We are at the end of the 20th century, we have left behind us the bitter days of slavery and the nightmare of the plantation. The blood of our African ancestors was spilt time and again in those fields of cotton, sugar cane, and coffee which gave so many riches to today's world. Many women suffered the abuses of their masters.

Cruelty was the name of the philosophy that the Europeans spread over the lands of the American continent, without any exception: in Cuba, Columbia, Uruguay, Ecuador, the Caribbean islands. In all those places where the system of slavery was present, the men and women who came from the African continent had in common a long chain if sufferings. Families were torn apart, bonds of affection destroyed on the altar of a savage exploitation for an international trade which saw the African only as a rustic tool of labor.

Many of our ancestors shed their tears, but many others never shed theirs because they converted those tears into rage, into rebellion and history. This history which many times remains forgotten or distorted by a eurocentric bibliography is precisely our principal source of creativity as much for literary works as for the world of images. Oral literature, the personal histories of our people are the obligatory references to penetrate into this inexhaustible universe of the collective memory.

Those of us who work with the language of images, we know the value of testimony. Documentary film making holds this possibility so perhaps that is why I chose, for the moment, this means of expression to show with my documentaries stories which reveal chapters of the African Diaspora.

We have this responsibility, this task to capture these small pieces of our common history which many times we hold close by, for example in our own family circle. And we have the responsibility to exalt these values to seek that which is called identity and know our music, our culture, to prevent the youngest from losing themselves in the falsehoods of material values and cultural globalization.

That is part of our responsibility as women communicators. In this manner the tears held back by our ancestors can be shed, but in this case tears of joy that come from knowing that their energies have been transformed into sources that promote our creativity for the struggle in the present.

Gloria Rolando
New York, October 17, 1997
Black Women Writers and the Future