Poetry, Plays, Pens, Persistence, Underpin Voice: Both Jean & Eleanor Live by Margot Van Sluytman

Stepping into the autumn season offers time to think about summer. Time to think about what happened during those hazy, lazy, crazy days. Digesting. Re-wording. Steeping one’s self in recent memories and drawing forth, indeed permitting to re-surface, what touched us most deeply. For me, The Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, was conjured. That imagined woman. That fictional woman. And her voice and her voicing. Buried she was, in a church, along with her name. Nobody came.

What is it that invites this negation of voice? Voices? Voice-ing? Particularly those of womyn? No matter class, culture, creed. This question continues to journey with me, as I myself, note the accumulation of years. As I breathe the beauty of my Grand-Children’s energies. And with-ness their lives unfold. Unfold in a world that is slowly, ever so slowly, yet determinately, and with unceasing tenacity, resurrecting the lost voices of womyn. Too long buried and silenced.

Jean Watts is such a voice. A contemporary of Hemingway, Bethune, Picasso, she was as if a forgotten fractured, fragment. A voice barely worthy of note. And noting. Of HEaRing.

Sitting at 4^th Line Theatre this summer, absolutely mesmerised by the play, Jim Watts: Girl Reporter, written my Beverley Cooper, and directed by Kim Blackwell, I was both transfixed and transported. I “met” “Jim” Watts. For the very first time. Jean [Jim] Watts a young woman reporter, who altered her name to Jim so that she could find approval from the males who had to approve of her … in every way. Of writing. Of publishing. Of reporting. Of going to the front of The Spanish Civil War.

In this local theatre on Winslow Farm, where Robert Winslow’s play, The Cavan Blazers, was the first production, thirty years ago, the seats were once again filled.

And with the rest of the audience I found myself leaning in. Leaning in close. HEaRing a story. A piece of HER-story most of us had never HEaRd before.

Each of us, listening within the crucible of poetic justice creating possibility with word. With feminine voice.  With matrilineal wisdom. And indeed, with hope. Hope, because even as we can acknowledge that the time is long, long, long over-due for womyn’s voices to be HEaRd, to be respected, to be with-ness-ed across all fields, all areas: personal, professional, academic, artistic, spiritual, and political, hope lives. Hope because Beverley and Kim chose to “resurrect” this young woman. Chose to bring to life a voice not only forgotten. A voice not known in the annals of HERstory. And in so doing, opened both the heart of the intellect and the intellect of the heart. They along with a community of actors, musicians, set-designers, created space for new and throbbing and vital conversations to be birthed. One and a half hours later, when me and my dear friend Ann left 4^th Line, and were driving though a countryside of fields, with the setting sun, and the dart of small swallows gracing the hallowed heavens, we both sighed. Mothers and Grandmothers, both, we acknowledged how far we have come as womyn, and how far we need as yet journey to excavate, unearth, learn of, and share of, these womyn, so many buried in a church with nobody tHERe to with-ness.

Yet! With-ness-ing is our way. We know. We are reminded. We are catapulted into a fragrant and fervent knowing that The Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, resurrected all of the lost voices of womyn. Because we bear with-ness. Jim Watts: Girl Reporter, is us, on journey now. This very now with life renewed because with her pen to the page, Beverley Cooper invited us to HEaR a voice, a tone, a relationship not only to the plight of womyn and our “acceptable” roles, our “acceptable” ways of being in the world; with her pen, via this play, which too includes poetry, the poetry of Dorothy Livesay. In the relationship between Jean and Dorothy, Beverly notes the stark banality of the one choice of being in relationship where erotic intimacy was accepted in time of Jean and  Dorothy was: female and male, with a view to marriage. wHERein any feint hope of career was decimated. Becoming wife and a mother, the only acceptable way of living. Of being acceptable. Accepted. Jean disagreed.

In one and half hours, death and life were with-ness-ed. And SHE lives. SHE the feminine way of being. SHE lives in us. With us. Through us. Having the play digest in me at this time, as I age and sage, and wage my own poignant voicing in the pen to paper, fingers to this very keyboard, I sit, not for the first time, but with a fuller, fatter, fulsome, community, aware that to be HEaRd and to be with-ness-ed and seen imprints history via HER-story, with infinite joy. Hope. And *Wisdom.

*The capital “W” denotes Sophia-Gaia-Feminine-Matrilineal Knowing.

~~~

Kim’s words and Bev’s words, below, underscore both Wisdom and Hope.

This show is a loving reflection on people who believe in something so deeply that they are willing to travel across an ocean, to a place they have never been, to fight for ideals they believe in so deeply. They are willing to risk their lives to allow others to have a say in the course of their own destinies. Kim Blackwell, Artistic Director of 4^th Line Theatre.

~~~

I have always been interested in the Spanish Civil War and why over 1500 Canadians joined the International Brigades to fight for the democratically elected Popular Front in Spain. So, when I came across the true story of Jean Watts, her life seemed like the perfect vehicle to tell a sweeping story in the gorgeous 4^th Line farm-theatre space. Bev Cooper, Playwright.

I was fascinated by this remarkable young woman from a well-to-do Ontario family who wanted to make a difference in the world: she identified as bi-sexual, called herself Jim, traveled to Spain as a reporter and ended up driving an ambulance for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion – the only Canadian woman to do so. Bev Cooper, Playwright.

Jim Watts: Girl Reporter

https://www.4thlinetheatre.on.ca/