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Brit Born Bajan Business

Using her skills, power, and creativity, as a poet, live artist and facilitator, to empower and effect positive social change, personal growth and self-expression


Dorothea Smartt, is of Barbadian (aka Bajan) heritage. Dubbed 'Brit-born Bajan international' [Kamau Brathwaithe], her work receives critical attention in Britain, Europe, the Caribbean, and the USA. She is acknowledged as tackling multi-layered cultural myths and the real life experiences of Black women with searing honesty. She was Brixton Market’s first Poet-in-Residence, and a former Attached Live Artist at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her evocative and spirited voice "coils up your feelings, around granite chips of truth... unwinds solace, in the most soothing volleys" [Caribbean Times]. Described as "accessible & dynamic", her work was recently selected to promote the best of contemporary writing in Europe today [www.liffey.net].

Her poetry collection CONNECTING MEDIUM [Peepal Tree Press, 2001], contains a highly commended Forward Poetry Prize poem, and poems from her live art pieces Medusa, and From You To Me To You (an ICA Live Arts commission). With her 'unique and penetrating voice' she's considered, "...a master artist who sculpts both Standard English and Caribbean English into a wide variety of poetic forms...capable of boldly crossing cultural boundaries in order to borrow from the past as she shapes poems for twenty-first century readers." [Caribbean Writer]. She was nominated for a prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and commissioned to create work with and for the historic Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas.

Her “medusaplay project”, an on-going live art work-in-process, premiered at the British Festival of Visual Theatre. Other collaborative works include the live art piece "fo(u)r women"; the installation “Triangle” (a Black Arts Alliance commission) and the multi-media/live art “Hairroots”, inspired by her poetry collection. Her solo work, “Medusa”, was selected to showcase seminal and outstanding examples of Black British Live Art.

In 2000 she was commissioned to write her first script, “fall out”, a multi-media play, which successfully toured primary schools. Most recently she’s produced her first short films, for her installation/performance “Just A Part” commissioned by AFFORD (African Foundation for Development) and “Bringing It All Back Home”, inspired by Sambo’s Grave on Sunderland Point (a Lancaster LitFest commission).

She is SABLE LitMag’s poetry editor [www.sablelitmag.org], co-editor of “Words from the Women’s Café’ [Centerprise] and, as a former Audre Lorde Womens’ Poetry Center member, guest editor of the journal ‘Poder’. She is a ‘graduate’ of Kwame Dawes’/Spread The Word, Afro-Style School, and a member of the Black Arts Alliance.

As well as reading and performing around Britain, she often goes abroad, most recently: Canada, Bahrain, Denmark, Egypt, The Netherlands, Jamaica, The Shetland Islands, Slovenia, and the USA. She also enjoys mentoring, going into schools to inspire and motivate as a visiting or resident poet, speaking at conferences, and providing workshops for various communities. Currently she’s researching and processing new live art pieces and working towards a second poetry collection in print.



'A Critical Essay on Dorothea Smartt' by Jeremy Poynting 2001
Dorothea Smartt is a poet whose work has been recognised as one of a new generation
of a new generation of Black performance artists. Her work has been published in
many anthologies. She was born in London and grew up in Battersea. Her parents
came to London from Barbados in the 1950's.

Dorothea Smartt was appointed by Spread the Word to be the resident poet in Brixton
Market from August-October 1998. During the residency, she was "commissioned to
write poems about the market, its history and its place at the heart of Brixton." This
culminated in a poetry reading with Roger Robinson on National Poetry Day (1998) to "a
lively and receptive local audience, some attending their first poetry reading" in Brixton
Library (Poetry Places Archives).

Dorothea Smartts' first collection of poetry, Connecting Medium, was published by
Peepal Tree in 2001. It is another milestone passed for a poet who, despite having a
strong drive to critically assess and develop her writing, says she might never have
written at all if it hadn't been for the fact that she was missing her sister. (Phillips,
2001).

When Dorothea's sister left home at the age of 18, Dorothea began to use a diary as a
means of dealing with the loneliness. "It became a place for writing and exploring my
feelings - and at that time I think I wrote one of my first conscious poems. I didn't have
anyone to talk to - it was very upsetting when she left, we were very close. So I should
acknowledge her for my getting into poetry". Then, Dorothea's involvement with the
Black Woman's Movement in the 'eighties presented some early opportunities for
writing. "It was in my politics to articulate the Black woman's experience, my
experience. In the early 'eighties the feminist movement gave validity to doing that kind
of thing", she explains (Phillips, 2001). She worked for local groups and Black Women's
co-operatives in Brixton, helping out, organizing newsletters, writing book reviews and
theatre reviews. She didn't think of publishing poetry until some of the women she
worked with got her involved in performance, and her poetry was incorporated into a live
art piece performed at Brixton Art Gallery. Then Black Women Talk, a small publishing
collective, decided to put an anthology together and asked her to submit some work. A
couple of her poems were subsequently published in the anthology, which also included
work from Jackie Kay and Bernardine Evaristo. Similar invitations followed, with the
result that she was published fairly widely, quite early on. The performances continued
with invitations to read at benefits and women's events.

Many of the poems in "Connecting Medium" explore both her Barbadian heritage and
the experience of growing up in London, with confidence - "Your coming made me... // a
different kinda Essex girl, / the kinda Blackwoman / the world ain't seen yet" - and
confusion at Clapham Junction: "Stood... / looking at the largest / railway junction in the
world / with a train passing / every three minutes / Wondering where to go". Some of
the poems are written in what Dorothea calls her "London voice", others in the "Bajan
voice" [Barbadian voice] of her childhood.
"I learnt to speak English from my parents, who speak in a very particular way. So I use
language in a very particular way, and I always say to people, poetry saved my Bajan
voice", she says. "It used to be something I was embarrassed our of, but it's the voice
that I love, it stops me in my tracks even now. With the Medusa poems, I was really
struggling to put those poems together. I was trying to do it with my London voice until
at one point I tried them in a Bajan Voice and it just fell into place. In some ways
it's the voice of my childhood, my primary voice, I wanted to save it, I didn't want
to lose that way of expressing myself" (Phillips, 2001).

Her solo performance work, Medussa, a combination of poetry and visuals began to
take on a life of its own. Inspired by cleverly combining the mythological figure of
Medusa with a Black woman's experience (Dorothea was once called "medusa"
because of her hair-style). The work got her her first commission at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts (with Sherlee Mitchell) in London and is now the subject of
academic study in the U.S.

The ICA commission gave Dorothea space and time to look seriously and critically at
her writing. Luckily, at around the same time, the agency Spread the Word were
starting up the first Afro-Style school workshops, with Kwame Dawes as tutor. "I
already knew I could perform", says Dorothea. "I had a voice which made people sit up
and listen. But I was concerned that my poems should stand on the page, on their own
without me. The Afro-Style School changed the way that I wrote. It broadened me out and
made me engage with form. I'd always thought form would inhibit my particular
voice. But through the school I found that it didn't. It was important to discover that I
could use this stuff as well, it didn't belong to other people. Also, I realized that a lot of
these forms came out of oral traditions in the first place, so it suited me" (Phillips, 2001).

Several poems which came our of Dorothea's Poetry Places work at Brixton market
appear in Connecting Medium. Food features prominently, as you would expect, and so
does hair. "I had to do a poem about hair," she says. "This is one of my main interests,
my themes, if you like, and I feel I've got so much more to say about it. It resonates so
much around the Diaspora. It really strikes a chord - other black women know exactly
what you're talking about...."(Phillips 2001).

In the last couple of years Dorothea has been a guest writer at the Caribbean Woman
Writers and Scholars Conference in Puerto Rico. She has also been a visiting writer at
Florida International University, and continues to run workshops for the Poetry Society,
Apples and Snakes and Spread the Word, and has recently performed at the City of
Women Festival in Slovenia, and the Black Magic Women Festival in Amsterdam.

Sources
  1. Phillips, J., (2001), 'Dorothea Smartt Interview: Medusa and Me' Poetry
    News, Autumn 2001, http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/news/smartt.htm
  2. Poetry Place Archives, Dorothea Smartt: Brixton Market,
    http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/places/brixmar.htm
  3. Smartt D., S. Mitchell, 'From You To Me To You',
    http://www.cityofwomen.org/2005/sl