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In The Telling: Black Family Podcast
This season, we expand the conversation on heritage and traditions, crossing borders to engage with voices from the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Europe. Together, we delve into the rich and complex threads that intertwine our histories, creating a shared and vibrant tapestry of collective identity.
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Contact us if you would like to be a guest on the show.
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Original music by Sean Bempong
Season 2
On the season finale of In the Telling, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor shares poems and memories from her recent book of poetry, Mama Phife Represents, honoring her son, Hip-Hop Legend, Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest aka Malik Taylor.
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Mama Phife Represents is a verse memoir of a poet, mother and teaching artist who suddenly loses her son to type 1 diabetes. It is a story of loss, love, and courage.
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Boyce-Taylor’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Chicago Review of Books. She holds an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Stonecoast/The University of Southern Maine. Cheryl is the author of several books including Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival: Poems, and the forthcoming, We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems (February 2022).
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For more information about Cheryl and her work, check out her website. Purchase Mama Phife Represents here.
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In this episode, Maurini Strub shares introspective and warm memories of her grandmother, Honora Georgina John, who was born in Trinidad in 1926 and had a profound effect on her life.
Born and raised in the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Maurini emigrated to the US in the early 1990s to pursue her higher education. She spent over 20 years in Detroit and just shy of 5 years in Louisville, KY before moving to Rochester, NY. She has been a swim instructor, lifeguard, and even an insurance cold caller (yes, she's been that person) and hopes to one day bike her first century.
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In this episode, Vernon Textel, who was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, shares a bit of his own family history, starting with himself, his parents and then maternal grandparents. He also talks about what African-ness means in Suriname--as in how African peoples came to Suriname and how people of African descent identify themselves today.
Textel is a journalist at the De Ware Tijd newspaper and public communications officer at Staatsolie Petroleum Company in Paramaribo, Suriname. Born in 1975, Vernon was raised by his mother, Muriel Texel and says that he was born into a typical Black Surinamese family.
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In this episode, Andwele, who currently lives on the island of Saint Maarten in the West Indies where he works as a clinical pharmacist, begins his story with a 1926 photograph featuring his great grandmother on the occasion of her 60th birthday. It was his curiosity about the people in that picture that made him always listen to stories from his mother’s siblings and cousins about those memories from their childhood, and bits and pieces of information that they remembered about stories that were told to them.
Andwele means “God brought & delivered me” in Swahili. He was born November 20, 1977 in the capital of Suriname, Paramaribo. Suriname is a small country on the northern coast of South America where the official language is Dutch. His journey into unearthing his family history started as a child...being fascinated by stories told at family gatherings. Stories that connected him to people long dead before he was born...but whose stories helped to shape his identity...and fed his hunger to fill in the blanks.​
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In this episode, Odile Tevie, current director and co-founder of Nubuke Foundation, a visual arts and cultural foundation based in Accra, the capital of Ghana and in outstation Wa-Upper West Region, discusses her and her family's background in the Eastern part of Ghana.
Born in Accra, Tevie's love of people and their stories and connections inspire a curiosity that moves her to explore beyond the surface and cross boundaries. She refuses to be boxed in by anyone and embraces all the things that make and have shaped her. And for her, the voyage of discovery is a never-ending one. She is a graduate of University of Ghana BA (honors) Computer Science, Mathematics. Her journey within the arts started after retiring from 10 successful years in the field of IT. After setting up Black Swan gallery in London from 2000 to 2005, her interest in artists and creative people grew.
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Under Tevie's vision and drive, Nubuke Foundation, established in 2006, has become an internationally acknowledged arts institution whose robust and engaging programming calendar has supported the career of many mid-career Ghanaian artists today. The multi-faceted programming initiatives of the Foundation can be attributed in Tevie's interests in people and her curiosity about human interactions beyond the obvious.
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In this episode, Ajamu, a fine art photographic artist, scholar, archive curator, and radical sex activist with a 25+ year track record of exhibiting in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces worldwide, talks about his family's immigrant experience starting with his grandparents migrating from Jamaica to Brandford in 1958.
Ajamu is the co-founder of the award winning rukus! Federation, the rukus! Black LGBTQ Archive, and is a leading specialist on Black queer history, heritage, and cultural memory in the UK. His philosophical-political-aesthetic includes portraiture/studio-based constructed imagery, early analogue printing processes, and large format photography, which unapologetically celebrates Black queer bodies, the erotic sense[s], desire, pleasure as activism, and difference. He recently made history by showing the first erect penis on British terrestrial TV in the documentary, Me and My Penis.
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The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. We understand that the global Black archival experience is a complex one and converging over time, space, and memory. We acknowledge and affirm archiving our stories is a cultural and political act. Learn more about the project here.
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In this episode, Dr. Ashie-Nikoi shares information about Ga naming practices, which are unique in Ghana. Ga names immediately identify one's clan, one's position among siblings, possibly even one's father's position among his siblings, and possibly one's town of origin.
Dr. Edwina Ashie-Nikoi is an archivist, historian and curator of the African/Diaspora experience. Her probing of culture and history began early, constantly asking (pestering!) her bemused parents and older kinfolk about their family and Ga ethnic histories. Having connected with various strands of blackness while growing up in Dubai, studying in the US and researching in the Caribbean and UK, she continues to be fascinated personally and academically with the ways peoples of African descent document themselves. Her scholarly research engages the myriad cultural records and indigenous knowledge peoples of Africa descent create as well as the institutions and processes involved in preserving them. Edwina currently teaches at the University of Ghana (UG)’s Department of Information Studies and is editorial coordinator of UG’s Institute of African Studies' Contemporary Journal of African Studies.
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In this episode, Dr. Maboula Soumahoro talks about her Côte d'Ivoire heritage and the complexities of being born in France.
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Dr. Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English department of the University of Tours, France, where she also received her PhD. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies (Atlantic), Dr. Soumahoro has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France: Bennington College, Columbia University (New York and Paris), Barnard College, Bard Prison Initiative (Bayview Correctional Facility), Stanford University (Paris), Sciences Po (Paris and Reims), the prisons in Bois-d’Arcy, Villepinte (juvenile detention), and Fresnes. From 2013 to 2016, Dr. Soumahoro served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. Since 2013, she is also the president of the Black History Month (BHM), an organization dedicated to the celebration of Black history and cultures throughout the world. Dr. Soumahoro is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, La Découverte).
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In this episode, Flip Cuoto, an HIV+ brazilian dancer, performer, cultural mischief maker and curator who interrogates, redefines and creates a diverse range of spaces and actions athwart the periphery of São Paulo culture, speaks about the value of family, his biological family, his partner, and the House of Zion.
Flip Couto is the Executive director of "Aliança Pró Saúde da População Negra" (Alliance for the Health of the Black Population), founder of Collective AMEM (group of black queer artists), dancer at Sansa-croma company and member of House of Zion.
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​As a South American gay black male who is publicly open about his HIV status, Flip uses his own body as source material. Working within and across several companies, projects, different community groups and networks both physically and on online including --art, urban spaces, dance battles, balls, performances and theatre--his practice is always searching for a transit between these spaces, which provides and provokes a creative-socio-political conversation within the gaps and silences in the Brazilian QPOC community and the wider public.
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In this episode, librarian and genealogist Phillip Bond talks about the maternal and paternal matriarchs of his family, Venus Bond and Ella Dockery, the impossible odds they had against them and the incredible legacy they left behind.
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Phillip Bond has been working in public libraries for 15 years. Beginning his career as a public librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, he uses the diverse backdrop of the changing Brooklyn Borough to create projects, events, and programs around archives, photography, oral histories, podcasting, and genealogy. The Milwaukee native has a personal invested interest in the research of his African American Southern roots, by way of Tennessee and Arkansas, having traced his family lineage back 6 generations to the 1700's. He currently resides in Washington DC and works as an Adult Literacy and Technology Librarian in South East DC for the DC Public Library.
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