Respect Due

Coming here to the land of your colonial masters, I knew what to expect a little bit. The British European canon was there in front of me. I come from original writing in postcolonial, Southeast Asia. I'm a Sri Lankan, Tamil, Malaysian-born, Singapore-educated woman; race riots in Malaysia took me across the border to Singapore, because my parents wanted us educated in the English language. I come here, and I'm in the northwest of England where already if you're not Pakistani Muslim, Asian, then you're kind of in a minority already. And then here I am, Tamil, but not Indian, Sri Lankan Tamil. And people were confused because, ‘Malaysia? Singapore? How does all this connect? She speaks Chinese, she speaks Malay, she doesn’t speak Urdu or Punjabi or any of the North Indian languages.’ So it was quite a conundrum.

I didn't realise that the bravest thing to do was to stand alone on stage and tell the story of being a woman brought up in a multiplicity of identities. I think that was something new to a lot of the people who received my work, in the sense that I never came across in my past. So I came fully formed as an artist. I didn't understand that a building has a politics to it and I didn't quite grasp that until I came here. Secondly, I didn't grasp the idea that most people don't understand the psychological state of being postcolonial.

They don't understand how complex racism is. So I was talking about racism within my own community, whereas I think all they've encountered with brown and black people talking about racism is to do with white people. So from the get go, my work was devoid of the white gaze. And that was huge.

Oh, well, Curry Tales is my most lauded show, because it seems to have that kind of cachet that people just completely get into. I play six different characters and cook on stage and I serve the audience curry. When you do Edinburgh Festival, it gives you a very universal, very international audience. And so all the invitations kept coming. I mean, it transferred to London, to the Lyric Hammersmith, and it was a huge success. And then I did two national tours of it. I was the most toured show at venues up and down the country, and then I got to go to Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, as I said, and then Zimbabwe, Mauritius, then America. It went to the Crossroads Theatre and all the greats, Ossie Davis, and all, they were all there. It was so beautiful. I mean, the theatre is beautiful. They work on subscription, so you always get full houses. I was there for three weeks. And all the lovely black women who would come upstairs, they were in their eighties, to make cookies for the audience. Obama had just won the primaries, and it was 2008. So that was a big fold of conversations about race and it was amazing.

The play that happened too close to home is the play about the family. That saddens me the most. I started thinking about it after I did a workshop with a group of young Muslim men up here in the north, in Blackburn and in Manchester. It must have been about 2002, 2003 - after September 11th. One of the guys said, ‘Well, Rani, they're looking at me differently.’ We were in quite a deprived area of Blackburn, quite disadvantaged. They were very intelligent young men who grew up British in a very northern, working-class town where people are incredibly friendly. White neighbours jostle a bit, Asian neighbours sort of live together, cheek by jowl, and these kids will have played openly on the pavements. I get the sense that they grew up really okay with all of this, maybe one or two instances of racism, but nothing major. But after 9/11, I think they felt this was really difficult.

Taking a play of mine to Sri Lanka with the British Council was huge because my parents hadn't been back for fifty years, so they went back because of me and because it was the first time a woman performed in the north, in the war zone. That was in 2003, during the peace talks. It was called Pooja. The meaning of Pooja is ‘ritual’. That's the first play I wrote here and performed in Manchester in 1999. So it was so ironic.

I went to the north in Jaffna, which is where my family come from. My grandmother's ancestral home just as she described it, mango trees, all of that; it was war ridden, I mean bullets, half of it bombed out beautiful fields. I performed the show in a theatre that hadn't been used for twenty years because of the war. And there were guys there who were cleaning the theatre as we entered, and they were in prosthetics, you know, missing limbs, but they were struggling to clean the theatre because the honour of having someone like me, a Tamil woman, coming and performing there was just huge. It makes me emotional. And then my father's cousin, who was in his eighties, came up to me and I learned two things that I hadn't known before.

One was that we come from a caste. We were enslaved. We were slaves from India about 800 years before. We were brought as slaves to be cooks we freed ourselves. That's the first thing I learned, which I never knew. The second was about my great-grandfather. This guy said that Annavi is not his name. It's a title given by a Maharajah in India for his storytelling. He was an actor. My great-grandfather was an actor. He did one-man shows, doing all the Hindu epics in the back of a bullock cart, from village to village until he was invited by royalty into the royal courts. And he was given the title Annavi Vyramuthu. Vyramuthu is his name. Annavi is a title like a lord, you know, where you're given an honour, you're given a silk shawl, and you're given the honour of being the best actor.

I'm glad I'm insecure and uncomfortable and constantly agitated, because it means that the work will hopefully stay relevant. And I never want to repeat myself.

I don't want any more backyard politics. By which I mean, ‘this thing happened in this in my backyard, and I'm writing about it.’ Why do I say that? I say that because there's so much left out in that kind of narrative. There's no globalism in British theatre, there’s no sense of the rest of the world, which I think is connected to Brexit. It's too late to ask people to educate themselves, because very few will and it's too much and it's too painful.

Be curious. That will prevent you from being static. Because the worst thing you can do is to latch on to one way of telling a story about a particular community or person or idea because you annex the rest of it. I think it's so important to go beyond because it's harder to write. I mean, I wrote about characters who were from Kenya, and got Pooja Ghai to perform part of her speech in Swahili, because that's what I was interested in. I was interested in the African Asian experience and what happened there, that confluence and also that clash. I was interested in those things. So when you are interested, you go beyond, but it came from something I observed first. The impetus has to come from within. As Chekhov said, ‘If you want to work on your art, work on your life.’