Mixed Race Studies

Passion – Blackwomen’s Creativity: an interview with Maud Sulter

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue 220 (February 1991)
pages 6-8

Ardentia Verba

An Interview with Maud Suiter

In 1977 Maud Suiter stepped on a train from Glasgow to London and began her current journey into the interior of Blackwomen’s Creativity. She didn’t know at the time that some day she would call herself ‘artist’ or ‘writer’ – not many teenage coloured girls from the Gorbals in Glasgow had trailblazed a path in that direct­ion, so it was a real exploration into the unknown for her when at sixteen she set out to go to college to study fashion. Since then she has gone on to create exhibitions, including Zabat – a stunning series of Blackwomen’s portraits which will be exhibited at Camerawork Gallery in London from March 15-April 19, and has now edited Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, recently published by Urban Fox Press

‘Passion’ features many visual artists including Lubaina Himid, Robyn Kahukiwa, Sutapa Biswas and Janet Caron. However Maud Suiter’s vision of Blackwomen’s Creativity includes activities as diverse as Hairbraiding, Poetry and Performance. The many women included in the book were chosen because of their involvement with the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project, an organisation which Maud Suiter founded in 1982. In creating ‘Passion’, she has not only document­ ed the activities of BWCP but also provided ‘an excellent introduction to the range and intensity of Blackwomen’s Creativity in Britain’

Artists Newsletter

Why did you decide to create ‘Passion’?

In 1982 I was the first Blackwoman to join the Sheba Feminist Publisher’s collective. At that time a variety of the women’s presses were mooting ideas for conventional anthologies of Black writing in the UK. I felt that it was too easy for what were essentially white women’s publishers culling some short stories and poems from Blackwomen and then hailing the fact that they had published x-dozen Blackwomen writers. This especially at a time when they were earning significant incomes from Blackwomen writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

As Alice Walker has pointed out, Blackwomen must read history for clues not facts, and it seemed essential to leave clues as to a more holistic range of our artistic pursuits. Obviously no academic course in Britain is geared towards working class Blackwomen’s experience across the board, but so many of us have a vast appetite for knowledge—for a herstory. We must create our own, which is what I set out to achieve with Passion.

There comes a time in many of our lives when we say ‘Girl, get yourself a piece of paper’. Around 1985 I was getting so many requests from students, mainly from Blackwomen, to give interviews to inform their dissertations. Hours and hours of Blackwomen’s work goes—unpaid and unacknow­ledged—into quite literally saving Blackwomen from failing their degrees. So few informed Blackwomen artists are employed in institut­ions, that we are co-erced into helping out, at the very last minute, to save Blackwomen artists, no, let me correct that, Black students across the board, that it was obvious that the wheel could not be eternally re-invented.

Passion offers schools, colleges and commun­ity venues the opportunity to invest in a vast wealth of information about our work during the 80’s and then draw from that information in a more creative and challenging way. All of us face racism and sexism in our explorations, and the wonderful articles and portfolios in Passion signpost a continuum of experiences, our litany of survival, which has created the situation where we can, like the Blackwomen’s Creat­ivity Project, network internationally from a position of equality not imperialism.

And so to recap, my ambition was to look at Blackwomen’s Creativity across a spectrum of activities including fine art, childbearing, opera, theatre etc. It is not possible to create a hierarchy of our artistic fields as we are living as Blackwomen in the aftermath of slavery and imperialism. Therefore we need to recognise our creative practices as survival and press for their development from that position. It is no use to sit back on our laurels and think OK, so we were there. We need to be here now, and we need to ensure that we continue to create in the future…

Read the entire interview here.