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Campus Playwright Cheryl Gittens Dubbed "Sister Survivor"

Shaduhs Uh Voodoo, an award-winning play by FP Cheryl Gittens about her life in Barbados and the short, traumatic life of her brother Hendy, will be presented as a dramatic reading on November 12. Both Gittens and her literary idol Jamaica Kincaid (who visits MHC November 14) have written literary works about their brothers, who both died of AIDS.

Poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, sexual harassment, exploitation ... Cheryl Gittens has experienced more trauma in her thirty-four years than most people encounter in a lifetime. Yet here she is, a vibrant Frances Perkins scholar in control of her life and planning for the future. A reporter in Gittens's native Barbados aptly dubbed her "sister survivor." "You don't have to accept what's been imposed on you," she says simply.

Her father's violence plunged the family into poverty and eventually drove them onto the streets to survive. By age fifteen, Gittens--once a diligent student--had quit school and given up her dreams of college. "I went into survival mode for about fifteen years," she says.

In 1987 a job babysitting took Gittens off "the island that had become a prison," but her Canadian boss abused her. So she immigrated illegally to New York City and spent seven years "fighting to keep my spirit alive" before gaining legal immigration status and starting classes at California University of Pennsylvania in 1994. When she faced sexual harassment there, Gittens fought, then transferred to MHC in 1995. "I thought I'd finally made it," Gittens says, but she still had a rocky road ahead.

Immigration difficulties postponed a trip to Senegal funded by an MHC summer research grant. While resolving those problems, Gittens learned that her brother, Hendy, had AIDS. She returned to MHC and tried to focus on schoolwork and even produced her play Mary's Back for Twentieth-Century Tea and She's Pissed.

In January, she finally went to Senegal to research the Caribbean slave trade. At the slave houses on Goreé, "standing in the Door of No Return, I knew I needed to face my responsibilities," she says. So Gittens returned to Barbados to ease her brother's final days. "We had six weeks to connect after being separated for twenty years," she says. Gittens wrote Shaduhs Uh Voodoo based on Hendy's life and her own, and it won a James Baldwin Playwriting Prize in the 1997 Five College competition. She was also named to USA Today's 1997 All-USA College Academic Third Team.

Although still grieving for Hendy, Gittens is back at MHC and working on her special major in Caribbean women's studies as expressed through the performing arts. She plans to stage a full-scale production of Shaduhs Uh Voodoo as her honors thesis. A dramatic reading of the play will be given on campus November 12 (See calendar for details).

What's helped Gittens survive and thrive? Her Buddhist faith and a deep well of perseverance. "I refuse to be a victim," she says. After graduation, she'll postpone graduate school to help raise Hendy's twin daughters (now in an Barbados orphanage). "I don't want to stop studying forever, but the important thing is to get my life together and create an atmosphere for those kids that I dreamed of as a child."

Gittens tells her harrowing story to give others hope. "Don't ever give up," she tells others. "The moment you think you can't go on is the moment you can break through."