were ironed every morning

meanwhile, he was off saving the world

his one domestic duty was to bring home the meat for Sunday lunch from the butcher’s – a suburban kind of hunter-gatherer thing

I can tell Mum’s unfulfilled now we’ve all left home because she spends her time either cleaning it or redecorating it

she’s never complained about her lot, or argued with him, a sure sign she’s oppressed

she told me she tried to hold his hand in the early days, but he shook her off, said affection was an English affectation, she never tried again

yet every year he gets her the soppiest Valentine card you can buy and he loves sentimental country music, sits in the kitchen on Sunday evenings listening to albums of Jim Reeves and Charley Pride

tumbler of whisky in one hand, wiping tears away with the other

Dad lives for campaigning meetings, demos, picketing Parliament and standing in Lewisham Market selling the Socialist Worker

I grew up listening to his sermons during our evening meal on the evils of capitalism and colonialism and the merits of socialism

it was his pulpit and we were his captive congregation

it was like we were literally being force-fed his politics

he’d probably be an important person in Ghana if he’d returned after Independence

instead he’s President for Life of our family

he doesn’t know I’m a dyke, are you kidding? Mum told me not to tell him, it was hard enough telling her, she said she suspected when pencil skirts and curly perms were all the rage and I started wearing men’s Levis

she’s sure it’s a phase, which I’ll throw back at her when I’m forty

Dad has no time for ‘the fairies’ and laughs at all the homophobic jokes comedians make on telly every Saturday night when they’re not insulting their mother-in-law or black people

Amma spoke about going to her first black women’s group in Brixton in her last year at school, she’d seen a flyer at her local library

the woman who opened the door, Elaine, sported a perfect halo of an afro and her smooth limbs were clad tightly in light blue denim jeans and tight denim shirt

Amma wanted her on sight, followed her into the main room where women sat on sofas, chairs, cushions, cross-legged on the floor, drinking cups of coffee and cider

she nervously accepted cigarettes as they were passed around, sat on the floor leaning against a cat-mauled tweedy armchair, feeling Elaine’s warm leg against her arm

she listened as they debated what it meant to be a black woman

what it meant to be a feminist when white feminist organizations made them feel unwelcome

how it felt when people called them nigger, or racist thugs beat them up

what it was like when white men opened doors or gave up their seats on public transport for white women (which was sexist), but not for them (which was racist)

Amma could relate to their experiences, began to join in with the refrains of, we hear you, sister, we’ve all been there, sister

it felt like she was coming in from the cold

at the end of her first evening, the other women said their goodbyes and Amma offered to stay behind to wash up the cups and ashtrays with Elaine

they made out on one of the bumpy sofas in the glow of the streetlight to the accompaniment of police sirens haring by

it was the closest she’d come to making love to herself

it was another coming home

the next week when she went to the meeting

Elaine was canoodling with another woman

and blanked her completely

she never went again

Amma and Dominique stayed until they were turfed out, had worked their way through numerous glasses of red wine

they decided they needed to start their own theatre company to have careers as actors, because neither was prepared to betray their politics to find jobs

or shut their mouths to keep them

it seemed the obvious way forward

they scribbled ideas for names on hard toilet paper snaffled from the loo

Bush Women Theatre Company best captured their intentions

they would be a voice in theatre where there was silence

black and Asian women’s stories would get out there

they would create theatre on their own terms

it became the company’s motto

On Our Own Terms

or Not At All.

2

Living rooms became rehearsal spaces, old bangers transported props, costumes came from second-hand shops, sets were extracted from junk yards, they called on mates to help out, everyone learning on the job, ad hoc, throwing their lot in together

they wrote grant applications on old typewriters with missing keys, budgets felt as alien to Amma as quantum physics, she balked at becoming trapped behind a desk

she upset Dominique when she arrived for admin sessions late and left early claiming headaches or PMT

they rowed when she walked into a stationery shop and ran straight out again claiming it had brought on a panic attack

she had a go at Dominique when she didn’t deliver the script she’d promised to write but was out late night clubbing instead, or forgot her lines mid-show

six months after its inception, they were constantly at loggerheads

they’d hit it off as friends, only to find they couldn’t work together

Amma called a make-or-break meeting at hers

they sat down with wine and a Chinese takeaway and Dominique admitted she got more pleasure setting up tours for the company than putting herself in front of an audience, and preferred being herself to pretending to be other people

Amma admitted she loved writing, hated admin and was she really any good as an actor? she did anger brilliantly – which was the extent of her range

Dominique became the company manager, Amma the artistic director

they employed actresses, directors, designers, stage crews, set up national tours that lasted months

their plays, The Importance of Being Female, FGM: The Musical, Dis-arranged Marriage, Cunning Stunts, were performed in community centres, libraries, fringe theatres, at women’s festivals and conferences