Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald

Proud of the deep research that resulted in this performance work.

🔥As I created “I want revenge, grandma” it was really important for me to share certain historical facts about the colonial relationship between Germany and Liberia, which served as an example of the broader colonial relationship between Europe and Africa. I used two anchors to tell this story: B**g Mines, a German mining project operating in Liberia from 1960-1990; and brass ankle bracelets I saw in the when I first arrived to Berlin (one of many objects from Liberia held in German museums and their storage rooms).

🔥At the same I wanted to, as .kilomba said in a recent talk, create “an emotional space” to process the intense, violent, and troubling histories that colonialism contains. I made the decision to center revenge and rage in this work, to make sure it was not appeasing to white fantasies of easy reconciliation and solutions—Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor” taught me this. I wanted to provoke their worst fear (that the savage violence they did onto colonized people could be done onto them), and simultaneously create a catharsis for my Black and POC audiences who could watch me rage, call out, tell it like it is, read whiteness fiercely. I denounced the stolen lives and futures, inspired by the denuncias of and .

🔥And the thing that held the whole work together was my root. It was Kpelle culture and specifically Kpelle dance. That piece of culture that has survived against the genocidal mission of colonialism. That I was able to connect with even after the migrations that colonialism has provoked (because of violent and/or economic misery). The dance is a technology for survival. It survived and gives me tools to survive the hellscape that whiteness has built for us. It gives me pathways to escape, to trick, to make fun of, to provoke. It makes me feel like the most powerful woman in the room. It holds knowledge that the white man/woman/person will never understand and that is important.

🧚🏽‍♂️ Feeling so grateful for the journey that this work took me on. And proud of what I arrived at.