Review of The Supposed to Be – A Play You Must See at Rising Festival |★★★★★

I can’t help but think, what a privilege it is to sit in the dark and come out understanding the person who made you a little better than you did going in.

Written by Sita Sargeant

There’s a moment, halfway through Chenturan Aran’s The Supposed to Be, when the older woman raises her hand to strike the younger one, and the younger woman catches her by the wrist. You will not hit me anymore, she says. On stage it lands as a clean, almost unbearable beat of drama. In the back of your mind, there’s a voice: surely, you think, this doesn’t really happen like this.

Except that, over a laksa in Footscray just two hours earlier, my mother had told me a story I’d never heard, and described doing exactly that. In Year 12, her own mother went to hit her, and my mum caught her by the wrist and said that same impossible sentence: “You will not hit me anymore. Her mother was a woman for whom violence was second nature. She’d been born and raised in a Jakarta slum, descended from indentured labourers the Dutch had brought over from Tamil Nadu in the 1800s. She was a Dalit who had married into a Brahmin family after an accidental pregnancy (that led to my mother). They eventually let her into the house. But because she was untouchable, never once into their kitchen.

So when the scene unfolded in front of me, I felt it as a full-body jolt. I cannot imagine how my mother felt, to have her experience so clearly depicted on the stage. Afterwards, she kept calling it “eerie.”

This was the first time in my life (and in my mother’s, as she confirmed) that I had seen the story of a Tamil woman in Australia told on a stage. When we don’t put these stories on our stages, we don’t just close a door on the future; we decide these aren’t Australian stories, and the people in them aren’t quite Australian either.

As we drove home to my apartment in St Kilda I asked about her mother, and we had a conversation we’d never had before: we spoke of the violence she grew up around, and why her mother was the way she was. And her experience of leaving. For years I’d told her she’d minimised what she lived through. She pushed back. “I haven’t minimised it,” she said, “and I certainly haven’t maximised it.” A beat passed. “It was just the norm,” she continued. “It was what you went through. There was nothing exceptional about it.”

And, in so many ways, she’s right. There was nothing exceptional about her experience. Yet it’s not an experience either of us had ever seen told. A friend of mine is writing a memoir, and when my mum read the first chapter, one about her leaving her conservative Indian parents, her response was simply: “this is all of us.” What remained unsaid was: “and because it’s so ordinary, why are you telling it?”

On its surface, the play is a piece of audacious, funny speculative fiction. A Tamil-Australian actor discovers she’s a clone, grown to live the life of the original she was copied from: to become the great actor that original was meant to be, before her mother got in the way. And to understand who she is and where she came from, the clone pushes the original to dive into her past and embody her mother, the woman the original blamed for not letting her be who she was supposed to be.

I think what The Supposed to Be understands, and does so well, is that the cost of building a new world for yourself is to leave the old. You cannot have both. My father used to say that the bravest thing a person can do is build a different world for themselves, and that this was what he admired most in my mother. She did it more than once: to step out from under her own mother, and again when she migrated here in her early twenties to study.

The world we enter in The Supposed to Be was one familiar to her, but one I will never experience. I don’t think we can ever fully understand our parents, but perhaps the greatest thing art does is give us a way in. And I can’t help but think, what a privilege it is to sit in the dark and come out understanding the person who made you a little better than you did going in.

I’m so grateful, and proud, this play exists. I truly do think it’s a play that could only exist in Australia. It opens up a part of Australian identity we rarely see, yet is the experience of so many migrant women in this country. This is a play I think all Australians would get something out of, but particularly those, like me, who are the children of the powerful women who left somewhere and someone to build a different tomorrow.

The Supposed to Be plays at Footscray Community Arts as part of RISING until 6 June.

Members of ASAC can access a special discount.

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South Asian Theatre |  South Asian Writers |