Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer

Joan Belton in performance. - Contributed photos

Whatever the format from the title that was being employed on stage at a particular moment, Sunday evening's 'A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer, Readings on Violence Against Women' was a very moving affair.

Using only boxes for the readers, with no more than three of them on the stage at any one time, A Memory, A Monologue depended on the presenters' quality, material's strength and Fabian Thomas' direction and choreography to indelibly imprint the issues of violence against women, ranging from domestic abuse to rape, on the near half-capacity audience.

It began with one woman walking across a dimly lit stage saying "give me my baby". Her voice and cross-stage trek were joined by others, "They don't listen", "A Black woman can never be raped" and "I can't breathe" among the lines that gradually built into a crescendo but avoided cacophony.

Two women were left standing back to back. Nadean Rawlins and Patricia Donald were not quite in sync as they read Maya Angelou's 'Woman Work' ("I have the children to tend, the clothes to mend") rapidly, but each soon walked away from the centre spot to speak individually.

Passing high five

They came back together for a passing high five and a last "I got to ...," making way for an all-black clad Deanne Allgrove to do 'Woman' by Tariq Ali. "So many stones have been thrown at me I have lost count," she began, telling a sorry tale that included her sisters in Baghdad and Fallujah. "Some have watched their children die. Collateral damage ...," she observed. "Hurl your words, they no longer draw blood," she said with understated defiance, concluding "I can speak, and I will say I am not afraid".

Former Miss Jamaica World, Teri-Karelle Griffith and Zandriann Maye, one seated to read Edwidge Danticat's 'Celia' and the other out of the light on the stage nearby to act out the tale of a Guatemalan woman who was beaten by her soldier husband and ended up in a container as part of a human smuggling shipment into the United States, were moving. A strident "ayuda me!" (help me) was accompanied by slaps on the walls of the container, the narration which preceded the reading saying that the trapped woman is surrounded by persons who may be sleeping or dead.

A gum-chewing, sardonic Hilary Nicholson worked well with a passionat Hewitt, chuckles coming for the former's wry comments, which often came after an especially impassioned segment of a tale in which Hewitt's anger at her partner James as he refuses to help a woman being beaten in public is fused with her family's experiences as Tutsis in Rwanda.

The same looks which got her into "that nice fashion magazine" (German Vogue, Nicholson quipped) were the same ones that got women raped in Rwanda. "Hate and lust, rolled into one fat Danish," Nicholson said.

African conflicts continued as Joan Belfon, seated under a single light, did the painful 'Darfur Monologue' to bring up intermission, telling the baby in her arms the rape that brought life with "one by one your father, all six of them, entered me".

Retold the tale

After a collection was taken for the Glenhope Place of Safety, Ruth Hoshing, Rawlings and Nicholson took the party people to task in Fur Is Back by Eve Ensler and Nyanda Cammock retold the tale recorded by Dave Eggers of a woman and her sisters rescued from their Arab captors by My Mother With Her Hands as Knives.

It was those blades which scythed through the air as she ran after the convoy with her captured, bound, walking daughters and successfully begged for their release.

A song from Hewitt preceded the only male appearance for the evening in 'Part Owner', delivered by Karl Williams, Fabian Thomas and Brian Johnson. They part ownership came from the concept that Black women's bodies do not really belong to them, what with music videos, strip joints and the like.

Thomas also choreographed Maye's dancing in 'Woman's Work', which came before the touching 'My House is Wallpapered With Lies', written by Carol Gilligan and which speaks of spousal abuse from a child's perspective. The humour of Donald, Cammock and Hoshing dressed as children only made "last night he hit her. I saw it" only more painful.

'A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer, Readings on Violence Against Women' ended with Joan Andrea Hutchinson's simple, moving delivery of Alice Walker's To Stop The Violence Against Women.