Neeti Prasad

The purpose of the Imperialism Monologue project was to gain perspective on the lives of people who lived during the time of imperialism. After going through weeks of learning about different violent experiences people had under imperialism, we started this project. Our final product included presenting a monologue describing our experience with the effects of imperialism on our lives. We were given the choice of choosing a country that experienced imperialism and we could either describe the event from the point of view of the oppressor or the victim. The strength that I was able to develop through this process was exhibiting emotion through a presentation. In the past, the presentations that I have completed have been technical leading me to develop skills of explaining complex concepts and facts. However, this project required you to step into another person’s shoes and experience what they experienced. This required the performer to express emotions and act out the scenes that they were narrating. After completing this project, I was able to identify places in my technical talks where I could add more emotions to enhance the story that I was trying to tell. 

The first assignment that we were asked to create was an outline of the story that we wanted to tell by explaining the introduction of the character to the climax to the resolution. As you can see in this worksheet, I have included very basic minimal storylines about the events that my main character will experience in Palestine while alluding to the emotions she will feel such as saying "persuaded to fight for her rights".  It was at this point, that I still had not thought about the trauma that the girl would feel, living in a time of violence. Even when I formed the falling action and resolution, I had written it in a perspective of what happened with the actual countries as opposed to explaining how the eventual situation of Palestine's division specifically affected my main character as well as her family. 

As I started creating more drafts of the monologue, I started to add more emotions to the text. I took the event of the partition of Palestine, creating Israel and decided to create a deeper conflict for my character. In my monologue, I discuss the heartache the main character feels from her father and two brothers, influenced by the Jewish faith, relocating to Israel to follow their religion. In this draft, I included key phrases such as "my unforgiven father" and "the two brothers I am forced to call mine" to call attention to the hatred I feel for their actions while portraying my love and anguish that they are not near me. I say that I pleaded for them to stay, however "he [father] gave me a stern look and left me". This draft developed my thoughts into tangible emotions for the reader to understand. 

Through this

By my final draft, I had secured the main message that I wanted to send about this fictional girl who lived. The last part was to translate the feelings created in the text into my performance. This was the hardest part for me because I had to step out of my shell and become someone that I had never met before, someone that I had created in my imagination. I had to become an actor to convey the hardship of leaving in imperialist Palestine. After weeks of practice, I worked to bring out the passion, sadness, and anger that my character would have potentially felt if she lived during the time of imperialism in Palestine. During the presentation, you can see places where I pause such as right after "We along will discuss our county's future." to indicate emphasis on the power of what I am trying to say. When I start talking about my father, my voice tone changes slightly to bring in the sadness that I feel whenever I think about him. Along with the speech, I also try to set the stage by indicating the "border" between Palestine and Israel with specific hand gestures. I am also happy to mention that I received a 100% in the section regarding accurate emotions that were exhibited during the performance. 

Reading about articles of people's pain is one way of learning about the event, but it is hard to actually understand what people dealt with when they were forced in these violent ways. I know that I did not actually step into 17-year old Esharaq Dagher's shoes in 1951, but having to write and think about what she must have gone through put me in an alternate reality, allowing me to go back in time and experience, to a small extent, what she might have gone through.