The drama of my life:When an overjoyed Yasmin Alibhai-Brown won a prize for playing Juliet, she had no idea it would blow her family apart.

The drama of my life
When an overjoyed Yasmin Alibhai-Brown won a prize for playing Juliet, she
had no idea it would blow her family apart. Now she's back on stage to tell
the story
Published : 18 February 2005
It all started two years ago when I met Dominic Cooke, the erstwhile
associate director of the Royal Court Theatre. He invited me in to talk to
new playwrights about multiple identities, the sensibility of an immigrant,
the nation in flux and how I felt the creative arts were responding.
The playwrights were flushed with ideas and enthusiasms, cool, fresh,
challenging. I put to them my critique of multi-culturalism as espoused by
this state. It had led to wilful, woeful ignorance and volitional
estrangements between the peoples of this nation, leaving black and Asian
Britons playing marbles in the ghetto (in separate clans) and many white
Britons feeling disengaged and indignant. Meanwhile, British institutions
carry on blissfully, white and inward-looking. Our culture is officially
Balkanised, a trend I abhor partly because of my experiences growing up in
Uganda, my homeland.
Out there, my brilliant teachers had led me to the best of playwrights.
Makerere University in the capital, where I studied literature, was an
intellectual powerhouse of world repute. (I could almost hear them think:
"Seriously? In Africa?") We were stimulated to feel awe as we entered the
house of living words. Every time I make for my seat in a theatre, my blood
quickens and I relive that kick.
My old drama books are yellowing now, untouched for more than 35 years.
There, among about 150 paperbacks, are texts by Tagore and Wole Soyinka,
Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, The Insect Play
by the Czech writers Josef and Karel Capek (Josef died in Belsen),
Chekhov's The Three Sisters, Gorky's The Lower Depths, Three Plays for
Puritans by Shaw and most of Shakespeare. All have been annotated
furiously, in pencil, in squiggles I can no longer read.
I got to act, too, in some of the great classics. At 14, I was Nora in
Ibsen's A Doll's House, at 15 the impish Cleopatra in Shaw's Caesar and
Cleopatra and a manic Abigail in The Crucible. I was pitiless to Shylock as
Portia, and a not very convincing Viola in Twelfth Night. There was an
empty room beneath our flat, full of beasties. There, I tied ribbons under
the bust and round my head and acted parts - Miranda, Desdemona, Cleopatra
- alone, a melodrama-fest sometimes producing real tears, the nascent
actress with her extravagant, profligate yearnings.
I have photographs of a superb production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by
semi-professional players at Kampala's National Theatre, the hub of
cultural life in the capital. With friends (two Muslims, one Parsee, one
Hindu), I was a fairy in a cropped top and skirt made of green chiffon
petals. Even now, when we meet, someone turns into a babbling Bottom or
reproduces Puck's mischievous rhymes - old thespians in a kebab house.
Shakespeare remains for us the greatest inspiration, a lover whose voice
never ages.
It was this engrossing relationship with Shakespeare, I told the Royal
Court writers, which caused a lethal explosion, leaving scars that will
never heal. I was young, fiery and innocent. How was I to know that a
school play (Romeo and Juliet), would end in an almighty scandal that would
take me off the boards for ever? Until now.
The stage was where I felt released from a crushingly painful home life and
intolerable conventions. I had real talent, they said. One night 37 years
ago, I rushed home, an elated Juliet, carrying a precious acting award that
would have led to acting school in London. But these possibilities were
callously snuffed out by my family, my father most of all, who punished me
with a deadly silence. He, who loved Lear, never spoke to me again. He died
four years later. Fathers and daughters: a running theme in Shakespeare.
Dominic Cooke moved to the RSC and offered me a one-woman show based on
this tragedy within the tragedy. For 10 months, I have been transported
back to that hellish moment. My director Gavin Marshall, sharp, perceptive,
has forced me back into the cell of buried emotions and grief. It has been
shattering. Demons lurk and cause havoc in places you have not attended to
in order to go on with life. I am back with Shakespeare on my tongue.
Imagine that. After so many years and all that unfinished business.
This is a story about race, sex and class in that paradise that was Uganda
from where we were ignominiously chucked out by Idi Amin. He was a
monstrous man - cannibalistic, brutish, unpredictable, part child and part
savage, Caliban. We were the self-controlled, cautious, nifty merchants,
decorous fiddlers of accounts, hoarders of wealth, excellent bribers,
family and community creatures governed by manners. We thought of ourselves
as pearls before swine. And they called us the Shylocks of East Africa.
Asians wanted stakes in that gorgeous land, but many could only deal with
black Africans as inferiors. Black Ugandans grew, unjustly, to despise our
entire race. We had been part of a system of unspoken apartheid set up by
the British. Whites on top of the high hills, blacks in the sunless pits,
Asians in the middle.
For Asians, the wheels of life rolled predictably: birth, school, business,
marriage, children, school, business... and into this existence came
subversive forces. Elvis and Cliff first, then the Sixties, which wafted
over carrying Twiggy, op art, miniskirts and The Beatles. Hippies arrived
with unwashed white feet, never seen before. Jim Barrows, an American
draft-dodger who taught at our school, was a cross between Dean Martin and
James Dean. He said he'd been one of the divers in Dr No, and the sight of
him tickled parts we didn't know we had.
Kali and Gopi Gupta (not their real names), a couple from Calcutta, were
teachers and exceptional actors. Kali was voluptuous, walked with a swing.
Gopi had Paul Scofield's chocolate voice. They starred in the Dream
production at the National. Kali was a spiteful, whimsical Titania, Gopi a
charismatic, manipulative Oberon, and the jealousies they acted out seemed
to reflect their own flaming marriage. Can you imagine how exciting that
was for us, their pupils? We, who knew little about sex and possessive love?
This was the period of decolonisation, but with none of the abysmal
rejectionism of contemporary cultural politics. Nobody in Uganda wanted to
burn books by wicked Westerners. It was an expansive time, when ideas
opened up so that Third World artists could come into the canon and joust
with imperial narratives. The Black, Asian and white intelligentsia
believed that Shakespeare's plays were crucial for emerging nations.
But the end of empire also brought uncertainties and apprehension. Asians *
* were fearful that lascivious black men wanted to ravage their women. Some
black men were demanding the right to marry Asian girls and acting lewdly
when we were on the streets. We felt ever more alienated from the country
we loved, its heartbeat, its drumbeats producing only terror. Remember
Prospero's rage when Caliban tries to violate Miranda. It was the final act
of barbarism. For us, it was the final imagined horror.
My father seemed different, complex and awesome, because he hurled himself
against the surf waves of convention. He was an adventurer, a serial
failure in business, wilful, unreliable, but he appeared to understand
politics and injustice and literature. I thought. Life at home was always
confusing, infused with the suppressed fury of a disappointed marriage, the
misery of misfits. Until I was 13, I slept between my parents, ever more
sour to each other, like the air they breathed out.
School was my sanctuary. Run by Mr Raval, a much-respected headmaster, who
had a black and orange smile (he chewed pan all day) and teeth like old
stones in a graveyard. He saw everything. He chastised me for not being a
regular, trembling Asian schoolgirl. He was right, too, not to trust me to
be good.
We had a new drama teacher, beautiful, tall and blonde. Joyce Mann decided
to shake things up by producing Romeo and Juliet for a drama competition.
She, a white woman, decided to cast black Africans as the Montagues and
Asian Africans as the Capulets. It was radical, the right thing to do, but
naive. She didn't know just how deeply divided we were.
I was Juliet. Romeo was like a ballet dancer, had smooth reflective skin
and treacle eyes. Mrs Mann told me recently that she had to train us to
kiss properly on the mouth, alone in a classroom away from horrified eyes.
I had excised this from my memory, possibly because I was moved by John,
there was an erotic charge. The play was lauded, and I won the best actress
prize. The local newspaper, The Uganda Argus, pronounced me an enchanting
Juliet. I felt amazing.
On my way home, going up the dark staircase with its fetid stench, I had
heard ululations that started up on the street getting louder. A thief had
been spotted, the crowds were calling out to each other to come and sport
with him before they kicked him or burnt him to death. Not even this
quelled my joy on this night as I burst into our small sitting-room.
Why were they sitting as if someone had died? My mother was sobbing. Male
relatives came towards me with steely eyes, grabbed my shoulders, banged my
head against the wall, slapped me. They called me a slut, a polluter of
their good name. What good name? How dare he die before we had resolved
anything? What kind of father does that?
We Asians are old Elizabethans. Romeo and Juliet happens every day in our
communities. When Capulet tells his daughter she is his to do as he wishes,
we know what that means. Young lovers howl, run away, sometimes die because
they have dared to cross over, out of race, class, faith, village, caste,
ethnicity. Do the parents love their children? Yes, so much they can kill
them for their own good.
As I started discussing this with my director, Gavin Marshall, he suddenly
understood why Shakespeare, this dead white male, means so much to
immigrants from the old colonies. We are living his plays, not merely
watching them. Cecily Berry, the voice coach who helped me, goes further -
she believes that a comfortable, white, middle-class life has distanced
people from the profundities and experiences in Shakespeare.
Look at the stalking threats on the streets in the plays, the brawls,
knives and angry young men. In Othello, the eruption of violence between
Cassio, Roderigo and Montano rocks society, which feels shaky, vulnerable.
Lady Montague frets that Romeo might have been in another fracas. Think of
Stephen Lawrence's mother Doreen, and other mothers of black and Asian and
white boys, praying every time the proud men get dressed to strut. Will
they come back dead? Whence the swagger and bloodlust?
Julius Nyerere, the socialist president of Tanzania after independence,
translated Macbeth into Swahili, and theatre groups took the play to the
villages to get the people to understand the nature of ruthless ambition.
Troilus and Cressida has the most moving testimonies on the destiny of a
mixed-race child. Antony and Cleopatra spins around the dangerous
intoxication of the East, which destroys the most Roman of Romans. In 1930,
at the Savoy Theatre, with Paul Robeson as Othello and Peggy Ashcroft as
Desdemona, critics walked out and the audience hissed when they touched.
Race riots in this country have been triggered by what we may call the
Othello situation.
Every day in our streets, Othellos walk proudly with their Desdemonas. They
hear the insults, they fight the fights for their right to do so. Bright,
open white women have long been drawn to black men who can dance, dress,
seduce, love and talk like Othello. The first confident band of Caribbean
men arrived in their hats and suits after 1948, and they were soon in the
dance halls, champions of the jitterbug, irresistible to women emerging
into the light after the long wartime years.
I once sat in on a lesson on Othello in a London secondary school. Some
white boys said Desdemona was stupid for trusting a black. They are no
good. The girls think these guys are cool. Then they beat them up, get them
pregnant, "kick them about, have other girlfriends..."
And of course it can end badly. Othello does destroy sweet Desdemona. And
though this is not said openly, there are terribly disenchanted white women
who hoped for better from their black lovers. Men disappoint women much too
much of the time. But when the man is black and the woman white, race
intensifies the emotions, poisons meanings.
Oh yes, Shakespeare's truths are still alive and all-pervasive. His England
was the first age of globalisation. The itchy, bold Elizabethans could not
stay put, had to seek adventure and exotica, contact with the fantastic
unknown. Othello is the prize and price of those voyages. Action and
reaction. They understood that.
I called this testimony "Extravagant Stranger", because that is how Othello
is described by the friends of Desdemona's father. Today's extravagant
strangers are the unloved migrants who come here with their outlandish
dreams and huge suitcases, to be demonised and maltreated by our natives.
They were then, too.
This was sent to me by Trevor Phillips. It is from an unfinished work on
Thomas More by Shakespeare, which the RSC will dramatise this year:
Grant them removed...
Imagine that you see the wretched
strangers
Their babies at their backs, with
their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for
transportation
What had you got? I'll tell you. You
had taught
How insolence and strong hand
should prevail
And by this pattern not one of you
should live an aged man
For other ruffians as their fancies
wrought
With selfsame hand, self reasons,
and self right
Would shark on you.
All these evils come from the inability of humans to embrace the other; the
tribal impulse to extinguish those who do in acts of love, of simple
humanity or reaching out to people who have no choice but to leave their
homelands and impose upon suspicious folk in safer places. In this age of
globalisation, the imperatives of purity have been reasserted as the world
gets more messy and mixed-up. Tribalism, nationalism, communalism and even
racism have potent new advocates.
Although it hurt for years, and still does, the fallout from that
production of Romeo and Juliet has proved invaluable. I have learnt that
transgressors are everywhere. We live and laugh and make love and babies
and life-long friends across the boundaries. One day, our children and
theirs will inherit a country where it really won't matter at all what
colour they are, the gods they pray to, the songs they sing. And idealistic
brown girls will not be punished because they dared. And their fathers will
not cut them off.
'Nowhere to Belong: Tales of an Extravagant Stranger', Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown's one-woman show, is at the Soho Theatre, London W1 (0870 429
6883), 1 to 5 March
2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.