'Mother May We' by Mel Ree

If you’re a first generation Australian woman. If you’re the daughter of a black mother. If you’ve inherited their pain – of escaping the horrors of third world conditions, of carrying physical and emotional trauma, of reckoning with an unfamiliar western frontier that regards you as ‘other’ – then you’ll know how difficult it is to ask for permission to heal.

How can you balance your history with your unwritten future? How can you inhabit an individual identity when you’ve inherited the truths of your ancestors? How can you open your arms and feel the sunshine on your skin when secrecy and shame drain the colour from your parents’ eyes?

Poet Mel Ree rhapsodises about intergenerational trauma and marries ancestral and modern truths in a truly epic and cathartic performance. Peppering playful performance art with humbling, hard truths, Mother May We is a motivational manifesto for how to heal.