arts and design

Playwright Ifeoma Fafunwa: ‘It was permission, all of a sudden, to speak’

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Ifeoma Fafunwa is a playwright and director. She was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and at 17 moved to the US where she lived for about 20 years, training and working as an architect. Following her return to Nigeria, Fafunwa began collecting women’s stories for her play Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True. A success in Nigeria since 2015, it has also been staged at Harvard and the UN headquarters in New York, and will be at the Edinburgh international festival, 19-25 August.

How did Hear Word! start?
Many, many years ago I watched For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide [Ntozake Shange’s 1976 play about African American women’s experience] and I thought it would be good to be part of a project like that. Then I saw The Vagina Monologues and it was like: “OK, yes, what I want to do can be done.” In 2009 I started collecting real stories, and there was an NGO in Nigeria that had a grant to collect data and stories, so I accessed some of that. Then I added my own personal stories too.

What stories did you want to tell?
I was drawn to stories around this culture of silence. Many women experienced domestic violence or psychological abuse and did not share it with anyone. It crossed the socioeconomic classes, all the way up – there were female deputy governors getting beaten and saying nothing. I wanted to look at how women participate in some way in this cycle. In the west, people say: “institutions need to do this, men need to do that”. I didn’t have that response; I started looking at what women themselves do. I got some pushback from it, people saying: “You’re blaming the victim”. No, I’m actually finding where the victim’s power is.

With humour, music and dancing, the show is fun. How important was that?
It was key for me. I’d already seen gender inequality plays that came out of Europe that were very angst-filled and angry, but I wanted it to look appealing to everybody. So the messages are not hitting you too hard – they’re soaking in without you fully knowing how much you’re changing. I imagined change could happen right there in the theatre, but I was surprised when it actually did!

So what reaction did you get when it was first staged in Nigeria?
Immediately, women started to gather in the lobby after the show and exchange stories. It was permission, all of a sudden, to speak. In Nigeria it’s taboo to see a therapist, so it was just a chance to sit for 90 minutes and examine yourself. You could see people going through some kind of catharsis. Those women would then take their daughters and their mothers, and then their husbands. You’d hear in the lobby: “this is my sixth time”. I knew then: something is happening here.

What was it like performing at the UN?
It was really very surprising and cool. It was a big step for Nigerian women too. This came after the Chibok girls [the kidnapping of 276 girls by Boko Haram in April 2014]. The president at the time was in denial about it, and it had been a difficult time for girls to go to school. So another objective for me was to have Nigerian women serving solutions, sharing problems, rather than that culture of silence. Let’s flip this story and have these women standing tall and strong and saying: “This is what happens and this is how you fix it.”

Do you think Hear Word! has a message for women all over the world?
Yes, and I think that’s why it’s on the move now. It started before #MeToo, but when that happened we got more calls. It’s a universal story about inequality, but also a story about what the world would look like if equality did exist, if women were part of decision-making and leadership.

Have you been to the Edinburgh festival before?
No – I can’t believe it! It’s one of those dream things. People say there’s shows on every corner, in every closet, in every bar, and that you binge on art, trying to see five shows in a day. I don’t how that’s going to work for us – but we’re excited.

You were an architect before Hear Word took off. Do you see any similarities in your two careers?
In architecture I was designing with light and openings, brick and mortar – things that would stay in one place. It’s the same thing as a director: I see the light, the movement, it’s just I’m designing things now on stage that move themselves.

Watch a trailer for Hear Word! at the Edinburgh festival.

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