Hi my name is Justina Kehinde. I am a writer, a performance artist and a director.
I sing, I act, I do lots of different things within the creative arts
and I find that so fulfilling to not just produce my own work but to
create it, to be able to perform it, to work with other people in collaboration
and I think that as an artist being able to move between lots of different roles
enables you to hone your craft more and to understand it more.
You don't have to be one thing but you can explore lots of different things and in
different stages in your life, different things might become more dominant but
having an awareness and challenging yourself to embody different roles is
one of the most fruitful experiences you can have as an artist.
I had an awareness of Cambridge as a great institution for academics but when I was
in Year 13 my mum took me along to an open day and I went to the English
department and they were talking about medieval literature and I was just so
fascinated by the lecturer and the way that he brought these stories to life
and the pursuit for knowledge and the hunger for understanding and I just
thought I had five options why not try and apply there?
I was the first in my family to end up going there, it was opportunity that presented itself.
Going into Cambridge the literature side was fascinating,
my first paper was Renaissance literature and I'd never studied that
before at school and so it was kind of like a baptism by fire but really one of
my biggest passions was post-colonial literature, I was really fascinated in-terms-of
my heritage being both Nigerian and British
and also as a British citizen this country's relationship with its
former colonies and so I think I had gone on a journey of understanding
myself through post-colonial literature and when I discovered that Cambridge had
a paper about that I was really fascinated about how I could use stories
to to understand geography, to understand geopolitics. In time I completed my part
one and I then ended up switching to social anthropology because I found that
I was more interested in what the stories were exploring as opposed to
necessarily like grammar and commas and things and so anthropology proved to be
a far more fulfilling subject but both of them together have deeply influenced
what I have gone on to do. I came to the end of my first year and as much as
I had had access to lots of different forms of literature I was quite
frustrated because I wasn't seeing myself reflected in those stories,
I wasn't looking at characters that looked like me that spoke to me and I had a
deep desire when I looked outside of even my course, I recognised that there
was an acute lack of diversity, especially within the arts and so I said
to myself I want to be in a play that I could exist in and I want to put that on
and so the end of my first year I decided to put on Ntozake Shange's
'For Colored Girls (who'd considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf)'
It's a choreo poem exploring seven women of colour and their journey through
womanhood and through life. It ended up at the very end of it after going
through lots of trials and tribulations becoming, as far as we are aware, the
first all black or female production on a Cambridge stage and it completely
transformed not only my experience and experience of lots of other students of
colour at Cambridge but also the theatre scene there as well.
What was so fulfilling about it was that I didn't set out to make history in
doing that it was just an attempt to tell my story and
stories of people that look like me and to have a space for us.
'Rewire, reset. I wanted an internal Big Bang.
BANG!'
'An internal Big...' See my eyes? '...Bang.'
'BANG!'
Then you lock into the audience straight there use the body and now we're 360.
So go back to the top of that there.
Constantly pushing the barriers about what is acceptable, what can be seen,
of what can be created and
that has fueled me since leaving University, in one hand I work with
In Public Health around African women's sexual health and rights and that's
definitely deeply rooted in my anthropology but I also have been
working on other plays and I've recently written and directed my first original
play called 'Umuada' which explores mental health migration and motherhood
in the urban African Diaspora. So I think in that journey through Cambridge,
in that journey through literature and through anthropology I have come up with
a really beautiful blend of lots of different ways of speaking about what
has not been heard or what has not been listened to in the past.
A huge thank you to WoLab and theatre n-16 for giving us the space for this interview
and for supporting and enabling emerging artists to continue in their creativity.