The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Hear Word!

  • ‘Hear Word’ goes to Edinburgh

    Popular stage play, Hear Word!, tagged ‘Naija Woman Talk True’ which tell stories of domestic violence, overturning the status quo, abuse, disrespect, bravery, sisterhood and joy, will be staged at the Edinburgh International Festival holding from August 19 to August 25 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

    Hear Word! is Nigerian pidgin English for ‘Listen and Comply’. In this unflinchingly honest performance, ten of Nigeria’s biggest stars of theatre, film and television come together on stage to tell multi-generational stories of inequality and transformation.

    Hear Word! gives an intimate view into the obstacles that Nigerian women face. Stories of domestic violence, of women’s absence from positions of power, of resilience and resistance, of shattering the culture of silence, of overturning the status quo, of abuse, disrespect, bravery, sisterhood and joy.

    Some of the cast are already gearing up and have posted about the play.

    “We nor dey tire! No rest! #OnToTheNext project,” ,” Ufuoma Mcdermott wrote.

    “Its #HearWord baby, and this time, we’re off to #Edinburgh. #Repost @hearwordnaija Edinburg! It’s that time of the year again and the most amazing part is that, you will get to see the amazing and energetic #HearWord ladies live on stage.”

  • ‘Hear Word’ celebrates successful Harvard run

    ‘Hear Word’ celebrates successful Harvard run

    As a way of celebrating the a successful tour of the US and the International Women’s Day which is marked today, the cast of stage drama, ‘Hear Word’, on Tuesday hosted theatre lovers to a soiree at Roots Bar situated at Raymond Njoku, Victoria Island, Lagos.

    Speaking at the ceremony, Nollywood actress, Ufuoma McDermott explained that ‘Hear Word’, which is pidgin for ‘Listen’, sold out every single seat in every show in winter, describing it as a feat.

    “People understood what we were saying. Even though we tell Nigerian stories, we understand from our tours around the world now that the stories are global stories. People understood what we are saying even though we didn’t have to translate it. And we went with a message. This is not just a play for you to come, relax, watch and go home. What we do is while you are laughing, we throw in a message. And that is why it is called Listen (Hear Word),” she said.

    Also speaking, one of the cast members, Elvina Ibru, described the drama as a series of monologues about the plight of the Nigerian woman and the issues that surround them socially, economically, politically and spiritually; from child abuse to problems with health to certain peculiar cultures or traditions to just individual pressure.

    “So there are a few scenes that are peculiar to Nigeria. But generally the stories can be related to women from all over the world. And more importantly, it is not a man-bashing drama. The message is even more to women than men,” she stated.

    Writer and Director of the play, Ifeoma Fafunwa, stated that following the successful winter showing, the show has been garnering invites from all over the world. In her words, letters have been pouring in from Australia, London, Canada, Brazil and around Africa.

    “So we believe that we will be touring. We believe that the message we bring is universal and it I relevant. There is a global movement towards gender equality and so we find that we are very relevant. Given that, we believe that we are going to be moving around the world for the next three years, and that there will be more parts,” she promised.

  • When “Hear Word! (Naija Woman Talk True)” came to Harvard – finally

    When “Hear Word! (Naija Woman Talk True)” came to Harvard – finally

    Gboro, iyawo gboro/Gboro, iyawo gboro so’ko lenu! [Listen, woman listen/listen, wife listen and obey your husband!] From a popular Yoruba “apala” hit song of the 1960s

    It a literal, non-idiomatic level, the Yoruba word, gboro, that I have translated as “listen” in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece is more accurately translated as “hear word”. But as every self-respecting translator and linguist knows, literalism is the death of language, especially in its capacity to enable us to actually say what we mean and mean what we say. This is why “listen” is a much better translation of “gboro” in English than “hear word” that is almost nonsensical in the English tongue. But then, along comes Nigerian Pidgin which uses this same bad translation, “hear word”, as its normative term, not only for “listen”, but for “listen and obey”. Tracing our way from this normative Pidgin mistranslation back to the song fragment in our first epigraph, we find rather unexpectedly that in Yoruba “gboro” also means “listen and obey”. More felicitously, it means “listen and comply with what you hear, what you’re told”. Thus, both in Yoruba and Pidgin English – and I dare say most Nigerian languages – the word for listen when used beyond the mere phenomenology of sound, really serves as a powerful normative tool for enforcing obedience and compliance with the established order of things. This is why though in the song fragment in the epigraph only one woman, one wife is addressed, the command is actually to all wives, all women: wives obey your husbands; women, accept that it is a man’s world! In contemporary radical cultural theory and criticism, a word, a phrase that has such power of constructing and imposing identity is said to be ideological in the most effective way possible. But what does all this have to do with the subject of this essay? Well, these thoughts on language, gender, identity and human equality came to me after “Hear Word”, an all-female theatrical production on the condition of women in contemporary Nigerian society came to Harvard, but only after I had thought deeply about the impact of the performance.

    Yes, “Hear Word” did finally come to Harvard and, moreover, its coming turned out to be a veritable instance of the sort of outstanding foreign adventures captured in the classic rendering of Julius Caesar’s victorious military campaigns in Pontus: “veni; vidi; vici” (I came; I saw; I conquered). Except of course that in this case, that famous phrase has to be slightly revised to more properly fit the visit of “Hear Word” to Harvard: “we came; we performed; we conquered”. For the three days between April 15-17, 2016 when the show was staged here, the house was not only completely sold out, the impact on the audiences far exceeded all our expectations. Performance is not war, not a military campaign and so the analogy to Caesar here is misleading, even if the phrase celebrating Caesar is metaphorically and fortuitously appropriate. Performance is art; it is poetry in motion, space and time that brings, when truly outstanding, all the emotions that move people individually and collectively to get out of their comfort zones to see reality and the world with fresh eyes. This was what happened when “Hear Word” came all the way from Nigeria to perform to ‘standing room only’ audiences for three days nearly a month ago. If that is the case, why am I just writing about the event now; why didn’t I write about it earlier?

    This question is not as redundant as it seems; rather, it goes to the heart of what I wish to write about this performance in this essay. I could truthfully say that the performance took place at a critical period toward the end of the semester and the school year when things were so busy for me that I could simply not find the time to write a review, a discussion of the performance and the group that brought it to Harvard. But this is not the real reason. Also, quite truthfully, I could argue in addition that since in this column about seven months ago I had actually written in great anticipation about the coming of “Hear Word” to Harvard, I could take my time to reflect deeply on the event when it finally took place. [See “Hear Word” comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves”, TLH 134, September 20, 2015] But this also is only part of the story. More to the point is the fact that as I sat and watched the performance on two occasions, it gradually dawned on me that I was seeing something of a very rare order in art and performance, something that required one to go back to basics, to first principles.Not to sound too professorial in expressing the nature of this sort of illumination or revelation, I would put it as the moment when the power, pain and joy of a performance takes us to the roots of being and becoming. That’s what happened to me – and as far as I can tell, also to the majority of the members of the audience – when “Hear Word” came to Harvard last month.

    In getting to the heart of the discussion in this piece, I draw the attention of the reader to the main artistic and structural features of the performance, with special regard for the most powerful, moving and eloquent moments of what was altogether and almost without exception a performance whose every segment, every moment was well conceived and executed.In its main artistic and performative identity, “Hear Word” combines the best of individual character acting with ensemble group performance. In laywoman or layman language, that means that in some of the 22 pieces of stories making up the entire production, it seemed that one was watching a slice of a dramatic play exploring the emotional and psychic depths of one character’s soul while in other pieces, it seemed as if one was watching experiences common to women as a group, as half of the human race within one particular national community, Nigeria.Those who know anything about theatrical performance know that it is a daunting challenge to successfully combine character acting with ensemble performance. Actually, in my experience, “Hear Word” ranks as one of the best performances that I have ever seen that consummate this rare order of artistic achievement. It so happens that this achievement is central to the overall impact and future potential of the production as, hopefully, it makes its way across Nigerian and many other foreign travels to come. What exactly does this observation, this claim mean?

    If you are either an outright misogynist or a covert male and/or female opponent of gender equality and the empowerment of women of all social groups and classes in Nigeria, you could – and perhaps would – argue that “Hear Word” seems to be doing too much all at once. The 22 pieces in the production just about covers the demographic and regional diversity of the whole country, from the North to the South and from the East to the West. The list of issues and topics it covers is truly staggering: the chastening oppressions of child marriages in some parts of the North; in the South-south, the moral cynicism of families that participate in the trafficking oftheir own daughters and nieces in the international trade in abducted or enslaved sex workers; the chillingly unhappy fates of widows in “traditional” marriages in whichthe deaths of husbands transform women into non-persons in many parts of the country; sexual violence, rape andthe ensuing silencing of the victims after the act, within and outside the family as a social unit; the relentless, unending and ‘universal’ chorus of the preference for male as opposed to female children; the ubiquitous practice of training girls and young women to devalue and degrade the girl or woman who tries to set goals and targets that are considered “male”; the often slow and inchoate nature of girls’ and women’s coming to consciousness of themselves as innately valuable and worthy of respect from men and other women. The list goes on and on and, moreover, the stories and anecdotes are legion: “Hear Word” [Naija Woman Talk True] is truly a compendium that apparently wishes to tell it all, almost as if no other chance will ever arise to tell these stories again. So, how did the combination of individual character acting and ensemble performance of the whole group rise to the challenge of this driven, relentless inclusiveness of all the alienating challenges that women face in Nigeria today?

    In responding to this question, we must return to our opening reflections on the linguistic and ideological dimensions of the phrase “hear word” as a Nigerian Pidgin rendition of the most controlling and repressive term for the oppression of women, from infancy as a girl-child to adulthood as a married, unmarried or widowed woman. Everyone reading this piece who speaks and/or understands Nigerian Pidgin has heard the phrase used in one or two of its many controlling forms: “you no wan’ hear word?”; “the porson wey no dey hear word, na trouble go teach am sense!”; “wetin we fit do for dis pickin make e begin dey hear word?”; “Ha, you no know am, dem done beat am, beat am, still she no de hear word!”. It was a stroke of simple but profound genius for “Hear Word” [Naija Woman Talk True]” to have hit on this keyword, this trope of ideological control and normalization of oppression that universally applies to diverse groups and situations but finds its greatest functional power of coercion and intimidation in application to women and children as the anchor for all its otherwise staggering number of tales, anecdotes, dances, jokes and songs.At the most obvious level, as one watched the play, it became more and more apparent that the first part of the whole performance comprising about 12 of the 22 stories dealt with “hear word” in its repressive, negative constructs while the closing 10 narratives reversed the dominant, controlling form and began a counter-discourse, a counter-narrative of liberation in which the term, “hear word”, was now being addressed to both the oppressors and the dominated. But at a more fundamental level beyond the structure of the contents of the production, the whole performance came to encode a powerful feminist vision of both oppression and liberation as being in the final analysis, embodied. Speaking for myself, I think that the inspired combination of brilliant individual character acting with ensemble performance made this possible.

    Honourable Minister of Information and Culture are you reading this piece? This is a show that did Nigeria proud at its first international outing at Harvard. This outing, this journey of this performance must now extend far beyond Cambridge, MA, to other parts of the world with large Nigerian and African diasporas.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                                  bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • ‘Hear Word!’ comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves

    ‘Hear Word!’ comes to Harvard and America: ‘rebranding’ Nigeria with the best in ourselves

    Hear Word!’ is coming to Harvard and I can report that there is tremendous excitement at the prospect of bringing this powerful piece of Nigerian theatrical performance to the Harvard community. It says a lot that even though the event is nearly seven months away in mid-April 2016, already the folks at Harvard are as excited as if the visit is only a week or two from now. Moreover – and this is perhaps the most significant portent of all – at a meeting last week at which all the programs and organizations at Harvard that are collaborating and pooling resources to bring this performance to Harvard met to begin planning for the visit, everyone who spoke about ‘Hear Word!’ and its Producer-Director, Ifeoma Fafunwa, spoke with great respect and admiration, without the slightest bit of condescension that is the more usual sentiment that you get when Americans in positions of power and influence speak about something from Nigeria or abut Nigerians they purport to respect. As the only Nigerian or African at the meeting, I was struck by this factor, especially since Ifeoma Fafunwa (nee Obianwu) happens to be an old acquaintance of mine who, the last time I saw her was an architect, not a theatre producer and director. The observations and reflections in this piece have their origin in that meeting here at Harvard early last week.

    I suppose the first thing to do here is give the reader a sense of what ‘Hear Word!’ is and what its impact has been at home in Nigeria where, so far, it is the only place, the only country in which it has been performed. This is all the more necessary since I have myself not seen the play in performance but am going by what I have been told about it, and what I have read about it on the Internet, together with YouTube clips and images of the performance that I have watched. Actually, the full title of the piece is ‘Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True”. It has an all-female cast that is appropriate for its content and message: Nigerian women are talking and are asking Nigerian men (and women) to listen and listen well to stories and accounts of the discriminations, abuses, injustices and suffering that women in our country experience for no other reason than the fact that they are women. Cast in the form of an experimental production that mixes individual and collective stories with music, song, dance humor, and biting wit, ‘Hear Word!’ has been performed to enthusiastic, perhaps even ecstatic audiences in formal proscenium stages at the MUSON Centre, the University of Lagos and the National Theatre and in the open-air venues of some markets in Lagos. If all these reports are true – and there is no indication of any kind that the reports are made up – these would make ‘Hear Word!’, in content, form and presentation, one of the most revolutionary theatre productions ever staged in Nigeria. These factors are critical for a proper appreciation of why the great excitement at Harvard about ‘Hear Word! is the axis, the pivot around which I am making all the observations and reflections in this piece, especially around the subject of the ‘rebranding’ of Nigeria in America and the world at large.

    My colleagues here at Harvard would definitely not be exactly happy to hear me say this, but I should emphasize the fact that the great interest, the great excitement at the prospects of bringing this performance to the Harvard community does not come primarily from the revolutionary nature of ‘Hear Word!’. Harvard is not instinctively against anything revolutionary, but neither is it known to be as reliably radical or revolutionary as some other major American colleges and universities are with regard to cultural currents and developments in Africa and the global South. The major criterion with Harvard is – excellence or merit of a high order. Social relevance also matters a lot to the University, but first you must have excellence. Thus, it was primarily because some Harvard faculty and staff watched ‘Hear Word!’ in performance in Lagos and saw how good it was, what impact it had on the audiences, that they became interested in bringing the performance to the Harvard community.

    Here one may think of the additional factor that at the present time, both the President of Harvard and the Director of the University’s Center for African Studies are women, together with the fact that the Director of the American Repertory Theatre (ART) that is based at Harvard is also a woman. This might imply that a play about women in Nigeria is bound to elicit the interest of such powerful female figures at the University, but I give you my word that if ‘Hear Word!’ had not so strongly impressed the Harvard faculty and staff that saw it in Lagos, no “sisterhood” solidarities would have launched the series of meetings and contacts that will eventually bring the performance to Harvard and America in April 2016. This is an appropriate note on which to now bring into this conversation the issue of the rebranding of Nigeria in America and the world at large.

    In case anyone reading this has forgotten let me remind the reader that under the previous PDP administrations, tens of millions of dollars were spent to “rebrand” Nigeria against the terribly negative perceptions of the country, its leaders and its peoples, particularly in the U.S. but also in the world at large. There is no reason to contest the fact that, at least on the surface of things, Nigeria and Nigerians seemed to need that project of rebranding. Across many parts of the world including the African continent, we were infamous for all kinds of indecent, backward and immoral things: political leaders and public officeholders who were not only some of the most corrupt in the world but were unequalled on the planet for the scale and impunity of their corruption; Internet scams that became the material of severely derogatory jokes about Nigerians throughout the world; the level of state and non-state thieving of oil products in the Niger Delta and the brigandage that passed for militancy in the region; tales of extremely cruel violence against women and children accused of witchcraft in many parts of the country and among communities of the Nigerian Diaspora in the United Kingdom; and the stories that visitors to the country carried back to their countries of the levels of chaos, squalor and insecurity of life and possessions in Nigeria’s towns and cities. So yes, on the surface, it seemed that Nigeria needed those projects of rebranding.

    There is no use in belaboring the utter uselessness of those rebranding projects, first under Frank Nweke Jr. which he dubbed “The Heart of Africa” and later under the late Professor Dora Akunyili that she called “Rebranding Nigeria”. Millions were spent, very costly Madison Avenue consulting firms were hired and the two Ministers, each in her or his time, went on extensive tours round the world in an attempt at bolstering Nigeria’s image that failed woefully and totally. I doubt that either Minister ever really understood why the projects failed, even though the reason is as simple as putting two and two together to make four: if the product is bad, if the material is rotten and rotten to the core, there is nothing in the world that you can do to make it smell and taste good. Moreover – and this is the most important point of all – while the official and totally hopeless rebranding projects were going on at great costs to Nigerians, quiet, non-official but powerful and eloquent acts of ‘rebranding’ were going on all the time and at no cost to the government or peoples of Nigeria. Examples: The Achebe Foundation, first based at Bard College in New York State and later relocated to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was holding seminal annual conferences that brought Africans at home together with Africans in the diaspora and that became the basis of identifying the locations of progress and renewal in Nigeria and the African continent; Wole Soyinka’s many appearances at congresses of the world’s leading thinkers and activists on issues of freedom and the war against terrorism in Nigeria and the world at large; Chimamanda Adichie’s addresses to many major forums of both high and popular political and cultural constituencies like the British House of Lords and the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; the relocation of “Fela!”, the hit musical on the life of Fela Anikulapo Kuti directed by one of the leading directors of American contemporary dance and opera, Bill T. Jones, from the small Brooklyn Academy of Music to Broadway; and the high profile performance of second generation Nigerian Americans as one of the highest achievers in high schools and colleges in North America, perhaps second only the children of South Asian immigrants.

    I see the coming of ‘Hear Word!’ to Harvard and America as a continuation of these currents projecting what is best, what is inspiring and creative in our country as a means of countering the many terribly negative things that are happening in our country and among Nigerian communities in many different parts of the world. The show has many first rate performers and artistes in its ranks: Joke Silva, Taiwo Ajayi-Lycet, Kate Henshaw, and Bimbo Akintola as well as many up-and-coming actresses who will probably go on to become the big names of the next wave of stage and screen actresses and performers in the country. Above all else, it is gratifying that having seen its impact in Nigeria, the Harvard faculty and staff are hopeful that through workshops and master-classes, Harvard students will get to learn much from the visit with regard to what we in the global South can teach the denizens of the rich countries of the world about issues of common concern to all the peoples of the planet. It is often the other way round: the global North dictating to the rest of us where things are headed for all of us, whether in the wrong or the right direction.

    I cannot end this piece without alluding to something about which I wrote in this column in October last year after the National Educational Summit (NES) organized by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) at which I had the great honour of being the Chairman. At that gathering, the special session on women was endlessly and incredibly disheartening: virtually all the men at the gathering treated the presentations by and about women’s affairs and condition in Nigeria as things to joke and laugh about. As a former National President of ASUU, I was greatly shocked by that experience. I now ask that the current National President to make all members of ASUU mandatorily watch performances of ‘Hear Word!’ on the condition of fines for failure to do so!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu