by Jas Keimig

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This weekend, poet Jourdan Imani Keith’s The Uterine Files will open at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. Directed by Sadiqua Iman, the play is an Afrofuturistic meditation on Black women’s health partially inspired by The X Files and is part of The Seattle Public Library’s Seattle Reads focus on Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

Across two “episodes,” the work investigates the history of gynecological experimentation, involuntary sterilization, and institutionalized stress Black American women have endured at the hands of Western medicine. Central to the story is Virginia Mary, a fictional enslaved Black woman whose experiences haunt her descendants from 1863 to the future. It also features an intergalactic griot named Afritiki who arrives on the scene to narrate and hold space for her ancestors.

For Keith, a former Seattle Civic Poet and environmental activist, The Uterine Files has been a long time coming.

The idea for The Uterine Files germinated in the early 2000s, when Keith discovered she had noncancerous uterine fibroid tumors. Keith began researching her condition, uncovering the fact that Black women experience extremely high rates of uterine fibroids and, as a result, undergo hysterectomies at higher rates than white women. As a poet interested in environmental health and epigenetics — the effect of early childhood experiences on genetic expression — the data both fascinated and horrified her.

“Is there a link between the experience of our ancestors and the arrival of fibroids in our communities? When I began to follow that, it required me to study slave narratives. I went to the Schomburg Library in New York and sourced documents to really create the main character who was Virginia Mary,” Keith stated in a recent interview. “And from there, continuing to look at experiences that we have, the stories we tell, and the role dreams play in our lives to guide us.”

For Iman, the play spoke to her as a bodyworker who routinely hears from clients, friends, and family about their struggles with uterine fibroids. “I don’t know any Black woman who I’ve mentioned [uterine fibroids] to who didn’t either have a story herself or has had it affect someone close to her,” said Iman. She first heard about the play when Keith did a one-woman rendition of The Uterine Files at Gay City in 2016. The performance sat with Iman for years until the fall of 2022 when she approached Keith with an offer to help Keith flesh out the play with a full cast. The Uterine Files: Episodes 1 and 2 soon became a reality.

The Uterine Files takes place across time and space — on a plantation, in a living room, at a beauty shop, at the club. All of the women characters are connected to each other as descendants of Virginia Mary and are played by a mix of actors, poets, and spoken word artists: Melany Bell, Aishé Keita, Olisa Enrico, Monique Franklin, Sophia Haddix, Nichelle Alderson, and Kamari Bright. Because the storytelling is stretched over generations of women enduring trauma, pain, and heartbreak, Iman believes that there are healing properties in seeing that generational change.

“It’s going to be really beautiful for the audiences to experience because so often we feel these harsh emotions, but we don’t see the ripple effect of how these emotions come out over generations or how it feels if you could have only been held during that rough moment,” she said.

A version of the play called The Uterine Files: Episode One, Voices Spitting Out the Rainbow directed by Rebecca O’Neil played at 18th & Union in May as part of Shattered Glass Project’s New Works Festival. The one-woman show starred Ziara Greathouse as Virginia Mary and her descendants — a hair stylist, a professor, an all-knowing narrator. It was a powerful, affecting show, esoterically connecting the trauma of slavery to modern-day woes and grief. Both renditions of The Uterine Files, however, are completely different interpretations of Keith’s text, so even if you watched O’Neil’s version, you’ll find something new and different in Iman’s.

“This is just one slice of the larger picture of decolonizing the way that we think about health care, the way that we think about work, and the way that we think about wellness,” Iman reflected. “All wellness systems aren’t built to benefit everybody.”

Keith and Iman both emphasize that despite the heavy subject, The Uterine Files is ultimately a hopeful story about Black women’s survival despite centuries of oppression.

“When you hike in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll see a tree called a madrona tree. It has red skin and that kind of peels back. It does everything to survive,” said Keith. “Most often if you’re hiking, you’ll find one that looks like it’s dancing off the edge of a cliff, literally holding onto whatever piece of soil that it landed in and growing out into the sun and leaning over. When I go through hard times and I think about our ancestors, I think about my mother, and how particularly our female ancestors are like madrona trees. You dance, you lean into the light, you hold on, you let the light come in every single way in order to not just survive but thrive.”

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“The Uterine Files” is on at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute May 25–June 2. Get tickets on their website.

Editors’ Note: This article was updated on 06/04/2024 to correct the timeline of when Iman began to work with Keith on “The Uterine Files.”

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📸 Featured Image: The cast of “The Uterine Files” rehearses at Langston. (Photo courtesy of Sadiqua Iman)

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