Cinders: A Duoethnography on Race, Growth, and Transformation

This auto ethnographic poetic inquiry is fashioned as a dialogue between Kristin Heavey and Kessey Jemmott, on topics of race and embodiment. Heavey is a white mother of a bi racial daughter in the United States of America; Jemmott is a Black Trinbagonian, living in Canada. These vignettes emerged from a collaborative performance piece, drawing from their backgrounds in theatre and dance. As a white mother and a black daughter, we interrogated each other's embodied experiences. We listened to the other's fears, memories, and family histories. We engaged in discourse surrounding the politics of blackness and the way white racial grievance seemed to overwhelm gender solidarity in the 2016 US election. This inquiry attempts to bring personal stories together, to find intersections where an intimate, felt experience of race can find significance and resonance--to find oneself in another's story and to hear its call for action and transformation.