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Voices heard and unheard
‘Khali Kamrah, to be staged in Lahore on the 30th, is a small effort to represent many different types of contradictions and conflicts faced by women every day. It is not a grand statement, just a small effort to make voices heard,’ says Feryal Gauhar
Feryal Ali Gauhar, the actress-turned-women development expert, has mostly been on the forefront of addressing women’s issues through various channels. Lately, she has also been voluntarily affiliated with a support group for women that has been providing trauma and reconstructive surgery services to victims of acid attacks and stove blasts.
Acid-hurling or inducing stove-blast injuries has, perhaps, been one of the most mutilating ways of oppression against women in a society that believes in suppressing all stirrings of sensitivity that might question its time-honoured norms and beliefs.
As a continuation of her efforts to promote the Depilex Smile Again Foundation cause, Feryal has organised an awareness programme and fund-raiser in the form of a play to be staged in Lahore on the 30th of this month. Khali Kamrah, as the solo-performance is called, is an attempt to depict the emptiness in the lives of women victimised by horrendous acts of domestic violence.
“It suggests that women are treated as objects devoid of desires, aspirations and identity, and are often not considered for their humaneness,” she explains while commenting on the play. “It also signifies the loneliness created in the face of these questions regarding conventional notions, as well as the possibility of filling up the hollowness by creating possible dialogue.”
In the hour-long narrative, Feryal will be portraying characters who have been victims of domestic violence, a crime that may only appear to inflict physical injury but which, in reality, also leaves cataclysmic emotional and psychological scars on the lives and personalities of the victims. “The narrative is a small effort to represent many different types of contradictions and conflicts faced by women every day. It is not a grand statement, just a small effort to make voices heard,” she adds.
“It is not necessary that all the characters in the narrative have a relationship with an empty room. At some point in our lives, we have all faced the emptiness of rooms and homes and lives. The performance is not a conventional plot-based play, but rather an evocation of the turmoil of these women’s lives which is often not articulated, neither in real life nor in the creative arts. So it is not all about misery, but also about finding one’s voice and having the courage to talk about issues which are usually swept under the carpets of empty rooms.”
Expounding on the fact that the play is a modest attempt at awareness-raising and may not send out an explicit message to the audiences, Feryal remarks that she doesn’t like to think of the effort as necessarily presenting a message. “I don’t think it is necessary for all performing arts to be pedantic or dogmatic or didactic all of the time. Sometimes, it is sufficient to let people take back what they can from a performance rather than have preconceived notions of what you would like them to extract from the experience. If even a few people sit up and begin to think about women’s lives, I will feel that the effort was worth it.”
Written and directed by Feryal herself, the play will be performed on a set suggesting a bedroom to represent the various philosophies revolving around the subject of Khali Kamrah. The Foundation plans to take the play to Chicago in early November, while the performance might be repeated in Islamabad and Karachi later on.
Currently, the DSF is working on the provision of reconstructive plastic surgery for the survivors of acid attacks and burn victims, with future plans to provide services which shall enable these women and girls to learn skills, along with the establishment of a rehabilitation centre. Says Feryal, “There are lawyers and human rights’ activists who are looking at each and every aspect of this extremely grave issue. One organisation alone cannot take on all aspects of an evil as pervasive as acid-attacks, and the mutilation and destruction such acts lead to.”
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