d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian feminist dub poet and activist. Her work includes theatrical performances, four published collections of poetry, twelve plays, and seven albums.
Early life and education
d’bi young anitafrika was born on December 23, 1977, in Kingston, Jamaica to dub poet Anita Stewart and community organizer Winston Young. In 1993, she moved to Toronto, Canada to join her parents where she completed high school.
Young's works, The Sankofa Trilogy, The Orisha Trilogy and The Ibeji Trilogy, explore the psychological and ideological impacts of colonization to capitalism on people of African descent, from a Black Feminist perspective. They are triptych dramas. The Sankofa Trilogy are the stories of three Jamaican women, Mudgu Sankofa, her daughter Sekesu, and her granddaughter Benu. Each play uses the women's familial bond to tell of their respective journeys of revolutionary self-determination, and transformative self-expression. The Orisha Trilogy is a series about the experiences of women characters of the past, present, and future who survived the transatlantic slave trade. In each time period, the women grapple with power, gender, and sexuality through oppression and social unrest, under the help and protection of the Orishas.The Ibeji Trilogy'' are three biomyth dramas about Black love as it evolves in the midst of major life changes, from friendship to romance, between mother and son, and deep self-love.
Publishing and theatre
Young established Spolrusie Publishing, a publishing house to support the work of emerging black writers. From 2008-2018 she also created and ran The Watah Theatre, the only black-focused performance art school in Canada. The Watah Theatre offered tuition-free professional development programs. Between The Watah Theatre and Yemoya Artist Residency, she mentored some of Canada's up and coming young black creatives and international artists of colour including Amanda Parris, Kim Katrin Milan, Titilope Sonuga, and photographer, Che Kothari. Young's style of theatre practice developed draws from her upbringing in the performative and political environment of emerging Dub poetry in Jamaica of 1980s. She uses Jamaican language and idiom as nation language, as opposed to colloquialism. She works extensively with monodrama and, or “biomyth monodrama.”
The Anitafrika Method
Young's work recognizes the connections between identity and community as both inextricable and sacred. The Anitafrika Method initiates self-recovery through a creative process of performance that grounds broader notions of identity, community, social constructs, and metaphysical concepts, and focuses them into an embodied performance experience. She has applied the method in a variety of disciplines and with practitioners in health care, social justice, art, and leadership development. From January to June 2015, Young applied the method in a special collaboration with the Women's College Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada: The Black Womxn's Health Research Project. In 2018 Young began work in postgraduate studies in the Praxes, Politics and Pedagogies of Black Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London.
