Fiction
Poetry
A Tale of Exile
Literary Monuments
Thotlines
Audience Response
A Lesson from the Book of Mama
A Lesson in Directing
Recently, a lady writing on Kenyan women directors asked me who my first influence in stage arts was. I said quite easily, "O, that would be my mother, she was my first stage director. I was just yea tall."
"Do tell!" she quipped.
"Well I guess you'll just have to read my next Mama's Lesson," I said.
I must have been no more than seven when I saw those two tiny trophies. They didn't look so tiny then. Mama carried them carefully and set them on the table. My big sister and brother had done them proud, having recited poems at an inter-schools competition. In one of those competitions, I still recall my sister reciting in that lilting taarab-style used in Kiswahili recitations, so lovely, so hauntingly.
Then for whatever strange reason, I remember the most, her curtseying at the end of her presentation. It was so... extraordinarily artistic, a performance ritual as simple as the wave of a hand, yet it captivated, please, and confounded my little imagination all at once. A curtsey.
Not too long after, my mother decided I too was old enough to stand on stage. What did I know? I simply followed directions. I was to recite a poem. These were perhaps set pieces picked by higher authority in Nairobi to be recited for the national schools music competition that started from the localities, through division, district, provincial, and on to national level. The competition season must have been grueling for teachers, trying to ensure their school won. Mama was a teacher in the same school all her children attended. Whether it was through her lobbying or a collective decision by teachers, a poem was thrust on the path of my destiny and I was to learn it and recite it.
Mama prepared a rehearsal schedule, and every evening after dinner, I was directed to take my place on "stage", an open space between the kitchen and the corridor. Mama would run the lines with me over and over again until I was perfect. A few days later, she came for rehearsals with two props. Of course I did not know what props were then. I simply followed directions on how to use them. She had cut a pair of glasses and a key out of carton board. The zeal to outperform and outmaneuver the competition drove her to pull out all the tricks of stagecraft known to her.
So there I was, my lines and gestures perfectly rehearsed. I would unleash the key and mime the opening of a door with my first line, "elimu ni ufunguo / katika maisha yetu" - education is the key / along our life's path. The glasses would also come out like a magician's wand; I'd place them on the bridge of my nose, and proclaim with poetic suave that education made us see clearly. I loved this game. Something about standing on that stage and speaking to the world felt just right. I would learn many years down the line that the stage was my home.
I was born to put voices on stage. Characters, stories, slices of life, the realistic, the absurd, the hoped-for, the past that needed forgiving, the present that demanded celebrating, the abstract space inside where memory birthed us, crushed us, moulded us. I became a performing artist; a playwright and director. I immersed myself in my trade, learning through experience, observation, and scholarship. I wanted to be good, nay perfect, as a connoisseur of stagecraft. Perhaps, somewhere in her mother's knowing, Mama knew it all along and ushered me through the doors of my destiny.
"So what are you going to do?" Dad had asked me after I quit my job as a Marketing Executive with a credit card company, a job that came complete with a company car. It was my first permanent job right after college. The quitting of this job is a much longer story than that, to be told another time.
"I'm going to pursue a career in theatre," I said. Dad had no fight left. It was dejavu. We had been down this road before. Years back, soon after high school when I had declared I was going to draw for a living. I'd figured I had some talent in visual arts.
"You want to go to one of those dingy colleges sitting on top of a bar in Nairobi?" Dad had asked, wishing he could do something drastic about this child's derailing life. I hadn't given the slightest thought to the education of a visual artist. My stubborn head had tried to defend my decision. Mama had been distraught, worried sick, fretting over what would become of this child. Suffice it to say, I was bundled back to high school commando-style.
But here I was, five years later, all grown up, having graduated college and held a responsible job for a few months.
"What will you do with theatre?" asked Dad. My only response was, and I will never forget it, because it was spontaneous, uncalculated, honest, out of place and all together irrelevant, "Dad, somebody's got to do it." You would think the world would come to a standstill if someone didn't pursue a career in performing arts.
At a time when there was no diversity of industry, parents did all they could to ensure their children were among the few that went through the eye of the needle of success. One needed to become a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or a profession that obviously brought in income and had a name to it.
A parent needed to be able to say, "Yes, my child is a so-and-so." It was very confusing and vexatious to the brain for one to have to say, "Oh, she's in theatre," or some such vague thing, then watch the deep galleys of puzzle and bewilderment form on the faces of the questioning relatives, gulleys so deep you could cultivate a banana plantation across their foreheads.
Your parents then have to find a way to change the subject quickly to avoid follow-up questions. There were no role models in that field to point out as examples. Perhaps more important, what the hell was theatre or performing arts? Unknown professions that did not involve an office, a title and a monthly salary were dead-end careers.
Things have changed now, and I see a lot of young parents encouraging their kids in diverse professions that were considered unconventional and a sure recipe for failure. Things like sports, fashion and design, music, jua kali and others. Mostly, mothers bear the burden of encouragement through risky choices, rushing their children back and forth for practice or some odd lesson in this-and-that. Its mothers that usher us in through the doors of our destiny, even when they may not fully know it.
At a period full of uncertainty, I kept my word and pursued a field little known. Shortly after, I wallowed in the success of my first professionally produced play, one I co-wrote and directed. It was all over the papers, and I had made it to centerfold page. But I knew the industry well. It was not a job with a steady income. I did not know when I was going to have the next successful production, and this first one had not made me rich. I was still a struggling artist.
It was while tittering on this scary precipice of success and looming uncertainty that I spoke to Mama, explaining to her that I was a performing artists, and that this was my destiny. She said, keep doing what you are meant to do. They are words I have carried with me ever since. She understood, yet was undoubtedly afraid. Whenever I see or hear traces of her fears and doubts about my little-understood profession, I stumble, my heart hurts, I cry, and I pick myself up, knowing that I know that she knows that I am walking the path of my destiny.
Children confident about their abilities don't try to manipulate their parents' support; they already know they have it. A mother will privately cry her heart out while saying goodbye to a child going off to boarding school, She knows it's the right thing, but she will be fearful about the unknown. Mothers stand in that dreadful gap of uncertainty for their children and pray them across the rickety bridge of life.
From the very first day Mama put me on stage as a little girl, directed my first performance, stage-managed the production, and set me off to move audiences, I knew she has always stood invisibly at the starboard of my ship. A ship that has taken me through writing and directing on the stages near and far. Winds that have sailed me through the scholarship of performance, studying Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Soyinka, and most of all, learning to tell the stories of my people. Yet I know the turbulence never ceases, for such is life.
That poem that Mama had me perform decades ago had taken me all the way from a small village school to the magnificence of a stage in Nairobi. There, my rural eyes had seen a few wonders, kids my age wearing watches, ties, and speaking English. It had been a new world, strange and baffling. With my props, made by Mama, my perfect lines, my well-rehearsed gestures, little me had gone on stage and spoken to the world. At the end of it, I had curtseyed, just as perfectly as I had seen my big sister curtsey at the end of her presentation. O, the magic of a curtsey!
I curtsey to Mama, my best audience,
My most desired source of applause,
My reason why I tell my stories.
Curtain Up
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Happy Mother's Day, Mao. Your children love you dearly, perfectly, always.
Mkawasi Mcharo Hall
