Kunapipi XXVI:1

KARINA SMITH
Demystifying ‘Reality’ in Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang

Sistren Theatre Collective’s debut production Bellywoman Bangarang (1978) is considered a landmark in Caribbean theatre. When first staged twenty-six years ago in Kingston’s Barn Theatre, the play caused a stir among theatre-goers for its unmasking of social taboos surrounding sexuality, teenage pregnancy, and domestic violence. Based on the life stories of Sistren members, Bellywoman Bangarang explores the inequalities Jamaican girls face as they mature from childhood to adulthood. Through a series of flashbacks, Sistren members’ childhood experiences of growing up in rural communities in colonial Jamaica are told through the lives of four female characters: Didi, Yvonne, Gloria and Marie. The characters’ stories, like those of the women who formed Sistren, are intrinsically linked through the shared experiences of difficult mother/daughter relationships; violent encounters with men; having babies in their teens; and the suffocating, and often prejudiced, attitudes of the local community. Folk songs, children’s games, rituals, riddles and character ‘transformations’, described by Rhonda Cobham as ‘ritual frameworks’ (235), are used to preface episodic scenes in which the characters’ stories are enacted, and, like much Caribbean theatre, drumming sets the pace throughout the performance. During the creative process behind Bellywoman Bangarang, Sistren members were encouraged to re-visit their childhoods whilst participating in a series of drama games designed to elicit their personal testimonies. Trust between Sistren members was essential as each woman unburdened herself to the group in the process of creating a production that became ‘less a reflection of life than a demystification of it’ (Cobham and Ford-Smith xv). Thus, the workshop phase pre-production was, in many ways, more important for the women in Sistren than performing before an audience. However, the physical presence of the women’s bodies on stage was arguably more significant for Jamaican decolonisation than verbal disclosure behind closed doors. Sistren members, performing their own stories before mainly middle-class audiences, intervened in and contested oppressive discourses that naturalise hierarchies of power based on gender, race, and class. This essay, then, looks in detail at the sophisticated use of ‘ritual frameworks’ in Bellywoman, which operate as symbolic representations of naturalised hierarchies; as strategically placed disruptions which juxtapose the female characters’ ‘reality’ with its social construction; and as strategies of survival against neo/colonial control.