Body language

...But when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

— Audre Lorde

There’s no poetry after the Kathua girl, a friend said. Grief is often unable to find the correct words. This review of Wombs of Fire , which is yet another story of gendered violence, is perhaps an agonised attempt at reminding myself to sing in the dark times, and to sing with rage.

Written and performed by Rehane Abrahams and directed by Sara Matchett, Wombs of Fire is playing at Cape Town’s Baxter theatre. This is their second collaboration, after they founded The Mothertongue Project in 2000 with the production of What the Water Gave . This powerhouse production tells the stories of three women as it travels space and time and uncovers the painful history of Cape Colony’s womb of fire that created South Africa. Highlighting the female body as a site for disruption and decolonisation, Abrahams gives a stunning solo performance as her body narrates a tale of violence, using nothing but her agility and a pole on stage. The vocals by Lukhanyiso Skosana evoke a soundscape that haunts you much after the show is over. The team has created an embodied mode of storytelling that is raw, honest and urgent. The performance was invited to the International Theatre Festival in Kerala early this year after it opened to critical acclaim at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2017.

Patriarchal violence interweaves episodes from the lives of these women — Draupadi’s treatment at the game of chess in Mahabharata; Grote Katrijn van Pulicat, the first recorded female convict, as she journeys across India and Batavia (1681-83); and Zara (1648-71), a Khoekhoe woman, whose body was mutilated by the Dutch East India Company officers after she took her own life. The bodies of both Pulicat and Zara are marked by colonialism and empires that use such barbarity against ‘other’ communities.

It was Matchett’s residency at Kalakshetra in Manipur that brought her politically and theatrically closer to Heisnam Kanhailal’s adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Draupadi’. When Draupadi is humiliated in the court by the Kauravas, Lord Krishna appears mysteriously in an answer to Draupadi’s prayer and saves her from being disrobed in public. Devi’s Draupadi , however, is set against the Naxalite peasant rebellion of the 1960s, which was a revolt by lower castes against the exploitation by the rich, upper-caste landowners and sexual harassment of tribal women under the aegis of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). When Kanhailal adapted the story for the stage in 2000, the character of the tribal protagonist Dopdi was played by his wife Sabitri. Towards the end of the play, she appeared naked, questioning and challenging the idea of the sacredness of the female body as well as drawing attention to repeated cases of rape and violence in Manipur. Dopdi screaming ‘confront my body’ at the soldier in one of the scenes is said to have inspired the 2004 nude protest in Imphal, against the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama Devi. But, whereas Draupadi needs a male saviour in Mahabharata, the protagonist in Devi’s feminist version is a tribal woman who does not aspire or hope for such a thing. In her foreword to the English translation of Devi’s story, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remarks that “rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and the divine, the story insists that this is the place where male leadership stops”.

Blood lines: Written and performed by Rehane Abrahams, the play is about three women — including Draupadi of the Mahabharata — whose lives are scarred by violence

Wombs of Fire , too, strips away false hopes of finding support in institutional network. It lays bare ruthless and deeply ingrained structures of patriarchal state oppression that torture women’s bodies for communal and racial wars. Its feminist politics isn’t individual and solitary, it is based on solidarities arising from shared pain. It forces the audience to accept that there is no easy theoretical framework for comfortable activism. “It is a roar, not a lament” — Matchett and Abrahams clearly state.

The last scene is fiery and unapologetic in its passion. Having peeled off the mask that had kept her gorgeous curly hair tied up until then, Abrahams climbs the pole, soars high, with magnanimous silver wings that are further amplified in their shadow on the wall. She laughs with abandon, looking down from the top. It is Hélène Cixous’s Medusa with her loud, joyful and disruptive laughter. Cixous asked for women to write themselves, write with their bodies and write other women in order to bring them back into the world and history that has repeatedly shunned them to the margins. Abrahams has scripted three women back in the history, and the laughter is as much of exhaustion as it is of liberation.

( Wombs of Fire runs at Baxter Theatre Centre till May 5, 2018 )

Swati Arora is an Andrew W Mellon postdoctoral fellow in performance studies, currently based in Cape Town

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