Afropean // Human Being

Afropean // Human Being is about the Afropean experience. The idea “Afropean” comes from music and fashion. First coined in the nineties by Marie Daulne (Zap Mama) and David Byrne (Talking Heads), it is a response to “African American”, “Black British” and the need for hyphens. It tells us being black in Europe doesn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.

In her work, Sukina Douglas seeks to reframe the big debates of our time, about decolonisation and identity, and moves them away from academic discussion and facebook activism into the theatre. The tool she uses is poetry. With her words she tries to build bridges between people who usually hardly have contact with each other. 

Sukina Douglas: "Right now, there are a lot of conversations happening about race, identity, colonisation, decolonisation, feminism, intersectionality… All of these ideas need to be spoken about. But oftentimes they are spoken about in groups of people who share the same ideology. And when people converse with people who are different from them, oftentimes it happens in an aggressive way. We live in a time of projections: if we see that they come from a certain background, we just assume that they have this particular identity or ideology. And what that does is that it creates fixed identities for people, boxes in which we no longer give anyone the space and the opportunity to change, to become better, to learn and to grow."

'If we as people of colour have a history and a legacy that we don't know because we are not taught it in school, white people are also not taught their true history either.'