DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN
ON SATURDAY night, I attended Iere Theatre Company's excellent production of A Brighter Sun, a novel by Samuel Selvon which was adapted for the stage by Eintou Pearl Springer.
In Naparima Bowl, there was that magical moment when the house goes dark and the stage illuminates. The set, designed by Narad Mahabir, was one of the more detailed I've seen in a long time. There was an old wooden house with its familiar doors topped by spaces for air between slats of wood and, of course, a curtain blowing in the doorway.
Here, Rita and Joe, an African couple (played by Harmony Farrell and Kurtis Gross), lived next to the main characters, Tiger and Urmilla, two adolescent and recently married Indians (played by Jitindra Mewahlal and Vandana Maharaj).
Their space was represented as an ajoupa or mud hut without furniture, except for a peerha or small stool, a hammock for baby Chandra and sugar bags on the floor for sleeping. Finally, there was the Chinese grocery shop, the centre for village goods, news, gossip and drinking.
I loved the small touches; the poui tree behind the house fronts, nearly shed of its flowers (which Rita would then sweep from her yard), and the mountains in the back reminding that the play takes place in Barataria, at the foothills of the Northern Range. I've been researching Indian women's historical clothing and additionally appreciated Urmilla's clothes, and costume design by Chandra Rattan and Geneva Drepaulsingh.
Selvon brilliantly manages to make the novel amusing and serious at the same time. Tiger, married at just 16, has no idea how to be a man, but knows he must identify and behave like one. For him, manhood is smoking, drinking, planting his garden, and dominating Urmilla.
In the play, Sookdeo tells him he should "gettam" house, land and cow, and "haveam plenty boy chile" for 'girl chile no good, only bring trouble on yuh head." Tiger dreams about learning to read so that he could escape the life determined for him. The entire novel is about his struggle with expectations of manhood.
Urmilla is negotiating the complexity of meeting expectations of Indian womanhood and obeying Tiger, and expressing her own ideas and ambitions. She forms a relationship with Rita and their cross-race friendship helps Urmilla through birth, motherhood and the troubles of marriage.
Indeed, when Tiger beats Urmilla, as Joe often beats Rita, and Urmilla miscarries the boy child for whom Tiger longed, it is Rita who breaks the news to Tiger that the baby was born dead. For Rita, her friendship with Urmilla is one that enables her to express her decision-making power over the contents of her house as she faces down Joe.
I wondered about what it meant to show such male domination and violence to the secondary school students who attended sold-out shows. It might have been the first scenes of domestic violence which Ziya has witnessed, and I thought of how little has changed between the novel's setting in the 1940s and today.
Among those women in the 2018
