How Black Mothers Say I Love You

From the author of the blockbuster hit ‘da Kink in my hair comes an emotional and raw look into family dynamics, trust, resolution and change.

Claudette still can’t forgive her mother for leaving. For six years of her childhood, Claudette and her sister Valerie were left with their grandmother while their mother, Daphne, moved from Jamaica to the United States to start a new chapter for their family. But in that time, Daphne remarried and had another daughter.

Claudette, now in her late thirties, travels to visit her dying mother in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t stop her anger and abandonment issues from bubbling up. It doesn’t stop Daphne from voicing her opinions on how Claudette lives her life, either. With Daphne, Claudette, and Valerie all under one roof again, each family member is forced to confront their emotions while there’s still time.

Though rooted in buried strife and sadness, How Black Mothers Say I Love You is full of humour, love and tenderness as it explores the complicated perceptions of immigrant mothers.

AUTHOR

Trey Anthony

Djanet Sears is an award-winning playwright and director and has several acting award nominations to her credit for both stage and screen. She is the recipient of the Stratford Festival’s 2004 Timothy Findley Award, as well as Canada’s highest literary honour for dramatic writing: the 1998 Governor General’s Literary Award. She is the playwright and director of the multiple Dora Award winning production of Harlem Duet (Scirocco Drama, 1997), which was workshopped at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in NYC, where Djanet was the international artist-in-residence in 1996. Her other honours include the 1998 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Harry Jerome Award for Excellence in the Cultural Industries, and a Phenomenal Woman of the Arts Award. Her most recent work for the stage, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (Playwrights Canada Press, 2003), was shortlisted for a 2004 Trillium Book Award and enjoyed a six-month run in the fall/winter of 2003/2004, as part of the Mirvish Productions season. Her other plays include Afrika Solo, Who Killed Katie Ross, and Double Trouble. Djanet is the driving force behind the AfriCanadian Playwrights’ Festival, and a founding member of the Obsidian Theatre Company. She is also the editor of Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, Vols. I & II, the first anthologies of plays by playwrights of African descent in C

Reviews

“Anthony plumbs this generational trauma to create a story of poignant truth about racism, colonialism, and their effect on the family… Trey Anthony is a national treasure.”

“She’s especially adept at switching from the serious to the comic in a few lines, and the audience reacts audibly to certain revelations as well as to the play’s moments of intensity and humour.”