Performing Black British memory: Kat François’s spoken-word show Raising Lazarus as embodied auto/biography

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Black British poets have been at the forefront of developing the “one-person poetry show” or spoken-word play, an apt format for negotiating diasporic history and cultural memory in a public arena. The focus of this article is Kat François’s one-woman show Raising Lazarus (2009/2016), which stages the poet’s own quest for information about her Grenadian relative Lazarus François, a World War I soldier. A media-specific analysis explores how François’s text is semantically enriched when translated into a live performance. The authenticity effect typically produced in spoken-word poetry through the unity of author and performer is compounded in Raising Lazarus by textual and paratextual keys that frame François’s show as embodied auto/biography. Merging life writing, monodrama, and spoken-word poetry, Raising Lazarus reveals the one-person show to be an effective and popular medium for Black British poets to articulate personal experience and negotiate collective identities through performance.

Africana Cultural Memory in the Afroeuropean Context

“…Only a handful of studies address the matter of cultural memory in the Black British experience, and they are literary studies rather than history and culture studies (Rupp, 2010; Kamali, 2016; Novak, 2020). To further mine the nature of cultural memory, it is possible to rely on the conceptual framework of Black cultural mythology layered with the methodology of retroactively coding a comprehensive cultural anthology on the Black British worldview to reveal its unique cultural variables of memory, myth, mythology, heroics, and commemoration, which may differ from the assumptions of an African American application.…”