By Franka Philip

Sunday Express

Section 2

August 24, 1997

Page 25

As she walked down Frederick Street, a group of people stared. It was clear they were trying hard to figure out where they knew her from. A few minutes later, one man remembered: "Ay, the girl!"

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, "the girl", Joanne Kilgour, played characters who were as well known as the heroines in today's soap operas, The Young and The Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. Back then, there was only one television station, and most of Trinidad and Tobago ardently followed serials produced by local television production company Banyan, like Who the Cap Fits, Epiphany and Cultural Callaloo. Kilgour was one of the stars who lit up the screen in those serials.

Kilgour left Trinidad 15 years ago for the United States to pursue her dream of studying theatre. After a year at Boston University under Derek Walcott's tutelage she went to the prestigious Juilliard School of the Arts in New York, where she concentrated on classical theatre.

Kilgour describes her time at Juilliard as "being on a cruise, surrounded only by what the owners of the ship decide is good for you for that journey".

"That time was very strange, and caused a lot of self-questioning. By the time I left Juilliard in 1987, I pretty much realized that taking the route of making a commercial career in America was not what my life was going to be about."

The last commercial work she did in the United States was in 1989, when she was the narrator for a Martha Graham Dance Theatre show.

After that, she left the theatre, as she believed American theatre was a dead end for her.

"I made up my mind that I was too highly skilled to be playing maids and prostitutes."

Kilgour was also coming to terms with being black in a country where blacks are not regarded as people. "Black people in America are treated in the same way that the poor people and vagrants are treated in Trinidad."

At Juilliard, Kilgour felt like "a fly in the milk". In her class, she was one of three black people, which was considered "the greatest miracle that ever happened". Coming from Trinidad, this was a complete reversal of everything she was accustomed to.

Prepared to return home, Kilgour was faced with a bleak unemployment situation in Trinidad. She was advised by friends and family to stay in the US and further her education. She enrolled at Columbia University to do a master's degree.

"My struggle from 1987 to now has been about trying to place myself somewhere that would make a difference in how people see blacks, and I found (the field of) education was the best place to do that," she said.

Columbia University is an Ivy League and, by extension, white institution. Kilgour was in the "fly in the milk" situation again.

"By this time I'm thinking, God is saying something to me, maybe there's something I need to get in touch with."

To this end, she asked to be placed in a public school in Harlem to do her teacher training. Harlem is known for its rich Afro-American culture and to Kilgour, seemed quite similar to Trinidad.

Strangely enough it was in this situation that felt so much like home that she faced another "fly in the milk" situation, but this time in reverse.

"After arriving there from downtown, Manhattan, the bastion of white culture, with my high yellow skin, Caribbean accent and Juilliard degree, I had to prove that I was black enough."

This challenge brought her militancy to the fore. If she wanted to be seen heard and understood she had to carve out a space from which she could act.

Carving out space was not a new experience for Kilgour: it was something she had been doing since her school days.

At Holy Name Convent, as in any other convent, the girls were encouraged to be proper young ladies.

Kilgour and her friends resisted all those notions. She attended the convent in the mid-Seventies, when the philosophy of the black Power Revolution was still fresh.

"We had to find a way to be us, because 1970 had gone and my brother and sister had marched in the streets with placards for Black Power. I was tremendously influenced by that and I had to find a way to express it and not be thrown out of school."

In a display of what she called "subtle militancy", Kilgour, who was the school's assistant head girl, took to wearing a low Afro or "flannel ball" hairstyle.

"It was the best acting training, life skills training that I got, because I'm doing the same thing as a professor in a white school," she noted. Not only is she using this to maintain her identity in a white institution, she also draws on her own experience t help the teachers she trains to understand what is happening to young black students I the US. As she sees it, their fight is harder.

"If you are invisible in a society that calls you three-fifths person in its Constitution, then your language is invisible. You then have to decide how or if you are going to translate that into standard English. These are the issues I discuss in my work."

It was this issue she dealt with in a paper titled "Double Speak" which she presented at the symposium "The Caribbean Towards 2000: Models for Multi-Cultural Arts Education" held by the UWI Festival Centre for the Creative Arts in early August.

While in Trinidad, she saw the Creative Arts Centre production of Shango: Tales of the Orisha, which she found "absolutely brilliant".

Did seeing all these young actors bring back memories and make her long to come back and act on a Trinidad stage?

"I've been begging God to make a way to bring me back home to work."

Though she would jump at the chance to act, she feels that it might be difficult to be cast in a suitable role, since many here still view her as a television actress. "They also have to reconfigure me in their heads, because I'm not the same young girl with the bubbly, juicy-fruit image."

Bubbly and juicy fruit she is not. At 38, Kilgour is married to William Dowdy and has just completed her Ph.D. in Special Education at the University of North Carolina. From next month, she will be at Georgia State University as the assistant director at the Centre for the Study of Adult Literacy.

Trinidad, however, has not lost this daughter of the soil, who would come home if the right job offer came her way. She cherishes the moments when people still recognize her in Port of Spain and say "Ay, the girl".

"That is invaluable, especially when you're in a city where people look at you as if you smell stink and you're on crack: you know there's that place in your soul that you can go to. That's when I look at them and think: you don't know me, you couldn't eat at my table where I come from. I am Joanne Kilgour."

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