“How Black Mothers Say I Love You” takes an unwavering look at sacrifice and devotion

by Sara Harowitz on November 2nd, 2023 at 4:40 PM

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The one feeling that permeates through the entire 120-minute runtime of How Black Mothers Say I Love You is hurt.

Daphne (played by Celeste Insell), a Jamaican immigrant mother of three, cannot free herself from the grief of losing her youngest daughter Cloe (Marlee Griffiths), finding solace only in her church and in the ghost of her dead child.

Valerie (Kerën Burkett), one of Daphne’s remaining daughters, struggles to process her husband’s infidelity and to care for her stubborn, cancer-stricken mother.

Claudette (Alisha Davidson), Valerie’s combative sister, returns home after three years away to the reality that her mother does not accept her queerness. She’s angry, but below that anger is extreme pain, caused largely by the fact that Daphne left Claudette and Valerie with their grandparents in Jamaica for six years while she went to North America in search of a better life.

The play, written by trey anthony and staged for The Cultch by The Frank Theatre Co., feels, at times, like it’s impossible to breathe. The entire piece is heavy—and while there are certainly moments of reprieve through humour, the darkness starts to feel like it just won’t let up. (So much so that when the four actors—who carry the entire show, by the way—come out for curtain call, this writer actually feels physical relief at the sight of Davidson’s smile. Phew! She’s okay!)

There is so much left unsaid among the three women, who struggle to exist in the present while wading through the muck of their pasts. What results is an unflinching look at motherhood, and sacrifice, and devotion.

This isn’t just a story, though. For playwright anthony, it’s an act of rewriting the pain. As she writes in the show’s digital program:

I come from a complicated legacy of black mothers who left their children. My great grandmother left her thirteen children in rural Jamaica for a better life in a bigger city. It was supposed to be for a short while, but she never returned.
Years later, my grandmother applied to the Domestic Scheme Act which allowed thousands of Jamaican women between the ages of 18-35 with no family ties to apply for domestic jobs in the U.K. and North America. For my grandmother, this new “opportunity” meant she had to leave her four children in Jamaica for a better life in England. My grandmother was reunited with her children after a six-year separation. The cycle of leaving continued when my own mother, who had me at age seventeen, decided to leave England in search of the Canadian Dream. Her story was repeating itself.
We are three women who share a hurtful and emotional herstory of leaving and being left behind.

How Black Mothers Say I Love You, then, feels raw, its suffering never far from the surface.

But it also feels emboldening. One of the most powerful tools any human has is the ability to forgive. This show asks us: what is our capacity for compassion? What is our capacity to forgive (but not, crucially, to forget)? What is our capacity to move forward, even when it hurts the most—and how can that act set us free?