Zahra Newman
For celebrated actor Zahra Newman, Louise Bennett’s iconic collection of poems, Jamaica Labrish, is a reminder of the power of owning your own history.
Zahra Newman traces her first encounters with the stage to her childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, where, as she puts it, story is inextricable from culture. The acclaimed actor, who moved with her mother to Brisbane as a 14-year-old, is known for her memorable performances across theatre, film and television. Newman received a Green Room Award for 2012’s random, an electrifying onewoman show at Belvoir Downstairs written by debbie tucker green, a major Black British playwright. Newman tackled toxic masculinity in 2019’s Wake in Fright at Malthouse Theatre, and later this year plays Billie Holiday in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. This month, she stars in the Sydney Theatre Company’s premiere of Fences, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson. The work, directed by Shari Sebbens, charts the life of an African–american couple in 1950s Pittsburgh as the force of midcentury American politics dictates the course of their lives.
Newman regularly returns to the work of Louise Bennett, the Jamaican poet and performer whose 1966 collection, Jamaica Labrish, marries the personal with the political. For Newman, it’s also a study in the power of owning your history and voice.
Jamaica Labrish is a poetry collection by Louise Bennett or Miss Lou, the Jamaican poet and performer who became the voice of the country’s culture. When did you first learn about her work?
I was introduced to Miss Lou at school; we would learn her poems in class. Then I performed it with community theatre enterprises and really liked it. I was very young. I was maybe 10 when I did my first show. I found a great affinity with the sense of building a community, building an ensemble to tell a story.
I think community-driven storytelling is embedded in the Jamaican psyche. The way that culture is intertwined with the education system in Jamaica is a precious thing that I think Caribbean people hold as part of identity-making. It is part of the political environment. It is a defining feature of an emancipated people.
The copy I have is my mother’s teaching copy from the ’70s. The whole cover is off – the pages are falling out!
Miss Lou famously wrote in Creole, a subversive act that helped pave the way for Jamaican people to embrace their own complexity. What do you think gives her work its power?
I didn’t think about it when I first encountered her language. The power of it comes in retrospect. It comes when I’m in Australia and performing and can look back. I think it would be different for people who were around in the ’60s, [after] the publication of this book, only four years after independence. I have heard stories of people in the hot sun taking tea at 4pm, hangovers of this colonial culture that persist even though someone like Louise Bennett says we have our own way of doing things and our language is just as much a language as the language of the coloniser. That it deserves to be written down and codified and critiqued like we critique other languages. I really only understood the meaning of what she did as an adult.
In terms of working on Fences, August Wilson is also using language to place a certain kind of person in a very particular context. That is what Miss Lou was doing as well. The characters and people and lives that she is talking about in her poetry are people who are typically not seen as worthy of exploration. But [for her] they have the same complexity of other lives and stories. In the presentation of these people, language is an important part of characterising them and situating them clearly.
Jamaica Labrish offers a biting social commentary on Jamaican culture. For instance, “Wartime Grocery” critiques the disparities between rich and poor when it comes to food shortages during World War II. What do you admire the most about the collection?
It’s the way that you are reading something that has to be performed. I really admire the way that Miss Lou is using really old and simple storytelling devices and techniques. I remember one that went something like:
I went down to the market and I saw this woman and they had a fight… There are parts that are about colonisation in reverse. Like, Hello England, we are coming now. You told us we are British citizens. You have come to our land, our island, taken all our sugar. And now, as a British subject I would like to see England.
That reversal is so clever.
I admire the way that it encompasses such a broad spectrum of life and is political and domestic at the same time. Watching Miss Lou, she would do these shows where she would come out dressed in traditional Jamaican dress and have a drummer. And she would ask: does anyone remember this folk song? And then she would do a poem.
Creole is an amalgamation of languages – of the West African languages that came with slavery, English and others. There are patois words that are directly from languages in West Africa, like Twi and other languages from Ghana. Because it is a language that has evolved orally, through listening and trying to communicate, the poetry is demanding to be performed.
I’m really struck by the domestic and the public, the way she mixes the modes together and doesn’t prioritise one over the other.
Similar to the stuff that comes up with someone like August Wilson, who was an incredibly political artist, even militant sometimes. The people Miss Lou and August Wilson are investigating have the capacity to be incredibly political [even if ] you don’t think that they are necessarily experiencing the on-the-ground effects of how these politics manifest.
“Colonisation in Reverse” is so cheeky. It is such a clapback. It is a very popular one as well. I also have a soft spot for “Is Me”. That would have been the first one that I learnt. It is one that is easy to teach to kids. It’s like – “Is me. I am here.”
Jamaica Labrish features many poems that skewer colonial dynamics – and she does it in such a playful way. In “My Dream”, for example, a working woman washes the clothes of a woman called Rose. Why do you think her critique still resonates?
I think context is important here. The conversation that Jamaica has about its colonised history is very different from the conversation that Australia has about its colonised history. I think because we still see the ramifications of colonisation on people.
There is a playful and sort of cheeky and confident way to own and talk about something that has the potential to be incredibly divisive and traumatic. The ability to do that is also part of why she holds such a dear place in hearts and minds. She doesn’t feel didactic. Not that history lessons shouldn’t be didactic!
Again, it comes down to this element of performance. What you are getting is characters, different kinds of people. And part of that is gossip – “labrish” means gossip. That is why the suite of poetry covers city and country and poor people and governors and prime ministers and England and the motherland and war. Because it is about the origins of storytelling, like “Oh my gosh, did you hear?”
That’s why I carry the book around with me. If I go on long tours, I pack it. I want something that reflects my individual history. We do such big plays with big themes, all these metaphors. It is wonderful. But sometimes simplicity is key to unlocking some of that.