Muscovado: A Disturbing, Powerful Play that Heralds an Extraordinary New Voice

A school night, in the midst of a busy week, and a very full day of teaching is almost enough to dissuade one from venturing across the river for pretty much anything. Add a blustery, rainy day, and Clapham Commons seemed even further away from my north London office. Still, I had tickets and company to nudge me along, so off I went...to the Holy Trinity Church, that almost forgotten spiritual - and political - home of William Wilberforce who campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade.  It seems apt, in retrospect, that I went to the church - for the first time, last night - to see Muscovado, written by the startlingly talented young playwright Matilda Ibini, and produced by Burnt Out Theatre. 

The brand new play had an initial run of ten days as part of Black History Month, but I might as well tell you right off the bat, it should be running at a major venue, backed by Britain's theatre big-wigs, and be seen by a LOT more people.  And frankly, if British Council and other tax-payer funded organisations are listening, they should be sending this one abroad too! 

We were greeted by a cheery atmosphere at the entrance, and my first reaction was surprise, and gladness, at very racially diverse, mixed audience -  in terms of race, ethnicity, class and nationality. Sadly, theatre-going in London - despite all its diversity - can be a strangely mono-racial phenomenon and I often feel marked out as the 'odd' one in most audiences. There were other little welcoming signs: in addition to the usual glasses of wine, there was the option of a warming, lovely rum punch. And much welcome it was after my cold, exhausting day! There was also a stand from the Caribbean Cafe selling the most delicious, restorative, food; ladies, you saved my life! 

As the doors opened and we streamed into the church, we were greeted by Parson Lucy (played by James G Gunn), and other characters from the play were already dotted around, seated in pews, eerily lit by candle light, or slowly weaving their way through the shadows. It can be tricky to perform in a space that isn't a formal theatre, but the director Clemmie Reynolds used the space well, and placing the actors in the church established an early complicity and intimacy with the spectator that made the play itself much more disturbing. 

The play itself unfolds in 1808 on the Fairbranch sugar plantation in Barbados. The timing is key as a year before Wilberforce had successfully pushed through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in British parliament. On the Fairbranch plantation however, the Act brings little change to the slaves' brutalised lives, and commercial calculations of its owners. The set was sparse yet effective, with props moved around, and the church surroundings were used fully to stage, with the audience seated in the pews in the chancel, and a few chairs spilling out into the nave. 

The plot skilfully weaves together multiple characters including the plantation owner's wife and daughter, the local parson, and various slaves. However, Muscovado keeps the owner of the plantation as an off-stage yet all-powerful, sinister presence/absence. It is a masterful choice, signalling the invisible pervasiveness of racial, gender, and class privileges that continue to this day. It is this off-stage evil 'deity' who repeatedly rapes his wife, Kitty, and in a grotesque coming-of-age ritual, is also the invisible rapist of the distraught child-slave Willa (who may/may not be his daughter).

While the most upsetting parts of the play are familiar to us from slave narratives - the whippings, humiliations, brutal violence in guise of discipline, the casual but persistent degradations and dehumanisations of quotidian plantation life - they draw power from a source that is not often seen on screen or stage. Muscovado presents the Fairbranch slaves as fully formed humans, not merely as props for a morality play; they dream, they dare to laugh and love, they find hope and strength in unexpected places, and most importantly they continue to resist by reasserting their humanity in innumerable small acts, words and thoughts of defiance and courage. The script has - perhaps unsurprisingly - been compared to Twelve Years a Slave. 

I would reject that comparison. I found Muscovado more humane and more powerful of the two as it finds little need to make narrative and commercial compromises. Unlike the film, the play offers no easy resolutions. But it also refuses to let historically dominant narratives push slaves to the sidelines of their own history. Instead Muscovado offers one of the few instances where non-white bodies - and even more importantly female black bodies - occupy centre stage, in all their fullness, complexity, grace, and tragedy. 

There has been a long tradition - in writing, art, and performance - of silencing and erasing the female nonwhite body from our stories, stages, screens and imaginations; Muscovado is compelling for its powerful insistence on placing the ignored, fetishized, brutalised black female (and a single male) bodies, lives, and beings at the centre of its narrative. By keeping the sexual and non-sexual violence inflicted on the black female body off-stage, it refuses to let the audience revert to the default practices of fetishization we have been taught and thus distance ourselves.  Furthermore, by similarly keeping Miss Kitty's rapes off-screen, it forces us to examine both the similarities and brutal disparities of gendered violence; and yet by performing Willa's invisible violation on-stage, the play also refuses to excise the role of race in gendered violence.

Moreover, the script fully explores the complex web of relationships, oppression and brutality of slavery and racialised oppressions. It does not shy away from messy hierarchies of gender and race: Kitty is not only fully complicit in the exploitation and brutalisation of slaves, she is also the mastermind who realises the ban on slave trade can be subverted by using her own slaves as 'breeding stock.'  Yet, she is at the same time, also a raped, desperate, isolated wife who can find few allies and fewer friends and can drunkenly order a house slave to help her kill herself.  

Muscovado also confronts the role of the church, and its clergy in upholding, maintaining, and actively promoting slavery, thus also reminding us of the ways organised religion - and religious scriptures - were, are, and can be used to justify the most inhumane and unjust practices and structures. Parson Lucy's hate filled racist rant took on particular resonance when delivered from the Holy Trinity Church's pulpit.  I couldn't help but imagine that Wilberforce himself had likely heard similar justifications of slavery and wondered yet again about how and why some (so few) of us refuse the dominant narratives of our times, and the necessity of such dissent. 

The play is both powerful and disturbing, and more so for its insistence on complexity. The dialogue is both unflinching and at times scorching. Despite a myriad range of characters, the script maintains tight control of each character's trajectory.  If there are some loose ends, such as for Olive's fate, they offer a glimmer of hope, however false, in a bleak setting. The end is shocking, upsetting and unpredictable, perhaps because the motivations of all involved are clear and familiar, but also because the multiple layers of complicity are rarely explored in narratives about slavery, or indeed contemporary race and racism. 

The actors were well suited to their part, and I walked away once again wishing there were more room for talented non-white actors on British stage. Alex Kissin as Asa, DK Fashola as Elsie and Shanice Grant as Olive brought both emotional power and physical vulnerability to their parts. It is a credit to the script, the director and the actors, that despite the brutal setting and theme, it still provoked empathic and not only discomfited laughter. 

The Holy Trinity Church made a symbolically apt setting for the play although the acoustics are not ideal. I do wish however that Muscovado would find a longer run and larger stage for itself: it is ambitious, complex, powerful, and it delivers dramatic, emotional and political punch. That it is the work of a playwright not yet twenty-three is both extraordinary, and exhilarating for the promise it holds for the future. 

Full disclosure: I know the playwright Matilda Ibini who graduated from the Creative Writing programme where I teach. However, she did not take many classes with me and I can certainly claim no hand in her growth and stature as a writer. I am however very privileged to have watched her grow as an intellect and a writer during her degree. 

A Different Angle to Women Reporting on Conflict:Beyond Lara Logan

I must start this piece with a disclaimer (Usual readers: you'll see why this is necessary): At no point do I support or condone sexual violence towards or harassment of Lara Logan or any other journalist or indeed professional trying to do her job.  This piece is NOT about the sexual harassment/violence that women journalists face but rather of the "whitewashing" of the issue in the debate following the much publicized attack on Logan.

As a kid in India, I had family and friends who were/are journalists. Some of these are women. They covered riots, wars, crime, the Union Carbide gas tragedy. They were true heroines and my inspiration.  Growing up in India, writing fiction was not a viable career choice and I always thought that journalism was a respectable, even noble, second option.  Not surprisingly, after finishing my BA, I took up journalism. I worked as a reporter, editor and free-lancer off and on for fifteen years in all sorts of places in Africa, Latin America, India, on stories that ranged from culture to business to human rights abuses.  And I used those skills for a range of media driven organisations: state-owned, private corporation and advocacy groups.

What I learned in those years of reporting convinced me that just as the feminist theories of universal sisterhood had meant the silencing of non-white female experience, the same holds true for the practice of journalism.  Outside India, many of my colleagues were drawn from an internationally motley group, primarily made of Europeans and north Americans.  Most were male. Like many women reporters, I had to work twice as hard to get the "tough" assignments, to prove myself as capable as the men.

But I had a second disadvantage: I also had to prove myself better than the white female reporters. You see, despite self-avowedly "liberal" milieu of the typical international newsroom, an implicit hierarchy still exists. The liberalism of my editors and colleagues meant they pretended to be blind to my race while continuing to assign stories that demonstrated their racist assumptions. And no, I will not go over instances of the prejudice simply because this post is not a whine or a rant!

The colour-blindness played out more oddly at the level of colleagues.  My white male colleagues, for most part, would deal with me without the sexual charge that often informed their interaction with white female reporters. So in a way, my skin colour gave me the added benefit of being sexually invisible as well with the result that I could drink and "hang" with the boys and swap tips without any of the "baggage" that marked similar interactions for my white female colleagues.  This had its good and bad: I developed a great network, felt less sexual pressure, and felt no need to "out-tough" the guys. The bad side was that I felt invisible, was treated by many white female colleagues as the male "runt" of the press club litter and often dealt with visible contempt.  Crossing of race and gender ensured that I was always the outsider.

Yet the same qualities gave me a strange edge while in the field. Even as most Latin Americans recognised me as a foreigner, my dark skin provided a strange protection: identified clearly as not linked to the social, economic, political and military power structures (ie EU/UK/US), and people spoke to me with greater ease.  In Africa and parts of Asia, my Indian-ness was and still is recognised and generally greeted with great affection, something for which I have to thank Nehru's foreign policy and Bollywood films.

Time and time again, locals have stepped in to assist, protect and inform me in ways that were not available to my white colleagues, regardless of gender.  Moreover, my skin colour ensured that I could blend into the crowds in a way white colleagues could not; and sometimes that tiny fig leaf is greater protection than any one can hope for.

There is a more complex aspect to this. Another sort of sexual invisibility protected me in crowds: People often forget that sexual harassment and violence is mostly about power not desire.  Whiteness is an indicator of historic power disparities in many parts of the world (read Fanon, Said, Shohat for the complex arguments of these issues) even though many of us choose to deny or ignore this.  White women thus become symbols of a larger historic imbalance of power than their individual selves, a factor in many of the cases of sexual harassment that not only women reporters but also average travellers face.  In contrast, my colour gives me an unexpected advantage: harassing me provides little redress for historic grievances.  Not surprisingly, I meet camaraderie and respect in places where my white female friends and colleagues only find aggression and harassment. It is an advantage that I have been always been grateful for, though I have done little to win it.

Finally, perhaps there is also a cultural education angle to this. Unlike most of my European and American women friends and colleagues, I have grown up with an acute awareness of power imbalances between genders. There is also greater awareness of cultural codes with clear sense of covering one's body and/or head if necessary without major ideological agenda.  This translates to clothing, body language, even reporting techniques. Even at my most aggressive, I am/was aware of potentially transgressing cultural norms and made subtle adjustments as needed.

This too is a gift - however ambivalent - of growing up in India where we adapt and adjust as needed.  It may also be a result of a postcolonial heritage which has never granted me the privilege of cultural, racial even gendered arrogance/naivete that I often see amongst many European and Americans.  For example, unlike Sabrina Tevernise, I would never assume that walking into an empty hotel and encountering a man would be anything less than risky, regardless of the part of the world. That too is a complex negotiation of culture, race, gender and history!

As a nonwhite women journalist, I recognise that I occupied a strange space when covering international stories. Without ever being told so explicitly by my employers, I knew that my "value" was lower than that of my white female colleagues. And while things have changed in the past decade with increasing number of nonwhite women reporters working for mainstream media, many of the experiences and issues I mention here have not drastically changed as long as one works for a western media outlet.  In frankest of terms, this means that I always recognised that I made less of a story than my American or European colleagues would (For those who question it, compare the media inches granted to Logan vs the temporary detentions of Sonia Verma the Indo-Canadian reporter or Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in Egypt).  This knowledge informed the risks I took as well as the professional decisions I made.

At the same time, I and other nonwhite reporters can access people and places that many "western" journalists can not, regardless of gender. And that is an advantage that few media outlets can ignore, especially as the power balance shifts away from the traditionally western centres of power. 

Perhaps, to reference Toni Morrison, it is the privilege of whiteness (or lack thereof).  I confess that I have used it to my advantage, as have many other women journalists from Latin America, Africa, Asia.  I also have to admit that it has worked to my disadvantage, although more at institutional rather than human/individual levels. 

As Kim Barker astutely noted: "Without female correspondents in war ones, the experience of women there may only be a rumour."  That is indeed true. But to whitewash the ways in which race and culture inform not only women reporters' functioning but also the response they receive is to be equally ingenuous as maintaining a silence on the issues of sexual harassment and violence.  

I hope these thoughts capture some of my own reactions to the debate triggered by the Lara Logan incident. I write in hope of giving voice to a set of women (and very able professional reporters) who are again being whitewashed from a narrative historically dominated by white middle-class women who position their own experience as universal; in making such a whitewashed case, and with greater access to mainstream western media, they also once again silence many of us who share their gender but not their race.

Update: Eyewitness accounts from Tahrir contradict the CBS statement on Lara Logan incident making my impression of Orientalist narrative that evolved around her even stronger. 

I am soooo sick of this one!

Okay, so this one was just basically a bomb waiting to go off: I have been wondering recently about various (sort of and former) friends who live where they do because its safely "white." They tell me that they think their preferred neighbourhood  has good schools, where their kids "learn the national ethos", but frankly when I look at the Ofsted figures, these are the schools that do poorly for one key factor: diversity (read slowly: "good" Home county schools are "great because they are predominantly white").

And then it makes me question why we were ever "friends" at all? Was I their token "race" justification or proof against racism?

Its a bit worrying when you start wondering how racist your friends and lovers really are; and if they have been using you as their token for proving their non-racist credentials:  Kills all respect and affection, I promise you!

But the reason the proverbial cup runneth over tonight of all nights (is that WAAAY too many references pulled together in way too few words or its just me being too bookish?), is getting to the Times page and seeing the ultimate F&CKing cliche! Sigh! Really? Are we f*cking done?

How often do you see me - the brown Indian woman, and no apologies for the language - declaring that there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with white people because they think that Haiti's earthquake happened because Haitians made a pact with the devil? When do I expand that one statement to the general populace? But I guess that measured thinking is the requirement only of the "other" and the marginalised!

And when do we - as in the brown people - start using a single dumb statement as a point of explaining how stupid, prejudiced, backward, illiterate, prejudiced, white people were?
 
See my point? Generalisations are dumb! And prejudiced! And based on a lack of understanding. 

So when I see a headline talking of: "Millions Rush to Cleanse in Filthy Ganges" I want to scream! I want to point out to these little white/middle-class (and yes, believe me, few people who are not either/or get employed or consulted at the Times) insular shits that they need to get over themselves!

That poor brown people like me who think nothing of bathing in a "filthy river" think that "their" reverence for the queen and the royal family is just as  if not more idiotic! Hell, bathing in that filthy river gets me benefits post-mortem but you lot bow to a some human who is supposed to be greater than all others in the land WHY?  So WHY do modern, post-Enlightenment, educated, humans bow and courtesy to these "royals"? Frankly, I will bathe in that filthy river a million times before bowing/courtesying before a pathetic human who has no worth beyond their birth! And PLEASE tell me HOW the Brits can justify that reverence for the monarchy as any more rational and logical than the Hindu partaking of the Mahakumbh (and we are not even getting to religion here!)

One good reason I have always thought for never giving birth to a child on UK soil is that the top post in this country is hereditary! I mean WHAT sort of a loser accepts that as part of human development?  And as a life-long republican, I can't see the point of ever raising a child with that sort of absurd limitation.    But  of course, as the apparently enlightened Brit journo will tell you: certain kinds of "royalty" are okay: funny how the British press is quite happy to talk of their own and other European royalty in laudatory terms but of course anything nonwhite is "oppressive," "backward", etc, etc.  

So yeah, I am sick of this one!

I am SICK of getting the bloody colonial British take on India (and much of the world) over and over again.   And worse still: you know the Brit press's favourite "uncle Tom yes-life-is-so-great-out-here-coz-we-have-no-clue" British Asian take?  Get OVER it: most second and third generation British-Asians (immigrants in general) are people who have no clue about India or the general subcontinent! They don['t speak the language, don't know the traditions or history or literature. Their parents were often illiterate when they got to Britian/USA and hardly in position to talk of their "culture." The first city they often saw was not Delhi or Lahore or Dhaka but London or Manchester.  Its like having a random American be an "authority" on Britain simply because somewhere two or three generations ago, their parentage was Welsh or Scottish or English (funny just how much fun the Brits make of the Americans looking for their heritage but then have no qualms turning the lens the other way). 

Point being, this is not just about cultures as in east or west but also urban vs rural. I find a 3rd generation British-Asian from the midlands is more backward/conservative than a first generation Indian villager who went from a home without electricity to working for NASA in six years (thats IIT graduates for you!).  But that is the point for a different post.

It is the embedded, intrinsic colonial conceit that pisses me off. And I am not quite sure what it would take for the people who peddle it constantly to realise that the empire is over. And frankly such retrogressive headlines don't do any good: the balance of power is shifting. Grow up and deal with it!!!!!

PS: Not particularly erudite, I have to say, but this has been written at the spur of the moment and I am furious (not unusual). I try to not blog when I am angry, but today, I make an exception.