(2011) Playwright Statement: Kemba Saran on A Dress of Steel Mesh

I first felt called to the practice of writing while trekking through apartheid South Africa and war-torn Mozambique. I was seventeen years old and my new surroundings bore little similarity to the Midwestern college town I left behind. The journals I carried with me were my constant companions. Within their pages, I recorded the citizens, shanty towns, and striking beauty of the landscape which texturized my internal dialogue on race, class, and identity.

The daily practice of journaling resulted in my first published book, To Dine with the Blameless Ethiopians. And over the course of the next eighteen years, journaling became a safe space to process the new frontier I stumbled upon while still a teenager—the terrifying terrain of domestic violence.

For eighteen years, I lived two lives. There was the life of accumulation—receiving multiple degrees from the University of Michigan, working as an architect in corporate offices, and devoting myself to the collection of beautiful things. And then there was the secret life that sustained me—the writing of a novel of a fictitious nation and the jail keeper of its most infamous prison that I wrote with shocking truth and bewildering parallel to my own fear and emotional confinement. And much later, when both accumulation and fiction were stripped away, there emerged the story of how I came to survive, escape, and reclaim my own wonderment. This is the story relayed in the play, "A Dress of Steel Mesh."

I have often felt that writing has saved me; that if I didn’t have a safe space to escape to, I could not have found my way out. My writing continues to demarcate literary landmarks of my journey. I encourage you to wander their rooms and inhabit a space that may be new, or all too familiar. Perhaps it will inspire you to create landmarks of your own.