Guest Blog: Emily Aboud On SPLINTERED at VAULT Festival

I'm an immigrant. A proper one like, I don't have a British passport. I'm not a UK citizen. In fact, in August of last year, my work visa properly expired and I had to move back home to Trinidad and Tobago for three months.

It was very stressful, let me tell you. All the while, I was frantically applying for a five-year Exceptional Talent Artist's Visa. I don't know if you've ever kissed your best friends goodbye and got on a plane, genuinely not knowing when you'd see them next, but that was particularly hard. Having worked in London as a director for three years, to just put all your plans on hold to apply for a visa to stay in the place you live, it's hard.

I'm not going to make this an immigration essay, though - you folks voted on a political party with very clear views on immigrants, so I won't try too hard to get your sympathy. Anyway, I got the visa so all's well. Hey.

One of the reasons I got this fancy artist's visa was a show I wrote and directed. It's called SPLINTERED and it's on at the VAULT Festival. A lot of brilliant people came together to help make this show a reality; from our collaborators, programmers, venue managers and dramaturge friends working for free to funding bodies, it was incredible, truly.

We were able to present it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. Ironically, our last show on 25 August was also my last legal day as a resident in the UK; I thought that was good luck. Now, with the visa in hand, we're back with a bigger, better and bolder show and, for want of a better word, I'm bricking it.

It's a play disguised as a cabaret, based on interviews with queer womxn from the Caribbean (a pretty famously homophobic region) and my own personal experiences growing up there. This is play that attempts to tackle homophobia in the Caribbean, presenting stories from different perspectives not really seen in the UK (or Trinidad for that matter) - the perspective of a queer Caribbean woman.

There's music and dancing and carnival-esque performances, there's sad bits and happy bits and the idea of an ending (how does one really end a play about an ongoing, structural problem?). All in all, it's a brilliant show and I'm proud of it.

However, doing SPLINTERED always raises a load of ethical questions on my part. What I've essentially done is flown home, interviewed a lot of marginalised people and wrote about it, collecting praise and money (in the loosest sense of the word, this is still the theatre industry).

I'm also presenting my country in a potentially negative light. This is a country with little to no equal rights for women (in law, yes - in practice, absolutely not) and even less for the LGBTQIA+ community. What kind of message am I sending, trying to make Caribbean work in the UK but, in a backwards sense, what feels like glorifying the UK for its equal rights?

In fact, every homophobic law in the Caribbean is a British law, left over from Colonialism. Is it mathematically accurate to blame the UK for the homophobia in the Caribbean? Or should we strive to be more like present-day UK, with better rights for the LGBTQIA+? But then that feels like a form of neocolonialism; we should strive to be us on our own terms.

It's tricky, this business. But the play is very good. Often, I think it's an artist's job to have these questions and we make work to try and answer them. Colonialism is complicated, as is homophobia, but come see us try to dismantle it anyway.

SPLINTERED at the VAULT Festival 12-16 February