“Make Me A Houri” a Spoken Word play by Emina Ashman – a Review
It’s freezing. I’m jetlagged. One thing I’m grateful for (as I acclimatise to Melbourne winter after five weeks of warmer weather in South Africa) is the company of independent arts scene. Art and music are my favourite entry points back into Australia. They are the reason I stay and thrive.
I try never to read theatre or film reviews and blurbs. I prefer to walk in and experience a production on its own terms. I like to immerse myself in an experience, allowing the work to expose my own hidden assumptions and taken-for-granted values or prejudices. I will attend a post-show QnA, just in case I have some burning questions; but, more often than not, I simply attend so I can connect directly with the creatives in real life. I love the contrast of the actor at work on stage with the actor after work and in conversation. It helps me to process and return back to reality from the world I escaped into during the play. That is exactly how I approached ‘Make Me A Houri”.
Why did I choose to watch this show and not another? Well, I have a very soft spot for La Mama Courthouse Theatre. I love stories by women about women. Also, I have met the playwright and lead, Emina Ashman and something about her piqued my curiosity. We seem to be drawn to the same circles and so I wanted some artistic insight. I do know the set designer, Lara Week, quite well; and I am familiar with Nisha Joseph’s work as a comedic performer. So, for all these personal and professional reasons, I was keen to see how their work came together collectively.
Based on my knowledge of their individual work and ethics, I was fairly certain I was in for a treat. There is also the fact that I did catch the word ‘Sufi’ somewhere in relation to the play. As a person who is naturally inclined towards the mystical and the spiritual, I was keen, especially since a recent encounter with Senegalese Sufis, led by a woman. Even though I had no definite idea what the word “Houri” meant, I entered La Mama Courthouse theatre curious and open to the story which unfolded in “Make Me A Houri”. I love the title: it is a command; an assured and confident demand – and I love women and stories about women who know exactly what they want and set about to achieve it, regardless of social prescript. Having recently returned from travel, my own “live your life, sister!” attitude is turned up to the highest setting.
The two-hander opens with the cast already on stage as the audience files in and takes their seats. As we look out before us, everything spells death and funeral but, somehow, feels alive. The lead, dressed in a flowing off white shift dress and lies face upwards, as if placed in a coffin, on top of what resembles a sarcophagus – but is in actuality a domestic two-door fridge. Sitting at her head, as though watching over her while dressed in a contrasting blue silk trouser and top combination, is the support actress (Nisha Joseph playing Sofia). The stage floor is covered in a thick layer of brown leaves. The only other imposing piece of stage furniture is an antique kitchen cupboard. The bizarre and banal converge viscerally. The stage is lit with blues and lavender. We are clearly in a liminal space, a place between heaven and earth, a place of contemplation, self-reflection and reminiscence of a life lived.
The poetic dialogue delivers me straight into the heart and feeling space. This is not the kind of play that gives you room or time to hide away in the thinking or head space. This spoken word play speaks eloquently in an emotionally intelligent.
From my experience, it is about the sentiments and yearnings which accompany the experience of coming of age as an Other who is positioned on the outskirts of Whiteness. There, desire is driven by what one can never quite attain but that which one still deeply yearns for, in only the way a young adolescent yearns. There is a sense of pining for adventure, excitement, freedom. A pining that young girls are subjected to as respectability politics shrinks our worlds from an expansive horizon into a hardened and dried out grape. Is this why we yearn for men, for boyfriends? So we can live vicariously through their wild abandon and freedom?
The storyline threw me back to my private school days in Africa. As a Black African daughter from a respectable family, I felt the pressure to conform. Yet, I just wanted to experience life and freedom the way White Europeans showed us and defined it for us in Hollywood movies I consumed and, when they turned up in Africa, in my up-close and personal encounters with seemingly carefree and sun kissed shabbily dressed hitchhiking backpackers. It was presented as a world beyond but a world the middle class elite aspired to inhabit. It is the colonial conundrum, the unattainable attainable, the reason why I studied so hard to attend university overseas.
As I sat in the audience, allowing Eshram’s poetic verse to jog memory wrapped in sentiment, I remembered those first years of university. I recalled indulging in the heady taste of a freedom that closely resembled the fantasy I had built up in Africa. The fantasy of the European world of freedom and independence. A freedom that tasted so good but felt so finite as it was closely reigned in by the tight tug of an internalised respectability politics.
Although I stayed out late, partied hard, drank and indulged in a few one night stands and lots of kisses with beautiful men, I also had the very clear understanding that this was a brief phase. I knew I was “being naughty”. I knew that “real life” looked far more respectable than this. Yet, I did not know who had taught me this and why.
Every society has its own version of respectability politics. I related to the show through my own Christian influenced upbringing in southern Africa’s elite Black middle class. Beyond that framework, I understood the lead character’s motivation through the lens of monogamy: that experience of desire and longing for a one true love, a one special someone who is true and loyal to you alone, forever and ever, Amen. It’s like bell hooks writes in one of her books on love, Feminism teaches us one thing but we’re still kind of hooked on the romantic ideal and the gender roles. I could definitely relate to the play’s revelation of some of the things and lengths we women will subject ourselves to for eternal and everlasting love. Seasoned polyamorists aside, that is a universal experience. I certainly came away with a contextualised definition of what it takes to become a Houri.
In this day and age, with the undue burden Islam bears to constantly explain and correct itself, it is probably best to encourage the audience to reach their own conclusions. Overall, the play was a delight from the set design and costumes (Lara Week), the perfect use of lighting (Shane Grant) to bring emphasis and nuance at just the right moment of the exquisite poetic dialogue (Emina Ashman). The direction by Stephanie Ghajar, amongst other touches, brought out the sisterly rapport between the actors (Emina Ashman and Nisha Joseph) and the sound composition design (Sidney Millar) was perfectly executed to highlight the themes the play cleverly elaborates upon without giving into the Western gaze.
Wonderful work all around. The production closes on August 3rd 2019.
