Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor, playwright, director; wrote National Theatre award-winners, starred in Casualty, artistic director of Senegal's festival, now leads a Baltimore theatre.
On the island
Eight records
In 1971, 72 my auntie came in from Trinidad and my parents are from the West Indian Island of Grenada and the big hit of that time was Lord Kitchener's switch into what was called Soca from Calypso to Soca and it was sugar boom boom. And it reminds me of the joy of my youth.
It's just one of those songs that I'll be seventy five and I'll be playing, because it inspired me. I I I adore this song.
Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)
Stevie Wonder taught me. That music. is a gift from God.
My elder sister, Mary, came to live with us, and she had a bedroom upstairs, my bedroom was downstairs, and she would play reggae music upstairs, and of course she's my older sister, so I couldn't bear her. And she would play Bob Marley, and I hated Bob Marley just'cause she liked Bob Marley. I got to about nineteen and I discovered him.
We went to this concert and my from my five year old to my eighteen year old and my twins in between and my wife and we and my cousin and we stood there. Just listening to this spiritual music at a festival that I was running. Yeah. It will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Fight the PowerFavourite
It's part of the thing that that inspired me to use art as a catalyst for debate, to use art as a as a catalyst to enlighten. Public Enemy came into my life, the rap band Public Enemy. Public Enemy said Fight the power. And I decided to do that.
The essence of it is that even though you know you are down. You can get back up.
I look back at my selection and I thought there's not enough dancing here. And I love dancing and I love life. And the dominant band of my youth was Earth, Wind and Fire. And so yeah, I've gone to Earth, Wind and Fire's Running as my final track, because on the island I want to feel high, I'll want to dance, and this is a brilliant track to do it to.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:26Can you briefly explain why you changed your name [from Iain Roberts to Kwame Kwei-Armah]?
I was about twelve and I was watching Roots, and it was a scene where Kunter Kente was being whipped about his name. What's your name? Kunter. No, Toby. And it reduced me as a 12-year-old or even an 11-year-old to absolute tears. And I looked at my mother and I said, one day I'm going to change our name. When I got about nineteen and I started getting political, I realized it was something I really did want to do. And um I was a very angry young man, angry at the Britain I was born into, angry at the way white society was treating me and my community, and angry that so little of my history had been taught to me and my peers.
Presenter asks
4:02What was your mother's response [to you changing your name]?
She was pained by it. Um you know, there's a kind of innate rejection when the very fundamental thing that you have given your child, they they reject. Um And that was of great pain to me. Um I think thank God I said it when I was twelve. Because she remembered? and she could locate the emotion that was going through me. and she had great fear for me.
Presenter asks
5:50What was at the root of the anger as a young man?
It would be remiss of me not to say that we have travelled. many miles in this country, but the London and the Britain that I grew up in was a very cold, cold place. And I think it was the naked racism that I received as a young man. My parents' generation kind of very much believed in the British status quo. So if you're being arrested by the police, you must have done something wrong. My parents didn't quite believe when I was 11 and tend that police officers would be kicking me in my back in the street as I walked down the street and saying, you know, come on, just give me a reason to arrest you. N-word. That happened to me. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then I'd go to school, and my teachers would speak to me and say things like, the reason why you can't speak properly is because the black mouth is not constructed to speak English in the or the tongue is too heavy. And I'd be getting this kind of stuff on a daily basis. It just made me. Angry.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Works of August Wilson
August Wilson
He was the playwright that showed me that I could still be black. Unsuccessful. Just by reading his plays, his ten-play cycle, describing the life of African Americans through the twentieth century. And I would want that.
The luxury
I'd need to write. I'd need to be able to put my feelings down. So the word processing part of my laptop I'd I would have to have.
Presenter asks
8:27Are you comfortable with being a role model?
Actually, my mother raised me to have a sense of responsibility for myself and my family and for my community. And that was part of the DNA of our family. And so, insomuch that I am described as a role model, I it it doesn't bother me. I speak in prisons, I speak in schools, I go in and I was doing that before I was known. There is no burden of responsibility for me.
Presenter asks
11:03Tell me about your mother then. What was she like?
My mother still is to this day my ultimate role model. She was a magnificent woman. She was a very hard working woman, a very religious woman. And she believed totally and utterly in education. So to that end, she sent all of her children... to fee-paying schools because she felt that her pound was her only form of accountability. In order to do that, she was a nanny in the day, she was an auxiliary nurse in the night. So on a Friday, she would work 24 hours. On a Sunday into Monday, she'd work 24 hours. She seldom bought anything for herself, like dresses and stuff, because all of her money was saving to put her children through private education.
“If I have been given a gift. It is not necessarily to sit only within the bandwidth of entertainment, but to use it as a tool for something, to particularly in my work at the theatre, to bring in new audiences. That's both in terms of race and class.”
“I became a a writer. Because I I was complaining too much as an actor. I hate complaining. I hate kind of sitting there having to moan, Oh, these scripts are bad, aren't they? Oh god, there's not enough parts for black actors Oh, they're not telling us our stories and and and I'm a bit like if it's not there then do it. Do it yourself. I feel that it's my job to to take the ball by the horn.”
“My mother is The center of my world. And um when she died in 2005. your world collapses and um And mine did. Actually. I mean I don't want to make light of it. But it was a big year. I got married. My son. Was born and my mother died. I think I was probably as close to having a nervous breakdown as as I've probably got to in my life.”