Sounds From Home

“Yoni ki Raat (Night of the Vagina) is a New York City-based performance piece where South Asian/Indo Caribbean people experiencing gender oppression share powerful and authentic stories that are often silenced or ignored. Yoni ki Raat is an updated spin on Yoni ki Baat, originally inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.” — YKR

In May 2017, Mira made her stage debut in Yoni Ki Raat 2017 at Dixon Place Theatre alongside a community of fellow warriors and survivors. Her one-woman protest was brought to life over several months consisting of weekly sessions and rehearsals where she dug deep within herself to extract this story which had been buried safely away in her memory. She chose to tell this story as the very first in the long ongoing saga of her migration from Guyana which changed her life and trajectory forever.

Of this piece, entitled “Sounds From Home”, Mira states:

“I wrote and performed this piece for my younger self, who migrated to the U.S. at 8 years old and had so many stories inside her to tell but felt she never had a voice, and finally gave her an outlet to be heard. I wrote this for my people — the resilient Indo-Caribbeans, past, present and future, across the diaspora who go unacknowledged and are painfully underrepresented — the giants upon whose shoulders I stand today, whose praises I will sing until my dying day. And I wrote this for my homeland Guyana, the only place on earth that has ever felt like home and to which I know I belong.”

This work was the subject of Dr. Tarika Sankar’s academic article “A Creative Process”: Indo-Caribbean American Identity as Diasporic Consciousness featured in the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 2020.

Photos by Robert Pluma