CHILDREN OF THE BLACK WATER

by Deivan Steele

Children of the Black Water is a new play about four generations of South African Indians as they emigrate to Canada; how they transform their speech, their dreams, and their gods, how migration shatters their family, and how they tell each other stories, true and false, to get through it all. The piece is based on Deivan’s own family’s story, infusing the myth of Shakuntala, popularised by the Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa.

This is a play about family, class, and being Brown in foreign lands, but it’s also about myth. We are constant inheritors of myth (etymologically, anything delivered from word of mouth); they’re what we’re composed of, and they ensnare us, often without our realising.

(Image by D Jeremy Smith.)