NAISULA
 A White Woman, her African Servant, a Shaman,
and a Spirit Child

    In 2016, I found myself writing an epic poem – something that I have never before attempted, but it became the mythical story of a white woman, her African servant and a shaman who manipulates events so that the woman and her servant end up making a “spirit child” out of clay.  In 2017, NAISULA was accepted into the John Drew Theater of East Hampton's annual JDLab Works-In-Progress competition and I was awarded  a single performance on this renowned stage.

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    Instead of just hiring some actors to read the script, I took a year to organize a full production, with a casting director, musicians, costumes, and professional actors culled from auditions in Manhattan.  I had been involved in amateur theater productions many times before, but this was my first chance to direct something of my own making. (read the whole story in my memoir here.)

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    It took me some time to understand the sources of this story. At first, I thought it was a true original – something that just burst forth from my ceaseless brain.  But on looking back, I realize that I have addressed the relationship between white woman and African servant in Colonial Kenya several times in my written work.  For example, there is a short story in my book AFRICA JUU which details the servant’s intimacy with his employer’s underwear, since he must wash and iron it. That custom was a source of great embarrassment to me as a teenager, and lo and behold, that has become a seminal scene in NAISULA.  There is also a story of the loving relationship between a white man and an African woman being ripped to shreds by the man’s English mother, who simply cannot contain her racial hatred.  Then there is the book I wrote that was never published – once again, addressing the relationship between a white woman on her remote farm and the African gardener.

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    Growing up in Kenya during the Colonial period, I was often exposed to the awful composite of white adults assuming financial responsibility for an African servant and his family, but basically treating him or her with disrespect, sarcasm and impatience.  The Africans were definitely “lesser” beings.  At the same time, many White Kenyans absorbed elements of African culture, and it was not at all unusual for a European to seek help from a shaman or “witch doctor” as they were called then.  This, too, has become a crucial element in NAISULA.

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    These racial disparities bothered me so much that I left Kenya when I was 23, uneasy with my place in that society.  Some of my work since then has been an attempt to analyze my own role, and that of my family, during the fascinating period when the nation was preparing to break away from British rule; social taboos were breaking down; and we were on the cusp of true racial integration.  When I visit Kenya today, more than 50 years later, I am thrilled to note that social integration has indeed taken root and that most of the social taboos I experienced are no longer evident.

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    You may wonder why I chose the name NAISULA . Some time last year, I bought a painting by Beth O’Donnell that I absolutely had to have.  It is a photograph of a Samburu woman from northern Kenya, taken in the 1970s.  She stares proudly out at the camera, wrinkled and dark and adorned with bead necklaces.  The artist has used  black encaustic slashed with brilliant red to make her even more mysterious and other-worldly.  Recently, my good friend former Maasai Chief Nickson Parmisa of Empakasi district in Kenya, came to visit me in Sag Harbor, NY. I asked him to hold a traditional naming ceremony for the  woman in the painting.  We bowed our heads, sent up a small prayer for her, and in the Maa language, she was named NAISULA – Woman of Power.