Guest Blog: Nia Morais on Her First Play IMRIE, Welsh Fantasy and The Dark Fantastic

The idea for Imrie, my first full-length play, first came from a dream about two sisters and a sea creature. I first wrote this story as part of my dissertation, focusing on the relationship between the two sisters. It originally had a tragic ending, but while rewriting it as a play, it metamorphosed into a fantasy story about hope, identity, and what it means to be an outsider.

The two half-sisters in the play, Josie and Laura, are on different journeys but travelling in the same direction: Josie finds out that she is a siren, able to live between land and sea, while Laura deals with micro-aggressions and assimilation in the tiny pond of her Welsh-medium school. I chose to write this play in Welsh both to contribute to recent discussions around Welsh identity, and also to provide the type of Welsh stories that I found myself seeking as a kid.

Josie's siren story is a queer metaphor for exploring identity and finding community, while Laura's story is a very real reflection on growing up mixed-race as a Welsh speaker and feeling constantly pulled between the two. In including this theme I wanted to show that even though Wales tries to portray itself as a progressive and multicultural nation, those of us who come from mixed heritages often feel as if Welsh identity is a closed club, exclusive only to those who 'look the part'.

I first chose to write in Welsh to counter this nagging feeling: Look! I'm here! I speak Welsh too! But I soon found that this was tiring and sometimes made me feel like a spectacle. It was almost as if some people who took notice of my work only did so because of my heritage, not because of the work itself. It's an issue I'm still learning to navigate, and something I want to move past. So while writing Laura's story, I realised that I wanted to try and free her from a similar narrative.

Josie becomes the creature in the story, but Laura is her antagonist. It's Laura who is positioned as what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas calls the "Dark Other" in her text, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, an analysis of racial difference in fantasy fiction: "the Dark Other occupies the same space in reality that the monster occupies in fantasy" (p20). This is a role that requires a "ritual sacrifice ... before returning to haunt the happy ending" (p25). Laura is the driving force in her own and Josie's assimilation, and both come close to losing themselves completely in the process.

But I didn't want Laura to just haunt Josie's happy story of finding identity in community. I wanted her to find her own community, her own sense of self, that didn't hinge on how well she spoke Welsh or how straight she could get her hair. I wanted her to realise she was more than what other people saw when they looked at her. Thomas theorises that the "Dark Other" in fiction can break free of this "ritual sacrifice" in order to tell their own story: "the final step in the dark fantastic cycle is emancipation. It is reached only when the Dark Other is liberated from spectacle ... it requires emancipating the imagination itself" (p29).

Laura has to free herself from the confining cycle of assimilation and othering by embracing her own hybridity. She does this for her own sake, but Josie also contributes to this emancipation by listening to Laura and facing her own privilege. They find support and community in each other.

They are two sides of myself - which is why it's important to me to show this to Welsh-speaking audiences specifically. One of the things I hope that audiences take away from the play is summed up by Thomas: "how Black girls show up on the page and on the screen matters for the ways that Black girls are treated in the world" (p33). For Welsh characters, and Welsh fiction more generally, I want to show that other stories are possible.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2019). The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York: New York University Press. Copyright. (https://nyupress.org/9781479800650/the-dark-fantastic/)

Imrie is currently playing at the Sherman Theatre until 20 May and will tour Wales from 23 May