Transcript

Josh Rivers: Mojisola, it's such an honour to have you here. Thank you so much for making the time for me and for Busy Being Black listeners.

Mojisola Adebayo: It's great to be here. It's my honour, honestly.

Josh: To open my conversations, I love to ask my guests the same question: How's your heart?

Mojisola: It's such a poignant question, because I have a heart condition. My heart is ticking really well. And in this moment – anything can happen – my anatomical heart is beating in time, in rhythm. So yeah, that bodes well. My emotional heart is also at peace. Thank you for asking. How's your heart?

Josh: Oh, thank you for asking. My heart is good. It's actually buoyant. Today, I bought my first plant. I went out and intentionally bought my own plant for my bedroom. And I did so because I've been really inspired by the biological philosopher Andreas Weber. He's really enchanting me and making me think about my ability to nurture life – within myself and in other more-than-human things. So, I went out and I found the perfect plant for me, and I've named the plant Andreas. That small act has really set me up for the entire day. I feel really, really buoyant.

Mojisola: I hope you and Andreas have great conversations. Apparently, there's something about speaking to a plant that does feed you, that does make you feel better. And it's something about the exchange of oxygen or whatever it is. I don't know, I don't get the science.

Josh: Well, as Andreas Weber argues in Matter and Desire, the world is motivated by feeling, even down to a cellular level: our individual cells are motivated by feeling, not only by some Darwinistic, causal-mechanistic drive, but this feeling – this urge – to connect, merge, bond and transform. The relationship with plants is just one example. This nurturing and tending and talking to something else outside of ourselves, I think it's an opportunity to get out of our heads and into the world again. If I can ask: you have a heart condition and that must also transform how you engage with the world on a day-to-day basis? Is that presumptuous?

Mojisola: When you say you have a heart condition, I suppose it always – because it's the heart – sounds very serious, but it's a very simple thing. It's just a rhythm thing that can get serious. But I suppose it affects how I think about the control that one has over one's own rhythm and the rhythm of the world. There are extreme moments, where I just can't move very far or speak very much at all, and where everything on the outside looks perfectly ordinary, but inside my body is running 100 metres, or my body is sinking underwater. That's what it can feel like, but everything appears fine. I suppose it alters my sense of perception of what is on the outside and the inside. And also, I suppose, an appreciation of the moments where you can be in rhythm with each other, but that actually, the rhythms that are set for us very often do not work for us. The arrhythmia really highlights that. There is a rhythm that one is supposed to be at: the nine-to-five, five day week, four weeks holiday a year, if you're lucky. The straightness, the capitalism, the big machine that you we’re supposed to fit in, I have a problem that really exposes that. It's fine to slow down, and it's fine to sit down or do something else. I'm getting very philosophical and I don't really know much about this philosophically, but yeah: my heart condition changes my relationship with the machine.

Josh: Is there something that you do to create rhythm around yourself, or to create space for yourself to follow your own rhythm when you need to?

Mojisola: I should be more attentive to those things that keep lots of us healthy: food, sleep, exercise, friendship and therapy – all kinds of stuff. When my heart goes funny, it's usually a red flag. It’s my body saying, "You're not doing those things, you have to do these things." It's also about vulnerability. I spent so much of my life – like lots of us – having to wear some very, very heavy armour, and be in a state of protection, hyper vigilance, always being ready for battle. If my heart goes funny, I can't be in that state, and so it puts me in an extremely vulnerable place. I'm learning through therapy, though, that – up to a point – that's actually really healthy, because we are all so vulnerable, we're all so fragile, everybody is. So it's important to be able to allow oneself moments of vulnerability, but it's really hard.

Josh: When I started Busy Being Black, I had a conversation with Bisi Alimi, the Nigerian LGBTQ human rights activist, and two important things happened in that conversation. He said, "Boys like me, don't get friends like you," which really moved me, but he also went to places in our conversation that I wasn't expecting him to go. I remember thinking, "You have to meet him at his vulnerability." I had to do this recalibration and it was from that conversation with Bisi that I realised I'm creating a space for vulnerability. And I thought, until really recently, that I was being vulnerable, but maybe I’m not. Let me just say it: I'm in recovery. Saying it to people is such a profound act of vulnerability: "I'm working on something and it's societally frowned upon, but also societally encouraged. And I don't know what I'm doing." And reaching out to my best friend and saying, "I want you to be part of this process, to invite you into this, but I just don't know what I need from you." I’ve learned that opening up allows other people a chance to show up for us, in ways that they're not able to when we're just trying to meet the rhythm of the structure.

Mojisola: You're so right. If you're a person who finds it extremely difficult to be vulnerable, then to know that you're not just being vulnerable on your own, but that you're in relationship, allows a space between people to open up that we all need. There's something that's just not possible unless one is vulnerable. There are certain qualities, poems, pieces of music, smells, ways of loving that can never, ever happen unless vulnerability is there. [Share this] And there are things we can take that put us in a place where we feel like we're vulnerable, something we can consume that makes us feel that we're in that place, but it doesn't do that. It's not the same and we know it's not the same. Wow. Thank you for sharing that.

Josh: That's why I love that question, "How's your heart?" It's such an invitation to open up. I'm always curious about how people came to the pen, as it were, and I read that you started off writing and performing as a rapper as a teenager. Do I have that right?

Mojisola: Yeah – and I'm so grateful that I'm so old that there was no YouTube, Instagram, mobile phones, or even CDs back then, so footage cannot be found. There may be a couple of cassette tapes floating around, I guess. But yeah, in the 80s, I started rapping on the street: a fundamentalist, religious, evangelical street rapper. So, I always have to add the proviso that, though it sounds like being a street rapper might be cool, there was very little cool about it.

Josh: So you were rapping for God?

Mojisola: Rapping for God, rapping for Jesus! I started by taking instrumentals of hip hop tunes that I liked and rewriting the lyrics. The first was "Push It!" by Salt-N-Pepa, the next was "Buffalo Stance" by Neneh Cherry. That gives you an idea of where I am in time, but it's kind of ironic that I took Salt-N-Pepe's "Push It!" – which is really sexy – and Jesus'd it out. So, yeah. That's what I was doing for about eight years, at a time in my life when I was massively repressing my sexuality, but found a great medium of self-expression. It was a fun time and it's a fun anecdote, but it's definitely what got me into playing with words and performing.

Josh: When was the transformation from street rapper for Jesus – it's just so delightful – to playwright? When did you realise that playwriting could be a vessel for your creative expression?

Mojisola: I ended up on a degree in drama at Goldsmiths in southeast London, only because I got kicked off another degree program. It's a long story, but it's a boring story. The drama department at Goldsmiths was the only department that would accept me on a degree program. My dad is Nigerian: there's just no way that I was not going to get a degree when I had been accepted into the university. I was literally wandering around the corridors of Goldsmiths, trying to find a degree program that would accept me in politics, history or sociology, but no one wanted me. The drama department took me in on the very first year of their Drama and Theatre Arts program. So in I wandered, with my yellow and green t-shirt, and my red trainers, and my faded-rapper look, and everybody was in the room wearing black and nobody was Black. It was just bizarre and I hated it – most of it. But by the end of it, I got introduced to something called Theatre of the Oppressed, which is a very heavy way of talking about theatre for social change. It really woke me up and got me excited. I ended up training with Augusto Boal, who is known as the innovator of that work, but he's really just one of the makers of that work. I trained with him, and then did loads and loads of theatre for social change work internationally, making shows and acting as well. Then I got really exhausted from travelling and working in areas of conflict and crisis: post-apartheid South Africa, India and Palestine. Although it's very exciting work, I got pretty burnt out. Then I ended up doing a Master's in Physical Theatre. So, funnily enough, movement work is what got me into writing. I started writing for movement, and out of that came Muhammad Ali and Me and Moj of the Antarctic.

Josh: You know what’s so interesting about that: Ocean Vuong, the poet and educator, advises his students that when they're working on a poem, or a piece of writing, and they can't quite find the right words or the line breaks – if it's just not flowing – to go walk with their work. “Language is something we carry,” says Ocean, and so the process of movement unlocks, or releases, the language. There's something about movement and language that is so intricately, intimately interwoven.

Mojisola: Absolutely, I totally agree. Language is movement. It's a form of movement. Thought is movement. There is nothing beyond movement, in my life anyway. Breath is movement, it's all movement. And so, if you can move your body, the mind will follow. When I run workshops, I encourage people to write with their hands, if they can – as in, not to type – because there's something else that happens when one writes with a pen or a pencil, or sketches and doodles, that encourages a sense of flow. Or, just write and speak. I think people get trapped into this idea that writing is now just sitting in a blank room with a computer, and for a lot of people that's a terrifying idea. I say to people, "Go for a walk and talk. Go talk with yourself, go talk on your mobile phone, or doodle and draw." Yeah, I absolutely agree with Ocean.

Josh: Doing my research for this conversation was the first time I heard of Theatre of the Oppressed. I think it's a wonderful approach and idea. It was inspired by the work of Paulo Freire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed: this idea that those who are being educated are both the subject and the object of the transformation, that we have to put the education, usefully, in the minds and in the hands of the people. How has Theatre of the Oppressed shaped and moulded the work you do as a playwright and theatre maker?

Mojisola: I think the central idea that you've really tapped into with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is that great education is all about a relationship, a dialogue and interaction – not just a dumping ground for knowledge. Theatre is a relationship, as well; it’s not just relationships with people on stage, or people making the work, but a relationship with one's audience – it's a give and take. That really clicked for me when I was doing my degree. And I think that also taps into hip hop and the African traditions: that's what performance is, that's what singing is, that's what ritual is, a call and response. It's a relationship between each other. And that is very much a part of how I work as a theatre maker – playwriting is just one aspect of being a theatre maker. It's all about what's going on in the relationship between the performers and the audience. There's always interactivity, in some way, in my plays. But I think that happens a lot with Black and queer and Black queer audiences anyway. If you go to see a show with loads of Black people in the audience, people will be speaking. It doesn't matter where you go in the Black universe. It's in what we do, and so I'm all about just allowing that kind of space. In Theatre of the Oppressed, it's a very direct interaction. The play is performed and then it's shown a second time. The second time around, any member of the audience can get up on the stage and change the story and solve the problem and have a debate. It's not as direct as that in my plays, but there's always space for that. So in Family Tree, for example, there's a whole call and response section: people can call out names and speak back. I'm just tapping into what has always been in Black traditions of performance, whether it be hip hop or West African storytelling or whatever.

Josh: Augusto Boal said, "Theatre is what we have inside. We are animals who have the privilege of being actors, we are acting all the time." And this made me think of Travis Alabanza. We had a conversation, years back now, and Travis was telling me that they disrupt the theatre experience through their understanding that the audience thinks they're coming to see a performance, but actually the performance is taking place out on the streets, the performance is everyday life. It's the decisions people make before they leave the house, before they don that armour that you were talking about earlier. And it also occurs to me that you're speaking to people in relationship through space and time, as well. So, if we can go to Moj of the Antarctic, which is this fabulous and fantastical play and experience. Can you tell us about it?

Mojisola: I was doing this MA that I mentioned earlier, and for my final research, I wanted to think about the ways in which Black folks have used performance in everyday life, which connects to what you were saying about Travis and their approach to thinking about theatre and performance. I was curious about that the ways we were just doing it all the time, but particularly in the Black experience, and perhaps even more so in Black queer experience. I was focusing on Muhammad Ali, because I was particularly taken with the way that he would dance in a boxing ring – which now is almost cliche, but at the time, it was totally radical – and rapping at press conferences and doing magic tricks, saying he was as pretty as a girl. You know, you do not say you're as pretty as a girl when you're a six-foot-whatever, heavyweight Black boxer in 1969. All of that stuff is now kind of archaic, but I was totally fascinated, and kind of in love, with this idea. But in the course of that research, I tripped upon the story of Ellen Craft, who was an enslaved African American woman who cross-dressed as a white man to escape slavery – and did it and got away with it. It was this incredible odyssey across the United States, and she and her husband, William Craft, ended up coming to England. They had children, met Queen Victoria and became abolitionists themselves. Just the most extraordinary people. So, I was particularly fascinated by her. And in this book, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, which was penned by William, is their account of their fight for liberation and their escape. But there's actually very, very little in the voice of Ellen, or what was really going on for her. And for me, it was this extraordinary performance: the performance of a Black woman playing a white man, and knowing that the stakes were so high that to be caught, to give a bad performance – if Ellen did not perform as brilliantly as she must have done, we would never have heard of where she'd been; she would have been re-enslaved, or may have been killed. We know the horrors. So there's something about the performance itself and using performance outside of what we think of as performance. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about climate change – this was over 20 years ago now – how do we talk about the planet in crisis? And how do we connect that with the Black experience and, particularly, the African continent? We were so ahead of our time with that conversation; back in the early 2000s, people were not talking about the climate. And as far as I was concerned, it's devastating our people more than anybody else, so we've got to talk about it. I came up with this idea of this African American woman who escapes slavery by cross-dressing as a white man, but then becomes a sailor on board a whaling ship bound for Antarctica. That's where I take Ellen’s story off into fiction: my character becomes the first Black woman, if you want to call her that, stepping foot in Antarctica. So, I went to Antarctica, with an incredible genderqueer artist, Del LaGrace Volcano. I painted my face white and cross-dressed as a white man in mid-19th century costume and we did this incredible shoot –

Josh: In Antarctica?

Mojisola: In Antarctica, yes.

Josh: Black people are always doing the most, I love it!

Mojisola: We go to extremes, man. We know what it is to live in the extreme. We're not afraid of the edge – especially Black queer people.

Josh: What does Ellen Craft’s performance in real life enable you to do on stage?

Mojisola: I didn't realise until I gave a talk at my old college, Goldsmiths, quite a long time after Moj of the Antarctic. What she enabled me to do was answer my deniers at college who said I couldn't perform. So, the very first time I got up to perform at Goldsmiths, I was playing an 88-year-old white man. It was a scene between an old English gentleman and his maid. And it was me – I'm tall and androgynous, with fairly deep voice, and happy to play anybody – and a very small, quite feminine white woman. I didn't know anything about acting. My acting was appalling. I was just trying to impersonate Marlon Brando most of the time. I was told to do the scene, it was an assignment, and somebody objected to me doing the scene and said, "A Black cannot play a white person." I'll never forget the language: "A Black cannot play a white person." And there was this whole debate that emerged, with all the white students basically agreeing with this horrendous comment, and the teacher just standing to the side and just letting this abuse happen. And I'm sitting there thinking, "I've got fucking cotton wool stuffed in my mouth, I'm wearing my mom's suit, my acting is appalling and you got a problem with the fact that I'm Black and playing a white person? This is a shit scene, we're in southeast London, there's a world going on outside the door and you are offended by the fact that I'm Black and playing white person?" So, what Ellen Craft enabled me to do was realise that I had spent all this time responding to the accusation that I could not somehow step out of the frame my deniers had for me. That I was not allowed to play a white man – and so I went all the way to fucking Antarctica, the whitest place on the planet, and painted my face white. That's what Ellen Craft gave me: we can go anywhere, be anything, we can do anything. All of these categorisations and restrictions and all of this crap that we are given are just totally bullshit. [Share this]

Josh: Ellen Craft, and indeed Moj of the Antarctic, reflected whiteness back to itself as a constructed performance, right? Because the students were affirming that, for them, race is inherent, and because it's inherent, there's a way it's performed – and it cannot be performed by those outside of the race. But actually, you and Ellen both demonstrate that yes, it can. I can fool you into thinking I'm white, as many people have done.

Mojisola: Absolutely – and just exposing it for the lie that it is. One of the most extraordinary things about Antarctica is that it's got all of this discourse around whiteness connected to it. The explorations of Antarctica were all happening at the same time as the colonisation of Africa. These things all go together with this idea of a white space to be conquered by white men. It all feeds into this discourse of whiteness and white supremacy. But Antarctica is black, it's just the snow that's white. I couldn't believe it when I first went there and saw these rocks. This is black volcanic land, there's nothing white about it. There's a line in Moj of the Antarctic: "White is a cover-up. It's a beautiful lie." We know this race stuff is a lie. And I think this also maybe comes from my experience of being mixed heritage, in some way. I've always thought it doesn't quite make sense because you're the exception to the rule: there's Black and there's white and there's Asian – and that's it. But you're mixed race, so that's a bit different? Doesn't the exception to the rule challenge the rule? In the same way that there's men and there's women – and that's it. Well, what about intersex people? What about trans people? Doesn't the exception to the rule mean that there isn't a rule?

Josh: I'm interested in Stars and Family Tree, the two plays you have touring concurrently in the UK this year. What is Stars: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey and how did it come about?

Mojisola: Stars is the story of a very old woman, called Mrs., who wants to go into space in search of her own orgasm. She has never had an orgasm. She's 80-odd years old, her husband's just died and she's decided things need to change and that this is an opportunity. The catalyst for this moment in her life is that her husband has died – and they had very miserable, 60-plus-year marriage – but also that she's had three encounters that get her thinking about her body, about trauma, about recovery from trauma, about the possibility of love and the possibility of sexual fulfilment. One of the encounters she has is with a girl-child, who we discover has been through a non-consensual, traditional harmful practice. She learns a lot from that child and that child's own dream is also to go into space, as she's kind of obsessed with space travel. She also remembers an encounter with a would be lesbian lover in a launderette many years before, and she's repressed that story and that experience. And then an encounter with an old friend called Maxi, who reveals that she's intersex and that her orgasms are out of this world. So, these three encounters are what gets Mrs. thinking about herself and all of her desires and excitement, and all the possibilities that she's not allowed herself. I wrote it because I've been wanting to talk about orgasm and anorgasmia, the condition of not being able to orgasm, for a very long time. And I feel like now I can talk about it, but I needed to talk about it at some kind of distance from myself. That's why the central character is very elderly and that's why she goes into space. I'm like, "How far can I take her? I'll take her into space and put her in her 80s to give myself some emotional distance”, so I can talk about subjects that are very close to me, but also very painful, and to give them some kind of ecstatic, expansive feeling.

Josh: Well, pleasure is essential to our liberation, which I'm only just learning. adrienne maree brown has done a lot of writing and organising around pleasure activism. Jayna Brown, writes in Black Utopias: "Moments of utopia happen through the gratification of sensual desires. We open up and let ourselves go. Perhaps we can think of desire differently, not as consumption, but as relational and charged with the potential to explode all attempts to order and contain it." And so this pursuit of orgasm and these encounters with others who are learning to orgasm themselves, or at least pursue pleasure, feels like a pursuit of freedom.

Mojisola: I really believe in the power of pleasure and that pleasure is political, particularly collective pleasure. When we get together – people who are oppressed, considered on the edge, or powerless or having less power – and experience pleasure, whether that be in a party, in a dark room, on a dance floor, in a bed, when we're just laughing together, it's powerful. It's not only life-changing, but world-changing. [Share this] We're not supposed to. We were not enslaved to give us any kind of pleasure: the purpose was to deny us our pleasure, for our pleasure to be taken away and the pleasure of others to be foregrounded. It's the same for queer life, we're not supposed to. That's why our lives have been so legislated; what has been legislated is our pleasure. And that's why the show transforms into a club night, because I think that's the closest I get to orgasm with my clothes on is on a dance floor, with other people. It's not enough for me to just do some play, we have to do something that feels like collective, revolutionary pleasure. So, on a couple of occasions, the show immediately transforms into a club and I just love that.

Josh: And that pleasure is not incidental. It's not an accident. It's not something that we pursue only at the weekend, or when we've finished all of our work, or when we have a bit of free time, but that it's central, right? It's an animating thrust, if you'll excuse the pun.

Mojisola: When I'm running workshops, one of guidelines – along with things about confidentiality, and all kinds of other stuff – is “seek out the pleasure”. It's a rule in my work. Find the pleasure, even in the difficult stuff. Even in the really challenging exercises or whatever it is, seek it out, because you're not supposed to. You're not supposed to seek it out. I think that's what I'm always trying to do in my work, is to find the beautiful in the brutal, to deal with brutal experiences that I've had and that many of us experience in our lives and our histories, to find what is beautiful and to make beautiful memories. And not in a wishy-washy, flimsy way, but because I think it's revolutionary. I think we weren't supposed to have that.

Josh: I love this idea of the beautiful in the brutal. It's such a beautiful way of understanding our lived and embodied experience; it's always going to be a mixture of these things as we continue to move towards the futures that we deserve. And I suppose the brutal part of the beautiful might be Family Tree. I don't want to brutalise the play, but just to say that the origin story of the Family Tree is part of that brutality you seek to address in your work.

Mojisola: The central story of the play is that of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman from Baltimore, Maryland, who – in 1951, at the age of 31 – got a very aggressive form of cancer, and sadly passed away. Without her knowledge, and without the knowledge of her family, cells were taken from her cervix. At the time, John Hopkins Hospital, like lots of places around the world, was trying to find the key to kind of everlasting life, trying to find cures for cancer. They were trying to find cells that would survive outside of the human body, cells that would keep reproducing outside of the human body. And so a lot of people, particularly African American people, had cells removed without their knowledge. And nobody knows why – to this day, no scientists can give us the answer – but Henrietta Lacks' cells kept reproducing, and are still reproducing, and have been reproducing during our conversation. They are the only immortal cells. And they have subsequently been sold to every lab, in every country on the planet; and every drug, every vaccine, just about any cure that anybody's had, through any traditional medicine, has been tested on her cells, in some way. So, her cells have given rise to "the greatest biological findings in history," to quote one researcher. And yet, for many, many years, her family didn't know about that, and until recently, most people didn't even know her name. Her cells were named HeLa, after the first two letters of her first name and her surname, but a lot of scientists call her Helen Lane, to this day. The fact that she was an African American, the fact that she was a Black woman, was covered up and she was made to seem as if she was white.

Josh: Of course the only immortal cells scientists have been able to find came from the cervix of a Black woman. Like, of course. Where else would they be?

Mojisola: Absolutely. There you go: beautiful and brutal.

Josh: It's a big task, to take on a story as brutal as this. What do you hope the Family Tree does by reanimating the life of Henrietta Lacks?

Mojisola: I mean, I'm not the first: there's a really great book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. However, what it doesn't do is imagine Henrietta speaking to us now, from the petri dish, as it were. I've seen her cells in the lab in Berlin, and given thanks to her. This idea that she's still reproducing ... if you were to write down a list of things that God is, whether one is a believer or not – omnipresent, all powerful, a source of healing – Henrietta is some kind of God: she is free, she has outlived her own life, she'll keep reproducing beyond us. It's quite amazing and it's just the most extraordinary story. And in terms of Black life under under threat, as we have been for 400 years, her cells remind us that our life itself is everlasting, that we are immortal and that we go beyond the bounds of manmade time and manmade space. You cannot contain Henrietta Lacks. I recently met very prestigious scientist at Cambridge, who works with Henrietta Lacks's cells, and she said, "You don't want her in your lab because she contaminates everything." Henrietta's cells are so powerful that if you have other cells in the same vicinity, she changes those cells into herself. They're not just everlasting, they're the most powerful cells ever. And I think as human beings, and particularly as people of African heritage, we need to know that we are beyond what has ever been prescribed for us. And I shiver when I think about it. Of course we are everlasting. Of course that knowledge has always been repressed. Of course we are. So then what else are we? What else can we be? [Share this] What else can our inner cells reproduce and become? To just sit in that knowledge and enjoy that knowledge, I think is incredibly powerful – and totally liberatory. Through Family Tree, I deal with some other difficult stuff, as well. It's the wider theme of extraction: extraction from Black women's bodies, extraction from the soil, extraction from the earth. And I look at the medical history as well of gynecology, and the fact that Western gynecology comes from non-consensual experiments on African American woman. And I also look at extraction now and the extraction of Black life, in terms of medical workers in the NHS, because I wrote the play during Covid-19. So I have these other stories running through and Henrietta is at the centre of it. She's at the centre of it because there is, I think, enormous power, enormous hope, in her story, cells and life. It's imagination, but it's science: you can also really prove it. So when science gives you something that is more than you could imagine, what then could be imagined for the future? And one of the most profound moments in Family Tree is when Henrietta has a conversation with a tree and she's angry, "All this time I took you from my ancient friend. I sat beneath you and suckled my baby at your breast and you let us down. You saw everything that happened. And how could it be that nature let us down?" The tree speaks back to Henrietta Lacks and tells her, "You're thinking in manmade time. Think with trees and things will feel completely different." And perhaps that's for you as well, Josh. Thinking with Andreas, thinking with your plant, thinking beyond beyond the manmade, gives us great power and hope that we are beyond time. The oldest tree in the world is 95,000 years old. Let's think with trees, let's think ourselves out of everything that's ever been constructed for us. Because Henrietta is in all of us.