Nadia Davids’ 2002 play, At Her Feet, is back on stage again and this time you can see it at Joburg’s Market Theatre. The award-winning, one-woman show tells the stories of six Muslim women living in Cape Town. Against the backdrop of a westernized African city, these characters weave narratives around their sense of self and belonging. One actor plays six demanding roles, in which each character reveals a highly personal story that investigates tradition, culture, and religion with a poetic fluidity.
The play is a collection of stories about mothers, daughters, aunts, cousins, friends and sisters struggling to reach each other across different divides. Written and directed by Nadia Davids, At Her Feet, challenges the ways in which Muslim women have been portrayed by the media particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks. “When I first began to think about writing a play about Muslim women, the world was reeling from the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath,” says Davids. “Afghan women were constantly on televisual display, and Amina Lawal’s tragic circumstances were being played out in the midst of media fracas.”
However, it was only when she heard about a disturbing incident of an honour killing that occurred in Jordan, that she decided to put her thoughts on paper. “One day, a friend of mine began speaking to me about an honour killing in Jordan. As we talked, we ran a gamut of emotions: outrage, disbelief, anger and eventually, hopeless helplessness,” she says. “I began to imagine the victim of the killing, her death, her life, her choices and began to think about how different Muslim women in Cape Town might respond to her murder.”
Davids - who is also a Cape Town Muslim - says although she grew up in the Mother City she feels a strange diasporic link to the Middle East, a belief in a collective ummah (community), but at the same time, she’s aware that their traditions and practices differ greatly. “The moment I decided to begin writing this piece, I bought a hardcover A4 book and covered it in a silk scarf, which held the words inside it in a patterned embrace,” she explains. “The book was a journal of my intentions. Coupled with the monologues are lists or manifestoes that state a need to demystify Muslim women, to offer multiple ways of seeing them, and to attend to the problems and dynamics that exist within various Cape Town communities.”
It’s been seven years since At Her Feet was first performed, but the story remains relevant to today’s political climate and the continuing misconceptions of Muslim women that the media feeds us. According to Davids today the world has shifted, contracted, regressed, and progressed, but the way in which Muslim women are depicted hasn’t changed. She says there are more informed debates about what constitutes the scarf, the veil and the place Muslim women occupy in our global imaginations, yet earlier this year when Gaza was bombed words such as ‘collateral damage’ were used to describe the dead women and children. “This term that has gained immense popularity since the second invasion of the Persian Gulf insinuates at best collective political guilt, at worst, a casual insistence that those lives just aren’t worth very much,” she adds.
Nadia also expressed discomfort at another incident which occurred this month where a 17-year-old Pakistan girl was flogged in a public square for talking to a married man. Two men held her while a third beat her until she screamed ‘rather just kill me…I cannot bear the pain.’ One of the culprits was her own brother. “These are difficult stories; hard to confront. But in today’s globalized world of inter-connected, inter-dependence and easily available information, we cannot afford to switch off or cop out.”
At Her Feet may not be an autobiographical piece, but it draws on experiences of people Davids has known all her life. “The issues that I wanted to trace around culture, traditition, religion, prejudice, inalienable rights, gender bias and discrimination are not in any way endemic to Muslim communities,” explains Davids. “I believe I would have written about these things through different stories had I been born into a different set of circumstances.”
The show uses different modes of expression such as movement, hip-hop, poetry and monologues which Davids believes could be an interesting way of shifting the audience from seeing Muslim women as veiled, mysterious and homogenous entities.
At Her Feet opened on 15 April at Market Theatre and will run until May 17.
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