{"id":6125,"date":"2010-03-18T23:28:15","date_gmt":"2010-03-18T23:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=6125"},"modified":"2016-09-07T01:41:06","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T01:41:06","slug":"interview-with-ngozi-onwurah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=6125","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Ngozi Onwurah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

African Women in Cinema<\/a>
\nAfrican Literature Association Conference
\nApril 1997
\nEast Lansing, Michigan<\/p>\n

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television<\/em>. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,\u00a0 2000.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.\u00a0 You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.\u00a0 Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.\u00a0 Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.\u00a0 Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.<\/p>\n

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.\u00a0 The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.\u00a0 So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.<\/p>\n

It is less complicated on a personal level.\u00a0 On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.\u00a0 But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.\u00a0 So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.\u00a0 It is two different experiences.<\/p>\n

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.<\/strong>\u00a0 Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.\u00a0 Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.\u00a0 But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.\u00a0 They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.\u00a0 Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life\u2014who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth\u2014is my mother; second my grandmother.\u00a0 These are two white women.\u00a0 These are the people who have formed me.\u00a0 And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.\u00a0 This is a strange place to be.\u00a0 It informs everything you do basically.<\/p>\n

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?\u00a0 You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.\u00a0 A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.<\/p>\n

It’s more complicated than that.<\/p>\n

Could you talk about these complicated identities?<\/em><\/p>\n

It is incredibly complicated.\u00a0 All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.\u00a0 Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.<\/strong>\u00a0 It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.\u00a0 I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah African Women in Cinema African Literature Association Conference April 1997 East Lansing, Michigan Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,\u00a0 2000. In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.\u00a0 You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8,10,25],"tags":[2531,2519],"class_list":["post-6125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-women","tag-african-women-in-cinema","tag-ngozi-onwurah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48999,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6125\/revisions\/48999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}