Simone, Half and Half, livre ebook

• First produced by Black Theatre Workshop, Montréal, in February 2020.
• Christine was commissioned by Black Theatre Workshop to write a play focused on a mixed-race character, and she ended up drawing from her own experiences to create Simone.

Miscegenation. Sounds like a science experiment... These are the words that have been used to describe people like me. But what's in a word or in these words or any words? What are the words that really say who I am? I am. I am. Here I am... Why do you need the words? What if there isn't one word? My mom can trace her family back to the 1600s to this one spot in the north of France. A name and a place. Daniel Parent, Tourcoing, Nord- Pas-de-Calais. But my dad can't do that. He can only go as far back as Trinidad and Tobago. A dark-skinned woman. Soledad Rouseau. My great-great-grandmother. An old woman who spoke little as she sat in her rocking chair watching the world change before her eyes. That's all my grandmother remembers. Was she a slave when she was a child? Or were her parents slaves? What did she see? What did she know? It's all gone now. We'll never know where she came from or what she believed or what cultural practices she had that came from her faraway homeland. Just an old black woman on a Caribbean island. To know and not to know. "Where are you from?" Everywhere. "What are you?" I don't know.