By Michael Reckord, Contributor 
Small, although retired, still keeps busy. - Norman Grindley/Staff Photographer Jean
JEAN SMALL went to Africa searching for her roots. Instead, she discovered herself to be 'a Caribbean person'.
"The Africans don't regard us (Caribbean people) as Africans," she said in a recent interview. "In Nigeria I was called a European. It made me realise that we in the Caribbean are a complex of cultures."
"Even in my own family," added the Guyana-born teacher and theatre practitioner, "we have Indian, African, Portuguese and European mixtures."
When she left Africa more precisely, the village of Ijebu Ode in Nigeria it was with a desire to explore her Caribbean identity. This desire has been a great influence in the past several decades on her writing, teaching and work in the theatre.
LOVE OF DRAMA
Her love of drama started at Bishop's High School, Georgetown, and continued when she left Guyana in the
mid-50s to study languages (French, Spanish and Latin) at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, in St. Andrew.
In what she regards as the 'Golden Age' of theatre on the campus, she performed in plays for both the Department of French and the University Dramatic Arts Society (UDAS).
She worked with persons who were to became well-known in Caribbean theatre, including Slade Hopkinson, Marcia Arscot, Archie Hudson-Phillips, Ancile Gloudon, Cynthia Allen (later Wilson), Hugh Wynter, Errol Hill and Derek Walcott.
Laughing, Small recalls how she lost the opportunity to be in a Walcott play which he was directing. During a rehearsal, she said, Walcott shouted at her and she left, never to return.
Nevertheless, it was at that time that she decided on a life in theatre. "I decided drama was a thing I could do and I loved it, loved being on-stage. I would be an actress."
Upon graduation, she returned to Guyana and in the little time she stayed there she performed with the Georgetown Dramatic Society.
However, because the Government "didn't know what to do with a language teacher" and besides, she wanted to travel the world, she applied for a teaching post in Ghana and Nigeria. She ended up in Ijubu Ode in 1958 as the only female teacher in a boys' school.
MARRIAGE, PREGNANCY
From Africa, she went to Australia to get married to Kenny Small, whom she had met at university, and to continue teaching.
Although the co-ed school, where she was Head of the Foreign Languages Department and at which she taught, was made up of students "who had never seen or touched a black person", it was a very good experience for them.
"One parent said 'the best thing that has happened to our children was Mrs. Small'," Jean Small stated, explaining that her presence allowed them to realise that black people were normal human beings. "When I was leaving, a whole class bowed their heads and cried," she added.
Unfortunately, her sojourn in Nigeria, her marriage, pregnancy and early period of motherhood meant that, for 12 years, Small did no theatre.
At the end of this time, however, she got an invitation from producer Lloyd Reckord to act in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff and could not resist.
The 'great experience and successful show' led to Dennis Scott asking Small to teach at the Jamaica School of Drama. There she designed and taught a course, Caribbean Lab, for 11 years a course with which she still is working.
Says Small: "The course provides for a theatre aesthetics for the Caribbean." This helps to define regional theatre.
While teaching at the Drama School part-time, she also taught at Immaculate Conception High School and, later, the UWI, and acted in a number of JSD productions, including the world premier of Agnes of God.
Using research material she had developed in Caribbean Lab, Small started producing theatre in the UWI's French Department. She used to produce a French play every year and in fact still does such a production, even though she has retired from the university.
In 1988, she returned briefly to Guyana to work at the university there. She directed a production of For Colored Girls which was such a "fantastic performance" that it was nominated for seven awards and received three, including one for 'Best Director'.
"The theatre people there were so jealous that I'd just come back and had won three awards, they did their best to keep me out of theatre," she said.
Frustrated, she decided to do a one woman show about her life experiences. It later evolved into the highly successful A Black Woman's Tale.
This play got her invited first to a Liverpool, England, theatre festival, and, in 1998, to the World Cup series of plays in Saint Denis, France.
After her performance, in French, says Small, "the audience wouldn't stop applauding. I had to stop them."
The job from which Small retired last year was as co-ordinator of the UWI's Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts.
RETIRED, BUT BUSY
She took up the position in 1992 and, while there, though she did not do as much drama as she had anticipated, did direct Your Handsome Captain by Simone Schwarts-Bart of Guadeloupe, in two languages (French and English on alternate weekends), directed herself in her second one-woman production In A Tight Place and acted in Hospice, all on campus.
Off-campus she acted in Hot Flashes, for which she got a 'Best Supporting Actress' award.
Although retired, she is still busy. "I'd like to put together a number of things I've written for publication," she says.
They include interviews she has conducted on radio (she can be heard on Sunday mornings on Radio Mona), and a book on how to direct oneself in one-character shows.
She also hopes to start producing puppet shows again she did this for many years and to train young persons in that art.
