A deeply moving text with a sombre focus, suitable for mature students
Bones by Tanika Gupta is not an easy read. I admit to putting it down several times to process exactly what was happening, not only to the characters in this story, but to society's appalling treatment of women and infants in Ireland, in what were known as ‘mother and baby homes’ across the country. This is a heart-breaking play based on the true story that for decades in Ireland, thousands of infant children were separated from their unmarried mothers, tortured, abused, neglected and died in these mother and baby homes under the supposed ‘care’ of nuns. Their horrific treatment was accepted at the time because Irish society saw these women and babies as sinners. They were treated as ‘inferior sub-species’ and appalling atrocities happened to them and their children, which are only now being fully uncovered.
The story is based loosely on what happened in Tuam, where 796 children were found buried in a mass grave on the grounds of a mother and baby home. Gupta uses a series of different flashbacks to tell the story of Grace, who finds herself pregnant outside of marriage and is sent to a mother and baby home by her parents, where her daughter is forcibly taken away from her. It moves between what we presume to be a story of her past, into her story of discovery when the bones of hundreds of buried infants are discovered. She realises the full extent of the horrors that not only happened to her in that home, but to thousands of women across decades in Ireland, and she tirelessly searches for answers to what happened to her baby.
The generational attitude shift is also interesting as we learn more about her other children and now grandchildren in the play, focusing on women's rights today, and uncovering what really happened in these awful homes.
It leaves so many searching questions about Irish society (of which many go unanswered), as Grace says herself in the final few pages of the play: ‘Do you know what that Home is like? Loveless. Cold. No compassion or laughter. Full of vindictive ‘Sisters’ and young girls like me having babies…No one ever stopped to ask who the men were that got us in trouble. Why weren't you punished along with us?’