Simba: "I had been influenced by Louise Bennett, Mutabaruka, and Ntozake Shange..."
Michael Reckord, Contributor
JAMAICA WAS an eye-opening experience for 13-year-old Adziko Simba. "A black person on TV! A black person running a bank! Wow!" These were her expressions, in a recent interview, because growing up in London, England, where she was born, she knew only one middle class black person her mother, a Jamaican.
Now living in Jamaica, Simba is a writer, storyteller, poet, a conflict resolution trainer for the Peace and Love in Schools (PALS) programme and though she admits this reluctantly a trained accountant. She claims she hates accountancy, but may find it useful since she is also an incipient businesswoman, being the co-founder and co-operator of the four-acre Sun-Arc-Ankh Rejuvenation and Culture Farm, St. Mary, due to open to the public in September.
Simba's love for words blossomed early, thanks to the nurturing she got from her mother and her aunt, the women who raised her. The former, a schoolteacher, encouraged reading; the latter loved music and song and on Sundays would play records for Simba.
"There were days," says Simba, an only child, "when I wouldn't come out of my room. I just read."
PASSION FOR READING
Not surprisingly, the love for reading bloomed into a love for writing and, as a nine-year-old, Simba began to win prizes for her compositions. Later, at high school where Simba was in the top stream with white girls while, in the main, black children from the Caribbean were relegated to the lower streams, Simba joined a writing club. There she had her first experience of writing poetry.
In her later teenage years, because of the race situation in London and with the growth of her African-Caribbean perspective on life, her poems took on the colour of social protest. She started moving away from her white friends and developing friendships with African and Caribbean people.
In the early 1980s, because of the growing racial tensions, the Government started pouring money into the development of the arts and sport and Simba and her theatre-minded friends applied for a grant from the Greater London Council to do performance poetry. "I had been influenced by Louise Bennett, Mutabaruka and Ntozake Shange," Simba explains.
The funding came through and Simba started choreo-poetry performances with the Munirah Theatre Company. She worked with the company for nearly 10 years, and describes the decade as "a fantastic time", a period of "great expansion" in her life.
PERSONAL LIFE, PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENTS
She did courses in alternative medicine, storytelling and mime; she started writing skits; she became a mother. Socially, spiritually and emotionally she grew tremendously, Simba said.
Then, suddenly, the Government's policy towards the arts and aiding Black community development changed and funding dropped "some 80 per cent", she says. Her social work was curtailed, but she had developed confidence and skill as a writer and wrote numerous sketches for a BBC comedy, The Real McKoy. She also got funding to begin a sitcom, but instead decided to leave Britain.
She did not want her son, Jelani, to go the way of so many Black youngsters in Britain, she said. Fortunately, with her Caribbean links her aunt was back in Jamaica and she had contacts in Montserrat she had an alternative to offer him.
Simba went to Montserrat and worked for five years as a storyteller and creative arts workshop co-ordinator. During what Simba calls "a gentle introduction to life in the Caribbean", she founded a theatre group, Plenty Plenty Yac Ya Ya, which represented the island at CARIFESTA in Trinidad and Tobago.
The volcanic eruptions caused Simba and her son to migrate to Jamaica in 1998. Here she met storyteller Amina Blackwood-Meeks, who introduced Simba to local storytelling and theatre. Simba, who has won several prizes for her writing, is one of the featured poets at this weekend's Calabash Literary Festival.
