Performing Black British Memory: Kat François’s Spoken-Word Show Raising Lazarus as Embodied Auto/Biography

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Black British poets have been at the forefront of developing the ‘one-person poetry show’ or spoken-word play, an apt format for negotiating diasporic history and cultural memory in a public arena. The focus of this paper is Kat François’s one-woman show Raising Lazarus (2009/2016), which stages the poet’s own quest for information about her Grenadian relative Lazarus François, a WWI soldier. In a media-specific analysis, this paper explores how François’s text is semantically enriched when translated into a live performance. The authenticity effect typically produced in spoken-word poetry through the unity of author and performer is compounded in Raising Lazarus by textual and paratextual keys that frame François’ show as embodied auto/biography. Merging life-writing, monodrama, and spoken-word poetry, Raising Lazarus reveals the one-person show to be an effective and popular medium for Black British poets to articulate personal experience and negotiate collective identities through performance