In Gloria Majule’s Uhuru, language is an immediate source of social tension. Mshale, a Kilimanjaro guide, speaks careful English to American tourists and Swahili when he needs to conceal something from them. American missionaries Frannie and Henry know “the basics” of Swahili—“Yesu anakupenda” (“Jesus loves you”) and “hakuna matata”—and have little interest in learning more. Tanzanian-born Sprite, who is fluent in both languages, chastises them for their willful ignorance and Mshale for minimizing his culture in front of white clients. Many of the play’s funniest moments also stem from language barriers. Frannie and Henry misinterpret Sprite’s Swahili insults to comic effect; Mshale, anxious to smooth things over, does nothing to correct them. These conflicts and jokes make Swahili integral to Uhuru. They also create one of the play’s central theatrical challenges. How can Majule preserve the tension and authenticity of bilingual speech while allowing primarily English-speaking audiences to follow the story?
The Alley is no stranger to bilingual theater. In Real Women Have Curves (Season 79), Josefina López’s dialogue moves seamlessly between English and Spanish. This choice is effective on both a dramatic level and a practical one. Real Women’s characters, a close-knit group of Latina women working in an East Los Angeles garment factory, navigate both Mexican and American cultural pressures. Bilingual dialogue reflects this unique immigrant experience while keeping the play broadly accessible. Many Houston viewers have some familiarity with Spanish; even those who do not can easily follow along with the help of context clues and cognates. Real Women is a play about community, and López invites everyone in. Uhuru’s relationship to language is more complicated. For many English-speaking theatergoers, Swahili offers fewer familiar reference points than Spanish. A context-clues approach would collapse the language barrier central to the play: if Mshale and Sprite conveniently sprinkled English phrases into their private conversations, Frannie and Henry could understand them just as easily as the audience could.
Sanaz Toossi’s English (Season 79) finds an ingenious solution to the problem of an in-universe language barrier. Set in Karaj, Iran, English follows four adult students of varying fluency levels in a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) preparation class. When the characters defy their teacher’s “English Only” edict and speak Farsi, the audience hears it as unaccented English. By giving non-Farsi-speaking audiences immediate access to the students’ intelligence and ease in their native language, Toossi emphasizes the frustration they face when trying to express themselves in English. This device is incredibly powerful in a play that explores the universal experience of language learning. It would be less effective in a story like Uhuru, where language differences are essential to our understanding of social and cultural gaps between characters.
Uhuru’s approach to bilingual dialogue more closely mirrors The World Is Not Silent by Don X. Nguyen (Season 77). Nguyen’s play follows a Vietnamese-American astrophotographer as he learns Vietnamese Sign Language to communicate with his newly deaf father. Rather than providing contextual hints or verbal translations, The World Is Not Silent includes extended sequences in Vietnamese and VSL with projected English subtitles. Uhuru employs the same strategy. In both plays, subtitled dialogue allows viewers who do not speak the characters’ languages to experience their stories as both insiders and outsiders. We can track every emotional beat, but we understand how much work it would take to grasp the nuances of Vietnamese or Swahili. The World Is Not Silent reminds us how rewarding that learning process can be. Uhuru shows us what happens when people refuse to go through it.
By using subtitles, Uhuru makes Swahili legible to an English-speaking audience while preserving the distance that makes Majule’s satire so effective. We understand Mshale and Sprite, but we never forget that the other characters do not—and, more importantly, that they have chosen not to try. This ease of comprehension leaves audiences with an important question. We can follow along with the projections now, but how will we distinguish ourselves from Frannie and Henry when we step out of the theater?
