The play “Graveyaard Talez” is meant to capture, in its rawest form, the violence that members of the queer community are often subject to, says author Gabrielle Mohamed.
Mohamed, a 26-year-old emerging creole poetry writer, explained that the need to pen the story was fuelled by rage over the treatment meted out to a friend who identifies as transgender. She noted that the intention of the play is to expose people to the dark reality faced by LBGTQ persons, so that they might be moved to change their behaviour.
“Thus its raw images and voices of real characters allow you as a reader to undergo a breakdown and a breakthrough process,” she states.
Being Catholic, she recognises that her stance on the subject may not be shared by members of her community, however, Mohamed is firm in her opposition to such discriminatory behaviour, saying that she “cannot turn a blind eye to the danger threatening the lives of God’s children”.
Though the play draws on very familiar events to portray the trauma often experienced by this marginalised group, Mohammed’s choice of and depiction of the setting, which exists in two states, leaves the reader in limbo— a nod to the complexity of Guyanese cultural identity and history.
“To live in Guyana sometimes means there is no area of in-between. I find this to be very ironic given our diverse culture and hybridisation that Guyana would have experienced since our Independence from our Colonial predecessors. As a society of people, we have forgotten the physical, physiological and verbal trauma that was once expressed to our ancestors, as their identity was the lesser in the eyes of the Colonial master; yet we do the same. If you stopped and looked at the surrounding, one can recognise that we’re still wearing those masks today,” she adds.
Gabrielle graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English – Linguistics Degree in 2017 and has been writing poetry professionally for the past two years. Having roots in both Bartica and Berbice, and recognising how essential the native language is to the Guyanese identity, she has been employing creolese in her writing in an attempt to “capture the continual influence of colonial and post-colonial attitudes and behaviours” within her countrymen’s lives.
“Our Guyanese creole has allowed me to capture the beating pulse of our language that is alive and is constantly growing. I have also employed the utilisation of our native tongue to illustrate the successful harmony of other cultures existing in a sentence without fighting for dominance,” she also says of her choice of language for the play.
Graveyaard Talez, which has won the Guyana Annual’s Bertram Charles Prize for Playwriting, is part of a collection of plays, titled ‘Blackout Daze,’ which Gabrielle will debut this August in Trinidad at the Caribbean Festival of Arts. She will also be presenting a book of poetry, titled, “Is you Madness, Nah me Own.” Both are self-published and are available online on Amazon.
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