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Spoken word performer, Rachel N. Hastings, wowed the audience
with her diction and energy on July 16, when her play, ‘Seven’ was staged at
the National Theatre, Lagos. People intermittently applauded the playwright,
who played the lead role in the unusual drama which probes race, rape,
resistance, reproductive rights issues and women’s sexuality, amongst other
issues.

There were grey areas I wished to clear with the actress after
the play. Luckily, we meet some days before her departure from Nigeria and she
gladly obliges an interview.

Is it possible for seven generations of women to share similar
experiences as portrayed in the play?

“Absolutely,” reiterates Hastings. “We also look at the system,
not the exact same personal experience but the continuity that cuts across
becoming a woman. For instance, how did we become mothers? How do we understand
issues of femininity? How do we pass on what it means to be a good wife? How do
we deal with the men that we have loved and who have loved us in return? What
similarities do we have with children that we raise, and how do they change and
adapt as we move across different lands, borders and nations and the policies
that are in place? I don’t think they will be exact but replicas. We also have
similarities in them all, definitely.”

Avant garde play

Hastings also feels the audience shouldn’t have problems getting
the messages of the interesting but abstract play.

“‘Seven’ is an avant garde abstraction that uses poetry as its
vehicle of expression. We don’t expect everyone to know exactly what we are
talking about, not all. I expect them to say that I’m bothered by this and my
hope is that if they are bothered by that, they are not trying to wait for me
but are actually pulled into it, so they can do their research, talk to their
friends, look up this phrase, look up that phrase and figure out what the
message is. There was a line that used to be in the play when I was doing it as
a solo show, ‘regeneration through intellectual penetration.’ So, everything in
there is an intellectual kind of idea with the goal of generating literacy. I
name drop a lot: Who is Angela Davies, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Leroy
Jones, August Wilson, Che Guevara. People are like, I don’t know. But they have
rich stories and if we do a little bit of research, then the play becomes a
platform for literacy.”

Initially a 75-minute solo show performed by Hastings across the
US, she had to adapt the play to accommodate other actors during its recently
concluded tour of the UK, Barbados and Nigeria under the ‘Africa Lives’
project. She had to “figure out characterisation, dramatic tensions, the
relationship between these bodies and then how do they come to understand each
other’s stories” in the process of re-writing it.

Double love

Though she now has two versions of the play, Hastings doesn’t
prefer one to the other.

“I love them both and will not prefer either form because they
are two different pieces even though they contain the same general information.
I think the highlight of performing by myself is that if I make a mistake,
nobody knows but me. When I have a cast with me, they know when you mess up and
are going to call you out later. But there’s lots of joy in it as well because
you can laugh with somebody about both the good and the bad of each production.
Then, I get to expand the production through the use of new elements that were
not in the solo show. You have more bodies to create different images; it
becomes a playground where you and your friends are having a good time.”

Big issue

She explains why race is a big issue to her and why it is
reflected in the play: “In the United States, race is not an issue that is
fixed, if you will. The United States will tell you that we live in a colour
blind society; I would argue that we operate on colour; that every situation
you are going through has its colour coded structure that’s already in place.
Race was irrelevant to me growing up, I didn’t care. When I went to university,
people started to ask penetrating questions about my ethnic identity; I mean,
used race as an entry point. So what race are you? The questions were attacks
on my own identity. So my response was I’m going to figure out your system of
race, I’m going to speak back through that system, to explain to you that just
because I have a grandmother who was Filipino, a mother who is Filipino and a
father who is black, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have African descent. My
blackness is through those stories and through those ancestries and that’s what
makes us a stronger collective. You can’t take that from us, you can’t kill
that from us. So if you say you want to take race and operate from it, I’m
going to say, I’m going to use race to tell you my history.”

Personal history

‘Seven’, the story of six generations of first daughters
offering a love letter to the seventh unborn generation is taken from
Hastings’s personal experience. “I’m my mother’s first daughter and my mother
is her mother’s first daughter and her mother is her mother’s first daughter. I
can trace that back to six generations. I don’t know the complete story of each
of these women but I at least have a snapshot from their own lives that fuels
me and I find it really profound to think that I have a legacy of being a first
daughter. If I am blessed with children, these are the things that I would tell
my daughter: you should be aware of the world that you are entering because
it’s both a beautiful place and one full of conflict. But don’t have any fear;
know that you have a long legacy that you are entering into.”

Performance chose the author of ‘Metamorphosis’ and
‘Sole/Daughter’. Coming from a lower middle class family and a father who
enrolled his children in summer camps where they were exposed to several arts
activities, she eventually gravitated towards it. “Without even knowing that I
would be part of the theatrical world, here I was learning elements of
performance. And then I went on in high school to enrol in the humanities; an
International Studies Programme that had politics, literature and history.
Writing was always my avenue to be able to express myself. I went to college
and the next thing I knew I am performing all over the nation and here I am in
Africa doing my stuff,” she states.

Blessed to be here

One of the high points of the Nigerian tour for Hastings was the
student’s show at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. She says, “There is
something completely different and yet rather good when you perform for
students. It is one thing when you have people who you admire tell you good
job, it’s another thing to have the students who are looking to become what you
are, tell you that you did something well. We performed at Ife; the stage had
its own issues in terms of the level of noise, the confined space and silence
so that people can focus solely on the platform but the energy was so alive on
that stage because it was full of students of Dramatic Arts.

“Afterwards, it was a clamour of I want to know this, I want to know that. I
want to continue this conversation; please sign me right now… the next thing
I knew I am riding on people’s neck and arm. It was very inspiring for me and
it made me feel the purpose behind this work. Even if they don’t understand all
of it, it still penetrated them to the point where they felt alive and that
made me feel so much alive on stage. Ife is the centre of the Yoruba worldview
so to perform in such a spiritually and historically rich location, it added
more feel to it. It’s my first time in Africa and I’m blessed that Nigeria is
the first place I came to. They tell us negative things but it’s not true at
all.”