There are some plays in the corpus of Guyanese drama that need to be seen. These are plays that directly address themselves to national needs and have urgent statements to make that the national audience should hear. Every effort should be made to perform such plays, but the irony is most of them rarely make it to the stage.
In this category are works that confront the racial/ethnic conflicts in the country. A very small number of them have the capacity to disturb a complacent audience in a way that is not done often enough in drama in Guyana. Two plays that have this capacity are the outstanding and starkly revealing Two Wrongs by Harold Bascom and Sukanti by Paloma Mohamed. Sukanti had its only known performance at the Theatre Guild as a workshop production recently, while Two Wrongs was a highly respected winner of the Guyana Prize for Drama in 1994 but has never been produced.
Another of these works is For Love of Aidana Soraya by Ronan Blaze, which was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize in 2006. Blaze has been a very prolific writer, having turned out some 16 books. He is a native of Berbice who now holds an academic position in the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering in Florida. Before that he graduated in Chemistry and Maths followed by an MBA and worked as an analytic chemist at GuySuCo before moving to the National Sugar company in Frome, Jamaica, thence to the USA where he shifted to computer science.
His writing has been in the areas of poetry and fiction (which he calls fantasies), and he has now written drama. For Love of Aidana Soraya attrascted the attention of the Guyana Prize jury who saw some merit in it. Then it was produced and directed by Gem Madoo-Nascimento for GEMS Theatre Productions in 2009.
It is a three-act drama dealing with an old ethno-religious feud that one hears fairly little about in Guyana these days, but which plagued Guyana in the past, having taken root in the country since the arrival of Indian immigrants under indentureship. It is easy to imagine the scale of this inter-religious war in Asia since it contributed to the long history of insurrections studied by VS Naipaul in A Million Mutinies Now. It played a role in the partition of India when Pakistan was created as a condition of independence under the influence of Jinnah. These “million mutinies” continue in disputed Kashmir and are suspected to be behind recent terroist killings in India. It is still alive in the simmering hostilities between India and Pakistan today.
The antipathy between Muslims and Hindus in the Guyana context is well known. Although it cannot be described as a major problematic issue that rocks the society today, it is known to have been an issue in past years. These kinds of issues and the harmful consequences of this kind of confrontation still threaten contemporary Guyanese society, and the play offers several lessons that are instructive in relation to these. The play speaks of a particular quality of violence, cancerous hatred, prejudice and bigotry that result from community wars in the name of religion, or racial conflicts and ethnic divisions. With these, Guyana is quite familiar.
Blaze’s play, though somewhat lacking in a strong sense of place, is close enough to be felt as Guyana and speaks to matters with which the audience easily identifies. It can send strong signals to this society about the possible outcomes from Guyana’s present racial insecurities and prejudices.
Aidana Soraya (played in Madhoo’s production by Dimple Mendonca), is a virtuous Muslim woman who marries a Hindu, Jonathan (Ajay Baksh), an act which enrages her Islamic community. The men complain that she has scorned and insulted them and she is ostracised and disowned. In the drama, she is terminally ill and about to die, and the conflict escalates because her husband seeks to bury her in the Muslim cemetery. The issue divides the community and even the Christians become involved since the cemeteries are segregated according to religion, with both them and the Hindus also rejecting her. There are many inter-personal undercurrents as well, some of which are re-opened and the threat of warfare and violence rapidly develops.
There are, however, those on all sides who admire Aidana Soraya, but there is a defiant lack of consensus on the matter of the burial. A dramatic interest in the play, therefore, is the way “love of Aidana Soraya” divides the community, causes a hardening of positions, rekindling submerged hatred and inflaming secret passions.
The best elements in the play, however, revolve around the ironic way in which that same love brings about dramatic reversals, changes of attitudes and the softening of some hard positions, forcing a satisfactory resolution to the problem. But the play demonstrates the kinds of tragic outcomes that are likely under ethnic hatred.
In the GEMS production the obvious messages are communicated to the audience, but not without some hardships endured by them. The play reads much better than it works on stage. When committed to dramatic action its weaknesses are exposed. Madhoo did quite a job of cutting and editing, but still more of that kind of work seemed necessary. The play is lengthy, repetitive and at times over-sentimental, even maudlin in parts. Scenes repeat themselves.
Something is shown taking place among the Muslims, then its parallel is played out among the Christians and repeated among the Hindus. There are too many visits of these different religious groups to the ailing Aidana and the grief at her death is overdone.
The right kind of further editing can effectively improve it and make it a hit among audiences, since it has good dramatic possibilities. The use of irony and dramatic reversals are also among its best points, since the same thing against which the hatred is poured out acts as the main change agent in the drama. Over and above the petty animosities that arise from the fact that a Hindu husband and a Muslim wife had the courage to defy the prejudices of their communities and set an example, that very unity evokes the admiration which forces change.
The fact that Aidana Soraya is virtuous is also an effective dramatic factor. It isolates the malice which is sometimes spewed out against her and allows the audience to see the wrongs quite clearly.
Ronan Blaze’s For Love of Aidana Soraya is too important a play not to be performed and repeated since, as Madhoo states in her Programme Notes, it is compulsory viewing for a troubled Guyanese audience.
