Coming Out as a Playwright
Muzzling Myself is No Way to Live
Tomorrow, my play that was accepted by Kali Theatre is in rehearsal and by the end of the week, there will be two performances.
Yes, I’ve made my decision. No more hiding under the cloak of anonymity. I’ve spend too long thinking it was my duty to protect my mother/father/family/friends from any fallout arising from the expression of my beliefs, thoughts and ideas. Thus in important ways, I did kind of muzzle myself. I mean, look what happened to those with similar thoughts to myself — Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin and more recently the brave Bangladeshi bloggers seeking reformation of Islamic interpretations and rules.
Last summer, in large part from the satisfaction of giving and receiving responses to my writing and the writing of others on Medium, (Thank you, dear Readers and Fellow Creators) I found myself sending in a ten page offering to Kali Theatre’s ‘Discovery’ programme. If it was accepted, I’d be given the support of a dramaturg to develop the script into a twenty minute long performance. A modest start indeed. However, I didn’t know what a ‘dramaturg’ was and I hoped I would not inadvertently in an unguarded, excited moment, say, ‘dramaturd’.
Yes, I’m excited. I have so many stories to tell! I am one of those under-represented, under-heard or to be more accurate, I should say, I am one of those silenced voices. Part of my problem has been that I write too much. I mean, in writing to make sense of the world and my experiences in it, I have written short stories, for adults, for children, along with poems, plays, and political analyses. I have two unfinished manuscripts of Sci Fi over 60,000 words long. I look at the notes, files, folders and it feels overwhelming at times.
How did I end up in such a state? I was often under attack. At work, in social activist circles, in my family of origin… And I also, kept prioritising eveyone else. You could say my idealism, my compassion, my determination to make a positive difference as a teacher as a daughter, as an auntie, as a friend, too often took over. Now my need to give voice to myself is overpowering every other movement in my soul.
I need to focus my energy and make my will, the anvil upon which my disparate experiences are turned into meaning-making patterns that configure the resistance to the menacing powers that seek always, to oppress, to exploit, to silence the voice of compassionate humanity which seeks to nurture and to connect.
Breath by breath, word by word, I’ll stitch together, what must be heard. I will take up space that’s been given to too many tall tales of cowboys and Indians, for example
Do you know how many thousands of such crappy films, filled with lies, form the backdrop to the white Anglo-American Empire’s ongoing genocidal crimes? I’ll speak as a woman of Indian heritage. That’s a good start. Especially, I’ll speak of those Indians whose cultural heritage guided them to only make decisions, once they had considered the rights of the children who were yet in the soil, seven generations hence. The Indians who were truly the brave and the free, until the white ghosts landed on their shores along with their diseases and maniacal greed.
I’m coming out. I’m the same fierce fighter who was told, ‘As an undergraduate, you’re not supposed to think’ concerning my philosophy dissertation that I wrote in the voice of Sojourner Truth, addressing the big wig males of white scholarship in their compartmentalised fields of consciousness, imbued throughout by their false sense of superiority. Now, I have several decades worth of thoughts and experiences surviving the White Empire, to share. From the belly of this monster, as Alice Walker famously called it, I’m coming out.
Watch me roar, watch me sing, beyond the oppressive hierarchies, decimating life on earth … let us value the web of life and think… we are but one blink in the eye of Earth’s eternity, let’s protect and create, no longer consume, destroy and decimate.
