I’ve been wondering about my lost orgasm – where is it?? Where did it go?? – outer space??!! After years of therapy, I can laugh about it now, but as a survivor of sexual trauma, it’s still a tough question. So, when one summer an organization called idle women invited me to float on a boat on a remote rural canal and write a script, I laid back and thought, well it’s not just me, lots of people struggle with sex and millions of women all over the world are cut off from the possibility of pleasure because they go through traditional harmful surgeries as girls.
I want to connect questions of gender violence and control in one story and somehow connect it all with outer space in an uplifting Afrofuturist Afriqueer way.
I connected with FORWARD, a charity lead by African women and learnt a lot from them about female genital mutilantion (FGM). I’m also queer, and intersex activists such as Del LaGrace Volcano and Valentino Vecchietti taught me about the non-consensual surgeries faced by many intersex children in Europe and beyond. Yet the I on the end of LGBTQI is often forgotten and it is rarely discussed on the same page as FGM. Why? I thought, these problems all have the same root – I want to connect these questions of gender violence and control in one story and somehow connect it all with outer space in an uplifting Afrofuturist Afriqueer way.
I went looking for answers to my anorgasmia and found myself to be an accidental film maker.
And then I found this extraordinary myth from the Dogon of Mali, which seems to hold all these themes together and became central to the script. I ran workshops exploring the power of pleasure and came up with a magical play called STARS. I met the artist Candice Purwin on the boat too, and her amazing drawings formed part of the live show with a DJ playing music mixed by Debo Adebayo, all the way through – climaxing in a fantastic Afrofuturistic club night. Then COVID hit and the live show was delayed, not dismayed, we said to ourselves, let’s make a film from one section of the play: the Dogon myth. We got together with Tyler Friedman, mixed my voice with the music and drawings and here it is: a 7-minute animation film also called STARS.
How funny when I look back. I went looking for answers to my anorgasmia and found myself to be an accidental film maker. The full-length play went on stage, produced by Tamasha Theatre Company at the ICA in London, won the Off West End Theatre Award for best new play of 2024 and will be revived at Brixton House in London this summer. Before then, I hope you enjoy the story in its film format and I hope the telling makes you want to talk and talk and talk away sex and gender taboos.
Mojisola Adebayo
