Go girl, go!

Another fantastic show from Angelique Kidjo at The Proms last night, August 4. High energy, bursting with life and power, Angelique, whom I saw in the nineties at the Festival Hall, must be well into her fifties now. A great tribute to womanhood and a ‘bon courage’, fingers up spectacle.

And so different from the plight of Morwenna (‘Poldark’, 4 August, BBC1) and June (‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, 28 July, channel 4). Separated by two centuries or more the cruelty that besets Morwenna and June is a far cry from Angelique’s triumphant female strength. 

Morwenna, having been successful as a tutor to one of the well-off families of the time, her cousins, is forced by them to marry against her will. It will bring prestige to them and fear and sexual servitude to her. Not only is she in love with a young man who is besotted with her the man with whom she has to share the marital bed is obnoxious. He violates her and traumatises her against the act of lovemaking for some considerable time, well after his death gives her a merciful release from an abusive marriage.

In dystopian Gilead June also has to endure rape, to order, to conceive a child for a wealthy, infertile commander and his childless wife, in a land where fertility rates have dramatically fallen. She is an unwilling vassal in a new, harsh, ‘big brother is watching you’ regime. To dissent means ‘the wall’ - a euphemism for summary execution by hanging.

Both Morwenna and June give birth but neither is allowed to see, touch, play with, nurse, feed or cuddle their baby. Morwenna’s boy is brought up by her evil mother-in-law, the child’s grandmother. June’s girl is taken from her and placed with an otherwise childless, more hierarchically important family.

In this week’s episode we see Morwenna secretly watching her son playing with a maid or governess in her cruel mother-in-law’s garden. The cruel woman decreed it would be better all round if neither mother nor child acknowledged each other’s existence. But Morwenna finds her son and, keeping out of sight of the eyes of his minders, manages to ask him if he remembers her. He doesn’t. 

In equally, but differently, cruel Gilead, June finds out from their cook, a ‘Martha’ in dystopian USA, that her daughter’s new parents allow the girl to go to nursery. June manages to reach the outside wall of the nursery and painfully hears her daughter playing on the other side of the impenetrable divide but she cannot see, touch or communicate with her. And the cook is put into mortal danger. By being seen talking to June she is deemed to have endangered the life of a precious child of Gilead and is sentenced to hang.

Three different women, Angelique, Morwenna and June, live in different centuries and all work hard to get ahead and be their own person, oftentimes against the odds.

Liberty, a choice of lover, freedom of thought and safety from abuse and cruelty are hard-won human rights. Angelique has made a name for herself by moving from Benin, a land of subsistence farming with some forced labour and very poor literacy rates, to Paris thence to New York. From a country where so few can read and write she has managed to become an internationally acclaimed star. To appear at The Royal Albert Hall is the epitome of success. 

The writings of Winston Graham, ‘Poldark’, and Margaret Attwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, have been adapted for TV from the original works. It will take me some weeks to find out the fates of Morwenna and June, both driven by the strongest bond known in the animal kingdom. That of mother and child. To break that bond is cruel indeed. 

Neither Morwenna nor June seek fame but the simple act of union between mother and child would be a triumph, equally as great as Angelique’s success, in worlds which have become harsh places of enforcement and oppression. 

Go Angelique, go girl, go! Go June! Go Morwenna! Go!