Season 2, Episode 7 with Honor Ford-Smith - Collaborative Theater & Performance for Social Justice with Communities Affected by Violence, Jamaica and Beyond

Participatory Action Research - Feminist Trailblazers and Good Troublemakers 

Season 2 Episode 7 Host Patricia Maguire with Guest Dr. Honor Ford-Smith ((Recorded, March 7, 2024; Streamed April 1, 2024)

[00:00:00] Patricia Maguire: Welcome to Participatory Action Research - Feminist Trailblazers and Good Troublemakers. I'm your host, Patricia Maguire. Our guest today is Dr. Honor Ford-Smith. Dr. Ford-Smith, welcome. 

[00:00:22] Honor Ford-Smith: Thank you. It's great to be here. 

[00:00:25] Patricia Maguire: The PAR FEM podcast amplifies the contributions of feminist trailblazers, such as Honor Ford-Smith, to participatory action research. And today we'll talk with Honor about her successes and her challenges bringing feminist values and ways of being to participatory action research, particularly in her trailblazing work in collaborative or collective performance theater as an approach to knowledge creation and action. Dr. Ford- Smith is an activist, artist, a scholar, a theater worker, a poet, and her work emphasizes the intersections of race, decolonization, and globalization in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She engages in community-based, socially engaged, collaborative performance theater.Theatre Collective, a group of working class Jamaican women who, and with you as the artistic director, the women used participatory popular theatre techniques to essentially give voice to their own experiences of oppression. And you have written that, that surfaced hidden knowledge through oral stories, and then that knowledge got validated through public theater.

[00:02:11] Patricia Maguire:  So essentially you were doing a, I think a 

[00:01:16] Patricia Maguire: Dr. Ford-Smith retired from York University in Toronto, Canada, where she was Associate Professor in the Community Arts Practice Program, which was under the Faculty of Environmental Studies. And she's currently Artist-in-Residence at the School of Drama. The Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica, where she's working on her newest project - Memory, My City, My Home, which we'll get to towards the end of the podcast.

[00:01:43] Patricia Maguire: Back in 1977, when you co-founded the Sistren groundbreaking version, if you will, of participatory action research. So tell us what brought you to community, collective, community-engaged participatory research. 

[00:02:26] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, I was an actress, you know, I had been trained as an actress and I had studied theater in the U. S. and in England. I was always interested in how theater could be a force for social change, looking for ways for theater to make a difference. So that was one, one source. And I, had studied with a man called A. C. Scott, who, you know, way back in the day, introduced us to Asian theater in its many different forms.

[00:03:03] Honor Ford-Smith: And so I was aware of the fact that there was a different way of doing things to the way that classical theater training had gone. And those things were, were inspiring to me. And I wanted to see how that could be made to work in the Caribbean, which is where I'm from. So when I came home and started as a young teacher of drama, two things were happening.

[00:03:29] Honor Ford-Smith: First of all, feminist theater had sort of taken off in the U.S. and we were in a moment of profound decolonization here. It was a moment of kind of nation building, that was the form that it took at that time. But of course within the sort of broad basket of nation building, there are many different approaches and many different ways of approaching that project.

[00:03:53] Honor Ford-Smith: And then in 1976, there was the World Decade of Women. But that coincided also with, with the social change project that was happening here under Michael Manley at the time. And his very dynamic partner back then, that was Beverley Manley, who was a feminist and was very active with women. And so that gave a kind of opening to start a conversation about gender in the society, or, and women in the society.

[00:04:23] Honor Ford-Smith: That was how it started here. I was very lucky because I had an opportunity as a teacher at the school, as part of a new College of the Arts. I got hired as a teacher there and the school was anxious to open its doors to the whole Jamaican society. And there were opportunities for people to do many different kinds of things.

[00:04:47] Honor Ford-Smith: So that was how we got asked to do all kinds of things from work with prisoners, to work with community organizations, to work with rural groups, to work with people who were disabled in different ways. That's how we got asked to work with, um, with what later became Sistren. 

[00:05:08] Patricia Maguire: What are you thinking were some of the key accomplishments and the knowledge produced by the Sistren collective?

[00:05:18] Honor Ford-Smith: As a collective, it was a very unusual experience for all of us. Unusual in that we tried to establish a space in which we could have this conversations through performance. And it wasn't linked to any political party, although people will tell you that it was really. All the other women's organizations were either charitable women's organizations, organizations that promoted domestic, I don't know what you'd call it, housework - some of that was good in the sense that it promoted knowledge about health.

[00:05:58] Honor Ford-Smith: So it wasn't entirely bad,  health and nutrition, um, but it didn't address the things that needed to be changed in this society around for women. So there was that on the one hand, those organizations, and then on the other hand, there were political women's organizations that were, you know, part of struggles for more radical social change in the society, but those are linked to parties often, or to organizations that were more broadly addressed.

[00:06:29] Honor Ford-Smith: So we were autonomous. And this was, this was new for us. And then the fact that we were using, not for us, for the society, that we were focusing on the domestic area of women's lives and trying to politicize that. So those were two things that were new. And the other thing was that we were trying to challenge stereotypes of women that existed at the, at that time.

[00:06:51] Honor Ford-Smith: So the conversation in Jamaica was, and in the Caribbean, was a lot around how women were strong, you know, in spite of all the terrible things that had happened, enslavement and so on. And the society was what was called a matriarchal society, and it was called that because most of, many households were headed by women.

[00:07:14] Honor Ford-Smith: But the point is that women were presented as these strong figures who could overcome all kinds of terrible things. And in fact, that was not the case. Women were really suffering in the sense that they had very high levels of female unemployment. There was an ideology that promoted the male breadwinner, which came from the colonial forces.

[00:07:39] Honor Ford-Smith: It was them that promoted this idea of men as the, you know, head of the patriarchal family. And there had been policies, um, instituted by the colonial government to bring this nuclear western white family into being among black Jamaicans. So we were trying to challenge that and to do that, we had to show that,  poke holes in that argument.

[00:08:07] Honor Ford-Smith: And so we tried to bring out some of the difficulties that women faced as a result of the history that we had inherited, but primarily around, you know, domestic labor. There was no support at the time for, for families, very little child care was available. So it was all done within the family and little girls were of course tasked with looking after their younger siblings.

[00:08:37] Honor Ford-Smith: So they didn't get a chance often to go to school. Whereas the boys would get a lot more freedom. So we looked at how at that time, caring labor that women had to do kind of deformed what their opportunities were in the society. We looked at, at rape, which was a taboo conversation pretty much at the time and wasn't talked about.

[00:08:57] Honor Ford-Smith: So we looked at the question of sexual violence and put it on stage in a way that made it clear that it was violence, that rape and sexual abuse was violence. It wasn't just a crime that happened to involve sex or maybe just that women really wanted it anyway and were playing hard to get. So those were some of the contributions to the conversation at that time.

[00:09:21] Honor Ford-Smith: The other contribution that was very important is that this was a group of black working class women. Now, obviously I am not black or working class. I have some African ancestry, but, I, I'm white-passing, but the majority of the women in the group were. Those of us who worked with them took a, a position that that experience had to be made central to everything that we did and that experience, that working class women's experience had to be the focus of everything that we, we did. 

[00:10:03] Honor Ford-Smith: So that was a major contribution to place front and center class as a discussion and intersecting with gender. It was black women primarily. And there were people in the group like myself who, who were not black, but the majority were, and many of the middle class women, two or three, were, were black too.

[00:10:30] Honor Ford-Smith: So it was a black women's collective. And it, so it brought up a lot of discussions around what kind of feminism, what kind of women's activism was appropriate for women who came from former colonial societies. We have to accept that there are differences in the ways in which we want to move and which in our strategies.

[00:10:55] Honor Ford-Smith: And our priority is that women are an intrinsic and absolute part of any project of liberation. And by looking at that, you begin to understand and imagine liberation differently. And that was a major contribution at the time. But, man, did we get a fight. Yeah, that was, that was the fight,  that was the very controversial thing.

[00:11:21] Patricia Maguire: Let's stay with that. So, the, the women in the collective, the participants and the facilitators, if you will, together as a collective are creating, writing in a collective, collaborative way, these plays then that you're putting on for the public about this, the black women, working women's experience in Jamaica, experiences of violence, sexism, etc. And so what you're saying is there was sort of a backlash, a fight about that. How was that message received by your audiences when you put on these plays. 

[00:12:00] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, initially, I think that there were many people who were very supportive. It's very difficult to communicate the moment that we were in. So at that moment, there was this Cold War struggle going on. And I've indicated earlier, you know, Kissinger had come to warn Manley to stop his alliance with Cuba. And Cuba was at that time, putting a large number of troops on the ground in Africa to push back the apartheid regime. And the Americans didn't want, um, they didn't want, they were on the side of, at that time, you know, the ANC was a terrorist organization and they saw this as a Russian initiative.

[00:12:43] Honor Ford-Smith: In fact, you know, it wasn't a Russian initiative and only Fidel would have been crazy enough to try that. I don't think the Russians really wanted to risk, uh, putting, um, themselves at risk with the Americans. So it was, it was really a, you know, a third worldist initiative. That was a critical thing that unleashed in Jamaica.

[00:13:12] Honor Ford-Smith: That, plus the domestic policies that had, were, were being undertaken at the time, that unleashed horrendous violence. So, you know, every time you have a project of social change, they do the same thing. It's the same script everywhere you look. They arm the opposition. They create chaos in the society by shutting down, uh, the economy, they overthrow the government, you know, either overtly or covertly. And that was what was going on in Jamaica, going on. So we were in the middle of that. So we did have threats of violence. We did, we were attacked on occasion.  And violence works. Let me see, you know, uh, violence works. It shuts people up, makes them afraid to speak.

[00:14:00] Honor Ford-Smith: It has had a terrible consequence on this society, that intervention that happened there. You know, I don't think any of the societies that have suffered that kind of intervention recover, uh, quickly. You know, that was one of the manifestations that we had to deal with. 

[00:14:17] Patricia Maguire: You know, I lived in Jamaica during that time period. I think I worked in Kingston, 1977, 78, 79. And, I'm pretty familiar with the various strategies for violence and the IMF and the World Bank at the behest of the U. S. and the West trying to essentially wreck the Jamaican economy. And then what happened subsequently with structural readjustment or structural adjustment. And, um, so I, I understand what you're saying about how complex and challenging the times were particularly around violence. 

 [00:15:01] Honor Ford-Smith: And we've never kind of recovered from that. I think in that a new generation is coming up and they're going to make the changes that they want to see in the context of, you know, global moment. The effects of that time were that they kind of decimated a vision of radical change and, when Manley lost in 80, that was a big moment. That moment was the moment when we began to confront the legacies of 300 years of colonization and the systems, the racial, gendered, and class systems that had put in place.

[00:15:42] Honor Ford-Smith: The, the defeat of that moment and then the subsequent defeat of the Grenada Revolution had a massive effect on the vision of an alternative to, an alternative to colonization and the legacies of colonization and an alternative to capitalism. We still are struggling with that. I think we're coming back, but it's taking, it's taking a long time.

[00:16:09] Honor Ford-Smith: So, and I think that Sistren in itself as a small microcosm. There are very few organizations that genuinely put together working class and upper- middle, middle class women together to work together on a daily basis to make plans, to make policies. This just does not happen. It's always a division of labor, where those who have the skills and the knowledge get to make the decisions and to lead on the everyday basis.

[00:16:47] Honor Ford-Smith: Sistren had a general meeting, and that's where major policy decisions were taken, and where long hours of meetings were held, which were very educational for all of us. They were also very boring at times, but that's part of democracy, I think. Um, and so that experience, working across difference, working across boundaries of class and race.

[00:17:22] Honor Ford-Smith: This is gold. This is something that has to happen if you're going to change the society fundamentally. You, you always have, to me, you come back always to, well, there's this difference in the society. There's oppression. There's exploitation. Yes, you might overthrow the ruling class. Yes, you might have a revolution like what happened in Cuba, but that doesn't mean everything changes.

[00:17:55] Honor Ford-Smith: I mean, people still have in their heads all of the things that have been programmed for hundreds of years. So to me, you always come back to dialogue. You always come back to having to work across difference. And I think that was the great value of Sistren. 

[00:18:14] Patricia Maguire: Well, I think what, what you're describing is the, the power and the messiness of collaborative participatory work. Here you are doing, in a sense, collective, collaborative theater creation, creating knowledge about women's lives in a participatory way, and that's part of the messiness of collective, collaborative work, which I think is probably one of the things that waves people off from participatory research, participatory theater, whatever you want to call it, that it's, you know, democracy, collective work, dialogue, that's messy, challenging work, and it takes longer.

[00:18:56] Honor Ford-Smith: It sure does. It takes a lot longer. 

[00:18:59] Patricia Maguire: Let's move on a little bit from Sistren, and I want to talk a little bit about, you were one of the founding mothers of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action. Peggy Antrobus, who's also been on our show, was another of the founding members of CAFRA, and, you know, for our listeners, the Caribbean Association of Feminist Research and Action is a non-governmental organization that advocated for women's rights and empowerment in the Caribbean.

[00:19:32] Patricia Maguire: And I think it was one of the first regional Caribbean women's organizations that called itself feminist. So, tell us about, what was it about intentionally feminist research and action that your founding group thought was critical at that time in the Caribbean? 

[00:19:50] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, I think the same thing I said about Sistren, which was that there needed to be an autonomous space in which we discussed the specific concerns that women had across the region. And in particular, to pay attention to domestic labor, and in particular to pay attention to women's caring labor. Because remember, this is before the “Count Women's Work” campaign. But at this time, in the Marxist women's organizations, there begins to be a discussion about, about housework. So you're getting sort of a little bit earlier than CAFRA, you're getting, um, Selma James, you know, and, Dallacosta's piece, uh, I forget the title of it, but the book about women's labor and how, how women's labor needs to be seen and counted.

[00:20:44] Honor Ford-Smith: And a number of other debates are happening around the question of domestic labor. It wasn't seen as work. It wasn't seen as, as labor. And it was seen as natural. And the sexual division of labor that was entrenched in the society at the time was seen as normal. You know, if you, if you bear children, then you're expected, that's natural, you know, it comes out of your children, come out of your womb, so then you must be able to take care of everything else in the society, reproduce, do reproductive labor at every level. And this gets extended out into the social sphere as well as in the home.

[00:21:22] Honor Ford-Smith: So that was one of the things that we were very concerned about. This question of what later became the Double Day, but we're also concerned about it in relation to how it played out in the Caribbean. And this takes me back to Sistren, which I, I didn't say before. One of the other contributions of Sistren is its vernacular production and its emphasis on the vernacular, not just as a language, but also as a site of creativity. So if you read a lot of feminist work at the time, you could be in any country, you could be in India, you could be in China, you could be in Russia, you could be, they were using the same language to talk about everything.

[00:22:13] Honor Ford-Smith: So, you know, and it was a sort of positivistic language in many cases, but even where it was not positivistic, even where it was socialist, it was still very, very sort of modernist in its approach. Sistren brought to this discussion an awareness of the importance of trying to understand and validate the knowledge that had been created in the region.

[00:22:41] Honor Ford-Smith: Not just, you know, what we have to change, but what are we doing that is right?  So all our plays are in, are in Jamaican, long before Jamaican was an accepted language. Now it's not, it isn't that Jamaican wasn't being used in on the stage, it always was being used on the stage. But it's the kind of Jamaican that was being used on the stage. There are many different kinds of Jamaican. And the kind that's history knew, was very much an urban working class form of language. So there's a language question. That was something else. And then there were the forms of knowledge that women had created since abolition of slavery that are essential, creative products of our society around things like food preparation, food economy, trading, and so on.

[00:23:34] Honor Ford-Smith: So trying to pay attention to what people had done and trying to do that through the arts. So CAFRA, I think, was certainly a response to the first set of issues, that is to women's autonomy and class. And some of their research projects, I think, did attend to food and agriculture in, in the Eastern Caribbean in particular.

[00:24:04] Honor Ford-Smith: So I think those two things were very important. And I think that CAFRA tried to in a time when intersectionality didn't have a term, it tried to create a form of intersectional, um, work, but that also put front and center women and gendered systems of social hierarchy. 

[00:24:32] Patricia Maguire: I think your through line from Sistren to CAFRA is in Sistren using this collective, cooperative approach to theater creation. It's a creation of knowledge. It's validating women's working class, Black women's knowledge about their experience in Jamaica, their experience of what's happening every day. And that through theater, it validates that knowledge. You perform it and it becomes knowledge.

[00:25:03] Honor Ford-Smith: Yeah, and you challenge the stereotype of the strong Black matriarch who can suffer all kinds of things and still, you know, carry on without showing the vulnerability, the pain, the cost of that, without tackling the fact that actually she's not strong. She's outwardly continuing, but inwardly suffering enormous slow violence. So, so that was that. But, but I wanted to also go back to Sistren to say that I think that one of the most serious problems that we have is that because we're a plantation society, we're not really a plantation society in the same way, we had a particular problem and we still have it in that everything is validated by external modernist, western expertise.

[00:25:49] Honor Ford-Smith: We're always looking outward. We're very outward looking. We always want to go to a magical place called Farin, which is, which is a Jamaican term for outside of the island, not in the island itself. And so the, the thing is to be able to see what we are doing well. And validate that, that's not something that colonization has ever allowed us to do. So to create a framework for doing that is critical. And I think the way to do it is to start with the experiences of people whose, whose voices are not normally listened to. So it's also a profound project of listening. 

[00:26:34] Patricia Maguire: And I think that's one of the, continuing on that theme, one of the things that CAFRA did was being a Caribbean feminist organization that distinguishes we're creating knowledge in the Caribbean. We're not looking outward on our, you know, we're doing it here. We're creating knowledge. We're, we're knowledge creators. We don't have to just look outside. We have knowledge to contribute to the whole decolonization, structural adjustment, all these critiques, if you will, of structural adjustment, of the labor market that the Caribbean feminists had an analysis and a critique that was unique and contextual to your setting, and that you had that to bring forward. That, that's hugely validating and important. 

[00:27:31] Honor Ford-Smith: I think that in CAFRA, as Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen pointed out at a certain moment, it did for Indo-Caribbean women, for example, there wasn't enough validation of difference, and there wasn't enough discussion about difference. And there wasn't, I think that in all cases, we were struggling to find a language, a way to talk about privilege and oppression in the society that had to do with racial capitalism.

[00:28:01] Honor Ford-Smith: And we didn't use the concept of racial capitalism at the time. So, its become more common now. But, but we were struggling to find a language for that and we didn't really have it. And, probably the only person who's best, who's articulated it best in the society was Walter Rodney, who worked across the divide of Indian and African in Ghana and Trinidad.

[00:28:26] Honor Ford-Smith: We, I think we're quite weak on race in, in many ways. We substituted to gloss race as class. Because, of course, in the Caribbean race is class, I mean, you know, we have a pigmentocracy. Especially in Jamaica, you know, Jamaica and Barbados probably are the worst. We have this terrible pigmentocracy. I mean, I, yesterday I was in like three different establishments, you know, for different kinds of business. Every single one of them owned by a Jamaican, a white Jamaican, you know, I mean, this is 2024 for God's sake. We needed very much a language for talking about that. I think that's one of the things that, that's a project that we still have to work on much more aggressively. 

[00:29:11] Patricia Maguire: Let's continue on to talk about a cycle of collaborative performances - collaborative theater that you've been involved in that's gone from Letters from the Dead, Vigil for Roxie, and Songs for the Beloved, where you and the people that you've worked with have used collaborative, collective, participatory theater creation, if you will, performance, to tackle, um, memories of violence, state-sponsored violence at the hands of police and the security forces, gender-based violence, and I think what you've called the violence of armed strongmen.

[00:29:51] Patricia Maguire: So tell us about the Letters from the Dead project where you used a participatory structure. You started with art based workshops in the communities that were affected by violence to involve community people who are affected by violence. Essentially in exploring how they remembered or forgot violence, what it meant in their lives. Talk about the Letters from the Dead project. 

[00:30:16] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, this is starting around 2008, 2009 or something like that. So that's the period. And at that time we had one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere. We had a very high rate of police violence as well. So we had both a high rate of murder, we had a high rate, when I say murder, it was by, from gangs. It's, there are many different levels. You just have guys who are hanging out on the street corner. They call that a gang, but then you have big guys who have access to arms that are involved in a lot of money, trading, illegal trade and so on, plus police violence. And then there was domestic violence, which has been on the rise in Jamaica.

[00:31:00] Honor Ford-Smith: I don't remember what it was at that time, but at this time, I think we're the third highest in the region for intimate partner violence. The level of femicide is very, very high here. I was very concerned about what was happening. So I wanted to join with the efforts that were being made at the time by a number of different people to address violence in this society, and the way that I could do it was through performance.

[00:31:27] Honor Ford-Smith: So we joined with the Peace Management Initiative, which was very strong at that time, to try to work with communities to make visible the cost of, all of what was happening in the society. But I also wanted to see what memories people were carrying of violence that had happened in the past. Both deep memories of violence, I suppose what Rob Nixon would call slow violence, violence that maybe had happened long ago that had continued to have unexpected impact much later in the society, you know, much later, having a long ripple effect. I wanted to find out what people were feeling and thinking. So we started to talk about it and to get people to share their stories. And, what we found was that people really were in a state of pain and anger with this, the State for not doing it, for allowing this to happen. We began to, with this march across Kingston, which we did in 2009 I think, which brought together different communities, women mainly from different communities, carrying images of the dead, which they brought in.

[00:32:55] Honor Ford-Smith: So they would bring in the people who they, we created a sort of memorialization workshop where we asked people to share memories of someone they wanted to remember or memories of something that had happened in the, you know, that was violent in their community that they wanted to memorialize. And they created a bunch of different things. What we found was that there was a sort of political economy that had kind of arisen on the back of the narco trade. Where there was a kind of class formation going on in, in working class communities using the money and using the capital that had come from what the wealth that people had accumulated from trading illegally.

[00:33:44] Honor Ford-Smith: And I still think that's very important to look at and to think about. I think a number of economists have tried to tackle it. But what you saw was little internal groups. little internal communities where people were employing each other to do cultural production in the form of dance halls, in the form of murals, memorial murals.

[00:34:12] Honor Ford-Smith: So painters were being employed. This was an economy that was sort of a parallel economy to the formal economy of the society. So that was a very interesting discovery. And we did, we, we did the march across Kingston and the pressure went on and then in 2010, the Americans extradited one of the major drug dons of Jamaica and the whole society kind of ground to a halt. And there was a very brutal incursion in Kingston by the army and the police and many people were killed in Tivoli Gardens, which is a community in western Kingston.

[00:34:48] Honor Ford-Smith: And that caused a massive crisis and, but, and it also shifted the topography of violence considerably at that time, uh, to, and it has reformed in new ways. So I guess what I came out of the whole thing with was an awareness of how deep and profound the whole issue of violence is. How that, how, you know, there are these, these, original acts of violence that have brought the society into being genocide, slavery, and so on. And then on top of that, this new, these, these sort of new practices which kind of reiterate those old structures. So unless we can find ways of acknowledging the violence that people have gone through and looking very deeply at the kinds of behavioral practices, the kinds of ways that we treat each other  that have grown up as a result of it, then, you know, then any project of social change it's going to be stymied on this deep, deep sort of recourse to violence that has been the formation, the basis of the social formation of society. 

[00:36:03] Honor Ford-Smith: So again, you come back to very slow work, listening, Yes, struggles for changes of policy, struggles that involve putting more money into the hands of families that are really suffering, uh, economically with the divide, but that is not going to be enough. There also has to be a conscious shift and a conscious willingness on the part of everybody in this society to look at the ways that we individually are colluding with violence in many ways, from the way we talk to each other, to the way we collude with some of the illegal acts in the society and begin to address those in fundamental ways. So, yeah, I think that's what we took away from the first iteration of Letters.

[00:36:57] Patricia Maguire: And so the next iteration, and I want to keep coming back to reminding people that this is all sort of nested in what I would call collaborative performance, which becomes its connection, if you will, to participatory research, that doing workshops and these actions with people in a community, they're producing knowledge, if you will, about the impact of violence on their lives. So let's talk about the next iteration, if you will, of collaborative performance, which was Vigil for Roxie. And I think you've written that it was a play that came out of a kind of research creation process. And that the, the play came out of that, but you also use performance of the play to try to engage the audience in discussion about conflicting attitudes about violence. So it had two sort of knowledge production use pieces. Tell us about Vigil for Roxie. 

[00:37:59] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, Vigil for Roxie was a great disappointment to me because it never got much performed in Jamaica. Again due to censorship and due to couldn't get the funding we needed. So we only ended up performing it three times here. So that was kind of heartbreaking. But what we did was we took one of the stories of one of the women who's, whose son had been murdered by the police. A very, a very young guy who was murdered like at 15. And his mother waged a campaign for like decades to try to get compensation for his death and to try to get the police brought to justice.

[00:38:38] Honor Ford-Smith: And, uh, she held a vigil every year on the anniversary of his death, in which the whole community would be invited and they would do a little march to the place where he had been shot. And then they would have music and food, which they would share. And, so we used her experience as sort of the container for the idea of Vigil for Roxie. And then into that container, we put the experiences that had been shared with us in other parts of Kingston. And basically it is a look at violence in the society from the perspective of a number of different people in the society, at different levels of the country. So, um, it has an upper, you know, the, the upper class view of what's happening.

[00:39:30] Honor Ford-Smith: The, so the wife of a hotelier weighs in, um, a school teacher weighs in, a woman who's a dance hall queen weighs in, all different voices trying to make sense of what's happening and trying to make sense of how to survive it. And what it's about is the ambivalence in this society toward violence.

[00:39:58] Honor Ford-Smith: In other words, what was uncovered was, in our work, was not just the trauma, but also the fact that people see violence as necessary, as, as sort of predetermined, as kind of overdetermined. So toxic masculinity, masculinity that's assertive and bad and so on, are seen as good because each community needs a protector. You need someone who's not afraid. You need someone who, who not soft, you mustn't be soft, must be tough. Right? So Vigil is about, in a way, a romance with violence. And it just basically poses the question. So, is violence sexy?  And how do you, how do you overcome the sex, how do you deal with the sexiness of violence in a, in a way which will allow us to envision a society in which we can be more socially just?

[00:41:06] Patricia Maguire: What you're doing again in this next iteration of this collaborative performance project, if you will, is building on everyday community people's experience of violence that then creates kind of a knowledge about violence and its normalization in the society and its romanticism. So you're creating through this collaborative performance process, new knowledges about violence and you referred to, well, it was only performed three times. It was, you know, uh, when new knowledge from everyday people about their experience gets exposed, everybody doesn't want to hear it. You know, it's, it's, uh, threatening. And I think as you, you know, mentioned that the performance, Vigil for Roxie, was only performed three times in Jamaica, and you said that was sort of a form of censorship, if you will. 

[00:42:05] Honor Ford-Smith: Oh yeah, because at that time, we were in the middle… remember I said that there was an extradition of a, of a very prominent don to the U. S. and that was extremely violent and many people were killed. And then there was an inquiry into it. And we were doing, we were working alongside that. And so it was very difficult to get it performed at that time because it was seen by the people who would give us funding to do that as inappropriate. And it cost quite a lot to do. So we only did it three times, and that's why Songs for the Beloved took the form that it did. 

[00:42:44] Patricia Maguire: All right, let's talk about Songs for the Beloved. Tell us about that project, which again, I believe, is another iteration of another cycle of this collaborative, community-engaged performance creation.

[00:42:58] Honor Ford-Smith: Well, there were three iterations in the cycle of performance. The first was the overt street performance, calling on the state to take action and that was outside in the street. That was a march across the communities in conflict. And it ended up outside the Supreme Court and outside of the office of the mayor. And it called for the violence to stop. And it called out the names of the people who, it called out the names of the people who had been killed and it challenged the idea that those people were nothing. You know, the idea that these people are criminals, they're worthless, they're nothing, they must be just, you know, eradicated. This is the idea. This comes straight from slavery. You know, that there are people that are disposable and you know, there's nothing you can do with them. So you just have to kill them. We were challenging that idea and trying to say, you know, life means something and death is important because it shows us that life means something and how can we honor the dignity and the humanity of these folks who have been killed, who have died because their dignity was never recognized in the first place.

[00:44:17] Honor Ford-Smith: And so, you know, it was asking us to look at our own humanity. So that was the first iteration. The second iteration was Vigil for Roxie, where we looked at the violence, we looked at the ambivalence around violence. And it was a monodrama performed by one actress in which she plays 12 different characters. And it's a very athletic performance. And, but it, the idea was we would have one actress do it so that we could move it around easily and it moved around the world very easily, but it didn't move around Jamaica so easily because it was, uh, it went to, it went to a lot of different places outside of Jamaica, but in Jamaica, not many.

[00:44:57] Honor Ford-Smith: So that was much more looking at the ambivalence within us about power and violence and the kind of power that we recognize as power. After that happened, that we couldn't, that we found it difficult to do this performance, which had lights and had, you know, costume and, you know, needed various things, I felt very much that seeing also the reaction to that, the ways in which when we did have the big discussion, we did it at Liberty Hall. After that, when we had that discussion, many communities came to that one performance and the trauma that they expressed and the feelings of hopelessness were so deep that we felt that there was a need, or I felt as the director, that there was a need for quiet space, a space of mourning, where instead of suppressing the pain, which is what we do in the middle of violence, in order to keep going, you can't break down.

[00:46:08] Honor Ford-Smith: You can't, you have to keep going because you have to put food on the table. You have to look after your kids. There's nowhere in which you can acknowledge what has happened to you, what you have lost. There's nowhere you can have that witnessed and that affects your own sense of identity and humanity. So I wanted to create a secular space that had a spiritual weight in which people could simply sit with these very difficult feelings and have them witnessed in validating ways. Also, collectively create a memorial that they made themselves to the dead. Songs for the Beloved is a room in which there are like, there's a big long table in the middle of the room with sand on it, and they have their hands washed by a serviteur, and then they, they get a stone to memorialize somebody they have lost to violence.

[00:47:14] Honor Ford-Smith: They write the name on the stone. And then they place it on the table, and then they go to another table where there are a bunch of different cards with images from different moments of our project. And they choose one of the cards and they write on it a wish for how, for repair. How could this be repaired? And they place it on the table too. And then they go to another table where there are three women dressed in white and they can just sit there and talk to those people and say what they have been through. They can write if they want to write on a scroll what they've experienced. They can just, some people just cry and then they leave that room and they go into another room where there's a party and in the party, and this we owe very much to Alissa Trotz, they, there's a party, there's a wake, there's a dance going on and there are DJs and people, there's soup, you can get soup, you can give the name of someone, an activist in your community who you want to celebrate and the DJ will make a rhyme for you to remember the person. That's how vigil, how song works.

[00:48:25] Honor Ford-Smith: So you come out physically drained and emotionally drained, but then you go into this room where you get built up back again, you can have this release and, um, you can get something to eat. And so it, it's much more an internal project than the big, street project.

[00:48:43] Patricia Maguire: And it also addresses what you had expressed earlier about people being left with these feelings of hopelessness, that there was no way to repair or  recover or change the violence. 

[00:48:46] Honor Ford-Smith: Yeah, and that's a legacy of what I said before. Remember I said that after 1980, there was a kind of decimation of visions of alternatives. And I think that, you know, how do you get back to a place where you can, what my uncle used to use a phrase, gather strength to feel that your voice can be heard and to feel that you have a right to be heard and to struggle to make a difference. You have to have something that is supporting you to do that.

[00:49:31] Honor Ford-Smith: You can't just, people are not just going to get up and do it unless they have a space that validates the need for that. And I think, you know, I mean, if you look back at social movements, the social movements that are most effective, always have that space. You know, sometimes, and that space is often created through the arts.

[00:49:54] Honor Ford-Smith: I'm thinking of here of an American experience, the Civil Rights Movement, where I think it's the scholar T. V. Reed points out that, you know, the Civil Rights Movement had this kind of sonic space that it created with spirituals. And it was through that sonic space that people got the energy to be able to keep on fighting against this terrible violence that they were experiencing. So it's to create a space out of which you then can struggle. That becomes very important. And in Jamaica, it would be Rasta in, in, in, you know, Rasta, people like Mortimer Planno created a space within which people could gather strength through reasoning, through talking, through, through, um, drumming, through, you know, sharing ganja and talking create a space from which you can feel that your your creative vision for a better, a more just society can be realized. So that was what Songs for the Beloved is about. And it can be, it can be done anytime, it can be done anywhere. And it doesn't, it's just a space where those same people who gave all the ideas that contribute to Vigil for Roxie and also to Letters from the Dead they can come and they can, uh, contribute and make the memorial there. 

[00:51:29] Patricia Maguire: Well, I think again your through line all the way from Sistren goes back to one of the very first things you said of wanting to somehow harness theater for social change and social justice and your through line through your work is using this collaborative, collective approach to performance theater as a way for people to have an opportunity to have their voices heard, to create knowledge about their experience particularly about experience of violence. And through that, it creates new knowledge, new understandings of community violence. 

[00:52:10] Honor Ford-Smith: But it also creates new knowledge in the people who are doing it themselves. 

[00:52:14] Patricia Maguire: Yes. So it's both internal and external. And it, you know, may lead to some kinds of change and alternative visions of a less violent society. Let's wrap this up. Is there anything else that you want to talk about in terms of your work, your contribution over time of using collaborative and collective theater for social change? Anything else you came prepared to talk about today that we didn't get to? 

[00:52:44] Honor Ford-Smith: I think that there are particular forms that emerge at particular moments in response to things that are happening. And they're not always the same. They're so, for example, for us back in the day, in the ‘70’s, I think the theater had a particular resonance then that it perhaps does not have now. And this had to do with, again, the anti-colonial movement and how peasant society as it existed at the time, where the majority of people didn't have access to the media. So the way that you could make your voice heard or the way that you could speak and have your experience represented was through your body, your physical body, because you didn't need any capital to do that. 

So that was one thing. And then also the legacy of British colonialism is two cultural legacies that are very important in this society, the Bible and Shakespeare. And these are oral forms as well as scribal forms. And the British taught their ideas through performance. That was, you know, everybody, even if they only went to school for two minutes, had to came into contact with some of the words of Shakespeare. They had to do some little play, a nativity play at Christmas or something like that.

[00:54:19]  Honor Ford-Smith: So it was a form that was in a way accessible at that time. I don't think that's the case now. I think that it's still there, but I think that there are other forms, predominantly digital forms that have far more popular reach and popular appeal. So the question is, how do we bring, what are the forms that are appropriate now in this moment that we're in? How do we choose the kind of form that is available and accessible to the majority of people in a way that creates a narrative that they can feel is powerful. And that's, so what I'm saying is that, um, you can do theater until the cows come home. You can do, make it participatory until the cows come home, but there are conditions that throw up particular forms that are effective in some moments and not in others. And the role of the artists in a way is to be able to see with the community, how, what the best strategy is and what the best form is to make a contribution at a particular time. 

[00:55:39] PatriciaMaguire: What do you think are some of the current forms, if you will?

[00:55:43] Honor Ford-Smith: TikTok, Instagram, digital mapping, that's what we're doing right now. We're trying to do a digital map of the city, where we're creating a map, where students are animating what's going on in the city -  struggles over particular locations in the city, struggles around gentrification, struggles around unregulated development, struggles around memorializing the past or suppressing the memories of the past, lack of green space, lack of air to breathe, noise pollution, all of these things. 

[00:56:21] Honor Ford-Smith: But putting them into a map so that we harness the power of something, of locative media, in order to give people knowledge. So it's not, you know, putting it on a stage in a small theater where only a hundred people can, can fit. It's using the theater because they're still acting. They're still having videos. They're still doing newspaper theater and Boalia and forms like that in order to, but, and pinning them onto the map. And then, you know, using podcasts, like what you're doing, etc., to bring it to life, make it more immediate. Those are some of the ways forward. It doesn't mean that you can't still have the kind of work that we're doing back in the day, but it does mean that, you know, you have to be cognizant of what your strategy is. And, you know, what works when, with whom? 

[00:57:17] Patricia Maguire: Well, this digital mapping project sounds very powerful.

[00:57:20] Honor Ford-Smith: It's not original. I actually got the idea because I worked in a faculty of environmental studies and got interested in, in, in space. And then I looked at my city, which is a mess. You know, we have this massive uptown, downtown divide spatially. 

[00:57:35] Patricia Maguire: And you're talking about Kingston here. 

[00:57:38] Honor Ford-Smith: Yes, Kingston, we have this class divide where uptown is St. Andrew, near to the hills, where middle class people live, um, and downtown is in a city, materially impoverished, but it's also the cultural engine of Jamaica. So when you think of Jamaica, you, you think of reggae, you think of all of the things, those all come from downtown. So, even if you had a revolution tomorrow you'd still have the uptown downtown divide. So, spatially, how do you resolve that? How do we envision a city in which people can have equal access to space, spatial reserves, resources, communication, and so on? How can we address this space which over- determines our identity and how we're able to act? These are spatial injustices that allow for these difference, these differences to be remade and made at every point, at every possible point. And so that's what I'm trying to address now. 

[00:58:48] Patricia Maguire: Sounds very powerful. Well, I want to thank you so much, Honor, for talking with me today about your work, your life's work, your contribution across time of collective theater, performance, ending up here in digital mapping. I want to thank you so much for sharing with us today.

[00:59:07] Patricia Maguire: I want to thank our listeners. You can help expand our audience by sharing the episode link with your colleagues and networks, a transcript of today's podcast and additional information about Dr. Ford-Smith, her projects and publications, will be on our companion website parfemtrailblazers.net.

So that's it, folks, for another episode of Participatory Action Research - Feminist Trailblazers and Good Troublemakers, and as civil rights icon John Lewis urged us, just go make some good trouble of your own.