Woman of the Month: Djaq

Djaq from BBC’s Robin Hood

This month my friend and I finished the second season of the BBC’s most recent take on Robin Hood. I say “most recent,” even though it ended in 2009, because as far as I know there has not been another live-action television show based on the Robin Hood legends since – on the BBC or any other network.

This was the first time I’ve seen the show in many years, and it wasn’t a binge-watch, but something that was spread out over the course of many months, with an episode viewed after a movie or something like Shōgun, almost as a garnish to the more involved stuff. There was a lot of enjoyment to be derived from poking fun at the myriad of anachronisms and bewildering storylines, but also in wallowing through the lukewarm waters of nostalgia, given that this show comprised my very first fandom.

I say “lukewarm” waters, because to this day, I’m still haunted by many of the show’s inexplicable creative decisions in the final episode of season two, foremost among them being the brutal murder of Maid Marian at the hands of Guy of Gisborne, but also including the abrupt termination of the Black Knights arc, a one-episode foray to the Holy Land, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it death of a popular guest star, and the permanent exit of supporting characters Will Scarlett and Djaq the Saracen.

Yes, the conclusion of season two also brought about the end of Djaq’s story, she not appearing in the third and final season of the show. And yet she still holds a fascinating place not only in this retelling of the legend, but in the ongoing progression of the Robin Hood mythos and its ever-growing number of adaptations.

Her genesis can be found in ITV’s Robin of Sherwood (1984 – 1986) which was the first of its kind to add a Saracen character to the traditional lineup of Merry Men. As it happened, the character of Nasir was meant to be a one-shot bad guy, but the cast and crew liked the actor so much they kept him on.

His inclusion was handled so organically that when the screenwriter of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) was perusing relevant material to inspire his own script, he assumed that a Saracen had always been part of Robin Hood’s band and wrote one in accordingly, though having to hastily change the name from Nasir to Azeem when it became apparent the former was an original creation. Or so the story goes.

Technically, the tradition of Saracens in the Robin Hood legends started even earlier, from around the time the first ballads were moved from the reign of an undefined King Edward, to that of King Richard the Lionheart and his brother Prince John, which not only provided a rich historical backdrop for the story (the Good King versus the Evil Prince) but which necessarily made the Holy Land and the Third Crusade an intrinsic part of any retelling. As far back as 1922’s Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, or the 1950s’ Adventures of Robin Hood, there have been Middle-Eastern people mingling with the Anglo-Saxons – though granted, most of them were white actors in brownface.

But since Nasir and Azeem, there has hardly been a Robin Hood story that hasn’t featured a Saracen outlaw in some capacity, whether it was the jokey additions of Archoo and Barrington in Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, or Jamie Foxx playing Yahya, a Character Composition of the Saracen and Little John, in the 2018 film.

Smackdab in the middle of these portrayals came Anjali Jay as Djaq, who played the part between 2006 and 2007, and to this day is the only female iteration of the Saracen character.

In many ways, her presence was a stroke of genius. With only one other established female character in the cast, it made sense that the writers would be eager to introduce an Affirmative Action Girl to the proceedings, and gender-flipping the role of the Saracen, an “unfixed” character who had already gone through several different names and characterizations over the years, was an elegant way of achieving this.

In saying that, there’s also no escaping the fact that there’s a certain sense of deliberation to Djaq’s inclusion, not only as a more tomboyish foil to Marian’s femininity, but also to add some diversity to the otherwise all-white cast. In the decades before “woke” was widely in usage, those that are currently being driven to insanity by that particular term and its perceived threat to the art of storytelling would have been thrown into apoplexies of rage at the existence of Djaq.

In many ways, she does embody what’s known as a Flawless Token, and I definitely recall plenty of commentators back in the day throwing around accusations of her being a Mary Sue (along with Marian). At first glance, it’s not difficult to see why: she’s beautiful and wise and can hold her own in combat just as well as any of the men. She's a trained physician, is highly educated, can speak and read several languages, is an expert in the STEM fields of knowledge, and comes across as more sensible and emotionally intelligent than most of the menfolk that surround her.

In keeping with the prerequisites of the trope, she’s also given a tragic backstory involving the slaughter of her entire family during the Crusade, including her twin brother whose identity she assumed in order to fight in the guise of a man before she was captured and brought to England as a slave. It's a traumatic history that doesn’t seem to faze her in the slightest when she joins up with the outlaws, who have among their number two former soldiers that fought under King Richard in his invasion of her homeland. She... doesn’t have a problem with that?

There is a fear, prevalent to this day, to giving a minority character any overt flaws, and you can understand the logic at work (“we owe them” or “we’re too afraid not to make them perfect”) even if it robs them of some degree of humanity. So no, Djaq is not going to express any sort of anger or resentment or even basic introspection about the fact she’s now taking orders from a former Crusader, even though that would have made for a fascinating angle for the story to explore.

In many ways, Djaq feels like a character who was cooked up in a boardroom by a focus group, as opposed to the brainchild of a singular writer with a vision as her predecessors Nasir and Azeem were – an assumption borne out by the fact that once she had been conceived and cast and introduced to the show... nobody seemed to have any real idea of what to do with her.

Despite the implications of her presence, the wide array of skills she brought to the team, her rich backstory, and the potential she had in becoming a player of the wider political landscape this particular retelling was so interested in, she’s given no arc, no character-centric episode, and by the end of season two, she essentially Quits To Get Married, never to be seen or heard from again. She just completely ceases to exist!

In many ways, she's a perfect example of the clumsy preoccupations of networks in the early noughties. They want to have a heroic Muslim character to demonstrate how forward-thinking and progressive they are, but said character is played by an Indian actress, will be kept firmly on the periphery of the story, and will never get the chance to have her perspective or background explored in any great detail. That's representation in 2006, down to a tee. 

Djaq might be given tantalizing lines, such as when she tells a prisoner that "on that journey [to England] I learned every way there is of trying to talk my way out of bondage," but such dialogue is never examined further. There are moments of cultural significance, such as when she insists on the quick burial of a corpse, but they're never given any context. We get to see her bathe for prayers, but never actually pray. And finally, she falls in love with a Christian man, with no thought given to how they're going to negotiate their differences in religion, language, culture, family, or the fact their countries are currently at war with each other. 

Her abrupt departure is insulting to the point of offensive, especially when she’s promptly replaced by a white woman that fills much of her role in the gang dynamic, but who the new team of writers were mysteriously capable of keeping at the forefront of the storylines, letting her command twice as much narrative import despite not having any of the useful skills that Djaq was endowed with. (As an aside, all those commentators who complained Djaq and Marian were Mary Sues now found themselves desperate to get them back after the onset of Kate).

All these years later, and I’m still angry about it. I will always, always be bitter that we didn’t get a third season with her.

Where am I going with all this? To my point, which is this: that even though the writers failed her miserably, even though these days a certain segment of viewers would be screaming about "woke agendas" (back then they called it "affirmative action"), and even though she's by any admission a rather underwritten character that was almost certainly conceived to be the perfect box-ticking team minority – none of this necessarily leads to the formation of a bad character. Because I LOVED HER.

Loved her not only as a fascinating stepping stone in the evolution of the Saracen in the Robin Hood mythos, but as a character in her own right, as played with humour and panache by Anjali Jay, and as an inspiration to my own fledging attempts at writing. The show gave me a character prototype born out of a seemingly genuine desire (at least at first) to add diversity to the mix and I ran wild with it, as she is to this day the only fictional character I’ve written reams of fanfiction about, exploring the details of her past and future, and diving into material that the show never bothered with. There is the Djaq that exists on the show, and the one that lives in my imagination, and I have spent hours thinking about the latter.

I’m still a little stunned we never even got a flashback episode to her life as Saffiyah prior to meeting Robin Hood, one that explored the death of the real Djaq, her time as a Sweet Polly Oliver in the army, and the circumstances of how she was captured/sold into slavery, and I'll be forever bewildered that on formulating such a rich and interesting character, the entirety of the writers’ room was at a complete loss with what to do with her afterwards (that's another hallmark of 2006-era representation). 

But she also stands as a testimony to the fact that despite the obligatory feel of her inclusion, and the slapdash way with which she was removed, there is nothing stopping a determined viewer from utilizing their imagination and making a character their own. None of this "she's just not interesting enough," bullshit please. That attitude is entirely up to you.

This post has ended up an essay, and I’m annoyed that most of it feels like I’m justifying her presence, or examining her role in the early days of the internet culture wars. In the midst of all this discussion, Djaq herself is practically obliterated. Yet she is genuinely one of my favourite characters of all time: her wit, her intelligence, her potential, and her role in the ongoing Robin Hood canon.

One day I’m going to tell her story and do it justice.