| Holding Back the Tears 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 |
