Duenne by Paloma Mohamed

Introduction by Mark Tumbridge

Paloma Mohamed began her higher education at the University of Guyana, moving to Harvard University and then the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, to work on her Masters and complete her PhD.Paloma-cover1 She returned to the University of Guyana in 2008 as Director of the Centre for Communications Studies. In 2012, she was the first woman to be elected Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. As a senior lecturer specialising in communications strategy, sociology and social psychology and communications research to television production and behavioural change communications. She is also a prolific author; the publication of Duenne takes works either written or edited by Mohamed to a total of ten, including poetry, plays and analyses on communications and the media, with titles such as Condoned by Our Silence: Issues Impacting the Abuse of Children in Guyana (2000), Caribbean Mythology and Modern Life: 5 One Act Plays for Young people (2004) as well as Listen Up – A Source Book on Environmental Issues for Secondary schools (2004). Prior to Duenne was Communication, Power and Change in the Caribbean (2012) while Notes on the Media in Guyana is forthcoming. Some of her literary titles appear not only on the CXC syllabus throughout the Caribbean, but also in a number of other universities across the globe. She has also published essays and articles related to her specialized field in The Journey of Caribbean Studies and the Arts Journal. Mohamed has not only been the supervisor or executive producer for over twenty documentaries, one feature film and eleven short films, but she is also regarded as the developing force behind Guyana’s cutting edge cinematic brand CineGuyana. Furthermore, she is currently Chair of the Theatre Guild playhouse in the Kingston district of Georgetown, is a board member of Moray House Trust, and holds the directorship of the President’s Film Endowment. Mohamed now holds a collection of awards that recognise the significance of her academic work and cultural contribution – these include being three times winner of the of the Guyana Prize for Literature, a Cacique Award from the National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago, a Medal of Service from the Government of Guyana, and most recently, an award from the City of New York for Service to the City.
Paloma Mohamed’s Duenne is the first play to be published by the Caribbean Press. As such, readers will engage with it in a different way from the novella, poetry and other forms among the titles that have been published so far. As a play, it is given flesh and set in motion when it is performed. One will no doubt find oneself One will no doubt find oneself imaginatively reconstructing the stage, along with the many elements of the play, such as the visual and auditory aspects, that are normally manifest in a production.
The play’s background and context attests to its literary credentials – it has been successfully staged three times, won The Guyana Prize Literature in 1998, and has now become a Guyana Classic. By 1996 Mohamed had written most of the plays in her oeuvre. Her first, Reggae Marley, directed by Al Creighton (Thomasson 447), appeared in 1989 at the Cultural Centre with a cast of about fifty persons, and from then she was regularly writing two or three plays a year for the fifteen years up to the appearance of Duenne. The play therefore benefits from her years of experience and technical acumen in the theatre. Duenne was staged for the first time in December 2002 at the Centre for Creative and Festival Arts in Trinidad, directed by Kentillia Lewis, and has subsequently only been staged on a further two occasions. The Centre in Trinidad also influenced the play in terms of style and technical features. In reference to these two aspects of her work, Mohamed has said that the play marks a change, “dividing my career into two distinct eras”. Her dramatic works through the early to mid 90s were in keeping with the popular theatre of the day. Reviewing those years in 1998, Al Creighton referred to “the English drawing room dramas” which had formerly been “prevalent in the Caribbean”. These, Creighton continues, “returned with a vengeance in the Guyanese theatre of the nineties. Eighty percent of the plays were realistic living room domestic dramas” (493). Mohamed became not only increasingly bored with the mainstream, but also disillusioned with the technical restrictions of working at the Cultural Centre – at the time, the more intimate space of Kingston’s Theatre Guild, which would have been more conducive to her work, had been closed. Even her work in popular theatre had a psychological aspect to it, but the work from 1996 enters a wholly different realm. At the Centre in Trinidad, her exposure to the work of Derek Walcott and Dennis Scott of the Jamaica School of Drama as well as other friends and acquaintances in the Centre prompted the technical aspects and styling of Duenne which she refers to as “experimental expressionism,” a “work in phantasma”. Speaking of Duenne Mohamed says, “I am working in a mode where I am shifting between worlds and consciousnesses, and blurring the lines between what is considered to be real and imaginary. All of my work since then has been in this vein.” One staging of the play in Trinidad completely rearticulated the framework upon which the play had been written. Directed by Geneva Grepaulsingh, Duenne was refracted through a Hindu lens in which the figure of divinity was represented by Shakti, the many-handed mother goddess and source of power and creativity within the pantheon. In addition to the three characters written into the play, the cast of about twenty students moved through the stage to create the effect of an embodied world. This creative reinterpretation shifted the play away from its Christian foundation and invoked themes of rejuvenation, reincarnation and retribution.
Duenne marks the beginning of Mohamed’s interest in folk and how it might be enmeshed with not only mythology, but also modern thought. Maureen Warner-Lewis’ Guineas’s Other Suns (1991) analyses the socio-cultural formations derived from the Yoruba and their manifestation in Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean. She says that the “dwen” is “identifiably African, […] the Kalabari (Efik Ibibio) term for the spirit of the dead which haunts human environs”. What Warner-Lewis has to say about this creature is worth quoting at length.
“In Trinidad, the dwen is the soul of a child who dies before being christened or accepted into the community of Christ. In keeping with their failure to find integration within the human community, dwen are faceless and wear broad shady straw hats. In St Lucia, the soul of an aborted foetus becomes a bolom. In all these cases, the dead children appear at night and make disturbing noises. These serve to nag the conscience of adults and lure living children into the forest, where they lose their way. Sometimes they ask to be taken along a road, but become increasingly too heavy for the bearer to manage. In west Africa, it is believed that bands of these children roam about, frolic, or perform mischievous actions to annoy adults.” (Warner-Lewis 180)
Mohamed’s movement away from popular theatre and inclusion of elements of Caribbean mythology and lore in Duenne is in keeping with what refers to as “an increasing consciousness about my Caribbeanness and beginning to own that identity as a Caribbean person and as a Caribbean woman” (Interview). The folk as well as technical influences of the olay arise out of her contact with the work of Dennis Scott in Trinidad. Further detail about the mythology behind the title of the play is covered in the synopsis below.
Readers may also find the play chiming with Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In Duenne, the figure of divinity, IT, refers to Aisha as Beloved. Furthermore, the theme of the play’s ending can be related to Morrison’s novel, but to some extent there is also an inversion with respect to the attitude of Madonna/Sethe. It would be stretching the idea to connect the two works beyond these two similarities. Mohamed says that although she had been reading Toni Morrison’s work in the early to mid-nineties any association between the two was not conscious (Ibid.).
Mohamed originally conceptualised the play based on continuity – rather than dividing the whole into scenes, the audience would experience an unbroken, flowing, singular “scene”. However, Mohamed’s awareness of the technical and practical requirements of staging a play led her to structure it with the scenes that mark the text today; the cast would need time to change costume and the breaks in the play would create tension and allow the audience to pause for effect. The scenes more or less divide the play according to the time-shifts in the narrative, for example, the opening scene begins at midnight, the second starts in the morning – the expectations are scenes three and four, but perhaps time might be signified here by the lighting. All the productions have so far divided the play in this manner through Mohamed notes that:
“Equally, a director could pck the play up and stage it as one continuous piece, absolutely; if it was thought through carefully, if they were not concerned about time, but about the existential questions it raises. Their emphasis would be more on the phenomena of being pregnant”. (Interview)
This play’s meaning becomes superabundant when one begins to consider pregnancy, a child’s acquisition of language and thus consciousness, and the agency of both the mother and child. Aisha speaks early in the play from a realm which seems to be prior to conception – thus, IT, the voice of the creator, says to Aisha, “You choose when you go and to whom you go. But GO you MUST” (Mohamed 2013, 19), “You do not exist” (22), and Aisha eventually accepts that “for the moment an idea is exactly what I choose to be” (24). This positions the text in an imaginative world which allows Aisha some agency. Although as a not-yet-conceived child she has not entered the symbolic order of language, she is still given a voice and the ability of selection. The play allows the audience to observer Aisha’s move from the semi-autonomous position through to Madonna being pregnant with Aisha. The displacement of the child’s voice and consciousness engages with a dialectic between inside and outside, which is present elsewhere in the text. This does no operate as a simple binary or inversion, but a very complex, nuanced and interconnected set of articulations and movements. Another example would be the large “glass or cellophane sphere” (34) suspended from the ceiling above the stage area – the mother’s body is ‘externally represented, that is, outside or removed from Madonna her- self. Mohamed expected this “growing belly” to go some way towards showing the movement of time in the play as well as to signal Madonna’s “impending confinement” (Interview). Incidentally, the three productions of the play referred to above were unable to find a way of reproducing this sphere on or above the stage, so the text outstrips the stage in this respect. Another way in which this dialectic manifests itself is through the positioning of Aisha who has an inside/outside relationship with regard to capitalism; outside the system, prior to the pregnancy, Aisha looks “down there” (Mohamed 2013, 19) amid the “mayhem” of “DEMOCRACY” (16). We are, of course, unable to position ourselves ‘outside’ the system in this way – we are forced to operate within it and change it from the inside. Mohamed refers to the early work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as a theoretical underpinning for the agency inscribed in the play. In her essay Feminism and Critical Theory, Spivak refers to “a tangible place of production in the womb [which] situates the woman as an agent in any theory of production,” (Spivak 106) which reinforces the agency of not only Aisha, but also Madonna. The mood and ambience set up by the imagery of the text emphasises the close, intimate fecundity of pregnancy, and this is bound up with the structure of the plot to produce a coherent play that wastes no words.
An important development in terms of contextualising Duenne occurred off-stage over a year before the play was written. In June 1995, the passing in Guyana of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act brought abortion into the spotlight as an issue that playwrights, artists and other social commentators addressed. Part of the play’s success is its treatment of emotive themes and issues while remaining intimate but thoroughly unsentimental. One hopes that this publication will inspire productive critical attention for the play; it should be clear from the above introduction that a whole spectrum of perspectives could be constructed to elaborate and tease out its meanings. Women writers of the Caribbean are still, all too easily, passed over by the critics, in the Caribbean and abroad. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Paloma Mohamed’s Duenne to both Guyanese and an international audience with the hope that we may, one fine day, see the play on the boards again.

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