Imoinda

IMOINDA or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) is the first libretto to be written by an African-Caribbean woman, Dr Joan Anim-Addo. It is a re-writing of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, first published in 1688.

It tells the story of Oroonoko's lover Imoinda, a young African princess who is doubly enslaved, once by her king into marriage and then sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The play focuses on her experience with the slave masters and the birth of a child who symbolizes the triumphant survival of African-heritage people forcibly transplanted in the Caribbean Diaspora. In subversively re-writing Behn's 1688 proto-novel, this woman-centered narrative highlights the importance of women as repositories of cultural and historical memory, ancestral forgiveness and the maternal founding of the "Creolised Nation".