In the Autumn 1990 issue of Theatre Research International, Rhonda Cobham published an article that contained some rare and valuable research on a Jamaican play – Bellywoman Bangarang – devised and performed in 1978 by the Jamaican women's theatre collective Sistren. Bellywoman Bangarang was one of many plays Sistren devised collectively during the group's first ten years, from 1977 to 1988. Further, Sistren's daily administration was also collectively organized, and was seen as an important form of (feminist) resistance to neo-liberalism in the 1980s. Returning to a discussion of Sistren's work in 2010 is in keeping with lectures and articles published over the last ten years that reflect on the successes and failures of the Caribbean women's movement of the 1980s,Footnote 2 in which Sistren played an important role and in which collective organizing was advocated. This article will analyse Sistren's commitment to collectivity by looking at both its innovative use of collaborative theatrical techniques and its collective organizational structure. I will argue that in 1980s Jamaica, collectivity was an important form of resistance to the impact of neo-liberal policies introduced by the Jamaican Seaga government, then in power, but, because of the country's race-and-class social stratification, Sistren's model of collectivity unintentionally perpetuated the unequal social relations it opposed. The article will trace Sistren's development as a collective by looking at the way the following plays were created: Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), Bandoolu Version (1979), Domestick (1981), The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong (1984) and Buss Out (1989).
Sistren: an overview
Sistren was formed in 1977 by thirteen black working-class Jamaican womenFootnote 3 and Honor Ford-Smith, a ‘white’ Jamaican theatre practitioner. The working-class women were all employed in the People National Party's (PNP) Impact programme, a programme designed to provide jobs for unemployed women; they were first employed as street cleaners and later as teachers’ aides. The women were asked by the PNP, led by Michael Manley (who introduced ‘democratic socialism’ in his second term), to devise a skit for the annual Workers’ Week Festival, and Ford-Smith, who was then tutoring at the Jamaica School of Drama, was asked to facilitate the rehearsals. The skit, titled Downpression Get a Blow, was so successful that the women approached Ford-Smith to hold drama workshops that they could attend on a weekly basis. Ford-Smith sought support for Sistren from the Jamaica School of Drama and the Women's Bureau, which provided both rehearsal space and training.Footnote 4 As Cobham explains in her TRI article, the culmination of the drama workshops was Bellywoman Bangarang, Sistren's debut production, performed at Kingston's Barn Theatre in 1978. The play, based on the personal testimonies of Sistren members, uses sophisticated ‘ritual frameworks’ to explore the socialization of gender roles in Jamaican society.Footnote 5 Since then, the group has devised and performed many full-length plays as well as conducted outreach workshops with community groups in the Caribbean region, the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. While Sistren no longer produces the full-length plays for which it is renowned, it continues to offer socio-drama workshops in Kingston's downtown communities with a particular focus on violence prevention.
Despite Sistren's international reputation, there are very few critical readings of the group's plays because up to now the majority of them remain unpublished scripts. The exception is Bellywoman Bangarang, which was included in Waters and Edgecombe's 2001 anthology Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean; Helen Gilbert has also published excerpts from Sistren's QPH (1981) and Buss Out (1989) in her edited anthologies, (Post)Colonial Stages (1999) and Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology (2001), respectively. One of the reasons Sistren's plays have not been published is because they were devised collectively. The plays remain in a state of flux, constantly reworked to suit different directors' styles, changes in Jamaica's sociocultural milieu, international tours and feedback from local audiences and workshop participants. Hence there are many versions of the same play: two versions of The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong, three versions of Domestick and three of Muffet Inna All A Wi, for example.Footnote 6
Not only is Sistren renowned for its innovative approaches to the collective creation of theatre, it also organized itself as a collective in which the everyday running of the company, such as administration, grant-writing and liaison with communities, was divided ‘equally’ among all members of the group. In the late 1970s, Sistren was supported by the People National Party's Women's Movement (PNPWM) and the Jamaican Women's Bureau, both of which were heavily influenced by the global women's movement, particularly as it found momentum in the United Nations World Decade for Women, 1975–85.Footnote 7 While Sistren did not identify as a feminist theatre company per se, it did align itself with feminist concerns, such as consciousness-raising around women's issues and rejecting patriarchal hierarchies found in the wider society, hence its early decision to work collectively. However, it did not explore queer identity, neither did it set itself up as a radical separatist group, although some critics accused Sistren of taking an ‘anti-male’ stance (see, for example, Arthur Kitchen's review of Bandoolu Version in the Daily Gleaner).Footnote 8
The company was unusual in that it attempted to bridge the gap between race and class through working-class and middle-class Jamaican women working together to devise theatre in a cultural context where the disparity between the socioeconomic classes in terms of income levels, educational access and achievements and skin colour is distinct. Collectivity was viewed as a way to break down or at least cross some of these colour/class divides and to emphasize the solidarity between the women in the collective. Peggy Antrobus, the first director of Jamaica's Women's Bureau, described in her Lucille Mathurin Mair Lecture in the year 2000 how she developed a ‘feminist consciousness’ through working with Sistren:
From these women I learnt about the contradictions of class privilege and women's autonomy, the ways in which privilege can work as a barrier to freedom of expression and association. From women not normally accorded respect within a colonial class structure, I learnt to respect myself as a woman.Footnote 9
Antrobus's comments, first, reinforce the importance of Jamaican women of different social classes working together and by virtue of their collaboration exploring the limitations of their respective class positioning within Jamaican society; second, Antrobus's remarks point to the problems these divisions caused within Sistren despite the feminist ideals of equality the group adopted.
Devising a collective theatrical methodology: Bellywoman Bangarang
The process of creating Sistren's Bellywoman Bangarang defined the company's approach to devising theatre collectively. In an interview published in Sistren magazine in 1988, Ford-Smith pinpoints ‘feminism, socialism, experimental and political theatre and education’ as the ‘theory behind the work’.Footnote 10 While feminist theatre groups that emerged in the 1970s, particularly in the USA and the UK, promoted collaborative approaches to devising plays around women's issues, and Sistren was certainly influenced by these groups, the company's broader aim was the transformation of ‘the larger social project’, to quote Peggy Antrobus, who sees this as ‘transforming social institutions, practices and beliefs so that they address gender relations along with other oppressive relationships’.Footnote 11 The ideology underpinning Sistren's drama workshops in the late 1970s reflected the ideals of the Manley government's ‘democratic socialist’ experiment, which provided a space in which disadvantaged Jamaicans could articulate their daily life experiences; this was coupled with the concerns of the international women's movement, such as working towards global peace and justice for women,Footnote 12 and the local women's movement which, on the whole, ‘complemented the male-dominated political party structure as it grappled with issues of social reform in the emergent nation state’.Footnote 13 Sistren members used the space provided to form themselves into a consciousness-raising group, a ‘sisterhood’, which mirrored in many ways feminist groups in the global North; the women in Sistren shared their personal testimonies with each other in a safe environment so that reality could be demystified.Footnote 14 Importantly, though, Sistren's discussions differed in that they were focused on gender, race and class oppressions.
The thirteen women who formed Sistren initially participated in drama classes with Honor Ford-Smith in which the dynamic was that of tutor and students.Footnote 15 Later, Ford-Smith assumed the role of the company's artistic director. While the dynamic within Sistren was not equal due to Ford-Smith's position as drama tutor, the women in the group each brought ‘her own offering and through the exploration of this a play is created’.Footnote 16 Sistren member Lillian Foster describes Sistren's theatrical methodology as follows:
We do our plays by improvisation. We take our own experience – teenage pregnancy, mother and child experiences and so on – and we put bits and pieces together to form the play . . . Most groups use scripts while we just improvise, you know. Then we write a script, but whatever is written in the script is just what we say.Footnote 17
Nevertheless, Ford-Smith had final control of the artistic product, a method of working that was not unique to Sistren. Charlotte Canning, in Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women's Experience, cites the example of the Spiderwoman Theatre in the United States whose artistic director, Muriel Miguel, assumed the role of artistic director at the end of the creative process in order to polish the finished product; despite this, the creative work was still owned by the members of the company.Footnote 18
Ford-Smith's workshop programme drew on many different forms of collaborative performance-making, from avant-garde approaches developed by US companies such as the Open Theatre and the Living Theatre to popular theatre techniques, such as those developed by Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Kenya and the People's Educational Theatre Association (PETA) in the Philippines. But it was the incorporation of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed exercises and Colombian director Enrique Buenaventura's Theory of the Committed Theatre with aspects of Jamaica's oral tradition that defined Sistren's theatrical methodology. During the 1970s, many community theatre groups emerged in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean; all were working collaboratively and, as theatre practitioner Keith Noel suggests, many were influenced by Buenaventura's work with Teatral Experimental de Cali (TEC).Footnote 19 In fact, Cobham and Ford-Smith suggest that Sistren's work is ‘probably closest’ to that of Buenaventura.Footnote 20
The aim of Buenaventura's work was to create theatre which would challenge audiences to change the society in which they lived. Buenaventura's theatrical philosophy, called Theory of the Committed Theatre, saw theatre as a mirror image of society. By analysing its theatrical reflection, Buenaventura believed society may be ‘moved to change itself, even to the point of social revolution’.Footnote 21 Buenaventura combined elements from Colombia's oral tradition, such as Latin American short stories, poetry, songs and popular myths, with epic theatre forms developed by Piscator, Meyerhold and Brecht.Footnote 22 When devising performances, Buenaventura suggested that the ‘actor's improvisational responses to the material provided [should] shape the course of the finished piece’.Footnote 23 In the 1950s and 1960s, TEC's productions were based on adaptations of Colombian folktales which used music, dance, masking and complex images interwoven in the narrative structure.Footnote 24 Due to government censorship, the company's later work was restricted to using well-known scripts as metaphors for Colombia's then current political situation.Footnote 25
Ford-Smith's theatrical methodology was similar to that of Buenaventura in that it aimed to demystify reality in order to effect social change. By interweaving elements of Jamaica's oral tradition into the performance, the issues presented were made more immediate for Jamaican audiences. However, Buenaventura's approach to collective creation still privileged the role of the director; as Cobham and Ford-Smith point out, ‘he does not discuss the relationship between the roles of writer and director or between these roles and those of the actors as they affect the creation of the text’.Footnote 26 Further, Buenaventura's approach to collective performance-making did not explore gender inequalities. It was the preponderance of male-dominated theatre, both avant-garde and mainstream, that prompted the emergence of feminist theatre groups in the 1960s. Although non-feminist collectives claimed to be committed to collective creation, feminists often discovered that this was ‘either mere lip service or existed exclusive of women’.Footnote 27 Sistren's collective model maintained the role of the director mainly because the members of Sistren did not have any theatrical experience prior to forming the group. While Ford-Smith established a methodology that took into consideration the contribution of the actors, the process of staging the play reverted to the conventional approach of the director guiding the actors. Akua Rugg, writing for the Race Today Review, observes that ‘[a]lthough the plays are developed from improvisations during workshops, they are honed and polished to satisfy the exacting requirements of an audience drawn from the middle and professional classes’.Footnote 28 However, as Ford-Smith notes, Sistren members took control of Bellywoman Bangarang on opening night, ‘inventing loads of new dialogue for a packed house’.Footnote 29
Sistren in transition: Bandoolu Version
The same process of working was used in the creation of Bandoolu Version, which was performed at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital's Garden Theatre and then at the Barn, both based in Kingston. Although created from improvisations, Bandoolu Version, which follows the lives of three women who become involved with criminals, was Sistren's first fully scripted play.Footnote 30 Further, it was performed in support of the PNPWM, which was, in 1979, lobbying the government to introduce maternity leave legislation.Footnote 31 As Harry Milner notes in his review of Bandoolu Version, Sistren was in transition towards the end of the 1970s: he suggests that they had to develop their theatrical skills ‘without losing authenticity’, but in his opinion the group was close to exhausting the use of its members’ personal stories as material for theatrical productions.Footnote 32 The shift from creating plays based on personal experience to conducting research on women's issues in the wider society placed greater emphasis on literacy skills, which many Sistren members were still in the process of improving. Inevitably, Ford-Smith was credited with Sistren's success due to the ‘excellent work’ she was doing with this ‘exciting group’.Footnote 33 As I have argued elsewhere, groups such as Sistren were generally led by middle-class Jamaicans who were politically aligned with the Manley government, and Manley himself advocated traversing colour/class boundaries in order to effect social change.Footnote 34 But, as Ford-Smith points out, she was also ‘frequently criticized’ for the central role she held in Sistren because,Footnote 35 according to Elaine Savory Fido, some Jamaican critics felt a creative shape was being imposed on the women in the group.Footnote 36 Despite shifting to a completely collective organizational structure in the 1980s, the expansion of the company in terms of its commitment to producing professional theatre, its negotiations with development agencies and its emphasis on researching Jamaican women's lives underscored race and class tensions within the group.
Collectivity and the challenge to neo-liberalism
Sistren's decision to adopt both a collective approach to theatrical creation and a collective organizational structure reflects the type of social activism that was occurring in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s. In Jamaica, the ‘democratic socialist’ Manley government was replaced by the pro-USA Seaga regime, which ushered in a period of ultra-conservatism, reflected in the neo-liberal policies it put in place. Although many collectives in the North had failed during the 1960s and 1970s and had become ‘less rigidly democratic’,Footnote 37 finding ways of organizing that resisted the onslaught of neo-liberalism in the Caribbean was of utmost importance to cultural workers, such as the women who formed Sistren. In email correspondence with this author, Ford-Smith, in response to a question concerning Sistren's adoption of collectivity in light of the history of radical failure cited above, points out, ‘We were not academics with access to information or research of this kind . . . we didn't know this history’. Instead, she suggests, Sistren was influenced by the ethos of socialism and, I would add, the theatrical techniques taught at the Jamaica School of Drama and therefore the group felt collectivity was ‘the best and most democratic way of working at the time’. Further, Sistren did not consciously choose to call itself a collective but was described in this way by a staff member at the Women's Bureau: ‘it seemed right so it stuck’.Footnote 38 In the late 1970s, the Women's Bureau assisted Sistren to attract development-agency funding as a Women in Development non-governmental organization.Footnote 39 Labelling the group a ‘collective’ may have been part of the bureau's strategy to secure international financial support.
Although Ford-Smith suggests in the interview cited above that Sistren's adoption of the collective model was not a conscious decision, the group's embrace of participatory democracy was a political act which the company used to counter the hegemony of capitalist development models in the wider society. It was a way of preserving the philosophy of participatory decision-making established by the Manley government through its community councils ‘and a host of other measures designed to intensify popular mobilisation’,Footnote 40 as well as embracing the feminist values of ‘non-hierarchical organisation’,Footnote 41 so that the company's theatre practice and organizational structure were in dialogue. Honor Ford-Smith suggests that the decision to transform Sistren into a collective was in response to the
inequitable power relations found in the wider society . . . We did not want to reproduce a structure that equated skill with authority or that divided brain from hand. In a sense, the structure that we built aimed to prefigure the kind of ideal society we wanted to create.Footnote 42
In her book Ring Ding in a Tight Corner, Ford-Smith claims that the motivation to make Sistren's internal structure democratic was also to shake the perception that she was the manager of Sistren.Footnote 43 While this was important for Ford-Smith from a personal perspective, many feminists considered it hypocritical to critique power structures in the wider society if their own organizations were also based on the same leadership principles; therefore collectivity was an important strategy for defining the women's movement's difference from male-centred organizations – it was also a way of creating ‘an alternative future’ for women, particularly for those who had been locked out of decision-making processes.Footnote 44
In the early 1980s, the Jamaican women's movement entered a period of inactivity due to the change of government.Footnote 45 Instead of disappearing along with it, Sistren took the lead on women's issues in Jamaica and entered into greater discussions with ‘sister’ groups throughout the Caribbean. Sistren's more ‘militant’ feminist presence was in response to the Seaga government's attempts to dissolve the group. For example, it was asked to vacate the Jamaica School of Drama, the Impact programme was closed down, community organizations were ‘too afraid’ to continue their association with Sistren, and the media were ‘less receptive to their requests for publicity’.Footnote 46 Through the fostering of transnational feminist networks, both within the Caribbean region and elsewhere, Sistren was able to survive the political hostilities of the 1980s. Further, Sistren's adoption of collectivity fitted neatly with the Caribbean women's movement's vision of ‘transforming social relations and bringing about fundamental social change in the major institutions of a society’; and, as the Caribbean women's movement's membership included ‘women of all colours, classes, and creeds . . . from all countries across the region’,Footnote 47 collectivity was a way in which Sistren could lead by example.
Sistren's collective organizational structure
Sistren's organizational collective model revolved around the General Meeting, in which decisions were made and policies established via consensus among the founding members of the company. Each Sistren member was given an opportunity to express her ideas and raise concerns at this meeting, and facilitation of the meeting was based on a roster system so that the responsibility for chairing the meetings was shared among the members of the group. Further, the decision was made to divide tasks equally among Sistren members rather than along the lines of skills specialization. There were no job descriptions and no formal channels for holding members accountable for underachievement, and all Sistren members were paid the same wage, which was made possible through the development-agency grants the group was awarded.Footnote 48 Sistren member Lana Finikin describes the collective structure as follows:
I work with the accounts for four years now. I didn't have any training in accounts. I just look up Sistren account and started doing it . . . But the problem is that rehearsals and things like that take up the time, and we cannot find any time to do schooling.Footnote 49
Finikin highlights one of the major problems with Sistren's collective organizational model: how were grass-roots women supposed to improve their skills when they were required to tackle jobs, such as the accounts, without any formal training? Helen Brown, in Women Organising, suggests that collective organization ‘expresses a desire to relate to others in terms which respect the capacities of individuals, which seek to avoid placing one group of people above another, and to promote collective ownership of the aims of the endeavour’.Footnote 50 While the organizational methodology that Brown describes is good in theory, in practice it does not take difference into consideration. The women in Sistren were different in terms of education, skills and experience, differences which are directly related to Jamaica's colour/class social stratification.
In the 1970s, Sistren's drama workshops at the Jamaica School of Drama, which mostly involved Sistren members reflecting on their daily lives, nurtured the group. The safety of this space, however, did not merely relate to the issues that were discussed; it was safe because Sistren members’ lack of ‘formal’ skills was not the main focus. Rather, their knowledge of Jamaica's oral tradition, their creativity and their life stories were legitimated. Julia Sudbury, in ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women's Organisations and the Politics of Transformation, suggests that these ‘are spaces in which black women can create oppositional and empowering narratives of self’.Footnote 51 The transformation of Sistren during the 1980s changed the company's focus: it was no longer a theatre cooperative made up predominantly of working-class women; it became a professional theatre collective that required ‘resource people’ (read: middle-class), a term Ford-Smith uses to describe the women who joined Sistren in the 1980s, to assist with its research projects and to handle its administration, among the other jobs they performed.Footnote 52 Further, during the 1980s Sistren became increasingly dependent on development-agency funding, mainly from North American development agencies such as Inter Pares, which was applied for and negotiated by the ‘resource people’.Footnote 53 Hence ‘formal’ skills were given prominence and, as a result, the differences between members were highlighted. In the haste to apply for funding and produce theatrical productions and conduct workshops, skills were not passed on to the working-class members of the company;Footnote 54 instead, the middle-class members carried the workload, preferring to keep the collective running than address the glaring differences based on race and class.Footnote 55 Collectivity masked these problems, although they were particularly evident to Sistren insiders. Charles Landry et al., in What a Way to Run a Railroad: An Analysis of Radical Failure, suggest that one of the main problems with collectives is that the moral, political and philosophical stance taken when deciding to work collectively ‘is a short step to claiming that the process is morally superior to the “bourgeois” way of doing things and therefore cannot be called into question. At this point the group finds itself trapped’.Footnote 56 I would argue that Sistren found itself ‘trapped’ when the title ‘collective’ precluded discussions about power: who held it and how it was wielded.
Collective creation: Domestick and The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong
Sistren's approach to collective theatrical creation also changed to reflect Sistren's ‘professional’ status. The group focused much more on developing its workshop programme and particularly on devising plays that would spark discussions with workshop participants. Ford-Smith suggests that the group tried collective creation,
At the level of small workshops which are totally process oriented. We've tried it at the level of having a production which stops and we discuss and then go back to it. We tried it at the level of having the audience make suggestions which we then enact.Footnote 57
Domestick and The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong are two examples of Sistren's experimentation with collective creation in the early 1980s, as well as of its intensified focus on the social and economic conditions facing working-class Jamaican women. Domestick, which was performed in Jamaica and Canada, is based on research that Sistren conducted on domestic workers in Jamaica. Although it was staged at Kingston's Barn Theatre, Domestick is a didactic play which Sistren presented to groups of workshop participants in order to illicit discussion around the issues faced by household workers. The Case of Iris Armstrong, on the other hand, is written to include participants in the staging of the drama so that they experience, through improvisation, the world of female sugar workers.Footnote 58 Yet, in order to devise Domestick and The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong, Sistren members had to acquire professional skills. For example, interviews were carried out with communities, such as domestic helpers and sugar workers; research was conducted and documented by middle-class women in the theatre group; and plays were written based on the research rather than solely on improvisations.Footnote 59
In Ring Ding, Ford-Smith interviewed the working-class and middle-class members of the company to gauge their perspectives on Sistren's internal dilemmas. The working-class members accused the middle-class members of making them feel like idiots;Footnote 60 the middle-class members spoke of the ‘guilt’ associated with their privileged position within Jamaican society.Footnote 61 Ford-Smith cites the following two Sistren members, Cyrene Stephenson and Joan French, respectively, whose perspectives illustrate the extent of the divide within Sistren:
They try to force you to do something you don't want to do or understand. If you don't understand they make you feel like you're not in their league you don't understand what they're dealing with. Some resource people have a way of looking down on us Sistren because we are not educated.
The structure never honestly recognized the similarities and differences between the resource people. Because we were guilt-ridden about our class power, we made ourselves into non-persons in theory, but we remained individuals in reality. The failure to deal with that meant tensions developed between resource persons and these, together with the weight of the individuals’ role and their work with Sistren, had an impact on the perceptions and behavior of founding members.Footnote 62
While the ethnicity of Jamaicans is incredibly complex, and, as Martin and Pamela Mordecai suggest in their Culture and Customs of Jamaica, ‘defies the simplistic labels often employed by other societies’,Footnote 63 those with light brown or white skin are positioned at the top of Jamaica's colour/class social stratification. In Ford-Smith's articles on Sistren she refers to herself as ‘apparently white’ to emphasize her mixed-race ancestry.Footnote 64 Nevertheless, in Jamaica she was seen as ‘white’ and middle class, which translates to educated and economically privileged. Sistren resource person Hilary Nicholson suggests that her ‘status and perceived power was sometimes a barrier in her work, despite the fact that she would not have had much of the status she currently enjoys without the help of a group like Sistren that promotes working women’.Footnote 65 In the context of Sistren, the middle-class women were also associated with feminist activism and left-wing politics, ideologies that were not shared by all of the working-class members of the group.Footnote 66 Although Ford-Smith claims the working-class members of Sistren did hold informal power in the group, ‘it was the power of the resource people that emerged again and again as a problem’;Footnote 67 a similar observation is made by Cheryl Ryman in her evaluation report on Sistren for the Association of Development Agencies.Footnote 68 Yamini Mishra and Nalini Singh, in their essay ‘An Insight into Feminist Organizations’, make the important point that despite the aim of feminism to fight against ‘abuse of power . . . individuals and women are products of the societies in which they grew up’.Footnote 69 The relationship between the working-class and middle-class Sistren members reflected the class antagonism in Jamaican society, a direct result of British colonialism.Footnote 70
Guyanese activist Andaiye, in her 2002 Lucille Mathurin Mair lecture, identifies the scenario described above as a shortcoming of the Caribbean women's movement of the 1980s, which she criticizes for ignoring race and class differences in its approach to feminist organizing. She writes,
In the form and practice of organizing in the 1980s and later, we studiously ignored the power relations among women, thereby allowing us, women with more power (however derived) to dominate or exclude – consciously or not, deliberately or not, it does not matter.Footnote 71
Andaiye's remarks, although not exclusively addressing the racial divisions between black and white Caribbean people, are pertinent for understanding the internal dilemmas that occurred within Sistren. While problems associated with skills-sharing are reasonably common within collectives, race and class differences as wide as those in Sistren are not as common. Cheryl Ryman makes the point in her report on Sistren that the members of the group were not ‘simply different but vastly different and unequal in most every respect – race, colour, nationality, education, skills, qualifications, political affiliations, exposure and status’.Footnote 72 The group's commitment to collective organizing, to creating an ‘ideal society’ and to maintaining the illusion of feminist democracy took precedence over dealing with entrenched social hierarchies which reproduced themselves in the group. Jamaican social anthropologist Barry Chevannes, who wrote a report on Sistren in 1988, concluded that the only solution to the group's internal dilemmas was ‘social equality’,Footnote 73 by which he appears to mean the breaking down of class barriers in Jamaica, a view that is echoed in Andaiye's remarks quoted above. Using Andaiye's remarks as a frame for her article ‘Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-Racism’, Caribbean feminist scholar Rhoda Reddock, reflecting on the Caribbean women's movement from the early twentieth century to the present, suggests that Caribbean feminist activists and scholars need to pay attention to ‘difference’ so that social movements are not ‘fragment[ed] and neutraliz[ed]’ by ‘[r]ace and other forms of identity politics’, particularly in the face of ‘a rapidly globalizing Euro-American capitalism’ which is ‘negatively affecting the social and economic welfare of millions in the Economic North and South’.Footnote 74
Sistren's internal dilemmas and the creation of Buss Out
The creative process behind Sistren's production Buss Out, and the subsequent tour of the production locally, regionally and internationally, provides a useful point of departure for reflecting on the impact that Sistren's collective structure had on the group's theatrical vibrancy and political immediacy. Buss Out was collectively devised by Sistren members in collaboration with Jamaican theatre practitioners Owen ‘Blacka’ Ellis and Pat Cumper; it was directed by Earl Warner and initially performed at the Barn Theatre before being toured to ten countries.Footnote 75 The play focuses on the problems experienced by women living in a tenement yard in downtown Kingston who come together to resist being moved by their absentee landlord for the purposes of redevelopment.Footnote 76
In Michael Reckord's review of Buss Out for Jamaica's Daily Gleaner, he criticizes the process used to create the play. Instead of ‘building’ the play from one theme or character, he labels Sistren's process ‘collating’: ‘There, you collect together little ready-made buildings, chop off a section here, a similar piece there and then join them – again with story mortar – into a single whole’.Footnote 77 Reckord's criticism is based on the group's decision to create a play based on the personal testimonies that are published in the Collective's book, Lionheart Gal (1986). While the testimonies are very similar to those the group initially used to devise Bellywoman Bangarang, the process of consulting the printed testimonies in order to then improvise around the themes and rework them into a play did not, in Reckord's view, produce a ‘cohesive’ script.Footnote 78 What Reckord identifies as problematic with Buss Out, although not explicitly stated in his review, is that Sistren, with the help of guest playwrights and a director, was recycling material rather than creating an issue-based drama that had come out of the group's outreach work with disadvantaged communities.
The problems that Reckord identifies in Sistren's creation of Buss Out are indicative of larger problems that beleaguered the group since it formed itself into a collective. These included the speed with which the group transformed itself into a ‘professional’ theatre collective without reflecting on how collectivity would work given the race and class differences between the members of the group, let alone the level of theatrical skills and training; the decision to retain the role of the artistic director without selecting and training her replacement; the company's reliance on guest directors and playwrights, many of them male; the negotiations with funding bodies which were generally carried out by middle-class women in the group; and the pressure to produce new theatrical productions that reflected the lived reality of grass-roots people (often to meet the requirements of the funding). In the late 1980s, these problems were even more pronounced, as some of the key middle-class members, including Ford-Smith, had resigned from Sistren to move on to other projects. Sadly, by the time the PNP returned to power in 1989, albeit with a more conservative brand of politics than it had espoused during the 1970s,Footnote 79 Sistren was finding it difficult to sustain itself after resisting, through collective organization and development funding, the ultra-conservatism of the Seaga regime.
In conclusion, the practical application of collectivity undermined Sistren's ideologically sound intentions. Class- and race-based differences between the members of the group, differences upon which Jamaican society is stratified, were disguised beneath a feminist veneer of group solidarity. Filomena Chioma Steady, in her essay ‘Women and Collective Action: Female Models in Transition’, warns that ‘[s]olutions based on “sisterhood” invite us to enter into an imaginary paradise, and this can conceal the problem of class struggle and women's role within it’.Footnote 80 Further, the role of the artistic director perpetuated the unequal dynamic that existed when Sistren first began, despite Ford-Smith's experimentation with different forms of collective creation. Paradoxically, Sistren perpetuated Jamaica's social stratification by not addressing the issues arising from the combination of working-class and middle-class women working collectively. When it became clear that collectivity was not working it would have been wiser to abandon it in favour of another organizational methodology, which Sistren did after Ford-Smith resigned in 1988, supported by recommendations in Ryman's evaluation report.Footnote 81 Although Sistren struggled to cross the race and class divide, the company is now completely grass-roots-led, with Lana Finikin in the position of executive director. In 2010, all of Sistren's funding comes from the Jamaican Ministry of National Security, not from North American development agencies. Five founding members are still working with Sistren along with at least five new staff members, some of whom are male. Further, Sistren is focused on running socio-drama workshops in Kingston's disadvantaged communities rather than producing plays for mainstream theatre; hence there is no need to appoint a new artistic director.Footnote 82 The Sistren described in this article does not exist any more; it was a product of a particular period in Jamaican history. Nevertheless, the ideals that underpinned the group's work in the late 1970s and 1980s continue to inform the company's approach to working with community groups. It seems that, to some extent, by remaining faithful to its ideological position throughout the 1980s, Sistren undermined its own existence by emphasizing outward appearances rather than paying attention to internal realities.
