Trinidadian Emily Aboud will step into London’s biggest and boldest arts festival, the VAULT Festival, with a play which she wrote and directed and which also makes a bold statement about Trinidad— and the Caribbean by extension.

It’s called Splintered which she describes as “a play disguised as a cabaret, based on interviews with queer women from the Caribbean (a pretty famously homophobic region) and my own personal experiences growing up there”.

 “This is play that attempts to tackle homophobia in the Caribbean, presenting stories from different perspectives not really seen in the UK (or Trinidad for that matter) – the perspective of a queer Caribbean woman,” Aboud, a theatre and film director who is also a writer and a graduate and former Head Girl at St Joseph’s Convent in Port of Spain, wrote on blog which is published  on broadwayworld.com’

“Doing SPLINTERED always raises a load of ethical questions on my part. What I’ve essentially done is flown home (Trinidad), interviewed a lot of marginalised people and wrote about it, collecting praise and money (in the loosest sense of the word, this is still the theatre industry).

   “I’m also presenting my country in a potentially negative light. This is a country with little to no equal rights for women (in law, yes – in practice, absolutely not) and even less for the LGBTQIA+ community. What kind of message am I sending, trying to make Caribbean work in the UK but, in a backwards sense, what feels like glorifying the UK for its equal rights?” she asked in her thought-provoking blog.

  “In fact, every homophobic law in the Caribbean is a British law, leftover from Colonialism. Is it mathematically accurate to blame the UK for the homophobia in the Caribbean? Or should we strive to be more like the present-day UK, with better rights for the LGBTQIA+? But then that feels like a form of neocolonialism; we should strive to be us on our own terms.

It was a tough journey getting to the UK for the play to be staged. But it was Splintered which earned Aboud the visa required to travel back to London after she completed her tertiary education there.

 “I’m an immigrant. A proper one like I don’t have a British passport. I’m not a UK citizen. In fact, in August of last year, my work visa properly expired and I had to move back home to Trinidad and Tobago for three months,“ she explained.

“It was very stressful, let me tell you. All the while, I was frantically applying for a five-year Exceptional Talent Artist’s Visa. Having worked in London as a director for three years, to just put all your plans on hold to apply for a visa to stay in the place you live, it’s hard.

 “Anyway, I got the visa so all’s well,” Aboud wrote.