Molz is a marvel in ‘My Koek is Moeg’

When actress Abby Molz finally says the title line in ‘My Koek is Moeg’, you feel it in your soul. The utterance is not a punchline. It’s not hollow with the salacious air of clickbait or timed to shock you into discomfort. Instead, it is an anguished and heart-rending expression of a deep weariness of spirit, after a lifetime of abuse.

During a sweet return to Windhoek’s once thriving Theatre School last Saturday, ‘My Koek is Moeg’ begins with a trigger warning. Playwright Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja cautions that the subject matter may be deeply unsettling and says anyone who feels the need to do so is welcome to leave at any time.

The stage is bare and the crowd grows silent. After a minute or two, the vivacious and talkative Poppie Plaatjies (Molz) takes the stage and her world comes alive as she washes her lingerie – her literal and metaphorical dirty laundry – in a heavy white tub.

As pretty Poppie cracks jokes, talks smack about nosy neighbours and oscillates between Afrikaans and English, as well as somewhat manic exuberance and deep trauma, she tells us about her life.

Poppie is from Kho­masdal. She works at a supermarket. She’s excited about her new boyfriend and he’s the latest in a string of relationships that have been less than perfect.

And Poppie means much less than ideal. Sexually assaulted as a child, raped as a teen, silenced by her mother, beaten, discarded and abandoned, it’s a miracle that Poppie is still standing.

While just about every terrible thing that can happen to a woman happens to Poppie, her story simply echoes various realities of Namibian society.

It embodies the reasons for real life protests against sexual and gender-based violence (GBV). It is a mirror to the culture of silence around familial rape and intimate partner violence and it is a cross-section of Namibia’s grave rates of sexual and GBV.

In ‘My Koek is Moeg’, women and girls’ lives are reflected and theatregoers see their mothers, sisters, aunts, children, community and selves.

Directed by Obett Motaung, ‘My Koek is Moeg’ leaves the stage bare, save the washing tub and a pile of lingerie that transforms into binds and boats as Poppie tells her harrowing tale. The scenes are stark. They whip between high energy, humorous and bawdy, to horrifying, devastated and detached.

In this, Molz is a marvel. Though Poppie’s extended monologue and abrupt changes in mood must be challenging, Molz rides the wave of the character’s tumultuous state of mind with deep empathy, understanding and aplomb.

Molz is the play and, save a few stereotypical characterisations of the toxic men in Poppie’s life, the play is brutal, affecting and lingers.

While Mushaandja’s script is bleak and there is no talk of an unequivocally happy ending, nor does it illustrate a traumatised Poppie truly engaging in any accountability or introspecting on her adult life choices and destructive patterns of behaviour, the character is some kind of hero.

She is a person who has survived the unthinkable. She is a woman declaring that she’s had enough, even as the future demands of a baby grow in her belly.

“My Koek is Moeg (My vagina is tired),” says Poppie, slouched in a washing tub after a long pull on a cigarette.

The audience, who may initially have tittered at the title, are in ruins.

And Molz, a star, fades to black.

– martha@namibian.com.na, Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram, marthamukaiwa.com