Protecting Maternal Mental Health: M/OTHER goes from Journalism to Stage | Here’s more

M/OTHER, a dance production on maternal mental health, inspired by journalism from CNN premiered at the Afropolis festival in Lagos on Wednesday. Eliza Anyangwe, Managing Editor of CNN’s gender desk, As Equals, speaks to a CNN’s Lagos-based journalist, Adie Vanessa Offiong, about how the journalism series came about and its journey to becoming a stage production.

Adie Vanessa Offiong: How did the series on the maternal mental health reporting start?

Eliza Anyangwe: As Equals exists to do long-form, deep dive, investigative or explanatory journalism about issues that disproportionately affect women’s lives.

I try and think about global themes that affect a lot of women around the world and can be changed with the help of more awareness or visibility.

Once we’ve found a theme that has the potential for many interesting stories, we commit to a series because one story cannot capture the multiplicity of women’s experiences. That’s how we landed on the maternal mental health series.

Maternal health is underreported and, as you know, is urgent: far too many women are still dying in childbirth. But there is still a part of maternal health, which is the mental health of someone who is pregnant or someone who has just given birth, that is almost completely invisible in both our cultural conversations as well as in our medical and public policy practices and even sometimes women’s rights advocacy. And so, it felt like a strong contender for a series for As Equals.

Offiong: What was the experience when this series began? How did you decide on what kind of stories to focus on because it’s multifaceted?

Anyangwe: The series started when two journalists at CNN had conversations with me separately about the subject. And then I started researching it. One person had access to a really powerful, really moving story about a Thai woman with all the privileges, fairly affluent, but who, after having her baby, got postpartum depression.

And even though she had access to all the health care, she had an attentive and caring family, her depression descended into what is called postpartum psychosis. And in the end, she took her life and the life of her baby.

I saw on this subject there were so many more stories that we could tell. For example, we could also look at this situation from a different perspective. For example, we know that on the African continent, but not uniquely, there’s a lot of superstition about mental health issues.

So we told a story about what it means to get pregnant while you have a pre-existing mental health condition and you live in a community or in a society that might have already ostracized you – at this time, when, you know, pregnancy is such a vulnerable time, you are already feeling very alone.

We also reported a story from India about a helpline that was set up in a community because one of the things we saw even yesterday at the play, people were asking after seeing it, how can they help people in their community?

And when there is very few resources, one of the ways to help is to ask questions and to listen deeply. And what that story we reported in India, showed was that, without many resources, some trained people to listen to women because very rarely it’s only really now in the West and in some, you know, highly educated communities that people are talking about depression or postpartum mental health issues.

In most communities around the world, people are using different language for that. And if we asked them the question; ‘Are you feeling depressed?’ they might not understand it and feel alienated by it or not want to associate with what that word might mean in their communities.

That’s why with the play, it was so important to work with the Q Dance Company, which is a Nigerian dance troupe, with people from different ethnicities in Nigeria who could discuss together and bring their own experience and language.

But we also did you and I, you know, some background research to find what academic community was studying maternal mental illness in Nigeria.

We found some language also being used, typical fears and concerns from women and that also was fed into the creative process.

Offiong: Why dance and not just outright drama

Anyangwe: That was not a choice that I made, actually, and I’m really glad for it. The only choice that I made, the only sort of first catalytic choice I made was to approach Katy Streek.

I approached her because she runs a company with another woman, an African-American woman in Amsterdam called Sites of Memory, where they take people to places in the city and in different cities that have historic connections with slavery or empire, using not only archives and records but also creative license.

They tell the stories of the people who were affected in that time because, of course, in Europe, there’s a very whitewashed, history about empire and slavery and colonialism.

I had been to one of The Sites of Memories performances and recognised how so much of the material they were using was probably very similar to journalistic material. It was fact-based. It was evidence-based. I liked her approach because her way of working as a white Dutch woman is always to be collaborative, never to pre-script and then bring it until the actors use those words.

So that was true in the Netherlands and because she had worked in many different parts of the world, I knew it would also be true in that experience. And then maybe she might even partner with somebody who didn’t have that approach and there might be some cross-pollination there.

My ask to her was that it has to be in an existing space where people are already going to see art so that we know there’s going to be an audience for it, and it has to be in the Global South because As Equals’ reporting is focused on the Global South.

She already knew the Q Dance Company, and they were very keen to partner with her to do this.
I really like the answer to this question that I heard from Qudus Onikeku on the stage in his post-panel conversation where he said, ‘You know, we may have given people genders, but at the end of the day, we all have bodies. And so, it is bodies that express.’

This is why dance is really powerful, because increasingly, especially those of us who are highly educated, we exist in our heads. And yet if we are depressed, it is in our bodies that we’re feeling it as well.

Therefore, for the bodies of the actors to understand the material enough that they were able to convey it through dance to their bodies, was just as powerful as the spoken word. And then it allows audiences who are not in Nigeria, who do not speak Pidgin or Yoruba or Hausa or Igbo to also understand what’s happening because it is not dependent solely on dialogue.

Offiong: With the story and with the dramatization in dance, what did you notice where the recurring decimals in that narrative?

Anyangwe: There’s one word, isolation. Wherever we reported this, women who were going through, whether it was just the baby blues, just a bit of sadness, which is very normal, very common as well, right through to, much more serious mental health impacts, the isolation they felt, because in so many of our cultures, we have told women that giving birth is the most natural thing you can do. And becoming a mother is the most natural thing you can do.

While we might train to become professionals, the profession of mothering is supposed to come naturally to you. And so, if you’re finding it difficult, it is hard for you to find the places where you can go to admit that because it’s also often hard for you to admit it to yourself.

In the Nigerian context, as we saw in the play, there is also pressure from the husband, the mother-in-law, from the people around the woman, who should be the first people asking her, ‘How are you doing? Can we help you?’ Isolation is a consistent theme.

The other one is more of a societal/developmental issue, which is that mental illness does not happen in isolation. We saw with the story, for example, reported in India that women who are not adequately fed, and adequately nourished, exacerbate their mental health conditions.

And we know from evidence, from all over the world that women will prioritize feeding their families over feeding themselves. They have anaemia. They have inadequate nutrition and are yet prioritizing other people. And that also came across in the play, you know, the lead character, the mother, was heartbroken because she had to sort of pick between prioritizing herself and prioritizing her newborn.

The play opens with her apologizing to her newborn because she didn’t let the child make its own decisions for its life. But she must have felt so desperate to do what she did.

Offiong: When you were putting the performance together, what was the greatest concern you had and how did that change you after you saw the performance and the audience?

Anyangwe: My greatest concern was, am I wasting money? I believe deeply that the role of the media is to bring people together for important conversations.

Sometimes the journalism itself, whether it is audio, visual or written journalism, does that. We use that as the basis for that conversation. Other times, people will have to connect with the information, or it is most successful to connect to the information differently.

If we wrote one story and we indeed wrote many, we also convened a conversation on the platform with maternal health leaders and policymakers from around the world. And everybody was like, ‘We have some difficult choices to make.

Yes, we recognize that this is a large-scale, unseen issue. But there are ministries of health that have so little money to invest in each citizen.’ Now, they were able to give us an intellectualized answer because they were dealing with intellectualized content.

When you see a play and people are moved to tears on the opening night, you have to reach for something else to respond because it connects with you differently. And that had been my hope that people who may not read CNN’s journalism or watch CNN’s journalism would come to our play. And of course, because it is in different types of venues.

On Saturday, November 2nd, in Lagos, at Afropolis, it is being performed on the street that has been closed down so that people will not be sitting as they did very politely the first time but standing around maybe doing other things.

They will experience that differently and I was excited to see what they will retain from that, which is why performance is much more emotional because really it’s the emotion of the thing that draws us to action, the stories of the people that draw us to action.

But I had been, of course, concerned that it was a gamble because I was trusting Katy, I was trusting Q Dance, I was trusting Alejandro, who is the costume designer, and I was trusting all the performers to do enough with the journalism, that the key concerns and the key themes of the journalism come across.

Offiong: What next from here?

Anyangwe: That’s a great question, Vanessa. So in the immediate future, the show will have three more performances in Lagos on the 2nd of November, as I’ve already said, it will be put on at Afropolis again.

Entry is 3,000 naira and entry into the Acropolis venue gives you access to all the other things happening on the day. So I really encourage people to come down. It is a new festival in Lagos and we’re really proud to have been involved in its maiden voyage in Nigeria.

There are two more shows later in November. I think it’s the 21st and 22nd of November at the Lagos Fringe Festival, which is a much more intimate venue. You can also find information online, purchase tickets and come along. And then as well as that, we are recording the performance. The biggest risk also with theatre or anything live, is that it is temporary.

Given that As Equals is grant funded and also it’s an important subject, I wanted to create something more permanent and the opportunity to film the performance and for people to then use it, whether they’re screening it in their homes, whether they want to use it as educational material, whether they want to just show the first 15 minutes of a specific segment and then host a dialogue around that.

It creates so many more possibilities for people so that everything that we produce in As Equals, as much as we can, ends up back in the public domain, ends up back in the commons, and people can use that work and build on it. I know that Q Dance Company and Katy Streek are very well-regarded in their industry and so get invited to put on performances in other places. Maybe M/Other will now become something they can tour themselves and that would make me very glad.

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