The road to mecca

Discussion of the way the play represents women’s rights to express themselves freely. Since Helens husband death, she has lived alone and transformed her home into a work art by creating a myriad of cement wise men, camels, owls, mermaids and other figures around the house, and decorating the inside with dozens of candles and mirrors. She has created her own Mecca of beauty and freedom amid the harsh church-going Afrikaners and voiceless coloreds of this desolate region of South Africa. Through this Helen has learned to express herself, her thoughts and work of art freely without worrying what other people are saying. Helen found comfort through creating the sculptures and kept expressing them freely in her own home. Helen lived on her own and since her husband passed on, it was then that she discovered how to express herself. She did it on her own accord and alone without a man in her life. People in her region used to walk by and think she was crazy and her sculptures are a sign of madness and they made judgments without knowing her or without even trying to make the effort to get to know her or try to get an explanation from her. If they had taken a moment to talk to her they would have known that it was her way of expressing herself freely in her own home. The Mecca metaphor speaks to the relationship between imagination and freedom. Likewise Miss Helen candles the Afrikaners community expected her to shivered up and die after her husband death, for them, the right thing to do was for her to close the drapes to keep out of the light. But instead Miss Helen began to have visions of Mecca, an illuminated city that she began to recreate in a series of concrete images. In doing this, she alienated herself from the whole Afrikaners community, except Marius. Her art and her struggle to make it, is a metaphor for women’s struggle for her expression and self fulfiment in a society that sanctions conformity as well control the powerful and powerless. There are other