Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora

Black Theatre

Black Theatre Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora edited by Paul Carter Harrison Victor Leo Walker II Gus Edwards

temple university press philadelphia

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2002 by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards All rights reserved Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Black theatre : ritual performance in the African diaspora / edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-56639-943-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-56639-944-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Blacks in the performing arts. 2. Black theater. 3. Drama—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Blacks in literature. I. Harrison, Paul Carter, 1936–. II. Walker, Victor Leo, II. III. Edwards, Gus. PN1590.B53 B59 2002 791′.089′96073—dc21 2001055547

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Thelma Inez Harrison, to whom I am eternally grateful for providing the guiding light that illuminated the path for inspiration, and the reassurance that all things are possible with spiritual enlightenment. —PCH

Contents

Paul Carter Harrison Praise/Word 1

part i: african roots Victor Leo Walker II Introduction 13 J. C. de Graft Roots in African Drama and Theatre 18 Babatunde Lawal The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance 39 Tejumola Olaniyan Agones: The Constitution of a Practice 64 Derek Walcott What the Twilight Says: An Overture 88 Gus Edwards Caribbean Narrative: Carnival Characters— In Life and in the Mind 108 Michael McMillan and SuAndi Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain 115

part ii: mythology and metaphysics Victor Leo Walker II Introduction 131

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Wole Soyinka The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy 140 Marta Moreno Vega The Candomblé and Eshu-Eleggua in Brazilian and Cuban Yoruba-Based Ritual 153 Femi Euba Legba and the Politics of Metaphysics: The Trickster in Black Drama 167 Keith L. Walker Art for Life’s Sake: Rituals and Rights of Self and Other in the Theatre of Aimé Césaire 181 May Joseph Sycorax Mythology 209 Joni L. Jones Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood 227 Victor Leo Walker II Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman 236

part iii: dramaturgical practice Paul Carter Harrison Introduction 247 Deborah Wood Holton The Dramaturg’s Way: Meditations on the Cartographer at the Crossroads 251 Sydné Mahone Introduction to Moon Marked and Touched by Sun 257 Paul K. Bryant-Jackson Kennedy’s Travelers in the American and African Continuum 273 Andrea J. Nouryeh Mojo and the Sayso: A Drama of Nommo That Asks, “Is Your Mojo Working?” 285 Jean Young Ritual Poetics and Rites of Passage in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf 296

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part iv: performance Gus Edwards Introduction 313 Paul Carter Harrison Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music 316 Beverly J. Robinson The Sense of Self in Ritualizing New Performance Spaces for Survival 332 Lundeana M. Thomas Barbara Ann Teer: From Holistic Training to Liberating Rituals 345 Amiri Baraka Bopera Theory 378 Keith Antar Mason From Hip-Hop to Hittite: Part X 382 William W. Cook Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson 388 Ntozake Shange Porque Tu No M’entrende? Whatcha Mean You Can’t Understand Me? 397 George C. Wolfe Performance Method 400 Eleanor W. Traylor Afterword: Testimony of a Witness 409 About the Contributors 415

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Black Theatre

Paul Carter Harrison

Praise/Word

I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters, and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth. As there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life, these men and women found themselves to be sufficient and secure in their art and their instructions. —August Wilson (1996)

In 1996 Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson dropped the gauntlet on skepticism about the validity of Black Theatre. His keynote address, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” delivered at the eleventh Biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University, became the occasion for Wilson to remind us that the term “black or African-American not only denotes race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory.” And because of the unrelieved “abuse of opportunity and truncation of possibility,” it becomes imperative to alter perceptions of self by jettisoning the aesthetic models of Western tradition that have forged such perceptions of blackness. These models must be replaced by the “spiritual temperament” of the ancestors whose songs, dances, and art were a manifest act of the “creator from whom life flowed,” thereby placing the craftsman at the “spiritual center of his existence.” Wilson’s declaration could easily be misconstrued as a mere reaction to oppression, when in fact it is a testamental reflection on the goal of contemporary Black Theatre artists to identify and retrieve African traditions from the American social landscape. In the process, a self-validating African moral universe would be reconstructed that would lead to the achievement of the “spiritual center” necessary for a reappraisal of black humanity. While the black experience in America and throughout the African Diaspora is not monolithic but exhibits a wide range of class and regional diversity, there is sufficient

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commonality of collective response to African retention to construct a culturally specific mythos that reveals ethnic authenticity, if not ethnic purity. Such a collective response may very well be consistent with Northrop Frye’s observation that when “a mythology is formed, a temenos or magic circle is drawn around a culture, and literature develops historically within a limited orbit of language, reference, allusion, beliefs, transmitted and shared tradition” (Frye: 268–342). Lucius T. Outlaw reminds us that in order to preserve the integrity of black culture and rescue our minds and hearts from the corrosive effects of self-deprecation, “a transformation of consciousness” is required. The new consciousness is achieved through a process of “symbolic reversal” that offers an opportunity to reassess, valorize, and codify experience in accord with values gleaned from the culturally specific traditions of black experience. Symbolic reversal implies a code-switching that permits us to engage experience “on the level of symbolic meaning” so as to disentangle the assumptions projected by dominant culture about the process of black social life and to claim authority over the existence of its authenticity (Outlaw: 403–4). Symbolic reversal of social and sacred codes is vital for the “transformation of consciousness” needed to overcome the negative connotations of blackness constructed in Western consciousness for more than 2000 years. Black and White are symbolized in Judeo-Christian mythologies as polarities of darkness and light in eternal struggle; they have thus become racialized signifiers in contemporary Western language. Such mythologies deified white skin as light and dark skin as darkness. Yet we discover that in African mythology blackness provides an alternative origin and symbolic representation in the universe. In his study of African myths, for example, Clyde W. Ford recognizes in the Egyptian myth of Nut, the sky goddess, the movement from light toward dark as the necessary initiation of the procreative passage of sunlight through the underworld, where seeds are planted in the fertile darkness of dream time before the sun reappears in its divine nature to complete a cycle of death and renewal. “Black people” are seen as “people of the setting sun; people of the dream time; people of the seeded earth; people of the fertile womb; people on the underground journey toward God-realization; people of immeasurable radiance; people of infinite compassion” (Ford: 6–11). A mythology that assigns to blackness the symbolic movement of the setting sun that carries human consciousness into dream and the realm of the unconscious before reappearing is a procreative symbol of renewal and transformation, and offers a productive ideogram which can be found in the ontological systems of most African cultures. As evinced in the aesthetics of Hip Hop culture, symbolic reversal has shaped the encoded language of a vernacular oral tradition that has proven to be the reliable agency for the continuance and re-absorption of African myths framed by the new context of experience. In his twentieth-century cycle of plays, August Wilson has immortalized the Hill District of Pittsburgh by identifying it as the spiritual location of myths that reconstruct mundane experience into mysteries of life that reveal signs for self/collective affirmation in the midst of chaos. In George C. Wolfe’s Colored Mu-

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seum, the use of symbolic reversal in contemporary Black Theatre is commonly used as an artistic/rhetorical strategy both to confront the stereotypic demons that haunt consciousness and to reinvest formerly negative stereotypes with character traits that might valorize them as significant icons in a newly constructed mythology of the black experience. Rather than adhere to the “keep ’em laughin’” survival strategy of Jasper and Sambo Coon, the iconic jesters of American entertainment, Robert Alexander infused Uncle Tom, the symbol of passive resistance, with a new meaning in I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Matt Robinson reveals the trickster pedigree of the Signifyin’ Monkey as the master of improvisation in The Confessions of Stepin Fetchit (Euell: 667–675). And in Marsha Leslie’s The Trial of One ShortSighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae, code-reversal has made it possible to rescue and reinvent the Mammy stereotype as a warrior/mythic-hero archetype. Parenthetically, the need to recover Mammy as a mythic reference to the Great Mother of Creation in African mythology reflects a current trend to bring forth the voices of the African goddesses that have been submerged through the paternalistic hegemony of Christian dogma. While the reclamation of Africa as a central iconographic source has provided symbolic fortification for African diasporic cultures in general, it has served greatly to reify the black female image in particular. The Great Mother, iconically symbolized in a sanctified universe with the regenerative powers of procreation, is often represented as rock or sacred stone, projecting the image of the strong black woman who is venerated (as in Sweet Honey in the Rock) for the archetypal qualities more often associated with male strength, power, and creative force. The African female principle shares none of the angst of Western feminists forced to the margins of social organization. Instead, African diasporic women are best represented by the image of Osun, who in Yoruba mythology resides at the core, rather than the periphery, of social order (Davies; Bádéjò). This is also apparent in the male/ female dual qualities of Obatala in Yoruba mythology, Dambala and Ayida in Vodum, and the non-gender-specific potency of Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Winnie Mandela. And then there is Sycorax, the magical source of nature created in the margins of Shakespeare’s mind in The Tempest, making a modest reappearance in Aimé Césaire’s adaptation, A Tempest, through the voice of her nature-offspring, Caliban. May Joseph, writing in Part II of this volume, awakens us to the need for a Sycorax-like voice to reconstruct values that are spiritually liberating for black women shouldering the burden of being both mothers and fathers in absent-male households. At this juncture of contemporary African consciousness, which recognizes blackness as a quality of sensibility and not a reaction to whiteness, Larry Neal’s 1968 black arts movement manifesto, instructing black artists to replace the Western aesthetic tradition with a separate symbolism, mythology, iconology, and critique generated by the specific continuity of African cultural traditions, becomes a significant mandate. Houston A. Baker has observed,

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The guiding assumption of the Black Arts Movement was that if a literary-critical investigator looked to the characteristic musical and verbal forms of the masses, he could discover unique aspects of Afro-American creative expression —aspects of both form and performance—that lay closest to the verifiable emotional referents and experiential categories of Afro-American culture. The result of such critical investigations . . . would be the discovery of a “Black aesthetic”— a distinctive code for the creation and evaluation of black art. (Baker: 74) Neal’s edict echoes Alain Locke’s challenge to artists of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, when he urged that black dramatic art must be liberated not only from external disparagement but from its self-imposed limitations by breaking away from established dramatic conventions to develop its own. Though emerging from a context of oppression, the ideal expressive products of Black Theatre throughout the Diaspora should reflect an alternative style of work or practice that is culturally specific and not limited to Western dramaturgical conventions. The new work must aspire beyond the documentary replication of experience that is reduced to convenient racial tags such as Negro or Colored or Aboriginal or Other, which relegates such performance practices to an insular, ghettoized theatrical experience. Perhaps a distinction should be made between those performance exercises represented by anecdotal dramas that review the slings and arrows of outrageous (racial) fortune in black domestic life, and theatre as the ritual reenactment of black experience. Certainly there has always been and will undoubtedly continue to be something called African American drama—including popular entertainments such as revues and urban circuit musicals, melodramas and stock comedies that parody the black experience, as well as socio-historical docudramas and biographies constructed in the usual linear convention of social realism that hold black performance hostage to crude, reductive imitations of life that reliably adhere to the descriptive interpretation of sociological facts. And irrespective of its recurring popularity in the repertories of American theatre, the exoticized Porgy and Bess remains an offensive portrayal of black life; equally unflattering was the cork-faced rendering of Mammy by one of the icons of American musical theatre, Al Jolson, which was merely a vulgarization of black performance. Consequently, it should be evident that the mere presence of black actors on a stage, including the novelty of a nontraditional all-black cast performing European classics such as The Cherry Orchard, does not constitute Black Theatre. Clearly the dehumanizing oppression and resulting dysfunctional pathologies suffered by Africans in the Diaspora over the past five hundred years, as a result of the barbaric slave trade and colonialism, constitute the most indescribable holocaust in human history. Its dimensions cannot be assessed through isolated, episodic narratives of victimization. Without an enduring epiphany, personal litanies of victimization can only solicit provisional sympathy. The challenge of contemporary Black Theatre is to formulate a specific practice that can contextualize African-inspired values and overcome the trauma of dislocation and subjugation. Black Theatre must generate a transformative ritual style of work informed by the expressive strategies located

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in the continuum of African memory throughout the Diaspora. At its expressive core is a spiritual connection between shadow and light, ancestors and the living. Most importantly, whatever value it might have as entertainment, the inventive process of Black Theatre must illuminate the collective ethos of the black experience in a manner that binds, cleanses, and heals. The intention of this collection of essays is to demonstrate that Black Theatre is not merely the social inscription of victimization arrested in the lens of social realism. Rather, it is the rhythmic spectacle of language, movement, and sound rooted deeply in the social negotiations of church, Carnival, and the call-and-response practices of collective experience. Common to the language styles of Black Theatre in the Diaspora is a virtuoso performance with a certain musicality of tone and pitch that promotes onomatopoeic insinuations for semantic effect. The spiritually invocative process is designed to minimalize naturalistic character traits in order to collapse, as W. E. Abrams observes of the Akan oral tradition, realism into the supra-universe of myth that reveals the form of things unknown. In The Mind of Africa, Abrams observes a similar tendency in the Akan literature, in which character types or archetypes are favored over well-rounded characterizations. Abrams explains this as a result of the individual’s relationship both to a society “comprising individuals with antecedent duties and responsibilities” and to the spiritual world. As a result, “the three-dimensional individual, completely subsistent, and a distinct atom, was non-existent” (Abrams: 97). Similarly, it is not uncommon to discover in the ritual forms of Black Theatre characters that are more representative archetypes than individuated, full-dimensioned characters located in the conventions of realism. Characters configured as archetypes serve a universe that allows both the living and the dead to drive the actions of a dramatic event. Although Western traditions have been moving “from a metaphysical apprehension of the world to a naturalistic one” guided by empirical calculation, the worldview of most African cultures includes both the living and the dead, and relies on storytelling that unfolds as “reproductive verisimilitude” as opposed to “descriptive realism” (Abrams: 92–97). It may be useful here to use Abrams’s observations on the “reproductive verisimilitude” of African art as an analogy for the objectives of Black Theatre in the Diaspora: Traditional African art was not literary or descriptive, employing conventional devices for effects like a kind of code-language. It was direct, magical, attempting a sort of plastic analogue of onomatopoeia, to evince and to evoke feelings which the subjects induced in one. . . . The superlative achievement of African art probably lies in the control achieved over deformity and its associated feelings in their societies. Thus in the relevant works, there is a near-vigour, but not vigour a la Japan, near-hideousness but not hideousness, near-distortion which is not complete, the complex of attributes which does not quite scarify, but leaves a ponderous aura of dark forces, of massive unreleased potency, of the unknown and the indeterminate, almost a hushed version of the ventriloquist ubiquity of the rattle-snake, the sense of mesmerized helplessness, still, cold, silent, enchantedly for-

6 paul carter harrison lorn, and an aura of the numinous presence of primeval spirit. African art was testamental, except when it was secular. (Abrams: 112)

It is precisely the magic “aura of dark forces . . . the unknown and indeterminate . . . the numinous presence of primeval spirit” that Black Theatre pursues in its testimonial rituals. Such a pursuit was anathema to Richard Wright, the author of the Marxist novel Native Son, who preferred the concreteness of realism to the metaphysical literary objectives of some of his peers, which he repudiated as the search for the form of things unknown. Perhaps the defining moment of change at the crossroads between realism and the ritual form of things unknown came with the reception to Lorraine Hansberry’s critically acclaimed A Raisin In the Sun, which played on Broadway in 1959 and altered the cultural landscape of the Great White Way for the next four decades. While it appears to be a black domestic drama framed by the conventions of Marxist-style realism, this play reveals many aesthetic qualities associated with an African consciousness. The most salient of these is the active trickster presence of the dead father at the crossroads of domestic indecision, not as a ghost but rather as a spirit force that drives the actions of the play (see Femi Euba, in Part II of this volume, on the African trickster). Hansberry’s play appeared in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, a time of urgency that demanded new forms to carry messages of social change. Recognizing that the highest expectation of art is that it transform the mundane, ritual mechanisms were constructed to probe the recesses of African memory, penetrating fixed relationships of material reality to bear witness to the spiritual essence of familiar experience. As a performance practice, Black Theatre abandoned documentary expositions of black life and moved away from “drama—the spectacle observed,” as Kimberly W. Benston has noted, “to ritual—the event which dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, between self and other” (Benston: 62). Ritual gestures, once subordinated by dominant culture, were retrieved from the vernacular rhythms of traditional folk life to illuminate the culturally specific aspects of social experience that reaffirmed the presence of a durable human spirit struggling to overcome the conditions of oppression and dignify existence. The new aesthetic vision awakened the African American consciousness to a self-definition shared with other African diasporic cultures, thereby solidifying the need for a global consciousness that recognized the collective experience and the shared impact of Eurocentric colonization on cultural practice. The earliest signs of departure from the convention of realism to and its replacement by ritual were discerned in the mytho-absurdist inventions of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) Dutchman, both prompting the emergence of a Black Theatre movement with its own expressive voice. The movement had gained substantial momentum and currency through the mounting in 1965 of Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, performed by a black cast in white-face, a satirical inversion of the American minstrel format that revealed the subtle interdependence between blacks and whites. The production became the cata-

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lyst for the formation of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967, which for the next twenty-five years produced and nurtured the widest repertory of black works in the world (the only exception being the prodigious repertory of work produced since 1969 by Woodie King, Jr. at the New Federal Theatre). Contributing to the new wave was Ed Bullins’s 1968 absurd-realist play, The Electronic Nigger, which paved the way for the short-lived New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, at which Bullins and Richard Wesley (Black Terror) were principal writers and collaborated with director Bob Macbeth, who was committed to the development of ritual theatre. As Bullins put it, “We don’t want to have a higher form of white art in Black faces. . . . [We] are working toward something entirely different and new that encompasses the soul and spirit of Black people, and that represents the whole experience of our being here in this oppressive land” (Marvin X: xii). Also in Harlem during this period was the National Black Theatre, under the spiritual and artistic guidance of Barbara Ann Teer, who abandoned Western dramatic structures and aggressively promoted black church performance techniques inspired by Yoruba rituals (see Lundeana M. Thomas on Teer in Part IV of this volume). As the movement evolved, it developed a performance practice that framed the folk traditions of urban and rural black life with conventional plot structures, yet revealed an invocative, testimonial language of voice and gesture to drive actions into a kinetic, seamless weave of non-linear storytelling. In the process, a relationship between spiritual and mundane reality was encouraged through a coalescence of time and place that validated the social and moral landscape and provided immediate symbolic significance and utility for ideograms gleaned in an integrated social universe. Finally, the movement is a practice that demands choreographic action on the scale of a spectacle—which can be achieved by a single performer—to accommodate the kaleidoscopic character of African memory. It soon became clear that the objectives of the new practice required a method of systematic analysis beyond the constraints of both the Western aesthetic paradigm and the social conditions from which such creative exigency emerged. As Wole Soyinka has astutely observed, a critical discourse requires an understanding of the cultural syntax of a people. “When you go into any culture, I don’t care what the culture is . . . you have to understand the language, by that I don’t mean what we speak, you’ve got to understand the interior language of the people, you’ve got to speak . . . the metalanguage of the people.” Until recently, scholars, critics, and practitioners of theatre have regarded black presence in a stage play merely as a vector for the exploration of social conscience, a dramatic construction without a verifiable, culturally specific worldview. We have not always been responsive to the arc or pattern of symbolic expression rooted in the collective ethos of the African continuum, captured in such terms as August Wilson’s “blood memory” and Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire’s “plasmatic dimension,” which shapes existence with the “accumulated, inherited experiences buried in the collective memory and unconscious of people of African descent.” We failed to detect the collective sensibility made possible through the arousal of a shared sense of spirituality located in language, religion, food, celebration and ceremonial rituals, music, and dance (see Keith Walker on Césaire in Part II of this

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volume). In order to make an informed assessment of the performative intentions in the aesthetics of Black Theatre practice, scholars, critics, and practitioners of the discipline (particularly those who claim ancestral privilege to black experience) must necessarily study, with requisite rigor, the sacred and secular symbols of traditional African culture that issue from African Diaspora cultures. Just as Sandra Richards has revealed the role of Yoruba archetypes in the dramaturgy of August Wilson, and as Diedre Bádéjò has identified the Yoruba goddess Osun as a “paradigm for African feminist criticism,” Wole Soyinka’s critical construction of the sacred mythologies that inform Yoruba tragedy might be useful as a model for evaluating the integrity of the newly erected African Diaspora performance practice (see Soyinka in Part II of this volume). By now it is commonly accepted in the African Diaspora that performance is not limited to an edifice, the technology of computerized sets, or the bounding of a script. An opportunity for performative expression can be located in the daily rituals of life, including “sporting events and in circuses, in storytelling and in public events, in clothing and hairstyles.” In the African tradition, theatre begins with the incantative voice of the storyteller (griot), the poly-rhythms of the musicians, and the gesticulate responses of the body, all orchestrated to bring spiritual enlightenment to mundane experience. As early as 1970, buttressed by the emergence of new scholarly inquiries and reappraisals of African retention in the African American culture—e.g., Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu (1961), W. E. Abrams’s The Mind of Africa (1962), and LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) Blues People (1963)—I was compelled by the absence of a coherent critical discourse about Black Theatre to write The Drama of Nommo. It was a project designed to construct a foundation for identifying the continuity of African cultural underpinnings in the American experience that informed the aesthetics of Black Theatre. Other works have emerged since then as tools for critical reference and analysis of performance practices rooted in the African and New World Diaspora, including The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Errol Hill, 1980); Mance William’s Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-critical Analysis of the Movement (1985); Carlton and Barbara Molette’s Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation (1986); Samuel A. Hay’s African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (1994); and Tejumola Olaniyan’s provocative interrogation of the Afrocentric dialectics of Black Theatre, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (1995). This volume, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, took shape in response to August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech, which catalyzed the 1998 National Black Theatre Summit at Golden Pond, where more than fifty scholars and practitioners convened to examine the state of Black Theatre. The issues discussed during the five-day summit ranged from the formulation of strategies for supporting theatre as an aspect of community economic development to the development of new black playwrights through a culturally specific paradigm and standard of practice (see “Unprecedented Times,” Black Theatre Network Magazine, 1999). The Committee on Aesthetics, Standards, and Practice (which included myself and

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two other contributors to this volume, Beverly Robinson and William Cook), arrived at the following formulation of objectives for Black Theatre practice: Black Theatre is performative, not didactic, yet seeks collective self-definition. In both ensemble and solo work, the performance objectives rise above self-aggrandizement, recognizing the tension between I/we that subjects the individual self to collective responsibility. It is a preservative and transformative dramatic ritual that requires ritual ground as the space to focus centrality of spirit. The continuity of spirit/memory is made possible through the testimonial use of call-and-response to bear witness to collective experience. It is a dynamic experience with the potential to reformulate riddles and coded messages over time through recognizable and understood rhythms that underscore the symbolic action of the trickster’s infinite possibilities. Black Theatre is joy, passion, and beauty, which leads to positive illumination. The momentous meeting concluded with the formation of the African Grove Institute for the Arts (AGIA), a national service organization for Black Theatre in the Diaspora, with August Wilson as chairman of the board and Victor Leo Walker II, a principal organizer, as CEO and president. In the spirit of AGIA’s intent to promote a more enlightened view of Black Theatre globally, the following essays are offered, in association with my co-editors, playwright Gus Edwards and Victor Leo Walker II, as the first collection of essential texts to offer a critical analysis of the historical, theoretical, and performance commonalties of Black Theatre practice throughout the African Diaspora. These essays cross the borders of the African continent, the Caribbean, and the United States, amplifying the initial explorations of the retention of African memory propounded in the Drama of Nommo by demonstrating the intersection between spiritual invocation and theatrical practice throughout the African Diaspora. The collection is divided into four parts, each with an expository introduction: African Roots; Mythology and Metaphysics; Dramaturgical Practice; and Performance. It concludes with an afterword by the ever-sentient cultural critic Eleanor Traylor. Finally, we offer praise to the spirit of Dr. Beverly Robinson, whose transition to the ancestors in the spring of this year leaves us a legacy of uncompromised commitment to the study and research of folk traditions in African American culture. While these texts do not propose a singular canon for stage practices, they do present a framework for apprehending a common stylistic process in Black Theatre that has resonance throughout the African Diaspora. I should note here that we chose these particular essays for their capacity to offer an approach to the study of Black Theatre aesthetics and performance in the African Diaspora without compromising the integrity of the cultural expression unique to a particular region. It is our wish that this collection will serve as a point of critical reference for enlightened evaluation of the performance practices of Black Theatre wherever encountered. Columbia College Chicago 2002

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References Abrams, W. E. The Mind of Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Bádéjò, Diedre L. “The Goddess Osun as a Paradigm for African Feminist Criticism.” Sage 6 (summer 1989), 27. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Benston, Kimberly W. “The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama: From Mimesis to Methexis.” In Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill, 62. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987. Davies, Carole Boyce. “Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism.” In Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, ed. C. B. Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1986, 1–17. Euell, Kim. “Signifyin(g) Ritual: Subverting Stereotypes, Salvaging Icons.” African American Review 31 (winter 1997): 667–86. Ford, Clyde W. The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. Frye, Northrop. “The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism.” Daedalus (spring 1970): 268–342. Locke, Alaine. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Marvin X. “An Interview with Ed Bullins: Black Theatre.” Negro Digest 18 (April 1969): xii. National Black Arts Summit, Aesthetics, Standards, and Practices Committee. “Black Theatre’s Unprecedented Times,” Black Theatre Network Magazine, 1999. Outlaw, Lucius T. “Language and Consciousness: Towards a Hermeneutic of Black Culture.” Cultural Hermeneutics (1974): 403–4. Richards, Sandra. “Yoruba Gods on the American Stage: August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Research in African Literatures 30 (1999). Rubin, Don. “African Theatre in a Global Context.” In Encyclopedia of World Theatre, vol. 3, Africa, 11–14. London: Routledge, 1997. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Wilson, August. “The Ground on Which I Stand.” Keynote address, eleventh Biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Princeton University, 1996.

Part I African Roots

Overleaf: Ritual staff of Osanyin, the Yoruba orisha (deity) of herbal medicine. (Obafemi Awolowo University Art Museum, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Photo: Babatunde Lawal.)

Victor Leo Walker II

Introduction

Toledo. Now, what I was saying is what Slow Drag was doing is African. That’s what you call an African conceptualization. That’s when you call on the gods or call on the ancestors to achieve whatever your desires are. . . . Naming all those things you and Cutler done together is like . . . a bond of kinship. That’s African. An ancestral retention. Only you forgot the name of the gods. Slow Drag. . . . Don’t come talking that African nonsense to me. Toledo. . . . There’s so much that goes on around you and you can’t even see it. —August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

The terms theatre and drama will be used throughout this section and throughout this book as terms that are inclusive of ritual, ceremony, carnival, masquerade, testimonials, rites of passage, the blues, improvisation, “Negro spirituals,” spoken word, hiphop, storytelling, and other performative modes of expression rooted in the ancestral ethos of black Africans in the Diaspora. That is, we regard these terms as encompassing much more than the conventional disciplines that, according to the Nigerian philosopher, playwright, and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, “Western European man later reduced to specialist terminologies through his chronic habit of compartmentilisation.”1 The Western paradigm of the proscenium and the so-called “dramatic text” as essential ingredients in creating theatre are treated in this introduction and throughout the entire book as resources within the matrix of performative/ritual expressions. The vast majority of black Africans in the Diaspora share experiences of what folklorist, scholar, and cultural historian Alan Lomax refers to as the “the African style of collective creation” rooted in the performative rituals and ceremonies of the community.2 The communal spirit animates the full spectrum of these rituals and performances, including black Baptist church ceremonies, rhythm & blues music, and the black arts movement in the United States; canboulay rituals and calypso drama in Trinidad; carnival and condoble in Brazil; rituals of the Omo peoples in the lower

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Omo River valley in southwest Ethiopia; the planting rites ceremony of the Bedik peoples in Senegal; Yoruba Masquerades and the ritual dramas of Wole Soyinka in Nigeria; Vodou ceremonies of the Fon, Ewe, and Ga peoples of West Africa (Benin, Togo and Ghana); Bianou Muslim Festival of Tuareg; ritual protest theatre of Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Kenya; folk music and poetry of the Buena Vista Social Club of Cuba; and the Black Theatre/Live Art Collective of Great Britain. Most black Africans in the Diaspora who create performative rituals do so to reaffirm the life force of the community by engaging the community in an experience that reinforces the collective worldview in which the natural rhythms and cosmic balances of the community, despite periodic disruptions, are in harmony. Consider the traditional New Orleans African funeral march and procession, where the deceased is celebrated, not mourned, as a soul on the path of a metaphysical journey whose time on earth has come to a natural conclusion, whatever the cause of death. This reaffirms the community’s collective sense of the natural order of the cosmos. The essays in this section, “African Roots,” address Soyinka’s assertion that theatre and drama of the African Diaspora is “communal” and embraces the “belief in culture as defined within man’s knowledge of fundamental, unchanging relationships between himself and society and within the larger context of the observable universe.” The focus on the communal in the performative rituals of black Africans in the Diaspora is distinctive. According to Soyinka: The difference which we are seeking to define between European and African Drama as one of man’s formal representations of experience is not simply a difference of style or form, nor is it confined to drama alone. It is representative of the essential differences between two world views, a difference between one culture whose very artifacts are evidence of a cohesive understanding of irreducible truths and another, whose creative impulses are directed by period dialectics. So, to begin with, we must jettison that fashionable distinction which tends to encapsulate Western drama as a form of esoteric enterprise spied upon by fee-paying strangers, as contrasted with a communal evolution of the dramatic mode of expression, this latter being African. Of far greater importance is the fact that Western dramatic criticism habitually reflects the abandonment of a belief in culture as defined within man’s knowledge of fundamental, unchanging relationships between himself and society and within the larger context of the observable universe.3

“Roots in African Drama and Theatre,” the first essay in this section, by the late Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft, was originally published in 1976; yet de Graft’s critique of West African drama is still relevant today. De Graft notes that in modern times Africans have embraced their indigenous rituals as they are “naturally dissatisfied” with the continued cultural domination of Africa by Western modes of expression, but he argues that such rituals are only one aspect of drama. Distinguishing between “magical drama” and “dramatic art,” he illuminates the difference between ritual drama’s power to summon the communal spirit and “the modern commercial theatre of pure entertainment.”

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Babatunde Lawal’s essay, “The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance,” is a thorough examination of what the character Toledo, in August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, refers to as “the ancestral retention[s]” of black Africans in America. Lawal’s essay discusses the major role art played in precolonial African cultures, and continues to play today “because of its ontological significance.” Lawal lays the historical groundwork for what will be an explication of those African retentions related to dance, music, theatre, visual arts, and customs found among Africans in the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also are incorporated into the spiritual practices of black Africans in the Americas. Lawal is particularly attentive to the ways in which African American artists and performers have been transforming their African heritage “to reflect new needs, influences, ideals and visions emanating from both sides of the Atlantic.” In “Agones: The Constitution of a Practice,” Tejumola Olaniyan argues for a counterhegemonic discourse that moves us closer to defining Black drama on its own terms. Surveying the pan-African discourses from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, Olaniyan examines the various elements of discourses on black theatre that begin to construct a language and philosophy that articulate the complexity, history, and art of black theatre practice. Derek Walcott’s “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” is an exploration of identity and its role in producing art. Walcott’s art reflects two worldviews—one European and the other Afro-Caribbean. “Caribbean Narrative: Carnival Characters—In Life and in the Mind,” by Gus Edwards, explores Afro-Caribbean cultural/aesthetic forms and traditions. The essay is a discourse on certain types of theatre and performative rituals that evolved from slaves, colonial subjects, and postcolonial citizens of specific Afro-Caribbean communities. Overlapping with Walcott’s terrain, Edwards poses questions that address the complexities of Afro-Caribbean identity and various cultural/aesthetic practices that illuminate the African ethos in performative rituals of the Caribbean, such as Carnival and its various manifestations as an amalgamation of African rituals and performance that include drumming, dance, Vodou ceremonies, ring shouts, and masquerade. Illuminating the performative elements of daily life, he asserts that performance for most Afro-Caribbeans is not a social luxury but a daily ritual that affirms the community’s aesthetics, customs, and worldview. The closing essay in this section, “Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain,” by Michael McMillan and SuAndi, explores the fragmented history of black theatre and drama in Britain in the twentieth century. They note that in the last half of the twentieth century, the significant increase in black African and Caribbean immigration to Britain spurred a black theatre movement whose art and rhetoric was steeped in postcolonial discourse. At its peak in the 1970s the movement generated today’s black theatre in Britain, a vibrant array of plays, diverse modes of performative rituals, and an ever-expanding performance art community.

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The essays in this section reflect the complexity and diversity among the peoples, cultures, and customs of Africa and among blacks in the African Diaspora, from West to East Africa, from the Caribbean to the United States, from South America to Britain. These discourses present a record of the practice of black theatre/performative-ritual expressions in the African Diaspora under the oppressive circumstances of slavery, colonialism, cultural imperialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, Jim Crow, segregation, and globalism (the new capitalist hegemonic paradigm). Hence the creative spirit of African peoples and cultures discussed in this section reflect what Amiri Baraka calls the art of resistance, a performative ethos that reaffirms the ontology of the community as resistance to Eurocentric critical orthodoxies that orientalize black African diasporic cultures and cultural forms. Collectively, the essays in “African Roots” consider the social foundations of a black aesthetic form and thereby “a culturally situated Black dramatic theory”4 and meta-discourse for a mature, critical study of those cultural and aesthetic forms referred to as black theatre and drama of the African Diaspora. The African roots of black drama and theatre in the Diaspora date as far back as 2500 bce to the ancient Egyptian Passion Plays. One could argue that if the Egyptians “laid the foundation of Western civilization,”5 those ancient Africans could also have laid the foundation for theatre and drama. According to William Branch, theatre historian and playwright, “theatre as a communal entity did not originate about 500 bce in early Greece but began instead over two thousand years earlier on the continent of Africa. The first ‘plays’ were extensions of religious observances among those ancient Africans—today known as Nubians and Egyptians—who inhabited the long lush valley of the Nile. . . . They were often, in effect, elaborate Passion Plays. . . . The best known of the early Egyptian dramas is the ‘Abydos Passion Play,’ whose god-hero was Osiris, corn-deity, spirit of the trees, fertility patron, and lord of life and death.”6 Branch and theatre historian Mergot Berthold assert that the origins of Western theatre are rooted in the ritual practices of the ancient Egyptians. But the myth and ritual of the ancient classical forms have been replaced in modern times with the practice of diversionary entertainment. According to Branch: By nature, few Black dramatists—whether Nigerian, Ghanaian, South African, African Caribbean, African Brazilian, or African American—appear inclined to engage in the exercise of their art and craft solely, or even primarily, for the purpose of producing ‘diversionary entertainment.’ . . . Perhaps in the tradition of those unknown African bards who created those ancient Egyptian Passion Plays, they see themselves as serving a vital function in their respective societies: that of involving themselves and their fellow humans in a challenge to the mind and spirit . . . a search for truth and justice—if not always beauty.7

Notes 1. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 6. 2. Alan Lomax, “The Land Where the Blues Began,” PBS Documentary, 1990.

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3. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, 38. 4. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11. 5. Mergot Berthold, The History of World Theater (New York: Continuum, 1972), 9. 6. William B. Branch, Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), xii, xiv, xxvi. 7. Ibid.

J. C. de Graft

Roots in African Drama and Theatre

In a book on Haiti published in 1929, W. B. Seabrook gives an eyewitness account of a Voodoo substitution sacrifice which I have always found most fascinating, as illustrating the awesome relationship between role-playing and sympathetic magic.1 The worship of the Voodoo god Damballa Ouedo would seem to require periodically the sacrifice of a human being, and in the distant past humans may actually have been so sacrificed. Since it is not likely that the law would connive at such a practice in any modern society, however, the custom may have started of substituting a goat for the human victim. To preserve the essence of a human sacrifice, then, a ritual is performed at the altar of the god in which the priests are able to induce a kind of personality switch between a maiden and the sacrificial goat, under the combined influence of potions, drugs, spells, chanting, and powerfully rhythmic drumming. According to the account, The ceremony of substitution, when it came, was pure effective magic of a potency which I have never seen equalled in dervish monastery or anywhere. The goat and the girl, side by side before the altar, had been startled, restive, nervous. The smell of blood was in the air, but there was more than that hovering; it was the eternal, mysterious odour of death itself which both animals and human beings always sense, but not through the nostrils. Yet now the two who were about to die mysteriously merged, the girl symbolically and the goat with a knife in its throat, were docile and entranced, were like automatons. . . . The girl was now on her hands and knees in the attitude of a quadruped, directly facing the goat, so that their heads and eyes were on a level, less than ten inches apart, and thus they stared fixedly into each other’s eyes. . . . By shifting slightly I could see the big, wide, pale-blue, staring eyes of the goat, and the big, black, staring eyes of the girl, and I could

Reprinted from J. C. de Graft, “Roots in African Drama and Theatre,” African Literature Today (Drama in Africa, No. 8), ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones (London: Heinemann, 1976), by permission of James Currey Publishers.

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have almost sworn that the black eyes were gradually, mysteriously, becoming those of a dumb beast, while a human soul was beginning to peer out through the blue. But dismiss that, and still I tell you that pure magic was here at work, that something very real and fearful was occurring. For as the priest wove his ceaseless incantations, the girl began a low, piteous bleating in which there was nothing, absolutely nothing, human; and soon a thing infinitely more unnatural occurred: the goat was moaning and crying like a human child. . . . While the papaloi still wove his spells, his hands moving ceaselessly like an old woman carding wool in a dream, the priestess held a twig green with tender leaves between the young girl and the animal . . . on a level with their mouths . . . against the hairy muzzle of the goat, against the chin and soft lips of the girl. And after moments of breathless watching, it was the girl’s lips that pursed out and began to nibble at the leaves . . . nibbling as horned cattle do . . . As she nibbled thus, the papaloi said in a hushed but wholly matter-of-fact whisper like a man who had finished a hard, solemn task and was glad to rest, “Ca y est” (There it is). The papaloi was now holding a machete, ground sharp and shining. . . . Neither seemed conscious of anything that was occurring, nor did the goat flinch when the papaloi laid his hands upon its horns. Nor did the goat utter any sound as the knife was drawn quickly, deeply, across its throat. But at this instant, as the blood gushed like a fountain into the wooden bowl, the girl, with a shrill, piercing, then strangled bleat of agony, leaped, shuddered, and fell senseless before the altar. . . .

And so the account goes on, almost like fiction! It must be added here for the squeamish, however, that it was the goat that died, not the girl; she was carefully lifted up and carried away unconscious, to be revived by the priests. Seabrook’s The Magic Island may not be easily accessible to most readers of this essay, hence my decision to quote the account at such length. But the phenomenon described there is not peculiar to Voodoo, nor is it so rare as it seems. As J. G. Frazer has amply shown, at its most profound level of realization role-playing is closely related to sympathetic magic, one of whose basic assumptions is the principle “. . . that like produces like, or that the effect resembles the cause . . . ,” from which principle “. . . the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires by simply imitating it.”2 Doubtful though this principle may be as a verifiable scientific fact, there nevertheless is irrefutable evidence that a firm belief in it underlies much of the ritual behavior of mankind. Thus we find that accounts of religious practices in many communities around the world—both in ancient and in modern times—are replete with instances of procreation rituals, for example, in which men and women masquerading as spirits and gods take on the role of divine consorts in order to stimulate such natural processes as the return of spring, fertility, growth, and plentiful harvests.3 It would be ridiculous, of course, to maintain a direct causal relationship between procreation rituals and such natural events as the return of spring and plentiful harvests in the light of our present knowledge of climatology and agricultural science. On the other hand, would it not be equally ridiculous to underestimate the psychological effects on the participants themselves of rituals like these which are based on a belief in this principle of sympathetic magic?

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It is important at this point to try and establish a distinction between drama and life as we live it from day to day, in order to avoid possible confusion. The danger of such confusion is particularly great when, as Africans who are naturally dissatisfied at the continued domination of our “culture” by Western modes of expression, we talk patriotically about “our heritage of indigenous drama and the richness of our dramatic traditions.” At such times the term “drama” seems to cover almost every form of social expression that may be said to incorporate movement and gesture: singing, drumming, dancing, all ceremonial behavior, enstoolment and destoolment of chiefs, child naming, circumcision rites, hunting, drinking palm wine, and eating goat’s meat—literally everything. I know of no easier way of reducing to nonsense one’s thinking about drama!4 Drama certainly derives from everyday life, but it is not the same thing as everyday life; just as a song, no matter how stirring, or a picture, no matter how vivid, about hunting is not the same thing as an actual hunt. Drama is a condensation from everyday life, whose many aspects—visible and invisible, tangible and intangible— it attempts to manifest, embody, or affirm. It is in this sense that drama is an art form. But what makes drama unique as an art form is that not only is it capable of drawing on all life for its raw material, but also it does and must utilize the pulsating raw material of actual human bodies, attributes, and behavior as the sine qua non of its very medium of expression. It is for this reason that drama is closer to life as men actually live it than any other form of artistic expression. As a distinct form, however, drama begins to body forth, to precipitate from everyday life, only when man introduces into life’s normal pursuits the element of impersonation or role-playing as a means of achieving certain ends. On the surface these ends are many and varied; but at the deepest psychological level they are closely related to man’s compulsive need, and therefore search, for sanity and security in a world that threatens annihilation from all directions. I believe that until we realize the significance of this fact, our understanding of the role of drama in human life will always be limited to the superficial glamour of theatrical occasions. To appreciate the extent of man’s need for sanity and security, one must be alive to an exterior environment charged with such threats as we associate with elemental phenomena like lightning, darkness, floods, cold, holocausts, drought, earthquakes and storms, gravitation, space, noise, and silence; then one must be alive to an interior world of biochemical processes whose delicate balance—absolutely essential as it is to man’s sanity and well-being—can be easily upset not only by hunger, thirst, and suffocation but also by the very sustenance we take in (beer and wine included). One must also be alive to all the threats imaginable from one’s fellow creatures— beasts as well as men, but particularly men with their ill-will and hatred, their envy and “evil eye.” Last, but certainly not least, one must never forget those threats posed by forces that lie deep within our own souls (as some would put it), forces like pride and anger, greed and lust, jealousy and fear . . . It was the awareness of these many threats that led “primitive” man to those rituals of apprehension, propitiation, purification, and exorcism of which impersonation

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was often such a cardinal feature. It was this same awareness that animated the drama in such widely different cultures as those of fifth-century Greece (b.c.) and mediaeval Europe. Indeed it is impossible to read accounts of the origins and development of ancient Greek drama and theatre, or of mediaeval European drama, without being deeply impressed by this fact.5 But even more impressive is the evidence yielded by the extant plays from these cultures, where pride, intemperance, homicide, wrong-doing, or simply “sin” and their consequences (as people believed) in famine, pestilence, misery, madness, divine displeasure, and damnation constitute an ever-recurring theme.6 In this respect one sees even the comedies of Aristophanes as, essentially, a humorist’s attempt to focus attention on evil in its less startling aspects as social folly, venality, chicanery, and downright political corruption, thereby calling on all sensitive men to help in exorcising it through derisive laughter so that society may attain to health and sanity.7 In these twentieth-century days of scientific omniscience, it is easy to discount many of the threats that drove men of former times to rituals of propitiation; even those of us in Africa who live, most of us, on the remote fringes of Western scientific civilization are beginning to think that these threats have no power over man and his imagination. But that is where, I think, we make the greatest mistake about ourselves as human beings, as peoples in the highly industrialized countries of the Western world—including the U.S.S.R.—have suddenly begun to realize, after several centuries of steady brainwashing under the mechanistic, materialistic philosophies of their thinkers and scientists.8 For at heart, even the most “civilized” modern man is still quite “primitive.” He may be able to explain that lightning is something quite other than the bolts of Shango or Zeus, that men get reeling mad on wine because of the effect of the alcohol in it on the nervous system and not because they are possessed by the god Dionysus, that recurrent premature deaths in a family may be due to some hereditary blood-cell disorder transmitted through the genes and not the result of a curse on some wrong-doing ancestor, or that epidemics are caused by viruses and not by gods; nevertheless he is dominated by passions and dogged by fears. Everywhere around us is evidence of modern man’s domination by acquisitive passions and by terror—of mental derangement, of the machines he has himself invented, of premature death whether by epidemic or violent revolution, and of the unknown forces that lurk in the secret, uncharted regions of his neighbor’s political intentions. One of the saddest facts of twentieth-century Western civilization is its unwillingness, or inability, to accept the basic truth that man is still at heart quite “primitive” and to come to terms with it adequately with the aid of almost the only weapon that man has discovered for combating insanity and fear successfully at the deepest levels of consciousness. I mean those ritual acts that enable man to empathize physically, emotionally, and intellectually with the forces that threaten his very existence. Here, then, is the motive power behind the perennial search that drama really is —a reaching out by the whole man toward sanity through vicarious experience, whether as an impersonator who himself assumes the identity of the inimical forces or their more powerful opposites, or as a celebrant who seeks identification with an

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impersonator acting as mediator between him and the forces concerned. In either case the call is on our powers of empathy, those powers through which human beings are able to enter into the experience of people and objects and so reach an understanding of, or come to terms with, life and the world around them. The decision to enter into an act of impersonation is always a conscious one, more or less, requiring some kind of physical and psychological preparation. But the form of the impersonation, in terms of what the impersonator does and how he does it, is sometimes not possible consciously to determine. Such is the case, it would seem, in magical dramas of the type described by Seabrook; such also would seem to be the case in some ritual masquerades among the Kalabari people of southern Nigeria,9 and in some ritual dance dramas observable among Asiatic peoples: e.g, the Sanghyang or trance dances of Bali,10 the devil dances of Sri Lanka (Ceylon),11 and the Nat Pwe or spirit dances of Burma.12 Here, having been helped to a state of readiness with drugs, rhythmic music, incantation, spells, and passes (aids to concentration and selfhypnosis, as the modern psychiatrist will most probably call them), the subject slips unconsciously into the act of impersonation. What he does in this trance state, and how he does it, is beyond his control. He is possessed, as we say, by a spirit or daemon; and in this state he works out his own salvation, as it were, while the audience of initiates is drawn through empathy with him into communion with the daemon, till they ultimately reach that state of ecstatic release which constitutes the objective of the ritual.13 When, on the other hand, the form of the act of impersonation is determined by a conscious selection and shaping of creative elements, then drama begins to take on the lineaments of consciously ordered art; then we are set on the long road toward secular drama and theatre of pure entertainment. Thus, if we accept impersonation as the central fact of live drama, and magical drama as the deepest of the roots of dramatic art, then it would seem that what distinguishes magical drama from all the other forms of drama that derive from it is the element of possession in magical drama, the trance state for which the impersonator in all the derivative forms of drama substitutes conscious intellectual and emotional control during the act of impersonation. So it is that the actor who understands his art knows that he must try to strike a fine balance between his awareness of the fictional world of the character impersonated and his awareness of the work-a-day world of his audience and his artistic self; he knows that no matter how deeply he immerses himself in the role of the fictional character there is always a psychological point of safety beyond which he dare not go, lest he be swept out of his depth and get carried away on the uncertain currents of hysteria and ecstasy. In simple theatrical terms this means that the actor loses control of himself and, with that loss of control, his grip on the role and on his audience, if it is an artistically sensitive audience. It also means that acting is at its most electrifying when it dares to go as close as possible to the psychological safety point, the farthest limit within control—the brink of possession! The evolution of conventions and styles of acting is, essentially, the story of how the actor-impersonator, supported by the other artists of the theatre with their conven-

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tions and styles of stage presentation, strives toward this most difficult of achievements within the ever-changing cultural milieu of his community. The aim is to arrive at a mode of communication which, because it is understood and shared in all its nuances by both actor and audience, enables them to reach the fullest rapport in the shortest possible time and to maintain it for as long as they confront each other. I think that this is the quality which Stanislavski strove for during his whole life in the theatre as an actor-director, through his “method.” The language he used to describe it was that of the theatre artist committed to naturalistic realism in a society that was basically rationalistic and materialistic in its outlook; nevertheless he seems to me to point in the same direction: Our art seeks to achieve this very result and requires that an actor experience the agony of his role, and weep his heart out at home or in rehearsals, that he then calm himself, get rid of every sentiment alien or obstructive to his part. He then comes out on the stage to convey to the audience in clear, pregnant, deeply felt, intelligible and eloquent terms what he has been through. At this point the spectators will be more affected than the actor, and he will conserve all his forces in order to direct them where he needs them most of all: in reproducing the inner life of the character he is portraying. . . . Among the finest qualities of artists in the theatre who have achieved supreme rank are their restraint and finish. As you follow the way they unfold a role before your eyes and watch it grow, you have a sense of being present at some miraculous act of bringing to life a great piece of art.14

Even though the distinction attempted here between magical drama and dramatic art is important and always worth bearing in mind when discussing the origins and development of theatre, in practice it is not always easy to establish. Between the kind of magical drama described in Seabrook’s account of the substitution sacrifice and the drama of the modern commercial theatre of pure entertainment there lies a vast region where the interested student may encounter many dramatic possibilities. It is to the early twilight zone of this middle region that many forms of ritual drama observable in many African traditional societies seem to me to belong—ritual dramas through which the participants seek such desired effects as social solidarity, or through which they attempt to reaffirm, keep alive, or commemorate such facts, beliefs, relationships, and attitudes as the community considers vital to its sanity and continued healthy existence. The Egungun and Gelede masquerade dramas of the Yoruba come to mind here. According to Ulli Beier, the Egungun cult deals with “the worship and appeasement of the dead. The great masks are impersonations of the ancestors, and to touch them could mean death.”15 This would be the cult at its most religious level of expression. In Ibo society, the parallel cult, the Egwugwu, had other functions, one of which was to settle disputes within the community, thereby ensuring harmony and reinforcing the community’s sense of solidarity. Chinua Achebe describes the egwugwu performing this function in one of his novels;16 and although his account has all the interest of fiction, nevertheless in its essentials it seems to be closely based on observed fact:

24 j. c. de graft . . . And then the egwugwu appeared. The women and children sent up a great shout and took to their heels. It was instinctive. A woman fled as soon as an egwugwu came in sight. And when, as on that day, nine of the great masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle. . . . Each of the nine egwugwu represented a village of the clan. Their leader was called Evil Forest. Smoke poured out of his head. . . . Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. He looked terrible with the smoked raffia body, a huge wooden face painted white except for the round hollow eyes and the charred teeth that were as big as a man’s fingers. On his head were two powerful horns . . .

A close reading of the full account from which this extract is taken reveals three things. First, the impersonation was here achieved primarily with the aid of costume disguise, through which it was in fact possible to identify the impersonators. Second, the impersonators were not in a trance; rather, they were fully conscious of the role they were playing. Third, in spite of the fact that the village audience recognized some of the impersonators through their disguise, it was prepared, nonetheless, to accept them in their new identity, to enter into the mood of make-believe, sometimes with awe and sometimes with laughter. We are here quite close to the art of drama and the spirit of the secular theatre. This impression is confirmed by Ulli Beier in his article on Yoruba drama already referred to: . . . the Egungun dancer does not merely display the mask; he acts the part. The mask he uses is usually a face mask and it is supported by the appropriate costume. . . . In each case the masquerader has learned the appropriate dance and style of singing. In some groups little stories are enacted. The Sango worshipper begins his display, is interrupted by policemen and finally bribes his way out of trouble. The harlot often does a kind of strip-tease act—displaying long cloth breasts and embroidered pubic hair—and she may frequently do a mock copulation with the policeman or some other character.

Again according to Ulli Beier, the prime function of the Gelede cult is “the placation of witches.” This leaves little doubt about the strong element of magic and ritual in the performances. The ritual dance always takes place at night. It is preceded by sacrifice and accompanied by praise songs and prayer. It culminates in the appearance of Efe—a powerful mask— preceded by a young girl who carries a witch in the form of a bird in a calabash.

Ulli Beier explains, however, that the Gelede performances may also have a certain element of entertainment: . . . But from the theatrical point of view, the dance that usually follows the next afternoon is more interesting. For the avowed purpose of this dance is to provide entertainment to

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the witches and keep them in good temper and—of course—at the same time entertain the townspeople at large who had been excluded from the night ceremony.

Once again we are quite close to the concept of secular theatre. In terms of dramatic evolution, the step from the original religious function of the Egungun and Gelede masquerader to that of entertainer (still held in awe, nevertheless) seems fairly straightforward, although historically it may have been difficult and taken a long time to achieve. Ola Rotimi gives a brief but perceptive analysis of the process of popularization of once closely guarded secret ritual dramas in southern Nigeria, in his article entitled “Traditional Nigerian Drama.”17 But from all accounts a similar process must have taken place in ancient India and the cultures of the Far East, in sixth-century ancient Greece and in mediaeval Europe. With the involvement of a spectator-audience of the uninitiated in what had formerly been secret rituals built round cults with a strong element of impersonation, the movement towards secularization and dramatic art may be said to have begun and led naturally to the theatre of entertainment. Ulli Beier’s reference to the little stories sometimes enacted by the Egungun masqueraders is important as indicating a very significant trend in the direction of fullyfledged dramatic art. For, just as the urge to impersonate is intrinsic to human nature, affording man his surest and shortest psychological escape route to sanity and a sense of security, so is the urge to recount experience, which is the basis of story-telling and all narrative art. I must explain immediately that I conceive of story-telling and narrative art as going beyond linguistic expression to include such other modes of expression as mime, dance, and even music. Like role-playing, recounting our experience somehow reinforces our confidence by enabling us to re-live our successes more gloriously (whether in our own or in others’ esteem) and even to accept our defeats more readily—on our own terms, as it were, by proxy. Already we can see here the importance of the elements of communication and audience. The real point to note, however, is that out of the marrying of impersonation and narrative art there always seems to be born an embryonic form of dramatic art which shares of the characteristics and effects of both. Such is the mimetic dance of the masquerader; such also is the art of mimetic story-telling as seen in the best examples of Anansesem—stories about Ananse the Spider—among the Akans of Ghana. Here the story-teller’s occasional need to impersonate the main characters and to fit into the time and place setting of the story becomes the starting point of a long chain of dramatic possibilities which include an elementary form of character development through language differentiation, mime, movement, and the interaction of the story-teller (now become an impersonator) with the audience, some of whom also assume the identity of various characters in the story and challenge the story-teller’s veracity. The techniques of these Akan story-telling groups vary, but the more promising groups show a remarkable sense of dramatic creativity, making quite impressive use of improvised dialogue, props, costume, and disguise make-up. At their best, therefore, Anansesem performances constitute sheer theatre, where the element of exagger-

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ation and caricature and such additional aids as singing and hand-clapping, drumming and dancing all combine to produce a lively sense of shared pleasure, of solidarity between the performers in the center of the circle and the surrounding audience of active participants and interested onlookers. I have called the kind of drama represented by Anansesem and the Yoruba Egungun and Gelede secularized masquerades embryonic simply because I think they are still capable of development in terms of thought content, plot complexity, and their handling of dramatic contrast and conflict, without necessarily changing their essential character. Their greatest appeal lies in their lively spontaneity and the performers’ unquestioned familiarity with the traditional elements of their art. Among the Mande-speaking peoples of the savanna regions of western Africa is to be found a tradition of comic plays which seem to have all the dramatic qualities lacking in the three examples of embryonic drama mentioned above. According to Ruth Finnegan, They have clear plot and linguistic content, as well as music, dancing, costume, definite audience, and the interaction of several human actors appearing at once in the village square that acts as a stage. . . . One group of these plays—those of the Mandingo—were [sic] described in some detail by Labouret and Travele in 1928. They are all comic, intended for entertainment and the realistic portrayal of the characters and faults of everyday life. As implied by the Mandingo term kote koma nyaga, the plays treat especially of married life, but also involve satirical comment on many other aspects of life. The authors are also actors.18

The ritual function and links of the Egungun and Gelede masquerade dramas have been explained. Anansesem also had a partly didactic and a partly religious function, since it was clearly intended partly to instruct the younger generation in moral behavior and social norms, and partly also to explain phenomena that were otherwise inexplicable, thereby reducing their aura of mystery and combating the threat of the unknown which they might have carried. However, there is a basic difference in the development of the masquerade dramas on the one hand, and Anansesem on the other. For whereas the former clearly started from disguise and mimetic dance, Anansesem seems to have started from a linguistic base, moving slowly toward drama with the incorporation of verbal mimicry, mime and gesture, costume, and disguise make-up where the artists were talented enough to see the creative possibilities of these other modes of expression. But even though we do not have very strong evidence of Anansesem’s links with such rituals of worship or religious apprehension as the masquerades are known to have emerged from, I think that Anansesem must have had a basically ritual function originally, as may still be glimpsed from the formulae of recurrent “pep” songs (mboguo) and verbal exchanges which the story-teller assiduously keeps up with his listeners, and from the large number of stories in which Ananse the bad one, the greedy one, the shrewd yet foolish one, is ultimately discomfited and ends up among the sooty rafters, an outcast from human society. The question is: was Anansesem originally part of a ritual of exorcism and social purga-

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tion? I do believe so, and this would be my answer to Rattray, who stops short of this ritual explanation even though he comes quite close to it when he adduces “the theory of repressions” in trying to explain the element of “apparent coarseness in so many Akan Folk tales.”19 Perhaps the same ritual origin and function could be ascribed to the Mandingo comic plays already mentioned. Since dramatic art in any developed form is essentially a communal activity requiring not only the role-player but also a supporting audience of sympathizers, the conditions that make for dramatic development tend to be community-centered. More specifically, however, it seems to me that dramatic art develops and flowers best in those communities where the following conditions prevail to a high degree: 1. A world view which predisposes the people to ritual practices requiring a strong element of role-playing; 2. An inclination to narrative expression, based on that community’s own history and legends, myths and folklore; 3. A strong feeling for social solidarity which, with the emergence of an embryonic form of drama from the interaction of conditions 1 and 2 above, fosters the resultant art form not only as an expression of the community’s ethos but, perhaps more important, as a means of further strengthening its sense of cohesion and identity; 4. A system of “notation” through which the most successful dramatic creations are communicated to wider audiences and, what is more, conserved and kept in sure memory for future generations; and last but not least, 5. Freedom or protection from such traumatic historical experiences as ruthless religious, political, and economic domination by aliens In most African communities, as in many others around the world, the first three conditions have prevailed naturally at some time, in varying degrees of vitality, consequently giving rise to some form of embryonic dramatic art. I suggest that if we had all the evidence at our disposal we might find that most, if not all, of such examples of embryonic drama had close links with the community’s religion—the body of beliefs and ritual practices which, in the view of the members of the community, ensured their moral sanity and communal survival. Again, if we had more evidence we might find that in most instances the mode of narrative expression employed in the enactment of these dramas was more mimetic than linguistic, the resultant forms being more closely bound to dance movement and music than to everyday speech and dialogue. Hence the mimetic hunters’ dances of the Khomani Bushmen20 and numerous other African tribes; the mimetic invocation dances of priestly cults; the simple mimetic re-enactments of snatches of legends during harvest ceremonies, festivals and funeral celebrations; and the mimetic provocation and victory dances of warriors. Unfortunately, however, in Africa the process of dramatic development and flowering was arrested by the absence of the last two conditions suggested above. Regarding the absence of adequate systems of “notation” and methods of conservation, it may be urged that African communities did rely on oral tradition. This is true; but

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it is also true that even the most closely guarded and meticulously kept oral records became less and less reliable with the passage of time in the simple process of handing down from generation to generation; if it were not so, African history would be much easier to reconstruct now from oral traditions! For the performing arts the significance of this fact would be that the kind of concentrated creative energy whose continued flow within the community is ensured over long periods of time by fairly permanent examples or records of artistic achievement could become woefully weakened, not only through the natural process of oblivion, but also through the subjection of all originally successful artistic productions to adulteration and indiscriminate modification by generations of untalented, uninspired performers. One has only to observe a group of “modern” young Africans performing some supposedly “traditional” African dance, without tuition from master traditional dancers and drummers, in order to appreciate the point being made here. This, I contend, is what in fact happened in Africa, by and large, resulting in a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of dramatic forms and impressions, often, admittedly, interesting and exciting on account of their immediate improvisatory appeal and freshness, but contributing little to artistic development in terms of the kinds of new goals which established works of great art tend to inspire successive generations of artists to set themselves, or in terms of the tough challenges which a sure knowledge of past achievement induces artists to accept. This is the predicament of folk art, inescapable and, perhaps, nothing to regret within the context of folk culture. But what it implies is that the best examples of folk dramatic art, the most successful results of experiments in the performing arts within folk cultures, are comparatively short-lived: they fade out of memory, sometimes almost as fast as the least successful, together with the techniques that made them possible. This high percentage of loss may not really matter in a milieu where the folk will is supreme, where the survival of the folk and its ways is often the raison d’être of artistic expression, and where the significance of such expression lies not in itself per se but in those beliefs and needs that inspire it, those vital forces that sustain and unify the various aspects of the culture. In such a milieu each artistic creation contributes, as it bodies forth, immediately and directly to the rituals that ensure the survival, sanity or well-being of the folk, and may very well be discarded deliberately— even though it is still fresh—unless it has a continuing significance as part of the rituals. In such a milieu any developments in technique and form that accrue from artistic productions tend to manifest themselves rather slowly. Organic development does occur, nevertheless, as shown by the history of the performing arts in various communities and cultures; and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we may presume that organic development there would have continued to be in African dramatic art if it had been allowed to follow the direction of its own momentum. This was not to be, however, because of the intervention of powerful disruptive forces from outside the continent. Now, what were the vital forces that sustained and unified the various aspects of African culture? What were the beliefs and needs that inspired the ritualistic and em-

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bryonic dramas in African societies? We have already indicated some of them; but the most important were the systems of belief which, until very recently, bound together humanity—those gone before, those here now and those to come—with the animate world of rock, fire, wind, water, plant, animal, daemon, and God! These, above all, were the systems which the invading forces of alien domination did their utmost to destroy. When we say that until very recently African life was strongly conditioned by certain systems of religious belief, we do not necessarily mean that the rapid process of change now visible everywhere in Africa is of recent origin. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is not merely a change but a collapse, the cumulative result of over five hundred years (in some places) of the subjection of African cultural systems to the most ruthless forms of domination and exploitation. And it is a collapse not only of systems of belief and worship, but also of systems of political, social, and economic organization and practice, systems of technology (no matter how elementary), and systems of linguistic and non-linguistic communication. In terms of the hypothesis advanced to explain the dynamics of dramatic development, we may say that with the favorable effects of the first three conditions necessary for the growth of vigorous indigenous forms of dramatic art already slowed down by the absence of the fourth condition, the whole process of growth was then brought to a standstill in some places, and in others practically negated, by the coming into play of forces the direct opposite—in their combined effect—of the fifth condition. These forces were narrowminded Christian proselytism, soul-destroying economic exploitation, ruthless political suppression and the insidious cultural concomitants of all these, the most important being the new educational structures imported from Europe; and the condition which they fostered was a kind of colonialism so stultifying in some parts of Africa as to be no better than physical and mental slavery. The story of the trauma is well known, therefore the details need not be spelled out here. But the cultural admixture that has resulted, where one can see any admixture rather than confusion, has not always been without some saving graces, though the total situation is yet rather difficult to assess. As far as the growth of dramatic art is concerned, however, we may say that the effect of the last few centuries of Europe’s impact on African expression has been largely disruptive. Two dramatic forms may be mentioned at this stage, nevertheless, the result of the admixture of European and African elements. These are the Ghanaian Concert Party and the Nigerian Folk Opera. Concert Party made its first appearance in Secondi during the mid-twenties, as a vaudeville-cum-burlesque kind of entertainment. Ishmael (Bob) Johnson, who created the form in the course of school concerts while still a schoolboy, decided to stay with it after his schooldays, and soon won great popularity for himself and his Versatile Eight touring the towns of western Ghana. From its early days the form bore the unmistakable marks of American influence by way of jazz and elements of costume and make-up drawn undoubtedly from the Negro minstrel shows of the time. By 1930 the troupe had dwindled to three, but Two Bobs—as the form came to be

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known from the stage names of its two male protagonists, Bob Johnson and Bob Ansah—continued to flourish. In 1937, after his two colleagues had pulled out of the troupe, Bob Johnson took on Dick Turpin and E. K. Dadson, and the new troupe, now calling itself the Axim Trio, strengthened its links with Ghanaian popular high-life by touring Nigeria with the Cape Coast Sugar Babies Light Orchestra, then the bestknown dance band in Ghana. It was as Axim Trio, therefore, that the form came to be known from the late thirties on through the forties.21 This period was the heyday of the three comedians of the troupe: Bob Johnson as the clown, but sometimes playing the role of the coarse fishmonger or market woman of advanced years; Dick Turpin as the smart Alec; and E. K. Dadson as the Carolina Girl. The evolution of this last character is interesting. From the beginning the form had made use of male impersonators for female roles, and the Carolina Girl, originally created by Hutton (the third member of the Two Bobs days), developed into the almost flawless role of a highly sophisticated, scintillating, modern Ghanaian woman as played by Dadson during the Axim Trio days. Now the role has taken on the more down-to-earth qualities of the half-literate, modern Ghanaian town girl; but it still retains its hold on audiences. With the years, however, and the infusion of new blood into the form with the creation of other and larger troupes manned by young artists from the thriving towns of the cocoa-growing areas of Ghana, Concert Party (the newest name of the form) has acquired a peculiarly Ghanaian character. This means that although the basic language is Akan, on account of the predominantly Akan membership of the troupes, snatches of any of the other languages used in Ghana may feature in the dialogue and songs as the need dictates; the costume is realistic and contemporary Ghanaian; the themes and situations explored are topical and Ghanaian in interest: e.g., the elderly cocoa farmer who marries a young girl from town and gets taken for a ride for his money; the chief and his elders who are duped by the corrupt politician with promises of development schemes in their district; the young girl who marries a smart man from the town against the parents’ will only to discover later that she has married a jobless ne’er-do-well. The action is supported with singing and dancing, accompanied with band music in the high-life tradition, although whatever goes for popular music in Ghana is grist to the performers’ mill; and as may be expected, the female roles are played in a kind of sustained falsetto. In spite of their comic appeal, the intention which informs most of the plays is decidedly didactic, with a leaning toward satire; and even though the plays tend to drag on for hours, Concert Party constitutes perhaps the most popular and dynamic form of contemporary theatre in Ghana today. The most recent turn taken by Concert Party is in the direction of TV drama, where it has begun to engage the interest of the Ghanaian public in a serious way, through the serialized program of satirical comedy entitled Osofo Dadzie. Exorcism of social folly through derisive laughter? And does this indicate the dawn of a new day of sanity in Ghana? Nigerian Folk Opera, which is associated with names like Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, Obotunde Ijimere, and Duro Ladipo, is a more secular form of drama

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than the masquerades, in the sense that even though the themes are often drawn from mythology and carry a good infusion of religious sentiment, their purpose is mainly to entertain. I consider them more developed, however; for not only do they combine a wider range of elements, but also they display a firmer narrative structure or plot, subtler characterization made more interesting by the demands of the more complex themes, greater dramatic contrast and conflict achieved through dialogue as well as dance and, growing out of all these, opportunities for more effective mimetic action and impersonation. The costume, as in Ogunmola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard,22 and Ladipo’s Oba Koso,23 is often elaborate and impressive. The little improvised stages on which they are often performed are used to great advantage, so that even from a distance, the attention of the audience is kept forever focused on the swirling action which is developed through lively dialogue in Yoruba—sometimes spoken and at other times chanted. And the never-flagging theatrical style of acting is supported with vivacious drumming, choral singing, and very well coordinated dancing. Even though the troupes are itinerant, they manage to carry a fair range of lighting equipment which enables them to perform in the evenings; they also carry props and standard stage scenic units, which they put to effective use. But as I see it, the heart of these operas lies in the human action, which keeps audiences fully involved. For what it is worth, we may take note of the interesting fact that Concert Party and Folk Opera have developed in two areas of Africa where, despite the ravages of the slave trade, the life and indigenous institutions of the people remained reasonably intact under European domination. Beyond this general observation, one may also note how the two forms seem to reflect the character of their respective societies in terms of the degree of Western influence on each society’s indigenous forms of expression. Whereas the Ghanaian Concert Party tended to lean heavily towards superficial comedy until recently, and had taken well over thirty years to evolve a truly Ghanaian character, the younger and more creatively virile Nigerian Folk Opera was, from the start, quite solidly based in Nigerian (Yoruba) folk life, mythology, legend, music, dance, and poetry—as may be seen even in the English translations/adaptations that have come out in published form.24 And we know that Nigerian life and religious institutions tended to be more resistant to Western influence! Ironically, however, it seems that events are already beginning to overtake Folk Opera, and perhaps the old myths and legends are not enough now; perhaps Folk Opera will need to address itself more and more to the totality of the present-day Nigerian situation; and we are yet to see how this abundantly rich and popular form will respond to the challenges posed by the rabid materialism that seems to have taken a decisive grip on the vitals of Nigerian society in recent years. Concert Party and Folk Opera may be said, however, to lie outside the mainstream of African drama associated with names like Sarif Easmon of Sierra Leone, Ama Ata Aidoo and Efua Sutherland of Ghana, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, James Henshaw, and Ola Rotimi of Nigeria, Robert Serumaga and John Ruganda of Uganda, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Kenneth Watene of Kenya, and Lewis Nkosi of South Africa. Some of these dramatists, notably Efua Sutherland and Wole Soyinka, have tried to

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maintain a kind of working relationship with the more traditional troupes in their countries, and have also used presentation techniques more readily associated with these troupes. As dramatists, however, they represent the new vintage of African drama that addresses its audience in English and is imbued with the spirit of internationalism. But even more important, these dramatists are a very different breed from the traditional artist whose orientation was, as we have tried to show, essentially towards the folk. No matter how talented he might have been, the traditional artist tended to see himself as an instrument of the folk will, a vehicle of folk expression, with no greater claim to authorship than the folk he served. Even when he was known to be the creator of a work—be it a song or a dance or a story—he seemed to naturally respect the right of the folk to contribute to its authorship by modifying it in performance. But the “modern” African dramatists mentioned here, and others that may come to mind, are fundamentally individualists with a fierce pride in their individual effort, their unique ideas, their artistic integrity, and their achievement. This individualism is not always a matter of deliberate personal choice, necessarily: if anything, it is forced upon them by the very milieu in which they now have to operate. The recognition of this fact brings us face to face with one of the most interesting aspects of the creative writing scene in Africa now, that is the dilemma of the individualist artist with a consuming drive to uniqueness of thought and expression who, nevertheless, has to try and respond affirmatively to the general call to “return to his African roots.” This call is naturally made in the best interests of African art, but it seems to require that we lose sight of the milieu of the present-day African artist. For the creative writer and dramatist, one of the implications of this call is that he accept a return to attitudes and modes of creative thinking more in consonance with a folkist milieu that is probably fast ceasing to exist for him, whether he likes it or not, and his immediate target of readers and auditors. No doubt some dramatists and artists would be temperamentally capable of responding affirmatively to the call, but it should not be expected that all of them would; because as a general call it does not seem to be based on enough insight into the vast complexity of the new forces that are beginning to undermine artistic creativity in Africa now. These forces include disbelief in magic and religious ritual; active rejection of the claims of clan and folk wisdom; a new psychology fostered by the competitiveness attendant on urbanization, industrialization, and a ruthless cash economy; and, last but not least, a growing belief in the almost limitless possibilities of technology. It seems to me that we cannot eat our kenkey and have it; and if our African societies insist on going the way Western society has, then this driving individualism will increase, leading to the kind of fragmented sensibility now observable in Western society, with its concomitant in the kind of drama that Lewis Nkosi condemns and ascribes simply to the failure of the dramatists of the Western theatre.25 And in any case we must ask ourselves seriously if the dramatists Nkosi condemns are as irrelevant as he says. Himself a dramatist and the author of a play remarkable for its broad-minded handling of the conflicts and dichotomies inherent in South African racism26—a theme that might have lent itself to the most bigoted and chauvinistic treatment in less able

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hands—Lewis Nkosi has some interesting things to say about trends in African theatre today, in the article referred to. Whereas one is in general agreement with most of the things he says, and in spite of his genuine enthusiasm for the arena kind of presentation and all the good things that spontaneous African drama can offer, it seems to me that Nkosi’s concern is directed more toward the exciting (and unexciting) externals rather than the spirit of drama, the nature of the experience that theatre should help us to achieve. I think that the first point to grasp is that if drama is at heart a goddess, she manifests herself in many ways, many shapes, many voices. The second is that, given the infinite variety of preoccupations which men bring to her shrine, that manifestation which may constitute nothing but sheer boredom for one pilgrim may be the essence of revelation for another, touching off whatever it is in him that enables him to achieve communion with the goddess of the shrine. It seems to me, therefore, that ultimately what matters is not how the goddess manifests herself, but what degree of readiness to self-surrender each pilgrim to the shrine brings with him and how much spiritual power the priests of the shrine bring to bear on the rituals of the goddess. This explains, in large measure, why many mature adults derive so much joy and pleasure from what some other mature persons dismiss as the silliest of pantomimes, or why Concert Party has so much appeal for some “well educated and sophisticated” people who are left utterly cold by Shakespeare! The ritual and embryonic dramas of traditional Africa could work for people because they brought to these dramas a mind prepared to believe in their efficacy. On account of the homogeneous character of traditional African communities, and also because of the essentially common body of superstitions, attitudes, and expectations which the members of these communities shared in their daily life, most of the people in each community could derive well-being from the same kind of dramatic fare—a fact further reinforced by the direct relationship between the dramas and the community’s fears, hopes, and beliefs, the very fabric of its life. We must not forget, however, that the violent dislocations and cleavages in outlook that characterize contemporary life, with its ever-increasing ideological, economic, and technological pressures, are as much a part of African life today as reverence for old age and the ancestral spirits was, as a matter of course, in the past; and they cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the theatre. If the pressures and alienations of contemporary life seem to make it difficult for people to approach the goddess of the drama with the same kind of willingness to surrender that they were capable of in traditional times, the remedy is to be found, I think, in a number of things that only the priests of the shrine can provide—apart from what I may describe as the compelling relevance of the themes of our new dramas: the priests of the shrine must bring to the worship of the goddess singleness of purpose, firmness of conviction, purity of intention, and an undoubted understanding of the rituals. Armed with these qualities they can turn almost any drama into a magical experience! And in the modern theatre, who are the priests? Not the directors, nor the stagemanagers with their various crews, nor even the dramatists with their “scripts,” but

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the impersonators—the actors in whose power it principally lies to communicate the will, the potency of the goddess to her worshippers, thereby inducing in them that state of deep emotional and intellectual involvement through which alone the theatre can assist the willing spirits that come to it to achieve new strength, calm, and sanity. To me there are three destructive enemies of the theatre. The first is excessive rationalism, which is not the same as even excessive intellectualism. Rationalism here implies all the parrying we resort to in order to evade the main issue, to avoid the startling truth.27 It is nourished on dread—the dread of involvement, whether intellectual, physical, or emotional; and in the theatre it reveals itself by the lack of the will to surrender the whole of the human self to the magic of the drama, a surrender which implies a complete or near-complete identification of the subject—whether in the role of the actor or as a member of the audience—with the pulse, the rhythm, the ritual purpose of the drama. Such complete identification is possible only for people who believe in the curative power of magic, perhaps. But drama and the theatre cannot begin to make any impact, cannot survive, without it. And the lack of it is not always necessarily due to a deliberate effort to be “rational”; far from it. Often it is the result of complacency on the part of both the actor and the audience; more often it stems from sheer ignorance of the potentialities of drama and the theatre, an ignorance partly the surprising result of “good education” which equates theatre to simply another enterprise in social propriety, with all the surface glitter which characterizes the vacuity we like to describe as modern sophistication and civilized detachment. Wherever in the African theatre this tendency to excessive rationalism shows itself, one may be sure it is a legacy from Europe. My second enemy of the theatre is the tendency to reduce all drama to the level of mere entertainment, sometimes no more than a kind of excuse for repartee, which Nkosi seems to think the essence of traditional African drama.28 Thus conceived, drama soon degenerates into something that others provide for us, preferably for a fee, instead of being something that we help to create for ourselves through affirmative participation, just as believers participate in worship and thereby achieve strengthening. So our audiences take their comfortable seats in the theatre after a good dinner out, or for want of anything else to “entertain” them, and wait for the actors to give them their money’s worth of complacent, self-conscious laughter! And entertainment for them means anything that tickles their fancy, anything that titivates their vanity or helps them to shut off their minds from the unpleasant realities of the human condition. So one director of no less a play than Shakespeare’s Othello did actually reply, when asked—in one of the capitals of Africa that shall remain nameless—why, of all the plays possible, he chose to produce this particular one: “Oh, simply to entertain our city audiences!” Now one may ask to know what interpretation the actors in such a production of Othello would be expected to aim for; or perhaps that question is not worth asking in Africa? At its worst the tendency just described can grow into an obsession with the material form of things in the theatre, making actors and directors and dramatists come to attach undue importance to the superficial aspects of drama and theatre: spectacular

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stage sets, glittering costume, over-indulgent lighting, and sound effects that merely distract attention from the action of the drama as communicated through the many facets of characterization, which is the heart of drama. Drama then becomes a show, a mere spectacle, and loses much of its power to help more and more people to discover in it a means of communicating with the forces that seem to dominate them, whether these forces be human, animal, mechanical, psychological, or supernatural. The act of communication consists again in self-surrender, in empathizing with these forces and, thereby, mastering them, appeasing them, coming to terms with them or exorcizing them. My last enemy of the theatre, closely related to the other two, is the tendency towards commercialism. Hence the view that drama and theatre should be marketable acquires greater currency; and competitive advertising and sales promotion force up costs, which are ultimately passed on to the audience, with the result that in more and more communities around the world only persons with fairly high incomes can afford a real live theatre experience. Meantime in Africa, in spite of all the loud noise by governments about the need to develop the arts and “culture,” the argument gains root that money cannot be spared from the national exchequer for the theatre because it is not productive! The theatre artist falls victim, in these circumstances, to the profit-hungry impresario, who proceeds to promote for the tourist market useless, bastardized travesties of African drama and dance—products of his businessatrophied imagination—all in the earnest belief that this way lies the salvation of the African theatre! The temptation to hold up one’s own preference in theatre as the most desirable is difficult to avoid; yet it would be ludicrous for anybody to advocate that any one form of theatre is the most desirable for any contemporary African community, a view that one sometimes hears expressed by some enthusiasts of African drama. As already pointed out, theatre manifests itself in many forms, and lovers of theatre bring to it a wide range of preoccupations. Let there then be as great a variety as possible of theatrical fare, and let each man relate to what most draws him, so long as the relating is deep and meaningful and so long as people of the theatre strive continually to create and foster those conditions that make such relating possible for everincreasing numbers within the community. Thus it matters little whether comedy or tragedy or absurdity—these are merely different forms determined by the nature of the dramatic theme and awareness to be communicated; whether expressionism or naturalism or symbolism—these are merely stylistic modes employed to give greater impact to the impersonator’s “message” and aid our surrender to the dramatic ritual; and whether prescenium or arena stage, candlelight or daylight—these are no more than convenient devices that the theatre artist resorts to in order to give a certain definition to the dramatic presentation and thereby enhance, hopefully, the intensity of the theatrical experience. Admittedly, all these bear close links with the substance, but they are not the substance, of theatre. The substance is the terror we seek to master, the inimical forces we seek to propitiate, the spiritual barrenness we seek to turn into fertility, the mind’s

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wounds we seek to heal, the cosmic joy we seek to share in, the empathy we seek to establish with the world of animate and inanimate things around us: this is what people who are devoted to drama go to the theatre to experience. The seeking is akin to an act of worship, and for an act of worship to have any efficacy the worshipper must also bring to it belief in the goddess of the shrine, understanding and sympathy for the rituals, and a readiness to surrender himself wholly to the rhythm of the service. Drama demands all these things from those who would truly want to share in it. The greatest weakness of the emerging modern African theatre is, to me, not that it tries to imitate the European theatre—as some would have us believe (although one would be right to question such imitation)—but that it lacks that element which is perhaps most abundant on the European stage: the convinced and convincing actor, the impersonator who comes to his art with singleness of purpose, concentration, and discipline like the Egungun masqueraders and Porro dancers of old. If we wish to quarrel with our modern African theatre, then, let us direct our rage at its sloppy “amateurism,” its lack of discipline and a sense of purpose, its scramble for miserable crumbs of dollars from under the tables of tour operators. Ultimately, however, the question remains to be asked: in what direction is African theatre moving? The strong impact of foreign influences, particularly in the towns, and the rapid rate of change in attitudes to dramatic art, language selection and use, work, leisure, and a host of other things—all this makes it fairly obvious that the movement toward commercialized theatre will continue unless it is deliberately and vigorously arrested. On the other hand, the weakening effects of television and cinema on theatre as a communal experience that owes its greatest strength to the physical confrontation of impersonator and audience (and the immediacy of shared experience thus made possible) may not be so easy to arrest. As people get more inextricably trapped within the vast, impersonal, economic and industrial structures which African nations are also madly building up, they may lose their capacity or desire to share their joys and fears through theatre. . . . This is the paradox of our modern situation, that the impersonal systems we set up tend to force us more and more into ourselves, away from the human and spiritual contacts that we do, in fact, need most. I can see only one way out of this frightening situation, and that is if the artists of the new theatre can evolve a philosophy of existence sustained by more humane values, which will replace the destructive materialism of our time and draw people back to theatre as one of the very few activities through which they may share more fully in its life-nourishing rituals, in much the same way as the values that inspired the magical and religious dramas seem to have done, both in traditional Africa and in other cultures that we know of. Paradoxically, to achieve this it will not be enough merely to “return to traditional roots.” We certainly will need to understand the new forces that threaten our societies, the things that hold terror as well as joy for our people; we will have to begin to think in terms of archetypes of human relationship different from the splintered patterns that seem to be emerging; we will need to create new or more compellingly relevant myths; but, perhaps most important of all, we shall need artists who are really committed to the primal concept of theatre modestly explored here.

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As I see it now, at least two consolations remain for the new African theatre. The first is that it can harbor an infinite variety of forms and experiences, so that given committed artists to work at it, it should be able to accommodate the equally infinite variety of expectations beginning to emerge in our African societies. But determining what expectations are morally and aesthetically worth catering for will not be easy, nor will the answer lie with any one person. The second consolation is that if drama is promoted seriously and imaginatively in our schools, colleges, and universities, it can stimulate those awarenesses which the coming generations will need in order to develop a love for theatre and a sympathy for all the good things they can achieve through it, both for themselves and for society in general. It seems to me, therefore, that the most promising field for developing live drama and programs of training, and for inculcating a deep sense of the possibilities of theatre, is in our educational institutions, especially those concerned with teacher education. In a very serious sense our drama teachers and the young people they teach should be our best hope for new and meaningful theatre traditions in Africa.

Notes 1. W. B. Seabrook, The Magic Island (London: Harrap, 1929), 58–72. 2. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (abr. ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1963), ch. 3. 3. Frazer gives numerous instances of this phenomenon in The Golden Bough. 4. J. H. Kwabena Nketia, for example, falls into this trap when writing about “Elements of Traditional Drama in Ghana,” in his Music, Dance and Drama (Inst. of African Studies, Univ. of Ghana, 1965), ch. 4. 5. Some standard works that come to mind are A. W. Pickard-Cambridge’s Dramatic Festivals of Athens (London: O.U.P., 1953), The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (London: O.U.P., 1946), and Dytheramb, Tragedy and Comedy (London: O.U.P., 1927), E. K. Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage (London: O.U.P., 1903), and Carl Young’s The Drama of the Mediaeval Church (London: O.U.P., 1933). 6. See The Oresteian Trilogy of Aeschylus, Oedipus Rex and Antigone of Sophocles, The Bacchoe and Electra of Euripides, Everyman, The Castle of Perseverance, and Mankind. 7. See The Acharnians and The Knights. 8. In a sense the revolt of Western youth, which finds expression in drug addiction, free sex, and such costume cults as one associates with hippies, may be seen as an aspect of the younger generation’s search for identification with primal life forces the direct opposite of the deadening ones unleashed by the materialism of Western industrialized “progress.” It is not surprising that underneath the costume and make-up—grubby clothes, wild hair, and unkempt beards—there often beats a heart that genuinely yearns for such insights as those offered by ancient religions like Zen Buddhism. Concurrently, Western Europe has seen the growth of a new kind of theatre which constitutes, at its best, no less than a reaching out toward the ritual origins of drama. The absurdist theatre, with its strong element of the supernatural and its rejection of rationalism per se, is an uncompromising challenge to Western man to see himself as he has permitted his soul-less civilization to reduce him to, in the hope that the shock of recognition will jolt him back to sanity. I am aware, of course, that the picture presented by the absurdist dramatists in terms of technique and theme—even in a few plays like Beckett’s Waiting for

38 j. c. de graft Godot, Pinter’s The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, Genet’s The Blacks, and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and The Chairs—is far more complex than I have suggested here. But then who can discuss these complexities in a footnote? See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966). 9. Robin Horton, “The Gods as Guests: An Aspect of Kalabari Religious Life,” Nigeria Magazine (1960), ch. 4. 10. Faubion Bowers, The Theatre in the East: A Survey of Asian Dance and Drama (New York: Evergreen Books Ltd., 1960), 233–36. 11. Ibid., 85 ff. 12. Ibid., 120 ff. Also Maung Htin Aung, Burmese Drama (London: O.U.P., 1937), 5 ff. 13. I have observed rituals very like these at shrines in Ghana, principally at Oguaa and the villages around. Aristotle calls this ecstatic release catharsis, and considers it the primary function of tragedy (see The Poetics). But the experience is common to all drama; although depending on the ingredients of the “ritual” and on the temperament of the celebrant, the release may take one of many forms: tears or laughter, vociferous ejaculation or silent paroxysm of emotions; and it may be powerful, or perhaps not so powerful . . . how very like sex! But the plain truth is that in man’s psychological make-up orgasm and catharsis are quite clearly related. 14. Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character (tr. Elizabeth R. Hapgood) (London: Max Reinhardt, 1950), 72 ff. 15. Ulli Beier, “Yoruba Theatre,” in Introduction to African Literature, ed. Ulli Beier (London: Longman, 1967). 16. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), ch. 10. 17. Ola Rotimi, “Traditional Nigerian Drama,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. Bruce King (Univ. of Lagos; London: Evans Bros., 1971), 38–39. 18. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (London: O.U.P., 1970), 505 ff. Finnegan’s reference is to the article in French by H. Labouret and M. Travele entitled ”Le theatre mandingue (Sudan Française),” in Africa I (1928). 19. R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (London: O.U.P., 1930), Preface. 20. C. M. Doke, “Games, Plays and Dances of the Khomani Bushmen,” in Bantu Studies, 10, 1936; referred to by Ruth Finnegan, op. cit., 502–3. 21. Sunday Mirror (Ghana), 29 May 1960, 3. 22. This is Ogunmola’s Yoruba operatic adaptation of Amos Tutuola’s dramatic script based on his own Palm Wine Drinkard. The project was carried out in association with the Ibadan University School of Drama, and became the School’s first production. It was enthusiastically received in Nigeria and in Ghana. 23. See Duro Ladipo, Three Yoruba Plays (adapted by Ulli Beier) (Ibadan: Mbari Publications, 1964). 24. Ibid. See also Obotunde Ljimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala and Other Plays (London: Heinemann, 1966). 25. Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile (London: Longman, 1965), ch. 8, “Toward a New African Theatre.” 26. Lewis Nkosi, The Rhythm of Violence (London: O.U.P., 1964). 27. I am also concerned that “rationalism” is not confused with “rationalization.” I used to do that myself! 28. Nkosi, Home and Exile, ch. 8.

Babatunde Lawal

The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance

The term “African American” reflects the two-ness of the black experience in North America, denoting what W.E.B. DuBois aptly described as a double-consciousness, that is, a sense of being an African and American at the same time, “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”1 It is a dynamic interface of the old and the new—the past and the present. As Ronne Hartfield puts it, The experience of African peoples in America is inherently and profoundly characterized by the act of looking backward. If we do not look back, we cannot know who we are. The non-volitional journey from Africa, the dreaded Middle Passage, the tearing apart of families, language systems and ritual practices rooted in communal consensus, the severing of mothers from infants, brides from bridegrooms—all have contributed to Black America’s obsessive concern with its past. It is in the seeking (of both African American writers and artists) and establishing of connections between both of these streams that the nexus of much of African American art resides.2

The African roots of this nexus can be traced back to prehistoric times and are evident in the rock engravings and paintings found all over the African continent. Some examples (from Namibia in Southwest Africa) have been dated to about 27,000 BCE, although many of the undated ones may be considerably older. The emphasis in the prehistoric rock art on body adornment, dancing, masking and other forms of celebration clearly shows that the visual and performing arts have been an integral part of African cultures since the dawn of human consciousness.

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Art in African Societies Because of its ontological significance, art played a major role in precolonial African societies—and still does to a large extent today. Many African cosmologies trace the origin of humanity to a piece of sculpture made by a creator god who bears different artistic names in different cultures, i.e., Amma (the originator) among the Dogon (Mali); Daya (the fashioner) among the Gola (Liberia); Borebore (the carver) among the Asante of Ghana; Eleda (the originator) among the Yoruba (Nigeria); Njambi (the inventor) among the Lele (Zaire); Imana (the potter) among the Banyarwanda of Rwanda; Musikavanhu among the Shona (Zimbabwe); and Mwatuangi (the shaper) among the Akamba (Kenya).3 After completing the sculpture, the creator deity infused it with a life force (soul) known as nyama by the Dogon, du by the Dan, okra by the Asante, and emi by the Yoruba. This makes the human body a kind of sculpture animated by a soul. Hence the Ewe of Ghana and Togo call a human being amegbeto, a “living molded clay.”4 An individual is alive as long as the soul dwells in the physical body. The separation of the soul from the body results in death when, according to popular belief, the soul retires to the hereafter, though it may be reincarnated as a baby to start a new life on earth.5 In other words, art makes the spirit manifest in the physical world. Much of indigenous African art is conceptual rather than descriptive because of its social and spiritual functions. The head almost always dominates a typical figure sculpture because it is considered the seat of the life force, without which a person cannot exist. Little wonder that art features prominently in African religions and is used not only to embody supernatural forces but also to signify values deemed vital to social and spiritual well-being. At the secular level, architecture, body adornments, and the decorative arts are employed to project taste, mood, status, prestige, and political power.6 Performing the Word, Playing the Music, Feeling the Rhythm Because of the dynamic and expressive nature of the spoken word, many African cultures ignored the art of writing until fairly recently. In precolonial Africa, myths, folktales, proverbs, legends, and history were transmitted orally from one generation to the next by guilds of professional historians and poets.7 These professionals are known as griots among the Mande, okyeame among the Asante, arokin among the Yoruba, abacurabwenge among the Banyarwanda, and bulaam among the Kuba of Zaire. For the professional poet or storyteller, oration is a form of performance. The speaker is never stationary but acts out the narrative using intonation, chants, and mime.8 Some storytellers use mnemonic devices. The griots, for instance, play chordophones called kora, while the mbudye diviners of the Luba of Zaire gaze into mnemonic boards called lukasa—arrangements of shells and color-coded beads.9 In the course of remembering the past, however, changes do occur, not only in the de-

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tails of the story but also in the manner of oral transmission. The retelling of a story is never the same; every delivery is unique, being interspersed with proverbs, aphorisms, homonyms, metonyms, metaphors, allegories, puns, and phrases with multivalent and sometimes ambivalent meanings.10 Sometimes, as among the Limba of Sierra Leone, the Akan of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and the Yoruba, Igbo, and Ibibio of Nigeria, designated assistants or audience members punctuate the storyteller’s narrative with sounds or words of approval, turning the occasion into a call-andresponse performance.11 Word and image are so closely related in Africa that one hardly exists without the other. Not only do sculptures encode ideas and ideals, they are used to mediate between the human and spirit worlds, becoming the focus of sacrifices, panegyrics, and carefully choreographed performance. Indeed, all the important occasions of life— birth, puberty, initiation, marriage, work, warfare, recreation, burial, and religious worship—are accompanied by or celebrated with art, music, and dance.12 Much of African music is characterized by an emphasis on vocality (including shouts, hollers, yodels, ululation, falsetto, glotalization, voice masking, and call-and-response or antiphonal singing), percussion (especially drumming), rhythm (regular, irregular, multiple, crossed, and mixed), offbeat phrasing, polyphony, syncopation, and extemporization, among others.13 While dance styles may vary from group to group, there are common features: slanted torso; hip rotations; clapping, stomping, tapping; upward, downward, forward, backward, and circular movements with sharp turns and acrobatic leaps, as well as multimetric enactments in which different parts of the body are made to respond to different musical instruments.14 Michel Adanson, a Frenchman who lived among the Woloff of Senegal between 1749 and 1754, observed the same phenomenon: “The Negroes do not dance a step, but every member of their body, every joint, and even the head itself, expresseth a different motion, always keeping time.”15 Spirit Mediumship and Masking Spirit mediumship in African religion is predicated on the logic that, since the body is a vehicle for the life force or soul, it is capable of containing and manifesting invisible supernatural forces. To this end a priest or priestess may undergo a special ritual that transforms his or her body into a vessel that a particular spirit may inhabit momentarily when invoked. In this context the human body functions as a threshold between the secular and the sacred, enabling the human to interact directly with the superhuman. Frequently spirit mediumship takes a more elaborate form in masking, when the body is enclosed in a colorful costume of fiber, raffia, leaves, fabric, or animal skins surmounted by a carved headdress. The masker usually takes part in a preliminary ritual that sensitizes his body to possession by the spirit associated with a given mask. It is worth emphasizing, however, that a mask created for secular or entertainment purposes may not require such a ritual, and the masker is not presumed

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to be possessed during performance. Nonetheless, such a mask is still considered sacred because of its social, political, or spiritual function. A mask’s function generally varies from one African society to another. Some masks—such as the kungang of the Bamileke and Bamum (Cameroon), ekpe of Efik (Nigeria), and kifwebe of the Songye—serve as agents of social control, enforcing law and order, adjudicating quarrels, and administering punishment. Others—such as the Poro, Lo, and Sande masks of West Africa and Mukanda of Zaire—may represent teachers, healers, and seers from the spirit world on whom depends the preservation of cultural traditions and spiritual well-being.16 In many parts of Africa satire is employed as an instrument of social reform. Masks such as the Gonde and Gongoli of the Mende (Sierra Leone), Gagon of Dan (Liberia), Okorosia and Okumpa of the Igbo (Nigeria), and Makishi (Chokwe) publicly ridicule irresponsible leaders and other antisocial elements.17 More often masks communicate with special gestures and esoteric languages understood only by the initiated. Thus in many African cultures there are two levels of knowledge, the exoteric, accessible to the general public, and the esoteric, restricted to the members of a privileged “inner circle.”18 Festival and Ritual Theatre The dynamic interaction between the visual and performing arts is best expressed in African festivals. Inspired by creation myths and by legends of migration and conquest, most African festivals are commemorative and have ritual at their core.19 The emphasis on ritual derives from the belief that nature is controlled by invisible forces that must be placated with art and sacrifices. Masking elevates the interaction between the human and the superhuman to a transcendental level where archetypal actions are reenacted in order to ensure human and agricultural fertility, healing, victory in warfare, safety from natural disasters, or to promote peace and social harmony.20 But myth and ritual are never static. The nature, structure, and scope of each celebration continually evolve under different social and political conditions, available human and material resources, and other factors that vary in a performing arts tradition which encourages individual improvisation within long-established conventions. That most African festivals are ritualistic does not mean that they are necessarily or exclusively religious. As Oyin Ogunba points out, “when one watches an African festival . . . the dominant impression is often found to be humanistic rather than religious. There is a relish of life and living, a spontaneous and frank preference for this life rather than the life to come.”21 The sacred and the secular are deeply, often inseparably, connected in African religion. And the visual and performing arts are the means of embodying, affirming, revitalizing, and celebrating human existence itself. Thus when Africans were transplanted to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, they held on firmly to their ancestral heritage, synthesizing it with American (both European and Native American) elements.

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After the Middle Passage: Art, Memory, and Identity Since the turn of the twentieth century, the study of African carryovers in the Americas and other parts of the world has been dominated by two anthropological theories. The first is the retention theory, advanced by Melville Herskovits in the 1940s. According to Herskovits, African languages and cultures, in spite of their apparent differences, have many deeply rooted commonalities, and it is these commonalities that facilitated their retention in “a generalized form” in the New World.22 Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, by contrast, propose what they call the innovation theory. In their view, since captive Africans came from different parts of Africa, with different languages and cultures, “and were transported, more or less, in heterogeneous cargoes,” they “could not be said to have had a single collective culture to transport.”23 According to Mintz and Price, whatever cultural traits captive Africans had in common were adapted to new situations, creating hybrids—a process that might have started on the slave ships or even on the African continent itself while the captives awaited transport to the Americas.24 While there is substantial evidence to support both theories, neither takes full account of the role played by memory in the production and transportation of images. Although it has several levels of meaning, memory is essentially a recollection of previously experienced events or images. Paul Connerton identifies four different types of memory, namely, the personal (a recollection of events from one’s past or life history), the cognitive (the capacity to remember learned facts or previously experienced activities), the habitual (a behavior or practical skill acquired through convention or repetition), and the collective or social (knowledge gained through education and historical consciousness, providing a context for sharing and transmitting personal and group experiences).25 Today the traditional definition of memory as mental storage has been modified to take account of the changes that often occur in the process of retrieving and re-presenting the past.26 But because both deal with the past, memory and history are often compared. The French historian Pierre Nora sees them as two different but related entities—one associated with recollecting and forgetting and the other with reconstructing the past.27 Suffice it to say that since the process of recollecting also involves reconstructing, and vice versa, memory is a form of history and history a form of memory. Being a recollection or interpretation of the past, memory not only facilitates the transfer of cultural property from one geographical space to another, it is also a catalyst in the construction and negotiation of new identities. Like the griot or professional historian, the traditional African artist relies on cognitive memory to perpetuate forms and styles handed down from the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that some African captives were able to reproduce in the Americas artifacts similar to those they had left behind. For example, carved headdresses worn during Gelede ceremonies by Yoruba slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil and Cuba bear a striking formal and stylistic resemblance to those found in

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Yorubaland today.28 A seventeenth-century drum reportedly seized from slaves in colonial Virginia looks so much like the atumpam drums of the Akan of present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that scholars at first thought that it had been imported from Africa. But subsequent analysis of its wood and hide revealed them to be American materials, indicating that the drum was almost certainly carved by a captive Akan (probably Asante) artist.29 Note also the similarity between the visage of minkisi (the carved “power figures” of the Kongo) and that of the glazed face-vessels produced in the 1860s by black slaves in the Edgefield district of South Carolina. That this is more than a coincidence is suggested by the fact that the southern states had many slaves of Kongo origin during the antebellum period.30 In fact, the slave ship Wanderer brought the last consignment of Kongo people to Georgia in 1858, and most of them were sold to Edgefield planters. One of the new arrivals, called Tahro (whose slave name was Romeo), is said to have constructed a Kongo-style house in Edgefield.31 A business ledger from the Edgefield pottery factory lists one Romeo among the workmen. According to Cinda Baldwin, “If this is the Romeo who arrived on the ‘Wanderer’ in 1858, the document provides the first direct evidence of a connection between the African Kongo people and the production of the Edgefield vessels.”32 These instances of specific ethnic carryovers seem to support the retention theory, but they contradict the thesis that Africanisms survived only in “a generalized form.” At the same time, these carryovers challenge the assumption underlying the innovation theory that the very first products made by captives in the New World were significantly different from those they left behind in Africa. Evidently the African-born captives had a clearer recollection of African prototypes than their American-born descendants, who either continued with what they had inherited or simply invented new ones. Thus, if applied objectively, the two theories—retention and innovation— actually complement each other. It is enough to say that the nature of Africanisms in a given area depends on variables such as the ethnic composition of slave populations, the number of trained, African-born artists among them, and the prevailing attitude of the slave masters toward African carryovers. In Brazil and Cuba, for example, where large numbers of Yoruba and Kongo captives were allowed to organize themselves into ethnic associations called “naciones” and “cabildos,” distinct carryovers from these cultures are easily identifiable, though others have survived only in hybridized forms. Even in Haiti, where Yoruba, Fon/Ewe and Western (Christian) elements combine in Voodoo religion and iconography, certain Yoruba and Fon elements are recognizable. But where the slave masters discouraged ethnic fraternities, as they did in North America, African carryovers survived only in fragmentary forms, notably in woodcarving, ironworking, basketry, pottery, quilts, musical instruments, and graveyard decoration.33 That they survived at all testifies to the relentless struggle by African captives to preserve their cultural identity. There is ample evidence that they used art for ceremonial or ritual purposes, just as in the motherland.34 In the 1930s Robert Pinckey, a former slave from Savannah, Georgia, recounted his experience:

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I membuh duh African mens use tuh all duh time make lill clay images. Sometime deh lak mens an sometime lak animal. Once dey make a big un. Dey put a speah in he han an walk roun im an say he wuz duh chief. But dat clay got too much ribbuh mud in um an he ain las long. Sometime dey try tuh duh image out uh wood, but seem lak duh tool ain right, so mos times dey’s ub clay.35

Translation: I remember that African men used to all the time make little clay images. Sometimes they look like men, sometimes like animals. Once they make a big one. They put a spear in his hand and walk round him and say he was the chief. But that clay got too much river mud in him and he ain’t last long. Sometimes they may try to do image out of wood, but seem to lack the right tool, so most times they used clay.

In the nineteenth century an African-born captive was observed catching turtles and birds and using wire to incise cryptic designs on their bodies before allowing the creatures to escape, apparently to deliver the messages implicit in the designs to the ancestors.36 Paradoxically, the slave masters themselves indirectly contributed to the preservation of African carryovers during the antebellum period, for they encouraged Africans to come together on special occasions, such as the ‘Lection Day, Gombay, Pinkster, and Congo Square (New Orleans) celebrations, to display their cultural heritage for public entertainment.37 In Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, the “Guinea Negroes,” who “had retained many of the ideas and traditions of their native land,”38 were allowed to perform during the Christmas season. Edward Warren provides an eyewitness account in the early nineteenth century: The leading character is the “ragman,” whose “get up” consists in a costume of rags, so arranged that one end of each hangs loose and dangles; two great ox horns, attached to the skin of a raccoon, which is drawn over the head and face, leaving apertures only for the eyes and mouth; sandals of the skin of some wild “varmint”; several cow and sheep bells or strings of dried goats’ horns hanging about their shoulders, and so arranged as to jingle at every movement; and a short stick of seasoned wood, carried in his hands. The second part is taken by the best looking darkey of the place, who wears no disguise, but is simply arrayed in what they call his “Sunday-go-to-meeting suit,” and carries in his hand a small bowl or tin cup, while the other parts are appropriated by some half a dozen fellows, each arrayed fantastically in ribbons, rags, and feathers, and bearing between them several so-called musical instruments or “gumba boxes,” which consist of wooden frames covered over with tanned sheep skins. They are usually followed by a motley crowd of all ages, dressed in ordinary working clothes. . . . Having thus given you an idea of the characters I will describe the performance as I first saw it at the “Lake.” Coming up to the front door of the “great house,” the musicians commenced to beat their gumba boxes violently, while characters No. 1 and No. 2 entered upon a dance of the most extraordinary character—a combination of bodily contortions, flings, kicks, gyrations, and antics of every imaginable description, seemingly acting as partners, and yet each try to excel the other in the variety and grotesqueness of his movements. At the same time No. 2 led off with a song of a strange, monotonous cadence, which seemed extemporized for the occasion, and run somewhat in this wise:

46 babatunde lawal “My massa am a white man, juba! Old missus am a lady, juba! De children am de honey-pods, Juba! juba! Krimas come but once a year, juba! Juba! juba! O, ye juba! . . .” After singing a verse or two No. 2 moved up to the master, with his hat in one hand and a tin cup in the other, to receive the expected “quarter,” and, while making the lowest obeisance, shouted: “May de good Lord bless old massa and missus, and all de young massas, juba!”39

Although the juba dance was popular all over the Americas (as part of the John Kunering/Jonkonnu Christmas masquerade),40 its exact origin and the meaning of the term juba are obscure. According to one legend, the term referred to the leftover food placed in a big container that captive Africans shared with livestock. But this legend does not fully explain how leftover food came to be associated with the juba dance. The current assumption is that the dance originated among the Bantu slaves and that the term juba derives from the Central African (Bantu) word giouba, nguba, ginguba, or diuba, which means peanut, the hour, the sun, to pat or to beat time.41 While this is possible, it should be noted that the term also occurs among the Akan of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo, where it refers to a female born on a Monday, not to a dance. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, on the other hand, the term means homage or obeisance, and often refers to the gesture or dance that accompanies it.42 The association of the Wilmington juba dance with “obeisance” is therefore significant: not only does it tally with the Yoruba meaning of the term, it recalls the preference for Yoruba captives in North America (then identified as Nago, Pawpaw, or Whydahs) because of their “submissiveness.”43 These captives were said to be “very polite and civilized, most respectful of superiors before whom they immediately fell on their knees and kissed the earth while thrice clapping their hands.”44 Indeed, the term juba, along with its variations like Jiba, Yuba, and Moyuba (“paying obeisance”), feature prominently in songs, dances, and religious ceremonies associated with the descendants of Yoruba captives in the Caribbean and Brazil.45 Another aspect of the Wilmington juba dance that suggests a Yoruba origin is the “costume of rags, so arranged that one end hangs loose and dangles.” As Sterling Stuckey rightly observes, this configuration reminds one of the Egungun ancestral mask of the Yoruba that the Dahomeans and related groups might have introduced to North Carolina.46 One account of the dancers mentions the presence of masked men dressed like women—in “strips of cloth of gay colors sewn to their usual garments and producing an effect of exotic grotesquerie.”47 This is reminiscent of the Gelede, a Yoruba mask dedicated to the spiritual powers of women. The Gelede mask, worn by men, often represents a female and the costume consists of “multicolored female headwraps and baby sashes . . . tied round the body.”48 A characteristic feature of the juba dance in the Caribbean and North America is its emphasis on foot-stamping and vigorous body movements; these are also characteristic of the Gelede dance.49 For example, the Gelede mask called Efe, at the beginning

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of his performance, breaks into incantatory chants “to superior powers. This . . . is called ‘ijuba,’ the paying of homage. . . . His dances consist of masculine strides, quick dramatic turns, rhythmic staccato foot patterns and stamping, vigorous swinging of the arms. . . . Efe makes a brisk roundabout turn to make his panel of headties swirl and flutter, stamping his feet on the ground to maintain his equilibrium.”50 Equally relevant here is Edward Warren’s observation that the costumes of the Wilmington’s juba dancers included “sheep bells or strings of dried goats’ horns . . . [that] jingle at every movement.” These may very well be a substitute for the metal anklet (iku) of the Gelede mask, which jingles rhythmically during the dance, amplifying the “staccato foot patterns.”51 Could the Yoruba captives have originated or popularized the term juba in spite of the creolized nature of the dance associated with it? In Brazil and the Caribbean, Yoruba and Bantu (especially Kongo) religious and cultural elements are known to have reinforced each other because of the fundamental similarities in their constituent elements.52 Is the juba dance another instance of this cultural convergence?53 It is hoped that future research will throw more light on these questions. Other African-derived but creolized dances performed by slaves included the Ring Shout, Buzzard Lope, Bamboula, Pas-ma-la, and Calenda.54 A late-eighteenth-century painting in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia,55 features a group of black dancers accompanied by two musicians, one of whom is playing a cordophone similar to the one observed in 1819 at Congo Square by the famous American architect, Benjamin Latrobe: “The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash. It was played upon by a very little old man, apparently 80 or 90 years old.”56 Latrobe’s sketch of the stringed instrument clearly shows that it belongs in the category of African lutes called banjar or kora, the ancestors of the American banjo.57 Latrobe’s concludes that the instrument was imported from Africa, but one cannot rule out the possibility that it was made in New Orleans.

From Ethnic to Pan-African and Diasporan Consciousness In precolonial Africa, an individual was brought up to identify primarily with his or her ethnic group or culture. As Sterling Stuckey has observed, the “slave ships were the first real incubators of slave unity across cultural lines.”58 For it is the common experience of humiliation and suffering on the slave ships, coupled with the psychosocial adjustment in the plantations and the collective memory of an African past, that eventually united different and sometimes antagonistic groups, paving the way for the transformation of ethnic identities into a new consciousness defined primarily by the idea of race.59 During the antebellum period, many free and enslaved blacks entertained the hope of returning to Africa, and some did go back to settle in Liberia. But following the Emancipation Declaration of 1863 and the passage of the Four-

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teenth Amendment in 1866, which gave citizenship to free blacks and former slaves, Africans (then identified as Negro) began to integrate into the mainstream American culture. Their descendants now form a significant part of the African Diaspora, which Colin Palmer has recently defined as a diverse group united “by a past based significantly but not exclusively upon ‘racial’ oppression and the struggles against it; [they] share an emotional bond with one another and with their ancestral continent . . . [facing] broadly similar problems in constructing and realizing themselves.”60 Charting a New Course in the Visual Arts American art of the antebellum period was for the most part an extension of the European emphasis on academic naturalism. Hence the slave masters looked down on the conceptual approach of the captive African artist as a failed attempt to imitate nature. Talented African-born artists and their descendants were retrained to produce European-type crafts. Only a few free blacks, such as Patrick Reason, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Edmonia Mary Lewis, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, had the privilege of receiving formal training in the so-called “fine art” of naturalistic painting and sculpture. Others, such as Scipio Moorhead, Robert Scott Duncanson, and Joshua Johnston, were largely self-taught. Many black artists who followed in the footsteps of these pioneers ignored the conceptual approach of their African ancestors because it was associated with the “primitive” and “uncivilized.” It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that some of these artists realized the need to return to their ancestral legacy— thanks to the artistic revolution in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when leading artists such as Maurice Vlamnick, Andre Derain, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse sought inspiration in African sculpture, inaugurating Modernism in the visual arts. This sudden change of attitude toward their African heritage provided a psychological boost for many African American intellectuals, artists, writers, poets, dancers, playwrights, and musicians. It occurred at a time when blacks were migrating in large numbers from the rural South to the urban and industrialized North, where they got better-paying jobs. Filled with new feelings of freedom, optimism, and self-esteem, they gave free rein to their creative impulses in the visual and performing arts. Alain Locke, the Harvard-trained professor of philosophy at Howard University, emerged as one of the leaders of what soon became known as the “New Negro Movement,” urging artists to return to their African roots. According to Locke, “if African art is capable of producing the ferment in modern art that it has, surely this is not too much to expect of its influence upon the culturally awakened Negro artist of the present generation.”61 Also contributing to this awakening was the Pan-Africanist movement, spearheaded by W.E.B. DuBois and aimed at generating race pride and unifying people of African descent within and outside the motherland. Formally trained African American artists such as Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, Sargent Claude Johnson, William H. Johnson, Malvin Gray Johnson, and Lesesne Wells either incorporated African images (especially masks) in their work or abstracted their forms in the African conceptual tradition. Others, such as Hale

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Woodruff, Richmond Barthé, and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, portrayed Africans in a heroic and dignified manner.62 It is worth noting that the break with the African ancestral legacy occurred mainly among formally trained African American artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many self-taught artists in the South continued with what they had inherited from their antebellum ancestors, thus helping sustain African carryovers (though in creolized forms) in quilts, woodcarving, basketry, gravestone decorations, and other artforms.63

Continuity and Change in the Performing Arts It is in the realm of African American music that African carryovers are most conspicuous and profound. In the fields as in their cabins, Africans sang in their mother tongues before becoming fluent in English. They also created African-type musical instruments, most especially drums. The ban on drumming—because it was used to instigate revolts—did not deter slaves from continuing with African-type rhythms, even after conversion to Christianity. They danced to the clapping of hands combined with the rhythm of improvised musical instruments. What we now call spirituals, blues, and jazz can be traced to these humble beginnings. The establishment of separate churches for blacks, such as the First African Baptist in Savannah, Georgia, in 1787 and the African Methodist Episcopal in Philadelphia (1787–1794), gave birth to new spirituals that expressed the yearning for freedom. While it may be true that many spirituals were inspired by biblical hymns or verses, they cannot be regarded as mere imitations.64 Each composition had its own unique language, mood, and rhythm, often reflecting African influences with a stress on “antiphonal performance, a loud strident vocal quality, and bodily movement during singing.”65 According to Joseph Murphy, The more subtle strain informing the Black Church comes from its more distant roots in the spirituality of ancestors brought over from Africa. Africa has given the Black Church a way of worship through music, movement, and ecstatic experience. What might seem to outsiders to be “motor behaviors” remembered from Africa are actually expressions of a dynamic, incarnated spirituality which is found throughout the diaspora. . . .66 The spirit of the Black Church is the celebration of God’s ultimate freedom in the body of the congregation. In word, song, music, and movement, the spirit is brought down to become incarnated in the very bodies of the devotees, showing them its power to sustain, heal and liberate the community.67

African storytellers typically engaged in a sort of dialogue with their audiences, so that simple oration easily gave way to call-and-response, a trademark of African American sermons today.68 So pervasive are the African influences in the black church that James Evans has suggested that African American theology “can best be understood as the convergence of an African derived world-view, the complexities of the experience of slavery, oppression survival, rebellion and adjustment in the New World, and their encounter with the biblical text.”69

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The blues, as a musical genre, exemplifies a specific attitude to life—the will to survive and, in the process, convert disadvantages into advantages.70 The blues evolved from an attempt to find a musical outlet for the harrowing experience of slavery. The earliest form of the blues may have been accompanied by stringed instruments that later evolved into the banjo. Western and other influences crept in before and after emancipation, turning into a professional occupation what was once a means of personal relaxation and of finding comfort in desolation. By the early twentieth century, blues musicians had developed a repertoire reflecting different aspects of the African American experience, its folklore and history, its joys and sorrows, its hopes and aspirations. Thus in the professional blues musician was reborn the African griot, though with new instruments, language, and melody, as well as new functions and forms of patronage. The new musical idiom retains many African carryovers, including the emphasis on rhythm, syncopation, stylized vocality, improvisation, polyphony, and call-and-response patterns, even if Americanized. These carryovers have been so transformed over time that only a trained ear can identify them.71 A similar cross-breeding of African and non-African musical traditions gave birth to jazz, now widely regarded as America’s greatest contribution to modern music. Like spirituals and blues, jazz began on southern plantations where African slaves used improvised musical instruments to express their creative impulses. During the American Revolution, some were drafted as soldiers and musicians—which gave them opportunities to learn to play Western instruments.72 Their participation in the Revolution, along with other moral considerations, led some northern states to gradually abolish the institution of slavery much earlier than their southern counterparts, who depended heavily on forced labor for the production of their agricultural crops, including cotton. Subsequent access to European musical instruments encouraged the formation of all-black brass bands in some states, which provided personnel for black military bands during the Civil War. So it was that after the war many musically inclined blacks turned professional, combining the banjo with such European instruments as the step drum, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, violin, and guitar to create the music that was to become jazz.73 Though a fusion of diverse musical traditions, including European concepts of melody and harmony, jazz music still shares many characteristics of the blues, so much so that one easily shades into the other.74 New Orleans emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as one of the most important centers, if not the cradle, of jazz because of the presence there of such talented musicians as Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Joseph “King” Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Edward “Kid” Ory, and Louis Armstrong. In the 1920s and 1930s, the spotlight shifted to Harlem, which had become the hub of African American creativity, attracting the best of African American blues and jazz musicians from New Orleans and elsewhere and providing the momentum for the blossoming of what is known in the annals of American history as the “the Jazz Age.” The catchy rhythms of jazz inspired a series of innovative dances such as the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, and the Jitterbug, all characterized by complex body movement and footwork. Some of these dances were reminiscent of

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the juba, while others reflected a synthesis of African and European dance modes. Although jazz later expanded to encompass influences from other parts of the world, its African ethos continues to rejuvenate the form.75 In Africa festivals provided the occasion for ritual theatre and celebration vital to social, spiritual, and communal well-being. The prohibition of such festivals in North America condemned slaves to a life of perpetual labor, except on Sundays and special occasions such as the Congo Square, the Pinkster and ‘Lection parades, and Christmas, when they were allowed to perform African dances. However, slaves secretly gathered on the plantation to mimic the mannerisms of their masters. The need for secrecy led them to develop rhetorical strategies akin to the African tradition of using esoteric sounds, words, and gestures to relate information accessible only to the initiated. This phenomenon, which postmodern academics refer to as “signifyin(g),” has since become a distinctive feature of African American literature and theatre.76 The first all-black theatre group, the African Company, was formed by free blacks in Manhattan in 1821, but it staged mainly Shakespearean plays and other European classics.77 It was not until near the end of the nineteenth century that musical comedies written by African Americans and containing African themes became popular, and most of these fell into the minstrelsy tradition, which romanticized the African connections. These comedies include Senegamian Carnival (1898), The Sultan of Zulu (1900), In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandana Land (1907).78 The Star of Ethiopia (1913), a pageant by W.E.B. Dubois, was one of the first serious artistic endeavors to glorify the African past. Organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation, the pageant had a cast of more than three hundred actors and a set that showcased Ancient Egyptian architecture. It featured African chants, dances, and religious rites and explicitly linked them with the African American struggle for freedom.79 The race-consciousness ushered in by the Harlem Renaissance not only inspired such Afrocentric poems as Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and Countee Cullen’s “The Heritage” (1925), but also Thelma Duncan’s The Death Dance: An African Play (1923) and Richard Bruce’s Sadhji: An African Ballet (1927), both of which emphasized African drumming and dance forms. Anglo-American patrons’ demand for the “primitive” led some playwrights (for example, Flournoy Miller et al. in Blackbirds [1930]) to exoticize African characters as “jungle bunnies” wearing “belly dance costume and tail feathers à la FolliesBergère.” 80 The use of the theatre to reconnect with the African past received a boost in 1929, when Asadata Dafora Horton emigrated to New York. Born in 1890 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Asadata had studied music in Europe before coming to the United States to pursue a singing carrier. He settled in New York, where he founded the Shologa Oloba, later known as the African Dance Troupe, which had a number of African-born and African American actors. The troupe’s 1934 play Kykunkor: The African Witch Woman was a huge success and received highly favorable press reviews, partly for its use of African characters, languages, and musical instruments and partly for the convincing manner in which African visual and performing arts

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were integrated to reinforce the plot. Above all the play offered a more dignified image of Africa than Broadway productions had done. It also encouraged a number of African Americans to develop an interest in their ancestral legacy.81 This reconnection with the past was sustained through the Great Depression into the 1960s by choreographers like Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Alvin Ailey, among others, who would elaborate on the African conception of the dance as dynamic motion involving the entire human body.

Developments since World War II African American art and culture have changed radically since World War II. The emergence of newly independent African states beginning in the late 1950s and the establishment of the Peace Corps and Operation Crossroads provided opportunities for African Americans to visit the continent for a firsthand experience of their heritage. In 1956 a Congress of black writers and artists in Africa and the Diaspora met in Paris to discuss strategies for projecting a black identity in the arts. A second meeting took place in 1959. Since then there have been several cultural exchanges and international conferences, the most elaborate being the First and Second World Festivals of African and Black Arts, held in Senegal and Nigeria in 1966 and 1977, respectively.82 The knowledge and experience gained from these interactions continuously reinforce the umbilical ties with Africa, serving as a valuable resource during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. African names and the donning of African dress (agbada, dashiki, buba, fila, and gele) and kente cloth became symbols of black nationalism and self-renewal within the diasporic experience.83 The inauguration of the Kwanzaa celebration in the 1960s enabled many African Americans to reaffirm the bond with Africa on an annual basis.84 In 1970 the Yoruba village of Oyotunji was established in South Carolina to revive African social and religious traditions in the United States.85 The village has ushered in an era of spiritual rearmament, providing a base for performing indigenous African rituals and festivals.86 The institution of African, black, and African Diaspora studies in many American universities since the 1960s has provided rich research opportunities to African American artists, musicians, novelists, poets, and playwrights. Some have been greatly influenced by the anticolonialist philosophy of Negritude, developed in Paris in the 1930s by African and black Caribbean writers (notably Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Aimé Césaire of Martinique, and Leon Damas of Guyana), which attempts to define the essence of an African sensibility in the humanities.87 Toward a Trans-African Art In the visual arts, a more intimate understanding of African heritage has encouraged the development of many black artists since the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like Lois Mailou Jones, John Biggers, and Kofi Bailey, render black subjects in a heroic and dig-

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nified manner while emphasizing the richness of the African ancestral legacy. Others, like Betye Saar, Alison Saar, Renee Stout, Willie “Bing” Davis, and Houston Conwill, focus on African ritual symbols, using them for individual and collective empowerment. In 1968 Ademola Olugebefola (formerly known as Bedwick Lyola Thomas) founded an artist group in New York called Weusi (Swahili “blackness”).88 Through a combination of African and European ideas and motifs, the members of Weusi used their art to celebrate different aspects of the African past and African American present, focusing on social affirmation and spiritual regeneration. They exhibited frequently at the Nyumba Ya Sanna Gallery (New York), selling their works at affordable prices.89 The AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), was formed in Chicago in 1968 to promote a new black aesthetic that would link contemporary African American art to its African heritage and use art as an instrument for social change and spiritual uplift. Members of the AfriCobra reflect in their works a blend of African American forms and elements of African mythology, cosmology, culture, and history as handed down through music, dance, icon, color, and design. Their works are characterized by an emphasis on intense colors and patterns influenced by African textiles and landscapes, African American quilts and both rural and urban black culture, creating complex rhythms, syncopated repetitions, and call-and-response modalities reminiscent of jazz music.90 A deeper knowledge of African aesthetics and iconography has allowed many African American artists to adapt them to the black experience in a more creative and meaningful way than their predecessors had done during the Harlem Renaissance. For example, while Harlem Renaissance artists rendered African sculptures and masks ethnographically in an attempt to satisfy their Anglo-American patrons’ taste for the “primitive,” most of the black artists of the 1960s and 1970s were more interested in using their art to support the civil rights struggle. Hence the frequent use of motifs associated with Sango and Esu, the Yoruba deities (orisha) popularly associated with thunder/social justice and destiny/opportunities respectively.91 The recourse to African icons has added a new dimension to the African American messianic tradition. Before the twentieth century, African Americans looked to Jesus and the Christian God to send a “Moses” to deliver them from racial oppression;92 but since the 1960s, some have been invoking the powers of African deities and ancestors in times of crisis. Others, such as John Biggers, have integrated African and American aesthetics to create new idioms.93 From Spirituals and Blues through Jazz to Rap African American music has evolved in like manner. While the spirituals seek inspirations from the Bible, they have also been influenced by Afrocentric celebrations such as Kwanzaa. Similar influences are apparent in the blues. In jazz, the emphasis on swing, bebop, and cool in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, respectively, tended to obscure the African roots of the music and its earlier stress on percussion. The arrival in the United States in the late 1940s of many master drummers (such as Julito Collazo, Francisco Aguabella, and Chano Pozo) from Cuba, where much of the African drum-

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ming tradition had been preserved in Santeria, Naningo, and Palo Monte rituals, gave jazz a new lease on life and led to the development of Cubop, a mixture of Afro-Cuban and Afro-American rhythms with emphasis on heavy, African-type percussion.94 A similar collaboration in the 1950s between North American and Brazilian musicians versed in the Samba tradition gave birth to Bossa Nova.95 From the late 1950s onward, the need to strengthen the black foundation of jazz has led some African American jazz musicians to seek new inspirations in African music. They have composed tunes with African themes that underscore the connections between the independence movements in black Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Such compositions include Airegin (Nigeria spelled backward) by saxophonist Sonny Rollins; Uam Uam (Mau Mau, the Kenyan Independence Movement, spelled backward) by Art Farmer; Uhuru Afrika: Freedom Africa by pianist Randy Weston, Liberian Suite by Duke Ellington, Accent on Africa by alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, Ritual and African Beat by drummer Art Blakey, and Afro/American Sketches by saxophonist Oliver Nelson.96 Tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, widely regarded as the most innovative jazz musician of the modern era, also experimented with African tunes and rhythms, as evident in his Expressions and Africa/Brass albums. He was a close friend of the New York–based Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, visiting the latter’s cultural center in Harlem regularly to seek inspiration from African music.97 The collaboration between leading African American jazz maestros such as Art Blakey, Randy Weston, Roy Ayres, and Yusef Latef and African-born musicians such as Miriam Makeba, Hugh Makesela, Dollar Brand/Abdulai Ibrahim, Guy Warren, Obo Addy, Babatunde Olatunji, Solomon Ilori, and Fela Anikulapo Kuti has nourished the African roots of the music.98 In the arena of popular music, the term “rhythm and blues” was introduced by Billboard Magazine in 1949 to subsume the new musical forms that had evolved from the traditional blues, emphasizing dance rhythms.99 In the 1960s and 1970s, a fusion of different aspects of the African carryovers with gospel and jazz elements produced rock ’n’ roll, soul, disco, and funk. The choreographic responses to this fusion culminated in the break-dancing of the 1980s, which emphasized African-type acrobatic movements. Although the hip hop rhythm of rap music is often said to reflect the pulse of inner-city life and to have broken ties with “the rhythmic subtlety of previous African American music,”100 some of its vocal styles, as John Storm Roberts points out, are deeply rooted in the blues.101 Toward a New Black Theatre In order to relate drama to the Civil Rights Movement and, in the process, go beyond the European fin-de-siècle notion of “art for art’s sake,” some black playwrights turned to the African praxis of total theatre, which blends the visual and performing arts, allows for improvisation, and eliminates the gulf between performers and audience.102 Playwrights such as Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Robert Macbeth, Ed Bullins, Richard Wesley, Ben Caldwell, Ntozake Shange, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Sonia

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Sanchez, Paul Carter Harrison, and Barbara Ann Teer experimented with African ritual drama in which art and life are inseparable.103 But as Shelby Steele points out, the term “ritual” as used in the black theatre does not necessarily replicate traditional African practices. Rather, it refers to “the strong presence of symbols, characterizations, themes and language styles which are frequently repeated from play to play and over a period of time . . . which have the function of reaffirming the values and particular commitment of the audience.”104 In the play Slave Ship (1964), for example, Imamu Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem, traces African American history back to a precolonial era in which a great premium was placed on ethnicity, community life, and life-cycle rituals. Then came the horrors of the middle passage, dehumanizing labor on the American plantations, slave revolts, emancipation, racial discrimination, struggle for survival, and the celebration of freedom. According to Larry Neal, the play is “a ritualized history . . . that allows emotional and religious participation on the part of the audience. And, like all good ritual, its purpose is to make the audience stronger, more sensitive to the historical realities that have shaped our lives and the lives of our ancestors.”105 The New Lafayette Theatre of Harlem (NLT), founded in 1967 and directed by Robert Macbeth, employed a similar strategy. It staged three plays during the 1969–1970 season, namely, Ritual to Bind Black People So That They Can Survive the Long Struggle That Is to Come, To Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future, and Black Time for Black Folk: A Play without Words.106 Not content with ethnographic research into the theoretical principles of African ritual theatre, the National Black Theatre of Harlem (NBT), founded in 1968 under the leadership of Barbara Ann Teer, took some of its members to Nigeria in the 1970s to deepen their understanding of African, especially Yoruba, drama. While in Nigeria, they also collaborated with local performers.107 Plays produced by the NBT in the 1970s and 1980s include Soljourney into the Truth, Ritual, Soul Fusion, Softly Comes a Whirlwind Rising in Your Ears, and Bill Manhoff’s Riding on the Wings of Love. According to Barbara Ann Teer, the orisha tradition has been a powerful instrument for reconnecting the African American playwright with his or her past, while at the same time allowing for ritual cleansing and healing.108 Admittedly, not all black playwrights identify with their African heritage. Some, like Arthur Graham, reject it on the grounds that their African ancestors collaborated with the Europeans during the transatlantic slave trade.109 But as Paul Harrison points out, African American art runs the risk of losing its uniqueness and soul-force if it fails to relate the past to the present.110 As Jan Vansina puts it, “No person can live without a sense of self. . . . Similarly, no enduring community of people, whether a family, association, a polity, or a nation, can exist without assuming an identity that, while it has no concrete body of its own, is still expressed by criteria for membership and mutual behavior based on and justified by a shared ‘historical consciousness.’”111 This historical consciousness has led some African Americans to return to their ancestral religions. At Oyotunji, South Carolina, the Egungun ancestral masking has been revived as a religious ceremony with therapeutic implications. By selectively re-

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claiming certain aspects of African heritage and integrating them into their lives, many African Americans no longer perceive their “bi-culturality” as a contradiction. They cherish it as a resource for making original contributions to the American mosaic, generating a new self-confidence and reconciling what W.E.B. DuBois once diagnosed as the “two warring ideals in one dark body.”112 In conclusion, it should be stressed that while many African American artists and performers are proud of their African heritage, they are not content with preserving it for its own sake. Over the years they have been transforming it to reflect new needs, influences, ideals, and visions emanating from both sides of the Atlantic. In 1991 the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, founded the African and African American Summit “to strengthen the bonds of heritage and history that tie Black Americans to Africa.”113 Since then biennial summits have been held in Africa; the 1999 meeting took place in Accra, Ghana. The Second World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (popularly known as FESTAC ’77), hosted by Nigeria in 1977, has been the biggest and the most memorable to date because it involved black intellectuals, writers, artists, and performers from different parts of Africa and the Diaspora. Alma Robinson’s experience of the festival sums up the unique feeling of being an African and American at the same time: Coming back from Africa, the best souvenirs were intangible: a certain glow of the inexpressible, a network of friendships and, perhaps most significant, the inspiration to revitalize old structures, to build new institutions and to stretch beyond previous limitations. Many cried, exhausted by the sheer density of activity, flooded with an intensity of emotions and humiliated by the weight of the responsibility assumed by having participated in the gift. As a “middle passage,” the Festac experience challenged all of us to acknowledge the beauty of our heritage and to do it justice by living up to its expectations.114

In other words, the African heritage has been (and continues to be) a catalytic force in the creative endeavors of African American artists, writers, and performers. It has enabled them to relate the present to the past positively, develop hopeful views of the future, and, in the process, make original contributions to the world of art.

Notes Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Christopher Brooks and Noreece Jones for reading the first draft of this paper and making many useful suggestions. 1. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1903), 3. 2. Ronne Hartfield, “Honoring Our Fathers: Memory and Metaphor,” The City Sun: New York City Metropolitan Weekly, July 14–20, 1993, 10. 3. For details, see Geoffrey Parrinder, African Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1967) and John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heineman, 1990). Among the Yoruba, the creator deity does not act directly but delegates responsibilities to lesser deities called orisa. One of the latter, called Obatala, molded the first human image.

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4. John K. Ansah, “The Ethics of African Religious Tradition,” in World Religions and Global Ethics, ed. S. Cromwell Crawford (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 245. 5. For more on the African belief in reincarnation, see Mbiti, African Religions, 159–60, and Geoffrey Parrinder, Religion in Africa (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 77–84. 6. For more on the functions of the arts in Africa, see Roy Sieber and Roslyn A. Walker, African Art in the Cycle of Life (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), and R.I.J. Hackett, Art and Religion in Africa (New York: Cassell, 1996). 7. For a comprehensive treatment of the subject, see Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 8. Ibid., 34. 9. Mary N. Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: Prestel, 1996), 36–38. 10. For a comprehensive survey, see Ruth Finnegan, Oral Tradition in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), and J. C. Miller, ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Hamden, Conn.: Folkstone, 1980). 11. For details, see Kwesi Yankah, Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 19–24. 12. See Alan P. Merriam, “African Music,” in Continuity and Change in African Cultures, ed. William R. Bascom and Melville J. Herskovits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 49–86, and Francis Bebey, African Music, A People’s Art (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1975), 40–113. 13. For details, see Merriam, “African Music,” J. H. Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), and John M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetic and Social Action in African Musical Idiom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 14. For more details, see Robert F. Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Michel Huet, The Dance, Art and Ritual of Africa (New York: Pantheon, 1978), and Judith L. Hannah, “African Dance: Continuity of Change” in Year Book of the International Folk Music Council 5 (1974). 15. Michel Adanson, A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree and to the River Gambia (translated from the French) (London: J. Nourse, 1759), 111, quoted in Thompson, African Art in Motion, 37. 16. For more on African masks, see Herbert M. Cole, I Am Not Myself: The Art of African Masquerade (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1985); Simeon Ottemberg, Mask Rituals of Afikpo: The Context of an African Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975); Esther A. Dagan, The Spirit’s Image: The African Masking Tradition—Evolving Continuity (Montreal: Galerie Amrad African Art Publications, 1992); and Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). 17. For details, see Robert Brain, Art and Society in Africa (London: Longman, 1980); Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle; Simon Ottenberg, “Humorous Masks and Serious Politics among the Afikpo Igbo” in African Art and Leadership, ed. Douglas Fraser and H. M. Cole (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 99–121, and E. Fischer and H. Himmelheber, The Arts of the Dan in West Africa (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 1984). 18. See Marcel Griaule, “Le Savoir des Dogon,” Journal de las Societe des Africanistes 22, nos. 1–2 (1952): 27–42, and Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 96–99. 19. See also Herbert M. Cole, “The Art of Festival in Ghana,” African Arts 9, no. 3 (1975), 12–23, 60–62, 90.

58 babatunde lawal 20. For an insightful analysis of the interrelationship of myth and ritual theatre in Africa, see Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Joe C. de Graft, “Roots in African Drama and Theatre,” African Literature Today 8 (1976), 1–25; and Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele, eds., Theatre in Africa (Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1978), 3–26. 21. Oyin Ogunba, “Traditional African Festival Drama,” in Ogunba and Irele, Theatre in Africa, 7. See also Bakary Traore, “Meaning and Function of the Traditional Negro-African Theatre,” in First World Festival of the Arts: Colloquium on Negro Art (Paris: Editions Presence Africaine, 1968), 483. 22. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 295. 23. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 8. 24. Ibid., 42–51. 25. Phillip Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 26. Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, eds., Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1–46. 27. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–25. 28. See Robert F. Thompson, Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at U.C.L.A. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), ch. 14, 2–3, and Henry and Margaret Drewal, Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 242–45. 29. The Virginia slave drum is illustrated in Sharon F. Patton, African American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), fig. 3. Compare the drum with a late-nineteenth-century pair of Asante atumpam drums from Kumasi illustrated in Roy Sieber, African Furniture and Household Objects (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 164. 30. Robert F. Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981), and Winifred Kellersberger Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1979), 9–19. 31. Illustrated in Patton, African American Art, fig. 13. 32. Cinda Baldwin, “Edgefield Face Vessels: African American Contributions to American Folk Art,” American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture (August 1990), 20. For a survey of Kongo influences on African American art, see Thompson and Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun. 33. For a survey, see John M. Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); and African Impact on the Material Culture of the Americas: Conference Proceedings (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1998). 34. Thompson and Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun, 181–203, and Jessie G. Mulira, “The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans,” in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 34–68. 35. Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), 106. 36. Harry S. Edwards, The Two Runaways and Other Stories (New York: Century, 1889), 202–3, 205; quoted in Thompson and Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun, 151.

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37. See Nicholas Creswell, The Journal of Nicholas Creswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Kennikat Press, 1924; 1968), 18; Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 144–47; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 52–58; Portia K. Maultsby, “Influences and Retentions of West African Musical Concepts in U.S. Black Music,” Western Journal of Black Studies 3, no. 3 (1979): 198–200; and Genevieve Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press), 72–91. 38. Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experience in Three Continents (Baltimore: Cushings and Bailey, 1885), 200. 39. Ibid., 201–2. 40. For a survey, see Judith Bettelheim, “Jonkonnu and Other Christmas Masquerades,” in Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 39–83. 41. For a review of the literature, see Beverly J. Robinson, “Africanisms and the Study of Folklore,” in Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture, 215–17. See also Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States, 110, and Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 27–29. 42. A Dictionary of the Yoruba Language (London and Ibadan: Oxford University Press), 135. 43. U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 190. In the antebellum period, the Yoruba slaves were sometimes called by ethnic names (such as Nago or Popo/Pawpaw) or the port where they were bought (e.g., Whydah). 44. Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 285–86. See also Thomas Astley, ed., A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London, 1745–47). However, it should be pointed out that the apparent submissiveness of Yoruba slaves is a strategy for survival based on the premise that a victim of oppression must feign powerlessness until he or she is in a good position to challenge the oppressor. This is implied in the popular Yoruba proverb: “Bi owo eni ko ba te eeku ida, a kii bere iku ti o pa baba eni” (until you have a sword in your hand, don’t confront your father’s murderer). See J. O. Ajibola, Owe Yoruba (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 14. In spite of their proverbial submissiveness, Yoruba slaves are reportedly “the catalytic agent that set many of the slave revolts in motion in the Americas and in the Caribbean Islands, and the cohesive force that held them together.” See John H. H. Clarke, “Some Neglected Aspects of Yoruba Culture in the Americas and in the Caribbean Islands,” in The Proceedings of the Conference on Yoruba Civilization (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Department of History, 1976), vol. 2., 607. 45. The Cuban variation of juba is yuba, as in moyuba. The latter can be etymologized as mo (I), yuba (pay respect/homage). In the Cuban Yoruba-influenced Santeria religion, it refers to the invocation to the orisa (Yoruba deities). See Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, The Santeria Experience (New York: Original Publications, 1982), 40, 52. In Trinidad, juba and jiba are used interchangeably by people of Yoruba ancestry to mean “homage.” See Maureen Warner-Lewis, Yoruba Songs of Trinidad (London: Karnak House, 1994), 23, 37. 46. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 68–69. The Fon of Dahomey were once dominated by the Yoruba and so assimilated many aspects of Yoruba culture.

60 babatunde lawal 47. John MacMillan, “John Kuners,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 39 (January–March 1926): 54–55. 48. Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle, 173, plates 6.1–6.12. Being a popular seaport, Wilmington is said to be “in close touch” with Nassau and the Bahamas (see Dougald MacMillan, “John Kuners,” 55). And given the prominence of Yoruba cultural influence in the Caribbean, the Wilmington-Caribbean connection further reinforces the possibility that the dance witnessed by Edward Warren contained some Yoruba elements, even if the dancers might have come from more than one African ethnic group. 49. Marian H. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” in Chronicles of the American Dance, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), 40. 50. Benedict M. Ibitokun, Dance as Ritual Drama and Entertainment in the Gelede of the KetuYoruba Subgroups in West Africa (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo Press, 1993), 105, 113. For other accounts of the Ijuba, especially the circular dance of the Efe chorus, see Peggy Harper, “The Role of the Dance in the Gelede Ceremonies of the Village of Ijio,” in Odu, A Journal of West African Studies 4 (1970): 67–94; Henry Drewal and Margaret Drewal, Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle, 118, 125. 51. For details see Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle, 187–88. 52. Robert Farris Thompson, “Recapturing Heaven’s Glamour: Afro-Caribbean Festivalizing Arts,” in Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, ed. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 20. See also Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 55 53. In the 1840s William Henry Lane of Providence, Rhode Island, became the most popular juba dancer in the United States and was nicknamed “Master Juba.” In 1846 he traveled to London, where he performed before packed halls. He died in London in 1852. See Edward Thorpe, Black Dance (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1990), 42–44. 54. For a survey, see Richard A. Long, The Black Tradition in American Dance (New York: Rizzoli, 1989); Edward Thorpe, Black Dance, and Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African American in the Performing Arts (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990). 55. Illustrated in Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, 24, fig. 9. 56. Benjamin H. B. Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans, ed. S. Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 49–50. 57. Similar instruments, called banjour, were observed among enslaved Africans in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century. See William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 2 (London: Egerton, 1790), 387, cited in Mervyn Alleyne, African Roots of Jamaican Culture (Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications, 1989), 112. See also Gerhard Kubik, “Reflections on Eli Owens’s Mouth-Bow: African American One-Stringed Instrumental Traditions and their African Backgrounds,” in Turn Up the Volume: A Celebration of African Music, ed. Jacqueline C. Djedje (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1999), 186–93. 58. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 3. 59. For more details, see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. 60. Colin Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 36, no. 6 (1998): 23.

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61. For details, see The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1925), 267. 62. For more on the Harlem Renaissance, see Nathan I. Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Studio Museum Harlem, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: Abradale Press, 1987); and David L. Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Viking, 1994). 63. For details, Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts; Cuesta Benberry, Always There: African-American Presence in American Quilts (Louisville: Kentucky Quilt Project, in association with the Museum of American Folk Art, 1992); Maude S. Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (New York: Studio Books, 1993); Carolyn Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts (New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1998); and Babatunde Lawal, “African Roots, American Branches: Tradition and Transformation in African American Self-Taught Art,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, ed. William Arnett and Paul Arnett, vol. 1 (Atlanta: Tinwood Books in association with Schomborg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000), 30–49. 64. Eileen Southern, “An Origin for the Negro Spiritual,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 3 (1972): 12–13. 65. Ibid. 66. Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 146. 67. Ibid., 169–70. See also Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible” Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 92; and Dorothea Fisher-Hornung and Allison D. Goeller, eds., Embodying Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance (Hamburg and London: LIT Verlag Munster, 2001), 27–28. 68. See also Yankah, Speaking for the Chief, 21–23, and Patricia Jones-Jackson, When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 43–44. 69. James H. Evans, We Have Been Believers: African American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 2. See also, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 247–48. 70. For more on the blues, see Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), and Larry Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 3 (1972): 42–48. 71. For a comparison of the blues with the music of the African griots, see Samuel Charters, The Roots of the Blues: An African Search (New York: Pedigree Books, 1981). 72. Christopher Brooks, “Music,” in The African American Encyclopedia, ed. Michael W. Williams, vol. 4 (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1993), 1128. 73. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 64–67. 74. Ibid., 367. 75. For more on the African roots of Jazz, see ibid. See also Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963); Eddie S. Meadows, “African Retentions in Blues and Jazz,” Western Journal of Black Studies 3, no. 3 (1979): 180–85. 76. For details, see Henry L. Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 67.

62 babatunde lawal 77. Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic, 40–43. 78. For a review, see James Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” in The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill, vol. 1 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1980), 13–16. 79. Freda L. Scott, “The Star of Ethiopia: A Contribution toward the Development of Black Drama and Theater in the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, ed. Amritijit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin (New York: Garland, 1989). 80. Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” 16–17. 81. K. K. Martin, “America’s First African Dance Theatre,” Odu: A Journal of West African Studies, New Series, no. 11 (1975): 115–28. For other productions by the African Dance Troupe, see Long, The Black Tradition in American Dance, 47–52. 82. See First World Festival of Negro Arts: Colloquium on Negro Art (Paris: Edition Presence Africaine, 1968), and Edith U. Enem, ed., Pageants of the African World (Lagos, Nigeria: Nigeria Magazine, 1980). 83. See Klytus Smith and Abiola Sinclair, The Harlem Cultural/Political Movements, 1960–1970 (New York: Gumbs and Thomas Publishers, 1995). 84. Maulana Karenga, The African American Holiday of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1988). 85. The headquarters of the Yoruba movement was first located in Harlem in the early 1960s before being transferred to South Carolina in 1970. 86. C. M. Hunt, Oyotunji Village: The Yoruba Movement in America (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979). 87. For more on Negritude, see Valentine Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 83–87, and Abiola Irele, “Negritude Revisited,” Odu, A Journal of West African Studies, New Series, no. 5 (1971): 3–26. For a critique of the philosophy, see Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 63–64, 136–39. 88. Members were Otto Neals, Taiwo Duval, Falcon Beazer, Abdullah Azziz, Ray Brown, James Phillips, Bill Howell, Oko Pyatt, Jim Sepyo, Milton Martin, Rudi Irwin, and Gaylord Hassan. 89. For more on Weusi, see Elisa H. Fine, The Afro-American Artist (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). 90. For details, see Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Africobra: The First Twenty Years (Atlanta, Georgia: Nexus Contemporary Art Center, 1990). 91. For illustrations, see Samela Lewis, African American Art and Artists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), figs. 120, 131, 190, 275. See also Dallas Museum of Art, Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 92. See James M. Washington, Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), and Elias Farajaje-Jones, In Search of Zion: The Spiritual Significance of Africa in Black Religious Movements (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), 36–40. 93. For a review of recent developments, see Richard J. Powel, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); Sharon Patton, African American Art (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Michael Harris, Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa (Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, 1999). 94. John S. Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds: African, Caribbean, Latin and African American Traditions, 2d rev. ed. (London: Schirmer Books, 1998), 246–49. See also Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not to Bop (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 319.

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95. Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, 29–30, 249–50. 96. For a survey, see Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder, 1998), 75–77, and Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, 254. 97. Richard Turner, “John Coltrane: A Biographical Sketch,” The Black Perspective in Music 3, no. 1 (1975): 10. 98. See also Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, 255–56. 99. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 513–14. 100. Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, 203. 101. Ibid. 102. For a discussion of the African tendencies in African American drama, see Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theater,” in Hill, The Theatre of Black Americans, 13–29. 103. For a survey, see Hill, The Theatre of Black Americans, and Paul C. Harrison, The Drama of Nommo: Black Theatre in the African Continuum (New York: Grove Press, 1972). 104. Shelby Steele, “Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theater,” in The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill, 30. 105. Cited in ibid., 31. For a similar interpretation, see Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphors, 61–62. 106. Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” 19. 107. Mance Williams, Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 52–53. 108. Barbara Ann Teer, “The African American Experience: Needed A New Mythology,” in Proceedings of the First World Conference on Orisa Tradition, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, June 1–7, 1981 (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Department of African Languages and Litratures, University of Ife, 1981), 210. 109. See Arthur Graham, The Nationals: A Black Happening of Many Black Minds (San Diego: Black Book Production, 1968), and Annemarie Bean, ed., A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements (London: Routledge, 1999). 110. Harrison, The Drama of Nommo. 111. Jan Vansina, “From Memory to History: Processes of Luba Historical Consciousness,” in Mary N. Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: Prestel, 1996), 12. 112. For a review of W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “double-consciousness,” see Richard B. Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 461–95. 113. Charles Whitaker, “Ghana’s Summit Success,” Ebony Magazine (August 1999), 109. 114. Alma Robinson, “Afro-American Odyssey to FESTAC ’77,” in Pageants of the African World, 87–88. See also Babatunde Lawal, “African Images across the World,” ibid., 58–76.

Tejumola Olaniyan

Agones: The Constitution of a Practice

The historicity of contemporary black (African, African-American, and Caribbean) dramatic practice is unintelligible outside the agonistic interactions among three main competing, more-or-less coherent discursive formations: the hegemonic, colonialist Eurocentric; the counterhegemonic, anticolonialist Afrocentric; and an emerging post-Afrocentric, which subverts both the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric while refining and advancing the aims of the latter.1 The emphasis here is on the sociality of the discourses as concrete practices within contested and contestable spaces. For instance, the Eurocentric discourse on black drama is thinkable only within the materiality of the rise of Europe, the conquest and enslavement of African peoples, colonialism, neocolonialism, and ongoing aggressive capitalist imperialism. The numerous slave rebellions, emancipation, the massive wave of decolonization followed by the anguish of arrested decolonization—so well described by Edward Said2—and the contemporary general assaults on the authority of Western culture form the substance and condition of possibility of the two anti-Eurocentric discourses. In emphasizing this historicity, what I intend is nothing less than an account of the social foundations of an aesthetic form, of the invention of a culturally situated “black” dramatic theory and practice. The account is also, in its own way, an aspect of the story of how the West was won and of the resistance of the victims to making this winning a zero-sum. In illustrating the discourses, I will focus on significant junctures and representative cases, rather than on an accumulation of data. This means that a lot will be left out, given the vastness of the field. The main point of this study does not depend, however, on an encyclopedic exemplification of the various formations but rather on

From Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama by Tejumola Olaniyan. Copyright  1995 by Tejumola Olaniyan. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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the adequacy of the adopted methodology: to yield valuable insights even with skeletal instantiations.

A Colonialist Discourse There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. —Frantz Fanon3 There is first affirmed the existence of human groups having no culture; then of a hierarchy of cultures; and finally, the concept of cultural relativity. —Frantz Fanon4 . . . what, then, is at work, if not desire and power? —Michel Foucault5

The Eurocentric discourse on black drama rests on a number of settled assumptions, practices, and “critical” orthodoxies. The ruling norm here is the implacable inferiorization of black cultures and cultural forms. It is asserted or implied that blacks have no indigenous traditions of drama. Where it is conceded that blacks may indeed have dramatic traditions, a hierarchy is erected in which, compared with Europe and Asia, these traditions are found to be merely “proto-dramatic” or “quasi-dramatic,” forms in a state of developmental arrest in terms of style, aesthetic canons, formalization of technique, and mode of historical transmission. Closely related is the claim that if there is indeed a “properly dramatic” black tradition, then—like “education,” Christianity, and so on—it is obviously another great advantage of the Africa-Europe encounter. In other words, these properly dramatic black traditions are but mere derivatives of Western forms and traditions.6 In the larger symbolic realm, beyond debates about the identity of a cultural form, what is at stake is nothing less than the black’s capacity for culture. This should surprise none, for the founding “regime of truth” of the “prehistory” of this discourse is constituted by the subjectivist racist discourse of such names with enormous social and symbolic “capital”7 such as Hegel, Jefferson, Hume, Kant, Frobenius, Freud, Gobineau, Tempels, Levy-Bruhl and a host of other participating “fellows”8—explorers, colonial administrators, missionaries, ethnologists, and so on.9 And “a great array of bayonets and cannons,”10 Fanon writes, facilitated its dominance. I will examine this formation’s claims in some detail through two performance traditions of critical significance to the constitution of black drama in Africa-America and the Caribbean, blackface minstrelsy and the Trinidad Carnival; and the scholarly debate on the presence or absence of “drama” in Africa. The blackface minstrelsy, which numerous critics and scholars consider the first quintessentially American theatrical entertainment, flourished roughly between the early nineteenth century and the 1920s.11 White performers in “blacked-up” faces, elaborate makeup, and costume grotesquely represent what they consider black “pe-

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culiarities,” to the hilarity and delight of their equally white audiences. Troupes proliferated with the form’s increasing popularity. Blackface minstrelsy was by no means the first instance of white impersonation of blacks on the American stage. Preceding it—even overlapping with it—was the tradition of nineteenth-century melodramas and farces in which “white low comics and supernumeraries typically played black characters . . . [v]ariously called such zany names as Cusha, Pompey, Cincinatus, Sam, Juba, Cato, and the inevitable Sambo . . . [and] merely functioned as one-line comic domestics.”12 But it was minstrelsy, wholly devoted, as a group announced in 1834, to the performance of the “oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of that Sable Genus of Humanity” that caught on, arrested the national imagination for over half a century, and commanded extensive acclaim and adoration “from the White House to the California gold fields, from New Orleans to New England, from riverboats and saloons to 2500-seat theaters.”13 With comic grotesquery as the informing principle of representation, minstrelsy emphasized “black” physical features, manners, dances, speech, music, religion, dress, and so on, in a most sensational and exaggerated form. Embellished by wigs, burnt cork, and carmine, minstrels performed weird body contortions, slapstick gags, jokes, and burlesque skits. In all this the model is the southern plantation slave, represented in a study as “the folk-figure of a simple, somewhat rustic character, instinctively humorous, irrationally credulous, gifted in song and dance, interesting in spontaneous frolic, endowed with artless philosophy.”14 The theatrical representations elaborate this sketch into the black as lazy and shiftless, afflicted with a peculiar appetite for watermelon, which is devoured in an equally peculiar manner, a cavernous mouth coming in handy, which, on other occasions, shapes itself into unmatchably funny and slavishly broad grins, or as a funnel for a glass too many of cheap gin, or yet as witness to atrocious incapacities such as twisted pronunciations, meaningless long words, and incomprehensible jabberings. With the honored predilection for the choice mixture in costume of the most violent and flashy colors, the black becomes a vain, grotesque, “feeblemindedness” in human form. “Throughout the life of blackface minstrelsy as a popular form,” Jeyifo writes, “it projected one composite, undifferentiated image of blacks: that of Sambo, the overgrown child of great näiveté and obtuseness, often given to impudence but basically of affecting good humor and simplicity.”15 Perhaps more than any discursive complex, blackface minstrelsy contributed significantly to the establishment of a particular kind of American perception of blacks and their cultural difference, and the evolution of enduring negative stereotypes. It is only too obvious that “Sambo was ultimately intended to subordinate a minority group.”16 For instance, though black inferiorization was the norm of the shows, in the early years skits were sometimes interspersed with occasional swipes at the brutality and inhumanity of the sponsoring context, slavery, though not necessarily out of any principled abhorrence of the system or sympathy for the slaves. However, when the early 1850s crisis set in, threatening the stability of the Union and institutionalized white privilege, the negative representations of slavery “virtually disappeared, leav-

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ing only contrasting caricatures of contented slaves and unhappy free Negroes.”17 This dominating apparatus was so powerful that when freedom came, the black troupes that emerged were forced by circumstances—of a highly commercialized enterprise controlled and patronized by whites—to take up wholesale the performance formats and standard repertoire of the white companies, including the blackened face, widened mouth, and all those outward markers set up to signify a feeble mind. Very few contexts could boast of so blatant a circumscription of a dominated group’s self-representation. Yet if we ignore or devalue this problematic, multivocal black participation in a discourse designed for their subjection, we would be overlooking one of the origins of an authentic African-American theatrical subjectivity. For the better part of the first few decades of this century, black theatrical presence on the American stage simply refused to excise its conceptual moorings from the minstrelsy, from the early black musicals to the white-controlled, “radical” Federal Theater units.18 Even post-1960s black theater, with its generally more self-conscious attitude to the formal determinants of its practice, cannot pretend to have escaped minstrelsy’s shadow. When Ntozake Shange attempted to exorcise this ghost in 1979 in her spell #7, she realized painfully that “the minstrel may be ‘banned’ as racist/ but the minstrel is more powerful in his deformities than our alleged rejection of him,” hence after performance every night, “we wd be grandly applauded.”19 It is interesting to compare the blackface minstrelsy, in terms of growth and influence, with what appears to be its West Indian version, the Trinidadian camboulay. Thanks to such factors as the numerical superiority of the slaves and the peculiarities of West Indian slavery (the phenomenon of absentee landlords, for instance), camboulay never developed into an extensive, highly packaged commercialized form or exercised such an enduring dominative influence as its American counterpart. The other important factor was that camboulay was never cut off from its secure, ceremonial location within a specific, ephemeral, time-delineated cultural occasion/form, the carnival. A typical fare of preabolition (1834) Trinidad carnival, camboulay was almost a parallel development with minstrelsy. It featured the “pillars of society”—the white planter aristocrats and overseers—caricaturing their slaves and performing slave dances and songs, to the rhythm of “African drums.” Errol Hill in The Trinidad Carnival cites a correspondent—a retired planter—in the Port-of-Spain Gazette of March 19, 1881, on this form: At the time carnival flourished, the elite of society was masked or disguised. The favorite costume of the ladies was the graceful and costly “mulatress” of the period, while gentlemen adopted that of the garden Negro, in Creole, negue jadin, or black field slave. At carnival time our mothers and grandmothers have even danced the belair to the African drum whose sounds did not offend their dainty ears, and our fathers and grandfathers danced the bamboula, the ghouba, and the calinda . . . sometimes also the negue jadin united in bands would proceed on evenings to the cannes brulees. Their splendid march with torches through the town streets imitated what actually took place in the estates when a plantation was on fire. In such cases laborers on neighboring estates were conducted there

68 tejumola olaniyan alternately, day and night, to assist in grinding the burned canes before they went sour; thus the cannes brulees.20

Introduced to the region by the whites, the Trinidad carnival was for long kept up and sanitized against the participation of other racial groups. A strictly hierarchical society, the recognized distinctions were, in order of importance, “Whites, Free Persons of Colour, Indians and Slaves.” Permission for non-white participation in the revelries, of course, followed this hierarchy, as a former police chief, L. M. Fraser, reported in 1881: The Free Persons of Colour were subjected to very stringent Regulations and although not forbidden to mask, were yet compelled to keep to themselves and never presumed to join in the amusements of the privileged class. The Indians kept entirely aloof, and the slaves except as onlookers, or by special favour when required to take part, had no share in the Carnival which was confined exclusively to the upper class of the community.21

As long as the status quo remained, the available newspapers—veritable mirrors of ruling class opinion—supported the carnival with elaborate reports and “flattering praise for the glitter and the merrymaking escapades of the upper-class maskers.” However, following emancipation in 1834—and then the abolition of compulsory apprenticeship in 1838—when the former slaves and other lower-class elements practically appropriated the carnival, the tone of these papers changed dramatically, becoming “antipathetic and hostile.” The upper-class whites withdrew from the carnival. In Fraser’s view, Carnival became a “disorderly amusement for the lower classes.” As early as the very first year of freedom, a paper lamented the “deficiency of elegant bustle, which was to be seen during the Carnival week of olden times.” In 1838 it was a “wretched buffoonery” which can only “brutalize the faculty of the lower order of our population.”22 The campaign for its abolition, ultimately unsuccessful, continued throughout the century. Camboulay passed on to the former slaves, who staged it with great devotion, complete with the black makeup and costume, just as in black participation in blackfaced minstrelsy—a representation of a representation. Unlike minstrelsy, however, what was caricatured in camboulay was not the slaves’ so-called peculiarities but their response to a particularly agonizing moment of forced labor. This accounted, perhaps, for the ex-slaves’ prompt and passionate appropriation of the form. The Port-of-Spain Gazette certainly grasped the power and subversive potential of such passionate enactments when it described a performance in 1858 as little more than “the hooting of a parcel of semi-savages . . . exhibiting hellish scenes and the most demoniacal representations of the days of slavery as they were forty years ago.”23 Decades, even over a century later, we still hear echoes of this description in the representations of black West Indian performance forms by scholars such as Martha W. Beckwith, Richardson Wright, and Ivy Baxter.24 While the former slaves, appropriating Carnival with their own forms, insisted on connectedness of histories by their cultural eclecticism, the whites violently clung to difference and purism, even at the cost of giving up and labeling inferior a form they

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had evidently enjoyed so much. The dominant white attitude to carnival did not begin to change to tolerance until the late teens and early twenties of this century. But even if this were otherwise, the influence of this form was bound to be profound on contemporary Caribbean drama. The colonialist Eurocentric discourse on continental African performance forms is similarly fixated with conceptual purism. Here the emphasis is largely on a critical definition of what constitutes “drama” in Africa. Ruth Finnegan’s influential work, Oral Literature in Africa, published in 1970, is singular in this regard. Her chapter “Drama” still remains for many the canonical survey. Her opening lines alone reveal her unconfessed limitations and restrictive methodology: How far one can speak of indigenous drama in Africa is not an easy question. In this it differs from previous topics [treated in the book] like, say, panegyric, political poetry, or prose narratives, for there it was easy to discover African analogies to the familiar European forms.25

Only if Africa could supply indigenous “analogies to the familiar European forms” would it be established as a continent with drama. Yet it is not difficult to contend that her proposition still leaves a space of freedom, a leeway, if only “analogy” were interpreted with some vision and creativity, away from the anesthesia of thesaurus and dictionary entries. Shunning this path, Finnegan keeps looking for European drama on the African continent: “what . . . we normally regard as drama”; what “we are accustomed [to].” The “definition” of drama she proposes, in all its pedantic formalism, is designed to achieve little else if not failure: It is clearly necessary to reach at least some rough agreement about what is to count as “drama”. Rather than produce a verbal definition, it seems better to point to the various elements which tend to come together in what, in the wide sense, we normally regard as drama. Most important is the idea of enactment, of representation through actors who imitate persons and events. This is also usually associated with other elements, appearing to a greater or lesser degree at different times or places: linguistic content; plot; the represented interaction of several characters; specialized scenery, etc.; often music; and—of particular importance in most African performances—dance. Now it is very seldom in Africa that all these elements of drama come together in a single performance.

Her—undeniably productive—failure prepares and authorizes her thesis, even against acknowledged contrary evidence: “Though some writers have very positively affirmed the existence of native African drama, it would perhaps be truer to say that in Africa, in contrast to Western Europe and Asia, drama is not typically a widespread or a developed form.”26 In the long passage that follows, let me direct attention to Finnegan’s important newfound lack in African drama, “tragedy” (the highest and most civilized art, thanks to Aristotle), and to the redoubtable performance of discursive violence especially in the consistent attribution of difference as fault and, toward the end, the visitation of a clear haziness of vision and failure of scholarship upon supposed inadequacies of the phenomenon under study:

70 tejumola olaniyan We go further and add that what dramatic or quasi- dramatic performances can be discovered never seem to involve tragedy in the normal sense. The events and characters are depicted as comedy, and treated more or less realistically, even cynically. Though costumes and masks are sometimes important, there is no evidence of specialized scenery or of buildings or sites specifically designed for theatrical performances. The players are sometimes skilled experts or belong to artistic associations such as the Ekine Society, but there is no tradition of professional actors. The audience, finally, is sometimes a “pure” audience in the sense that it appreciates without itself taking part directly; but, with the significance of the dance and the absence of the “proscenium barrier,” there is often a tendency to greater audience participation than is typical of most recent Western drama. We can also make other negative points. Little direct light is thrown on the question of the origin of drama by a study of African dramatic forms—except possibly in the vague sense that it might be said to enlarge our general view of the possibilities of drama, or of certain elements in drama. Similarly it adds little support to the kind of tragic archetypes and of rituals ultimately referable to The Golden Bough.27

When a few years later E. T. Kirby begins his essay “Indigenous African Theatre” thus: “It is true, as Ruth Finnegan has observed . . . ,”28 he testifies to the epidemic of a new narcissistic theoretical canon. It is important to understand Finnegan’s concept of difference, given her insistence that Africans in Africa produce European drama. To the extent that we are all the same, her work becomes unnecessary. If it is difference that enables her project, then her insistence on its erasure becomes paradoxical. But we must not assume that this illogicality lacks any logic, or that it thus self-destructs in the realm of power. Difference here is not erased but whipped into conformity and delimited in a hierarchy.29 It is interesting then to note that Ibadan, where Finnegan stayed for a time while working on her book, and where she signed the preface, is one of the main centers of the still vibrant Yoruba traveling theater “movement,” with a recorded tradition going back to the late 1590s.30 Apparently this theater refused to provide Finnegan with “analogies to the familiar European forms.” We can say only that black drama or lack of it that appears in Eurocentric discourse is, as Edward Said writes of the Orient in Orientalism, “a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces” that brings it into the orbit of Western consciousness and empire.31 It has little to do with a supposed original model, though Eurocentrism never ceases to claim dispassionate investigation, “scientificity,” “realism,” and “truth.” Nor is the power, efficacy, and value of Eurocentrism as an apparatus of domination in any way dependent on the closeness of its representations to the presumed “real.” Amilcar Cabral shows best this apparatus of domination in its broadest ramifications: The practice of imperialist rule—its affirmation or negation—demanded (and still demands) a more or less accurate knowledge of the society it rules and of the historical reality (. . . economic, social, and cultural) in the middle of which it exists. This knowledge is necessarily exposed in terms of comparison with the dominating subject and with its own historical reality. Such a knowledge is a vital necessity in the practice of imperialist

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rule which results in the confrontation, mostly violent, between two identities which are totally dissimilar in their historical elements and contradictory in their different functions. The search for such a knowledge contributed to a general enrichment of human and social knowledge in spite of the fact that it was one-sided, subjective, and very often unjust.32

A Counterhegemonic Discourse There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. —Frantz Fanon You’ve taken my blues and gone— You sing ’em on Broadway And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl, You mixed ’em up with symphonies And you fixed ’em So they don’t sound like me. Yep, you done taken my blues and gone. You also took my spirituals and gone. You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones And in all kinds of Swing Mikados And in everything but what’s about me— But someday somebody’ll Stand up and talk about me, And write about me— Black and beautiful— And sing about me, And put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be Me myself! Yes, it’ll be me! —Langston Hughes33 Our aim was to give vent to our talent and to prove to everybody who was willing to look, to watch, to listen, that we were as good at drama as anybody else had been or could be. The door was opened a tiny bit to us and, as always, the Black man, when faced with an open door, no matter how small the wedge might be, eased in. —Clarence Muse34

If it is the horizon of hope of every dominant discursive practice to be hegemonic, that is, to achieve the plenitude and immediacy of a fully operational “habitus”35 so that it passes itself off as natural and becomes unconscious of its own construction— genesis amnesia in Bourdieu’s phrase—it is the characteristic feature of counterdiscourses to insistently question this eloquent certitude and to emphasize instead the

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necessarily contingent status of the dominant. The claim of the dominant to seamlessly account for all experience is embarrassed by a force and passion that is not only disconcerting, but also negative. And this force is guaranteed, paradoxically, by an “internal necessity” that defines dominant discourses: [N]ot only are they unable to admit difference, in a sense they are incapable of imagining it. This is so for a simple reason. Once imagined, even so that it might be proscribed, difference acquires a phantom but fundamental existence. If it is countenanced at all, its legitimation, its inclusion within the canons of the orthodox, has to that extent begun. Thus even the work of proscribing it must be proscribed.”36

The task of proscription again discloses the fiction of inevitability and intrinsic selfevidence, and thus authorizes a counterdiscursive space, a space that is opened in a “structural limitation of social control,” for no discourse is capable of hegemony with a totalitarian completeness. This is where we must locate the great value of counterdiscourses: as counterhegemonic practices, they are “the emergent principle of history’s dynamism . . . the force which ensures the flow of social time,” for “situated as other [they] have the capacity to situate: to relativize the authority and stability of a dominant system of utterances which cannot even countenance their existence. They read that which cannot read them all.”37 In this capacity, however, lies a problematic feature of counterdiscourses: their deep and intricate relations with the dominant. They share the same ground with the dominant and thus run the risk of a fixation with the restrictive binary logics of the latter and of recycling its epistemological premises. It is not surprising then that many counterdiscourses are easily incorporated by the dominant. In its multiplex manifestations, the anticolonialist, anti-Eurocentric counterdiscourse on black drama evinces these strengths as well as weaknesses. In its insistence on privileging the presence, point of view, and self-determination of Africans, continental or diasporan, this discourse has earned for itself the label “Afrocentric.”38 The unevenness of this discourse demands concrete specification. Deeply inscribed in it is an unresolved tension between the imperatives of its counterhegemonic practice and the reality of an absence or underdevelopment of counterhegemonic infrastructures. Thus it is often the rule rather than the exception that many Afrocentric formulations unwittingly borrow supporting props, albeit in an inverted and most often subversive form, from the colonialist Eurocentric epistemology. We are led then to the formation’s greatest strength and distinguishing hallmark: its relativism, the basis on which it challenges Eurocentric epistemological dominance by proposing different rationalities: there are different rules for what constitutes “drama” in different societies; European drama is not the norm. Trying to escape a surrender to the logics of hegemonic representations, it substitutes a quest for different representations. Let us briefly explore the significant traces of this pan-African formation. In her famous 1895 lecture “The Value of Race Literature,” Victoria Earle Matthews insisted that “[n]ever was the outlook for Race Literature brighter” in spite of the “appalling evil” of “oppressive legislation, aided by grossly inhuman customs” be-

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ing suffered by the African-American. She thus advertised an agenda that, with rare singleness of purpose, would occupy the “race” for the better part of the twentieth century, a “recipe” for an escape from the clutches of minstrelsy.39 Against the widespread “perverted and indifferent translations of those prejudiced against us,” Matthews called for counterrepresentations, “thoughtful counterirritants”: a “Race Literature” that will not only emphasize “our history and individuality as a people” but also “suggest to the world the wrong and contempt with which the lion viewed the picture that the hunter and the famous painter besides, had drawn of the King of the Forest.” She argued, though, that Race Literature does not mean “thoughtless praise of ourselves,” a warning that presages later famous engagements with Negritude such as that of Wole Soyinka or Paulin Hountondji, or Cabral’s own proposition of a liberating attitude to African cultural materials.40 One of the new talents mentioned by Matthews as hope for the literature of struggle was none other than W.E.B. Du Bois, who had just then obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard. Du Bois was to later play a prominent role in bringing to national prominence the problem of the representation of difference in American culture not only through his organizational acumen—his management of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—but also through his writings focusing on the politics of the production and circulation of cultural discourses and their attendant subjectivities. “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” took the form of a national debate as the Harlem Renaissance was just beginning. Du Bois subsequently put forward an idea for a theatrical counterdiscourse, elaborating its four fundamental principles: About us, By us, For us, and Near us, principles that directly challenged the reigning fashion of “Negro Theater” written and packaged by whites, and also the idea of audience and related theatrical success defined merely commercially, within the asphyxiating parameters of Broadway. With this manifesto also came Du Bois’s formal preference for the pageant, a large-scale, large-cast theatrical event with diffused plot and dispersed climaxes, a form that simulates traditional African festivals and is at odds with the hegemonic tradition of the “well-made play.” The Little Theatre Movement housed in Harlem, as well as the Crisis playwrighting contests, were designed to give institutional sanctions to the new theatrical practice.41 The ultimate aim, Du Bois said, echoing a widespread conception at the time, was “a real folk-play movement of American Negroes.”42 The “real folk” formulation is not unproblematic, to say the least.43 Not even the age’s most eloquent, and perhaps most influential formulation, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” is able to totally distance itself from the classical anthropological tone in its valorization of the vital and close-to-earth “lowdown folks,” and the matching condemnation of the pretentious, “standardized” culture of the black middle class.44 A set of attributes the Eurocentric imagination attached to black culture—earthy, natural: a classical romantic whip against the mechanistic dominant white culture—is uncritically appropriated by the black (middleclass) intellectual and foisted on the black lower class. This twist is clearer in Alain Locke’s understanding of the folk form and his investment of “Negro life” as its

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“authentic atmosphere”: “The drama that will refine and entertain, that may even captivate us before long, is likely to be uncurdled, almost naive reflection of the poetry and folk feeling of a people who have after all a different soul and temperament from that of the smug, unimaginative industrialist and the self-righteous and inhibited Puritan.”45 This is another version of Negritude’s canonical nostrum expressed by Léopold Sédar Senghor: emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek.46 But Locke was still able to envision a strikingly different dramatic practice, though he did not live to see it happen: Negro dramatic art must not only be liberated from the handicaps of external disparagement, but from its self-imposed limitation. It must more and more have the courage to be original, to break with established dramatic convention of all sorts. It must have the courage to develop its own idiom, to pour itself into new moulds; in short, to be experimental.47

Such iconoclastic experimentation did surface, decades later, with the great cultural ferment of the 1960s known as the Black Arts Movement. Unlike the previous eras preoccupied largely with a neutralization of the “negative images of the race” while remaining essentially grounded within the same aesthetic structure and vision that produced the lamented images in the first place, the new dispensation made that received structure and vision constant targets of interrogation. The movement had a variable character, for its interrogations did not always translate to enabling propositions. Thus it was that within a generally (racially) self-critical movement, we also had full-blown what was the hidden prop of the valorization of a supposedly “folk” black culture from Du Bois to Locke: the reification of culture known as cultural nationalism.48 In spite of this, we could still say of the movement that never in the tradition was there such an irruption so simultaneously inward—an uncompromising critique of black culture itself—and outward—a re-visioning of the relationship with the larger social structure, in both national and international dimensions.49 The first anthology of the movement, Black Fire, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, appeared in 1968, containing essays, poetry, fiction, and short plays. It was, however, the Drama Review special issue on black theater of the same year, edited by Ed Bullins, that immediately became the movement’s unofficial manifesto. Together with Black Expression (1969) and The Black Aesthetic (1971), these anthologies codified the movement’s central concern, the development of an anti-Eurocentric, anti-imperialist theatrical-cultural practice known as the “black aesthetic.”50 LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, unarguably the one in the movement in whom the consciousness explosion of the times received its most complex expression, articulated the informing operational canons of this aesthetic: I would like to . . . say that my conception of art, black art, is that it has to be collective, it has to be functional, it has to be committed and that actually, if it’s not stemming from conscious nationalism, then at this time it’s invalid. When I say collective, that it comes from the collective experience of Black people, when I say committed, it has to be committed to change, revolutionary change. When I say functional, it has to have a function to the lives of black people.51

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In these terms, the new black theater literally defined itself away from the mainstream American theater. “Collective” pushes this theater from the norm of formalized entertainment symbolized by Broadway to a non-play event characteristic of communal rituals and religious occasions. “Committed” underscores consciousness grasped as transitory, continually transforming itself in response—”functional”—to the perceived needs, hopes, and aspirations of black people. The task, properly perceived, is a quest for form, suggested by Baraka as post-white or post-American form. These largely didactic expositions interspersed with vague rhetorical intimations of formal specificity later gave way to more sustained explorations of a distinctive difference for the black theatrical event built on re-visioned African-American and African performance forms.52 The dramatic achievements are equally varied, from ideological vociferations and agitprop pieces to some form of modified realism to expansive rituals—the latter the most favored as the truly Afrocentric and anti-Western form. Kimberly W. Benston suggestively traces this path as “a curve which moves dialectically from quasi-naturalism and overt rage against Euro-American institutions toward the shaping of uniquely Afro-American mythologies and symbolisms, flexibility of dramatic form, and participatory theatre within the black community,” from mimesis to methexis: Spiritually and technically, this movement is one from mimesis, or representation of an action, to methexis, or communal “helping-out” of the action by all assembled. It is a process that could be described alternatively as a shift from drama—the spectacle observed—to ritual—the event which dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, between self and other. Through this process, the Black beholder is theoretically transformed from a detached individual whose private consciousness the playwright sought to reform, to a participatory member of tribal or, in this case, national ceremony which affirms a shared vision.53

Although a similar graph could be plotted for the late 1960s South African Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) theater—a parallel to the African-American cultural renaissance—no comparable body of theoretical elaborations was produced.54 A “Theatre Council” planned by the South African Students Organization (SASO, the core body within BCM) to appropriate “poetry, music, drama, fine arts and films” as weapons in the anti-apartheid struggle did little to detail strategies toward achieving the stated objective.55 What was repeated most often by the theater groups was the “conscientization” (consciousness-raising) and revolutionary functions relevant black cultural forms must perform.56 The groups in practice cared little for specifically indigenous or non-Eurocentric forms but mixed forms at will, combining elements of realism and nonrealism; barriers between performers and the audience were observed or ignored as seen fit; fiery, direct polemical speeches were not uncommon; and many groups were well known for multimedia shows, integrating song, film projection, recitation, and chant. Kavanagh comments on this harried eclecticism: To a large extent, such a form emerged organically from the relation of the audience to the performers. This was not a commercial theatre. The actors were not hired. They were an-

76 tejumola olaniyan gry members of a wronged community talking directly to others of that community about their common oppression. Artifice and the traditional embellishments of bourgeois realist or avant-garde theatre were not only unnecessary but would have interposed themselves damagingly between the performers and their audience.57

Recent black and racially mixed South African dramas not only show elements of this form but are far more assured in the appropriation of indigenous formal structures fashioned in the context of anti-apartheid struggle. Take, for instance, the prevalence of small casts whose members play multiple roles, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing—a pragmatic response by the most social of the arts to an environment hostile to even elementary forms of human assembly. Athol Fugard, who popularized this form, called it “two-hander” dramaturgy.58 On their own part, Afrocentric scholars of African drama engaged the all-important question of taxonomy, debunking colonialist, “universal” standards of measurement and classification and proposing instead different sets of criteria informed by the indigenous traditions for the appreciation of the traditions’ performance forms. What the Eurocentric discourse denigrated as “predrama” became validly dramatic. And to the colonialist charge of a lack of historical consciousness due to an absence of written records, the unequivocal anticolonialist answer was that orality is an equally valid medium of historical transmission of cultural forms and their varied developmental patterns. This validation of orality also served to link the past with the present and thereby deny the colonialist claim of an absolute historical break in African culture due to colonialism (such that African theatrical forms today are theorized to be only derivatives of Western sources). This outline closely approximates the position differently articulated, explicitly or otherwise, and with varying degrees of sophistication, by theorists and critics such as Adedeji, Ossie Enekwe, Mineke Schipper, Bakary Traore, Oyin Ogunba, Oyekan Owomoyela, Kacke Gotrick, and Wole Soyinka. Among these are to be found systematic answers to the charges of the Eurocentric discourse. It is instructive that Soyinka’s famous theoretical essay on African tragedy, “The Fourth Stage,” . . . got no mention in Finnegan and only a footnote reference, within a different emphasis, in Graham-White, for years the American “authority” on African drama. Also ignored was the work of Adedeji on the Alarinjo, Yoruba professional theater since the late 1500s.59 To take a representative argument here: against the colonialist dismissal of African festivals as the “‘spontaneous’ inartistic expression” of primitive tribes, Soyinka suggested that the festivals be seen as constituting “in themselves pure theatre at its most prodigal and resourceful . . . the most stirring expressions of man’s instinct and need for drama at its most comprehensive and community-involving.” In one sweeping move, he turned a Eurocentric canon on its head: “instead of considering festivals from one point of view only—that of providing, in a primitive form, the ingredients of drama—we may even begin examining the opposite point of view: that contemporary drama, as we experience it today, is a contraction of drama, necessitated by the productive order of society in other directions.”60

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This last intervention has a close bearing on the ongoing debate in the Caribbean regarding the dramatic relevance—as an authentic and indigenous form—of carnival, the region’s most popular cultural form. Derek Walcott, the area’s leading dramatist, even while dramaturgically utilizing carnival forms, nevertheless once launched a withering attack at the suggestion, describing carnival as simply “theatrical” and not “theater,” and as “the art of the brochure”—to underscore its corruption and commercialization by the state. He argued that “[c]arnival was as meaningless as the art of the actor confined to mimicry. And now the intellectuals, courting and fearing the mass, found values in it that they had formerly despised. They apotheosised the folk form, insisting that calypsos were poems. Their programme, for all its pretext to change, was a manual for stasis. . . .”61 Walcott’s position directly challenged that of Errol Hill, who sees carnival as a great cultural resource from which an indigenous drama can be fashioned. In Trinidad Carnival, he analyzed in meticulous detail the “dramatic elements” of carnival and concluded that much of carnival’s material is suited to the theater. Its creative appropriation promises an end to the eyesore in which “[p]lays written by native authors are about Trinidadians or West Indians and are set in Trinidad or the West Indies. But the form of these plays is European inspired, and their manner of presentation is European.” The carnival, in short, is the “mandate” for a national theater.62 While Walcott may be right on the commercialization of carnival, this is a different argument from declaring it as dramatic or nondramatic. And there is just no reason why calypsos cannot be “poems,” if only the gospel of poetry “according to Milton” would be dropped. The irony here is that in spite of their apparent disagreements, Walcott and Hill are drawing from the same unexamined assumptions borrowed from the ruling discourse. Hill aims to defend the “dramatic” potential of carnival but he takes for granted the unproblematic universal translatability of “drama,” in spite of his consistently articulated disagreements with the structure of “Euro-American” theater. If indeed, as he insists, these—the structures of Euro-American theater—should no longer be privileged structures of Euro-American theater—should no longer be privileged because they are inapplicable to the West Indies, then his analyses point to only one result: carnival is authentic, full-fledged drama, Soyinka’s own argument about African festivals. Yet Hill never makes this point. On what basis then is carnival not “drama” but its potential? The Afrocentric discourse, basically binarist in its strategies, must not blandly be dismissed. This is the insight dispersed throughout Fanon’s works, in his simultaneous justification and critique of Negritude. Also, Chinua Achebe reputedly once said, against Sartre’s famous stricture on Negritude (that it is an antiracist racism), that an antiracist racism can be an important antidote to white racism.63 I anchor, then, with this incisive point from Jonathan Dollimore: Jacques Derrida reminds us that binary oppositions are “a violent hierarchy” where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other. A crucial stage in their deconstruction involves an overturning, an inversion “which brings low what is high.” The political effect of ignoring this stage, of trying to jump beyond the hierarchy into a world quite free of it

78 tejumola olaniyan is simply to leave it intact in the only world we have. Both the reversal of authentic/inauthentic opposition . . . and the subversion of authenticity itself . . . are different aspects of overturning in Derrida’s sense. Moreover they are stages in a process of resistance. . . .64

A Post-Afrocentric Discourse There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. How do we extricate ourselves? When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if . . . intelligence [is] invoked to proclaim the equality of men, [it has] also been employed to justify the extermination of men. —Frantz Fanon65

Fanon’s question and challenge define the space of an emerging discourse that tries at once to be both anticolonialist and post-Afrocentric. Its great distinguishing feature and strength is a more or less singular insistence on working through the excessive manichaeism of the Eurocentric and Afrocentric discourses and affirming instead the more difficult foundational premise of an irreversible imbrication of histories. I say this premise is “more difficult” because it displaces and is incompatible with the easy, smug satisfaction of a binary apprehension. What it suggests is an agonistic terrain, proposed as shared but from which a distinct identity must nevertheless be forged, for the sharing is in grossly unequal terms. It is thus a zone of the most complex, challenging, and dynamic conceptions of difference; a zone of endless critical questioning, as Fanon indicates: Sartre begins Orphée Noir thus: “What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that had muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?” I do not know; but I say that he who looks into my eyes for anything but a perpetual question will have to lose his sight; neither recognition nor hate.66

What the “perpetual questioning” subverts is the culturalist notion of difference that animates both the Eurocentric and Afrocentric discourses—the fixation of one upon white = civilized—black = barbaric opposition and of the other on a “white aesthetic” against a “black aesthetic”—and the more or less quiet disregard by both for the complexity of the enabling conditions of their utterances. The post-Afrocentric discourse not only quests for different representations but also, simultaneously, queries the representation of difference. A related operative force of the post-Afrocentric formation is therefore its emphasis on historical specificity, which it does in a way that not only reveals the hierarchy between the dominant discourse and the counter-discourse—judging alone from the

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rhetoric of some of the latter, one would think this hierarchy is no more—but also emphasizes the most frequently related internal differences within each formation. Biodun Jeyifo writes: In this discourse, the issue is now problematized beyond the parameters of the two previous sets of discourses since analysis characteristically now turns on questions like: Which African or European sources and influences do we find operative and combined in any given African theatrical expression? What motivates the interaction and combination of the “foreign” and indigenous,” for neo-traditionalism, or a liberating and genuine artistic exploration of the range and diversity of styles, techniques, paradigms and traditions available within both the “foreign” and the “indigenous”? What social and ideological uses and functions mediate, legitimize or problematize the intercultural fusion of the “foreign” and “indigenous”? And what aspects, within the reinvented “indigenous” forms, appear “foreign” to an indigenous audience and conversely, what absorbed “foreign” elements seem “familiar”?67

As an “emerging” practice, the third discourse bears many traces of this form of marginality. Many of its identified features are rarely all present in one work, or are most often muted and needing amplification. And it is not uncommon to find uncritical romances with the Afrocentric discourse—the main formation with which it shares driving aspirations and subordinate institutional status in relation to the Eurocentric, and whose grounds it largely occupies but challenges, extends, and re-visions—or even occasional lapses into assumptions, subtle and refined, characteristic of the Eurocentric—a complex with which it shares ruling standards of dramaturgy, academic performance, and fellowship. The latter seems to be the case, for instance, with Genevieve Fabre, the distinguished and non-Eurocentric scholar of African-American culture who writes, without any qualification—and as late as 1982—that “[i]n American theatre today hardly a season goes by without one or more black productions appearing on the legitimate stage.”68 The phrase “legitimate stage” goes without even the customary quotation marks, as if it was an uncontestable and uncontested designation without an acrimonious history, even if muted. Even if this were not so, “legitimate stage” still remains a concept that an anti-Eurocentric perspective must view at least with skepticism, or put into historical context. By attempting none of these, a phenomenon in American theater history is flattened and robbed of its due excitement. More important, the subjectivity of the “illegitimate”—since “legitimate” announces little else if not the precariousness of its legitimacy, courtesy of the excluded contenders—is thereby silenced, paradoxically what Fabre’s book set out to give voice to, and splendidly did.

Notes 1. See Jeyifo, “The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition,” 242. 2. “To have been colonized was a fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results, especially after national independence had been achieved. Poverty, dependency, underdevelop-

80 tejumola olaniyan ment, various pathologies of power and corruption, plus of course notable achievements in war, literacy, economic development: this mix of characteristics designated the colonized people who had freed themselves on one level but who remained victims of their past on another.” Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 207. 3. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10. 4. Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” Toward the African Revolution, 31. 5. Foucault, The Archaeology, 219. 6. See Jeyifo, “Reinvention,” 242–43. 7. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 171–83. 8. Foucault, The Archaeology, 225–26 on the “fellowships of discourse.” 9. See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 1–23; Miller, Blank Darkness, 3–65; Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 1–20; Césaire, Discourse, and Hammond and Jablow, The Myth of Africa. On the construction of Eurocentrism, see Amin, Eurocentrism; and Bernal, Black Athena, 1–73. 10. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36. 11. Some scholarly commentaries on blackface minstrelsy I found useful include Lott, Love and Theft, Jeyifo, Masks of Otherness, Boskin, Sambo; Toll, Blacking Up; Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy, Relcher, “The Place of the Negro”; Wittke, Tambo and Bones; and Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy. With particular reference to black participation, see Sampson, Blacks in Blackface. 12. Jeyifo, Masks of Otherness, 65. 13. Toll, Blacking Up, 30, v. 14. F. P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and Accuracy of a Tradition (1925), cited in Wittke, Tambo and Bones, 7. 15. Jeyifo, Masks of Otherness, 1. 16. Boskin, Sambo, 16. 17. Toll, Blacking Up, 66. 18. See the following historical and critical studies: Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama; Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era; Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925–1959; Mitchell, Black Drama; Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre; Bond, The Negro and the Drama; and Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form. 19. Shange, “unrecovered losses/ black theater traditions,” Foreword, Three Pieces, xiii. 20. Hill, The Trinidad Carnival, 11. See also Hill’s excellent historical account of the Eurocentric stage in Jamaica, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900. 21. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 10. 22. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 17, 16, for all the citations in this paragraph. 23. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 14, 25, for the citations in this paragraph. 24. See, as further instances of the Eurocentric discourse in the Caribbean, Beckwith, Black Roadways; Wright, Revels in Jamaica; and Baxter, The Arts of an Island. 25. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 500. 26. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 500, 516 (emphasis added), 501, 500. 27. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 516. 28. Kirby, “Indigenous African Theatre,” 22. For expressions of similar position, see De Graft, “Roots in African Drama and Theatre,” 77–80; Rotimi, “The Drama in African Ritual Display”; Echeruo, “The Dramatic Limits of Igbo Ritual;” 136–48; and Dhlomo, “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama.” 29. Further examples of the Eurocentric discourse include Graham-White, The Drama of Black Africa; Havemeyer, The Drama of Savage Peoples; British Drama League, “Native African Drama.”

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30. See, respectively, these two studies of the movement in general, and of a contemporary leading figure of the troupes in particular: Joel Adedeji, “The Alarinjo Theatre”; Jeyifo, The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria; and Ebun Clark, Hubert Ogunde. 31. Said, Orientalism, 202–3. 32. Amilcar Cabral, “Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle,” Return to the Source, 58. 33. Langston Hughes, “Note on Commercial Theatre,” 190. 34. Clarence Muse, blurb on the cover of Hill, The Theater of Black Americans. 35. This is Bourdieu’s concept, explained as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.” Outline of a Theory, 72. 36. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 14. 37. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 56, 15–16. 38. See Olaniyan, “Discussing Afrocentrism.” One of the very visible proponents of Afrocentrism in the United States is Molefi K. Asante. See his The Afrocentric Idea and Afrocentricity. 39. Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 170–85; 184, 171, 185, 175, 176. 40. Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 183–84, 173–74, 178–83. See also Soyinka, “And after the Narcissist,” 53, 56; Hountondji, African Philosophy, and Cabral, Return to the Source. For sympathetic accounts of negritude, see Finn, Voices of Negritude; and Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, 67–124. 41. Most of the plays that won the contests were not pageants by any stretch of the imagination. Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower (1928), one of the most experimental of the plays, is expressionist. For a brief account of Du Bois’s famous pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), see Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre, 78–80. 42. On Du Bois’s stated terms of the debate on representation and the various responses, see the following issues of Crisis: 31 (February 1926): 165 (March 1926): 219–20, (April 1926): 278; 32 (May 1926): 35–36, (June 1926): 71–73, (August 1926): 193–94, (September 1926): 238–39; and 33 (November 1926): 28–29. Over forty years later, this symposium was revived by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., perhaps a comment on its continuing pertinence, in spite of changed circumstances. See the responses published in two 1987 issues of Black American Literature Forum, 21.1–2 and 21.3. For Du Bois’s formulation of the four principles, see “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre.” See also his related essay, “Criteria of Negro Art.” For a detailed review of Du Bois’s aesthetic writings, see Turner, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic.” 43. Julia Peterkin, a “sympathetic” respondent to Du Bois’s national debate, wrote: “I write about Negroes because they represent human nature obscured by so little veneer; human nature groping among its instinctive impulses and in an environment which is tragically primitive and often unutterably pathetic.” The Crisis 32 (September 1926): 239. 44. Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 177, 178–79. 45. Alain Locke, Introduction, Locke and Gregory, Plays of Negro Life. The introduction has no pagination. Most of the twenty plays in the collection are by white authors. The next two anthologies implicitly critique this fact. The plays were written by blacks and contained materials essentially of “racial upliftment” designed for schools. “Why does not the Negro dramatize his own life and bring the world to him?” Carter G. Woodson queried in the introduction to

82 tejumola olaniyan one of them (Plays and Pageants), “Paul Green, Eugene O’Neill, and Marc Connelly cannot do it. They see that the thing is possible, and they are trying to do it; but at best they misunderstand the Negro because they cannot think black.” Richardson, Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, iii; and Richardson and Miller, Negro History in Thirteen Plays. For a discussion of these anthologies, see Sanders, The Development of Black Theater in America. In his obviously “political” conception of drama, Woodson is in good company with Du Bois—against Locke. Hay in his African American Theatre (Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2) has done a useful survey of the influence of this ideological division on subsequent African-American dramatic/ theatrical production. 46. Senghor, “The African Apprehension of Reality,” 29–34. For an illuminating commentary on Senghor’s proposition, see Hountondji, “Reason and Tradition,” 141–42. 47. Cited in Jeyifous, “Black Critics and Black Theatre,” 39. 48. Amiri Baraka, with his usual acerbic wit, characterizes this as “the guilt of the overintegrated,” in his account of his cultural nationalist days. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 255. 49. For some illuminating insight into this period of productive flux that appropriately left little as sacrosanct from critical inspection, see Gitlin, The Sixties; Carlisle, The Roots of Black Nationalism; Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America; Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Rebellion or Revolution?; and Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism. On theater, see Mance Williams, Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. 50. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, Black Fire, The Drama Review 12 (summer 1968); Gayle, Black Expression, and also The Black Aesthetic. 51. Quoted in Jeyifous, “Black Critics and Black Theatre,” 41. 52. See, for instance, Harrison, The Drama of Nommo; and Molette and Molette, Black Theater. 53. Benston, “The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama,” 62. 54. For a valuable introduction to the Black Consciousness Movement and antiapartheid resistance, see Fanon, Black Consciousness in South Africa. 55. Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, 161–68, has tried to distill a Black Consciousness dramatic-cultural theory from the manifestoes of the various groups and from conference releases and fragmented propositions on culture by many of the movement’s activists. See also Larlham, Black Theater, Dance and Ritual in South Africa, 75–92; Coplan, In Township Tonight! 203–29. Hauptfleisch and Steadman’s South African Theatre, introduces four different theater traditions in South Africa, Black, English, Alternative, and Afrikaans. 56. See Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle, 162–63. See also Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” I Write What I Like, 96. 57. Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle, 166. 58. See Fugard, Notebooks: 1960–1977; Jeyifo, “The Reductive ‘Two-hander’ Dramaturgy of Athol Fugard: Aspects of the Art and Society Dialectic,” The Truthful Lie, 98–104. Ndiovu’s, ed., Woza Afrika! An Anthology of South African Plays is a recent anthology of black and interracial South African drama. 59. Enekwe, “Myth, Ritual and Drama in Igboland”; Adedeji, “Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre,” “Traditional Yoruba Theater,” and “A Yoruba Pantomime”; Ogunba, “Traditional African Festival Drama”; Lesohai, “Black South African Theatre”; Kennedy, In Search of African Theatre; John P. Clark, The Example of Shakespeare; Traore, Black African Theatre and Its Social Functions; Gotrick, Apidan Theatre and Modern Drama; Schipper, Theatre and Society in Africa; Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage and Myth, Literature and the African World; Owomoyela, Visions and Revisions; and Enekwe, Igbo Masks. 60. Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 192, 194, 195.

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61. Walcott, “What the Twilight Says,” 37, 34–35. 62. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 4, 69–113, 114–15. For a more detailed review of these positions, see Omotoso, The Theatrical into Theatre, 46–61. See also Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900. 63. See Taylor, The Narrative of Liberation, 160. 64. Dollimore, “The dominant and the deviant,” 190. See also Derrida, Positions, 41–42. 65. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10, 29. 66. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 29. This is also the position elaborated decades later by Derrida, in his argument that “[t]he invention of the other is not opposed to that of the same, its difference beckons toward another coming about . . . the one that allows the coming of a still unanticipatable alterity and for which no horizon of waiting as yet seems ready, in place, available. Yet it is necessary to prepare for it; for to allow the coming of the entirely other, passivity, a certain kind of resigned passivity for which everyone comes down to the same, is not suitable.” Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” 55. 67. Jeyifo, “The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition,” 247. 68. Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor, 1.

References Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925–1959. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Adedeji, Joel A. “Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre.” In Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981. 221–247. ———. “The Alarinjo Theatre: The Study of a Yoruba Theatrical Art Form from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Present Time.” Ph.D. Diss. University of Ibadan, 1969. ———. “Traditional Yoruba Theater.” African Arts 3.1 (1969): 60–63. Allen, Robert L. Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History. New York: Anchor Books, 1970. Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. Trans. Russell Moore. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989. Asante, K. Molefi. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. ———. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Buffalo: Amulefi, 1980. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Baraka, Amiri/LeRoi Jones. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Frundlich Books, 1984. Baxter, Ivy. The Arts of an Island: The Development of the Culture and of the Folk and Creative Arts in Jamaica, 1492–1962. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1970. Beckwith, Martha W. Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1929. Belcher, Fanin A., Jr. “The Place of the Negro in the Evolution of the American Theatre.” Ph.D. Diss. Yale U, 1945. Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. ———. “The Aesthetic of the Modern Black Drama: From Mimesis to Methexis.” In Theater of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1980, ed. Errol Hill. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987. 61–78. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1987.

84 tejumola olaniyan Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. 1: 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Black American Literature Forum 21.1–2 (1987), and 21.3 (1987). Bond, Fredrick W. The Negro and the Drama. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1940. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. British Drama League. “Native African Drama: An Enquiry.” Drama 2.2 (1932): 27–29. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Cabral, Amilcar. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973. Carlisle, Rodney. The Roots of Black Nationalism. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Clark, Ebun. Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Clark, John P. The Example of Shakespeare. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1970. Coplan, David B. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. New York: Longman, 1985. Craig, E. Q. Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow, 1968. De Graft, J. C. “Roots in African Drama and Theatre.” African Literature Today 8 (1976): 1–25. Reprinted in Part I of this volume. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. DeVeaux, Alexis. “The Tapestry.” In 9 Plays by Black Women, ed. M. B. Wilkerson. New York: New American Library, 1986. 139–95. Dhlomo, H.I E. “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama.” Bantu Studies 13 (1939). 33–48. Dollimore, Jonathan. “The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic.” Critical Quarterly 28.1–2 (1986): 179–192. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” Crisis 32 (1926): 290–97. ———. “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement.” Crisis 32 (1926): 134–36. Echeruo, Michael J. C. “The Dramatic Limits of Igbo Ritual.” In Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981. 136–148. Enekwe, Ossie. Igbo Masks: The Oneness of Ritual and Theatre. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1987. Enekwe, Ossie. “Myth, Ritual and Drama in Igboland.” In Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981. 149–63. Essien-Udom, E. U. Black Nationalism. New York: Dell, 1964. Etherton, Michael. The Development of African Drama. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Fabre, Genevieve. Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Trans. Melvin Dixon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968. ———. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1969. Fatton, Robert, Jr. Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy. Albany: Stat U of New York P, 1985. Finn, Julio. Voices of Negritude. New York: Quartet Books, 1988. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Nairobi: Oxford UP, 1970.

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Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. S. Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Fugard, Athol. Notebooks: 1960–1977. Ed. M. Benson. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Gates, Henry L., Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Gates, Henry L., Jr. ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1985. Gayle, Addison, Jr. ed. Black Expression. New York: Weybright & Talley, 1969. ———. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Anchor Books, 1972. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. M. Dash. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. Gotrick, Kacke. Apidan Theatre and Modern Drama. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1984. Graham-White, Anthony. The Drama of Black Africa. New York: Samuel French, 1974. Hammond, Dorothy, and Alta Jablow. The Myth of Africa. New York: Library of Social Science, 1977. Harris, Wilson. The Wombs of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Harrison, Paul C. The Drama of Nommo. New York: Grove Press, 1972. Hauptfleisch, Temple, and Ian Steadman, eds. South African Theatre: Four Plays and an Introduction. Pretoria: Haum Educational Publishers, 1984. Havemeyer, Loomis. The Drama of Savage Peoples. 1916. New York: Haskell House, 1966. Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Hill, Errol. The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992. ———. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: U of Texas P, 1972. Hill, Errol, ed. The Theater of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1980. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987. Hountondji, Paulin. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Trans. H. Evans. London: Hutchinson, 1977. ———. “Reason and Tradition.” In Philosophy and Cultures, eds. H. O. Oruka and D. A. Masolo. Nairobi: Bookwise Limited, 1983. 142–143. Hughes, Langston. “Note on Commercial Theatre.” Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. 1959. New York: Knopf, 1983. 190. ———. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Doubleday, 1971. 175–181. Irele, Abiola. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann, 1981. Jeyifo, Biodun. Masks of Otherness and Negation: Theatrical Images of Blacks in America. Unpublished ms. Revised version of “Theatre and Drama and the Black Physical and Cultural Presence in America: Essays in Interpretation.” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1975. Jeyifo, Biodun. “The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition: Critical Discourses on Interculturalism in the African Theatre.” In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, eds. Erika Fischer-Lichte, J. Riley, and M. Gissenwehrer. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990. 239–251. Jeyifo, Biodun. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon Books, 1985. ———. The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1984. Jeyifous, Abiodun. “Black Critics and Black Theatre in America.” TDR 18.3 (1974): 34–45.

86 tejumola olaniyan Jones, LeRoi, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968. Kavanagh, Robert. Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa. London: Zed Books, 1985. Kennedy, Scott. In Search of African Theatre. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. Kirby, E. T. “Indigenous African Theatre.” TDR 18.4 (1974): 22–35. Larlham, Peter. Black Theater, Dance and Ritual in South Africa. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985. Lesohai, B. L. “Black South African Theatre.” In Theatre in Africa, ed. O. Ogunba and A. Irele. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan UP, 1978. 115–130. Locke, Alain, and Montgomery Gregory, eds. Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Matthews, Victoria Earle. “The Value of Race Literature.” Address delivered at the First Congress of Colored Women of the United States. Boston, 30 July 1895. In Massachusetts Review 27.2 (1986): 170–85. Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967. Molette, Carlton W., and Barbara J. Molette. Black Theater: Premise and Presentation. Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press, 1986. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Nathan, Hans. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1962. Ndlovu, Duma, ed. Woza Afrika! An Anthology of South African Plays. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Olaniyan, Tejumola. “Discussing Afrocentrism: A Seminar led by Tejumola Olaniyan.” Passages: A Chronicle of the Humanities (Program of African Studies, Northwestern U), no. 3 (1992): 4–5, 16. Omotoso, Kole. The Theatrical into Theatre: A Study of the Drama and Theatre of the English-Speaking Caribbean. London: New Beacon Books, 1982. Osofisan, Femi. Beyond Translation. Ife Monographs on Literature and Criticism, 3rd ser., no. 1, 1985. Owomoyela, Oyekan. Visions and Revisions: Essays on African Literatures and Criticism. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Rice, Edward Le Roy. Monarchs of Minstrelsy, from “Daddy” Rice to Date. New York: Kenny, 1911. Richardson, Willis, ed. Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1935. Richardson, Willis, and May Miller, eds. Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Washington, D.C.: Associated Press, 1935. Rotimi, Ola. “The Drama in African Ritual Display.” Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981. 77–80. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980.

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Sanders, Leslie C. The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. Schipper, Mineke. Theatre and Society in Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982. Senghor, Léopold S. “The African Apprehension of Reality.” Prose and Poetry. Selec. and trans. J. Reed and C. Wake. London: Oxford UP, 1965. 29–34. Shange, Ntozake. Three Pieces: spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people; a photography: lovers in motion; boogie woogie landscapes. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Soyinka, Wole. “And after the Narcissist?” African Forum 1.4 (1966): 53–64. ———. Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ibadan, Nigeria: New Horn Press, 1988. ———. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Taylor, Patrick. The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1989. Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1985. Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1974. Traore, Bakary. Black African Theatre and Its Social Functions. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan UP, 1972. Turner, Darwin T. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic.” The Harlem Renaissance Reexamined. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. New York: AMS Press, 1987. 9–30. Walcott, Derek. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. 3–40. Reprinted in Part I of this volume. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1978. New York: Verso, 1990. Williams, Mance. Black Theatre in the 1960s and the 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Wittke, Carl. Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1930. Wright, Richardson. Revels in Jamaica, 1682–1838. New York: Benjamin Bom, 1937. Wynter, Sylvia. “One Love—Rhetoric or Reality?—Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism.” Caribbean Studies 12.3 (1972): 64–97.

Derek Walcott

What the Twilight Says: An Overture

I But I see what it is, you are not from these parts, you don’t know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you! —Waiting for Godot

When dusk heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and rusting iron which circle our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare, like the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp is like a childhood signal to come home. Light in our cities keeps its pastoral rhythm, and the last home-going traffic seems to rush through darkness that comes from suburban swamp or forest in a noiseless rain. In true cities another life begins: neons stutter to their hysterical pitch, bars, restaurants and cinemas blaze with artifice, and Mammon takes over the switchboard, manipulator of cities; but here the light makes our strongest buildings tremble, its color hints of rust, more stain than air. To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the gilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted backyards, under their dusty trees, or climbing to their favelas, were all natural scene-designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theatre is as vivid, voluble and cheap. Years ago, watching them, and suffering as you watched, you proffered silently the charity of a language which they could not speak, until your suffering, like the lan”What the Twilight Says [excerpt]” from What the Twilight Says: Essays by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

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guage, felt superior, estranged. The dusk was a raucous chaos of curses, gossip and laughter; everything performed in public, but the voice of the inner language was reflective and mannered, as far above its subjects as that sun which would never set until its twilight became a metaphor for the withdrawal of Empire and the beginning of our doubt. Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theatre of our lives. So the self-inflicted role of martyr came naturally, the melodramatic belief that one was message-bearer for the millennium, that the inflamed ego was enacting their will. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the outward life of action and dialect. Yet the writers of my generation were natural assimilators. We knew the literature of Empires, Greek, Roman, British, through their essential classics; and both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began. If, twenty years later, that vision has not been built, so that at every dusk one ignites a city in the mind above the same sad fences where the poor revolve, the theatre still an architectural fantasy, if there is still nothing around us, darkness still preserves the awe of self-enactment as the sect gathers for its self-extinguishing, self-discovering rites. In that aboriginal darkness the first principles are still sacred, the grammar and movement of the body, the shock of the domesticated voice startling itself in a scream. Centuries of servitude have to be shucked; but there is no history, only the history of emotion. Pubescent ignorance comes into the light, a shy girl, eager to charm, and one’s instinct is savage: to violate that ingenuousness, to degrade, to strip her of those values learned from films and books because she too moves in her own hallucination: that of a fine and separate star, while her counterpart, the actor, sits watching, but he sits next to another hallucination, a doppelganger released from his environment and his race. Their simplicity is really ambition. Their gaze is filmed with hope of departure. The noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the twilight. If I see these as heroes it is because they have kept the sacred urge of actors everywhere: to record the anguish of the race. To do this, they must return through a darkness whose terminus is amnesia. The darkness which yawns before them is terrifying. It is the journey back from man to ape. Every actor should make this journey to articulate his origins, but for these who have been called not men but mimics, the darkness must be total, and the cave should not contain a single man-made, mnemonic object. Its noises should be elemental, the roar of rain, ocean, wind, and fire. Their first sound should be like the last, the cry. The voice must grovel in search of itself, until gesture and sound fuse and the blaze of their flesh astonishes them. The children of slaves must sear their memory with a torch. The actor must break up his body and feed it as ruminatively as ancestral story-tellers fed twigs to the fire. Those who look from their darkness into the tribal fire must be bold enough to cross it.

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The cult of nakedness in underground theatre, of tribal rock, of poverty, of rite, is not only nostalgia for innocence, but the enactment of remorse for the genocides of civilization, a search for the wellspring of tragic joy in ritual, a confession of aboriginal calamity, for their wars, their concentration camps, their millions of displaced souls have degraded and shucked the body as food for the machines. These self-soiling, penitential cults, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, the Poor Theatre, the Holy Theatre, the pseudo-barbarous revivals of primitive tragedy are not threats to civilization but acts of absolution, gropings for the outline of pure tragedy, rituals of washing in the first darkness. Their howls and flagellations are cries to that lost God which they have pronounced dead, for the God who is offered to slaves must be served dead, or He may change His chosen people. The colonial begins with this knowledge, but it has taken one twenty years to accept it. When one began twenty years ago it was in the faith that one was creating not merely a play, but a theatre, and not merely a theatre, but its environment. Then the twilight most resembled dawn, then how simple it all seemed! We would walk, like new Adams, in a nourishing ignorance which would name plants and people with a child’s belief that the world is its own age. We had no more than children need, and perhaps one has remained childish, because fragments of that promise still surprise us. Then, even the old rules were exciting! Imitation was pure belief. We, the actors and poets, would strut like new Adams in a nakedness where sets, costumes, dimmers, all the “dirty devices” of the theatre were unnecessary or inaccessible. Poverty seemed a gift to the imagination, necessity was truly a virtue, so we set out plays in the open, in natural, unphased light, and our subject was bare, “unaccommodated man.” Today one writes this with more exhaustion than pride, for that innocence has been corrupted and society has taken the old direction. In these new nations art is a luxury, and the theatre the most superfluous of amenities. Every state sees its image in those forms which have the mass appeal of sport, seasonal and amateurish. Stamped on that image is the old colonial grimace of the laughing nigger, steelbandsman, carnival masker, calypsonian and limbo dancer. These popular artists are trapped in the State’s concept of the folk form, for they preserve the colonial demeanor and threaten nothing. The folk arts have become the symbol of a carefree, accommodating culture, an adjunct to tourism, since the State is impatient with anything which it cannot trade. This is not what a generation envisaged twenty years ago, when a handful of childish visionaries foresaw a Republic devoted to the industry of art, for in those days we had nothing else. The theatre was about us, in the streets, at lampfall in the kitchen doorway, but nothing was solemnized into cultural significance. We recognized illiteracy for what it was, a defect, not the attribute it is now considered to be by revolutionaries. Language was earned, there was no self-contempt, no vision of revenge. Thus, for the young poet and actor, there was no other motivation but knowledge. The folk knew their deprivations and there were no frauds to sanctify them. If the old gods were dying in the mouths of the old, they died of their own volition. Today they are artificially resurrected by the anthropologist’s tape-recorder and in the folk archives of departments of culture.

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To believe in its folk forms the State would have to hallow not only its mythology but re-believe in dead gods, not as converts either, but as makers. But no one in the New World whose one God is advertised as dead can believe in innumerable gods of another life. Those gods would have to be an anthropomorphic variety of his will. Our poets and actors would have not only to describe possession but to enact it, otherwise we would have not art but blasphemy and blasphemy which has no fear is decoration. So now we are entering the “African” phase with our pathetic African carvings, poems and costumes, and our art objects are not sacred vessels placed on altars but goods placed on shelves for the tourist. The romantic darkness which they celebrate is thus another treachery, this time perpetrated by the intellectual. The result is not one’s own thing but another minstrel show. When we produced Soyinka’s masterpiece The Road, one truth, like the murderous headlamps of his mammy-wagons, transfixed us, and this was that our frenzy goes by another name, that it is this naming, ironically enough, which weakens our effort at being African. We tried, in the words of his Professor, to “hold the god captive,” but for us, Afro-Christians, the naming of the god estranged him. Ogun was an exotic for us, not a force. We could pretend to enter his power but he would never possess us, for our invocations were not prayer but devices. The actor’s approach could not be catatonic but rational; expository, not receptive. However, Ogun is not a contemplative but a vengeful force, a power to be purely obeyed. Like the Professor, only worse, we had lost both gods, and only blasphemy was left. Since art is informed by something beyond its power, all we could successfully enact was a dance of doubt. The African revival is escape to another dignity, but one understands the glamour of its simplifications. Listen, one kind of writer, generally the entertainer, says: “I will write in the language of the people however gross or incomprehensible”; another says: “Nobody else go’ understand this, you hear, so le’ me write English”; while the third is dedicated to purifying the language of the tribe, and it is he who is jumped on by both sides for pretentiousness or playing white. He is the mulatto of style. The traitor. The assimilator. Yes. But one did not say to his Muse, “What kind of language is this that you’ve given me?” as no liberator asks history, “What kind of people is that that I’m meant to ennoble?” but one went about his father’s business. Both fathers’. If the language was contemptible, so was the people. After one had survived the adolescence of prejudice there was nothing to justify. Once the New World black had tried to prove that he was as good as his master, when he should have proven not his equality but his difference. It was this distance that could command attention without pleading for respect. My generation had looked at life with black skins and blue eyes, but only our own painful, strenuous looking, the learning of looking, could find meaning in the life around us, only our own strenuous hearing, the hearing of our hearing, could make sense of the sounds we made. And without comparisons. Without any startling access of “self-respect.” Yet, most of our literature loitered in the pathos of sociology, self-pitying and patronized. Our writers whined in the voices of twilight, “Look at this people! They may be degraded, but they are as good as you are. Look at what you have done to them.” And their poems remained laments, their novels propaganda tracts, as if one general apology on be-

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half of the past would supplant imagination, would spare them the necessity of great art. Pastoralists of the African revival should know that what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew, so that mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word Ashanti as with the word Warwickshire, both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian. The power of the dew still shakes off of our dialects, which is what Césaire sings: Storm, I would say. River, I would command. Hurricane, I would say. I would utter “leaf.” Tree. I would be drenched in all the rains, soaked in all the dews.

II Et c’est l’heure, O Poète, de décliner ton nom, ta naissance, et ta race . . . —St-John Perse: Exil

Yes. But we were all strangers here. The claim which we put forward now as Africans is not our inheritance, but a bequest, like that of other races, a bill for the condition of our arrival as slaves. Our own ancestors shared that complicity, and there is no one left on whom we can exact revenge. That is the laceration of our shame. Nor is the land automatically ours because we were made to work it. We have no more proprietorship as a race than have the indentured workers from Asia except the claim is wholly made. By all the races as one race, because the soil was stranger under our own feet than under those of our captors. Before us they knew the names of the forests and the changes of the sea, and theirs were the names we used. We began again, with the vigor of a curiosity that gave the old names life, that charged an old language, from the depth of suffering, with awe. To the writers of my generation, then, the word, and the ritual of the word in print, contained this awe, but the rage for revenge is hard to exorcise. At nineteen, an elate, exuberant poet madly in love with English, but in the dialectloud dusk of water-buckets and fish-sellers, conscious of the naked, voluble poverty around me, I felt a fear of that darkness which had swallowed up all fathers. Full of precocious rage, I was drawn, like a child’s mind to fire, to the Manichean conflicts of Haiti’s history. The parallels were there in my own island, but not the heroes: a black French island somnolent in its Catholicism and black magic, blind faith and blinder over-breeding, a society which triangulated itself mediaevally into land-baron, serf and cleric, with a vapid, high-brown bourgeoisie. The fire’s shadows, magnified into myth, were those of the black Jacobins of Haiti. They were Jacobean too because they flared from a mind drenched in Elizabethan literature out of the same darkness as Webster’s Flamineo, from a flickering world of mutilation and heresy. They were moved by the muse of witchcraft, their self-disgust foreshadowed ours, that wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to

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escape. I repeat the raging metaphysics of a bewildered boy in this rhetoric. I can relive, without his understanding, a passion which I have betrayed. But they seemed to him, then, those slave-kings, Dessalines and Christophe, men who had structured their own despair. Their tragic bulk was massive as a citadel at twilight. They were our only noble ruins. He believed then that the moral of tragedy could only be Christian, that their fate was the debt exacted by the sin of pride, that they were punished by a white God as masters punished servants for presumption. He saw history as hierarchy and to him these heroes, despite their meteoric passages, were damned to the old darkness because they had challenged an ordered universe. He was in awe of their blasphemy, he rounded off their fate with the proper penitence, while during this discipleship which he served as devotedly as any embittered acolyte, the young Frantz Fanon and the already ripe and bitter Césaire were manufacturing the homemade bombs of their prose poems, their drafts for revolution, in the French-creole island of Martinique. They were blacker. They were poorer. Their anguish was tragic and I began to feel deprived of blackness and poverty. I had my own divisions too, but it was only later, when their prophecies became politics, that I was confronted with choice. My bitterness matched theirs but it concealed envy; my compassion was not less, but both were full of self-contempt and contained a yearning. Those first heroes of the Haitian Revolution, to me, their tragedy lay in their blackness. Yet one had more passion then, passion for reconciliation as well as change. It is no use repeating that this was not the way the world went, that the acolyte would have to defrock himself of that servitude. Now, one may see such heroes as squalid fascists who chained their own people, but they had size, mania, the fire of great heretics. It is easy, twenty years later, to mock such ambition, to concede what a critic called its “fustian,” yet the Jacobean style, its cynical, aristocratic flourish came naturally to this first play—the corruption of slaves into tyrants. Here were slaves who by divine right could never be kings, because by claiming kingship they abrogated the law of God. Despite my race, I could not believe that He would choose such people as his engines. Still, this tragedy’s fiercest exchanges contained a self-frightening fury: Archbishop This is the curse of the nation, Eating your own stomach, where the sickness is, Your smell of blood offends the nostrils of God. Christophe Perhaps the smell of sweat under my arms offends that god too, quivering his white, crooked nostrils; Well, tell him, after death, that it is honest as the seven words of blood broken on his flesh, tell Him the nigger smell that even kings must wear is bread and wine to life. I am proud, I have worked and grown This country to its stature, tell Him that.

The theme has remained: one race’s quarrel with another’s God.

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There was only one noble ruin in the archipelago: Christophe’s massive citadel at La Ferrière. It was a monument to egomania, more than a strategic castle; an effort to reach God’s height. It was the summit of the slave’s emergence from bondage. Even if the slave had surrendered one Egyptian darkness for another, that darkness was his will, that structure an image of the inaccessible achieved. To put it plainer, it was something we could look up to. It was all we had.

III I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain, Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home. —Yeats

To be born on a small island, a colonial backwater, meant a precocious resignation to fate. The shoddy, gimcrack architecture of its one town, its doll-sized verandahs, jalousies and lacy eaves neatly perforated as those doilies which adorn the polished tables of the poor seemed so frail that the only credible life was nature. A nature without man, like the sea on which the sail of a canoe can seem an interruption. A nature with blistered aspects: gray, rotting shacks, the color of the peasant woman’s dress, which huddled on rocky rises outside the villages. But through nature one came to love the absence of philosophy, and, fatally, perhaps, the beauty of certain degradations. In that innocent vagabondage one sought out the poor as an adventure, an illumination, only to arrive where, rooted like a rigid articulation of the rocks, the green and blue enameled statue of the Virgin leaned from her niche, facing a green and blue Atlantic, like the peeling figure-head of a slave ship (in her various shrines her age could change from decorous matron to eager postulant), and where, back in the bleached, unpainted fishing village streets everyone seemed salted with a reek of despair, a life, a theatre, reduced to elementals. The acrid, shuttered smell of the poor was as potent and nocturnal as the odors of sex, with its intimacies of lowered Virgin lamps and coconut-fibre mattresses until it seemed that a Catholic destitution was a state of grace which being part-white and Methodist I could never achieve. That life was measured as carefully as broken shop-bread by its rituals, it had dimpled the serene smile of Our Lady of the Rocks by its observance of five o’clock mass, rosaries, scapulars, colored prints, lampions with perpetual flame floating in oil, vespers, fasts, feasts, and the shell-bordered cemeteries by the village river. The race was locked in its conviction of salvation like a freemasonry. There was more envy than hate toward it, and the love that stubbornly emerged showed like weeds through the ruined aisle of an abandoned church, and one worked hard for that love, against their love of priest and statue, against the pride of their resignation. One worked to have the “feel” of the island, bow, gunwhales and stern as jealously as the fisherman knew his boat, and, despite the intimacy of its size to be as free as a canoe out on the ocean.

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That apprenticeship would mean nothing unless life were made so real that it stank, so close that you could catch the changes of morning and afternoon light on the rocks of the Three Sisters, pale brown rocks carious in the gargle of sea, could catch the flash of a banana leaf in sunlight, catch the smell of drizzled asphalt and the always surprisingly stale smell of the sea, the reek that chafes in the guts of canoes, and the reek of human rags that you once thought colorful, but, God give you that, in rage, a reek both fresh and resinous, all salted on the page, that dark catalogue of country-shop smells, the tang of raw, fine powdery cod, of old onions drying, of the pork-barrel, and the shelves of faded cloth, all folded round the fusty smell of the proprietor, some exact magical, frightening woman in tinted glasses, who emerged from the darkness like history. There the materials began. They were given. And the fishermen, those whom Jesus first drew to his net, they were the most blasphemous and bitter. Theirs was a naked, pessimistic life, crusted with the dirty spume of beaches. They were a sect which had evolved its own signs, a vocation which excluded the stranger. The separation of town from countryside and countryside from sea challenged your safety, and all one’s yearning was to enter that life without living it. It smelled strong and true. But what was its truth? That in the “New Aegean” the race, of which these fishermen were the stoics, had grown a fatal adaptability. As black absorbs without reflection they had rooted themselves with a voracious, unreflecting calm. By all arguments they should have felt displaced, seeing this ocean as another Canaan, but that image was the hallucination of professional romantics, writer and politician. Instead, the New World Negro was disappointingly ordinary. He needed to be stirred into bitterness, thence perhaps to action, which means that he was as avaricious and as banal as those who had enslaved him. What would deliver him from servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things, one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folk-songs and fables; this, not merely the debt of history was his proper claim to the New World. For him metaphor was not a symbol but conversation, and because every poet begins with such ignorance, in the anguish that every noun will be freshly, resonantly named, because a new melodic inflection meant a new mode, there was no better beginning. It did not matter how rhetorical, how dramatically heightened the language was if its tone were true, whether its subject was the rise and fall of a Haitian king or a small-island fisherman, and the only way to re-create this language was to share in the torture of its articulation. This did not mean the jettisoning of “culture” but, by the writer’s making creative use of his schizophrenia, an electric fusion of the old and the new. So the people, like the actors, awaited a language. They confronted a variety of styles and masks, but because they were casual about commitment, ashamed of their speech, they were moved only by the tragi-comic and farcical. The tragi-comic was another form of self-contempt. They considered tragedy to be, like English, an attribute beyond them.

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IV Clouds of heroes, young and old have died for me. —Gênet’s Queen in “The Blacks”

The future of West Indian militancy lies in art. All revolutions begin amateurishly, with forged or stolen weapons, but the West Indian artist knew the need for revolt without knowing what weapons to use, and just as a comfortable, self-hugging pathos hid in the most polemical of West Indian novels, so there was in the sullen ambition of the West Indian actor a fear that he lacked proper weapons, that his voice, color and body were no match for the civilized concepts of theatre. This is an endemic evil that cannot be dissolved by professional hatred or by bitter flaunting of his race. In his encounter with a tawdry history he was shaken by judgments of this sort: There has been romance, but it has been the romance of pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of life do not show themselves under such conditions. There has been no saint in the West Indies since Las Casas, no hero unless philo-Negro enthusiasm can make one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.

This is the tone used of canaille, but it is canaille who, in exasperation at this truth, begin revolutions. The pride of the colonial in the culture of his mother country was fiercer than her true children’s because the colonial feared to lose her. The most conservative and prejudiced redoubts of imperialism are in those who have acquired that patina through strenuous reverence: her judges and, ironically enough, her artists. My generation since its colonial childhood had no true pride but awe. We had not yet provided ourselves with heroes, and when the older heroes went out of fashion, or were stripped, few of us had any choice but to withdraw into a cave where we could scorn those who struggled in the heat. Change was too subterranean for us to notice. Our melodramatic instincts demanded sudden upheavals, and found nothing in the Roman patience of legal reforms. We became infuriated at the banal demands of laborer and peasant. We romanticized the poor. But the last thing which the poor needed was the idealization of their poverty. No play could be paced to the repetitive, untheatrical patience of hunger and unemployment. Hunger produces enervation of will and knows one necessity. Although in very few of the islands are people reduced to such a state, the empire of hunger includes work that is aimed only at necessities. It’s inevitable that any playwright, knowing that this is his possible audience, will not be concerned with deprivation as his major theme. So the sparse body of West Indian theatre still feeds on the subject of emaciation and what it produces: rogues, drunkards, madmen, outcasts, and sets against this the pastoral of the peasant. Its comedy begins with the premise that all are starved or deprived, or defend themselves from being further deprived by threats. Hunger induces its delirium, and it is this fever for heroic examples that can produce the glorification of revenge.

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Yet revenge is a kind of vision. The West Indian mind historically hung-over, exhausted, prefers to take its revenge in nostalgia, to narrow its eyelids in a schizophrenic daydream of an Eden that existed before its exile. Its fixation is for the breasts of a nourishing mother, and this is true not only of the generations of slaves’ children, but of those brought here through indigence or necessity, in fact, through the threat of hunger. But the communities maintain a half-brother relationship threatened by jealousies and suspicion. There is more romance in anthropology than there is in ordinary life, and our quarrels about genealogy, our visionary plays about the noble savage remain provincial, psychic justifications, strenuous attempts to create identity; yet there is nothing atavistic about our desires except that easy nostalgia which Hearne has described. Once we have lost our wish to be white we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers. “The status of native is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonised people with their consent,” says Sartre, introducing Fanon, and the new black continues that condition. His crimes are familial, litigious, his hatred is turned inward. The law is all he can remember of his past. Slaves, the children of slaves, colonials, then pathetic, unpunctual nationalists, what have we to celebrate? First, we have not wholly sunk into our own landscapes, as one gets the feeling at funerals that our bodies make only light, unlasting impressions on our earth. It is not an earth that has been fed long with the mulch of cultures, with the cycles of tribalism, feudalism, monarchy, democracy, industrialization. Death, which fastens us to the earth, remains pastoral or brutish, because no single corpse contributes to some tiered concept of a past. Everything is immediate, and this immediacy means over-breeding, illegitimacy, migration without remorse. The sprout casually stuck in the soil. The depth of being rooted is related to the shallowness of racial despair. The migratory West Indian feels rootless on his own earth, chafing at its beaches.

V Whosoever will, whosoever will . . . Hear the loving Father Call the wanderer home Whosoever will may come . . . —Salvation Army Hymn

A gas lamp startles the sidewalk and catches like fire-edged coals the black faces of men in white, martial uniforms, dilating the dun goatskin of the big bass drum, throwing its tireless radiance as far as our balcony across the street, changing the crossroads of Mary Ann Street and the Chaussée to a stage crossed by shadows. The recruiting patrol was Protestant, and their beat, thudding so loud that the stars shook, was to drum an army of Catholics into service by the joy of their performance, to arrest whoever paused, to draw children in a ring around the lantern-light until

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there would be more than spectators: an unheard army singing in the pebbled backyards, in the jalousied upstairs bedrooms whose moonlit linen would have to wait. And if there were, too rarely, a brass cornet played by some silver-headed English adjutant, its high note striking sparks from the tin roofs, then a kind of marching would begin, but one that kept the native beat. Yet, like the long, applauded note, joy soared further from two pale children staring from their upstairs window, wanting to march with that ragged, barefooted crowd, but who could not because they were not black and poor, until for one of them, watching the shouting, limber congregation, that difference became a sadness, that sadness rage, and that longing to share their lives ambition, so that at least one convert was made. They were the shadows of his first theatre, just as, at Christmas in the streets the Devil in red underwear, with a hemp beard, a pitchfork and a monstrously packed crotch, backed by a molasses-smeared chorus of imps, would perform an elaborate black mass of resurrection at the street corners. He and his brother were already creating their own little theatre, “little men” made from twigs enacting melodramas of hunting and escape, but of cowboys and gangsters, not of overseers and maroons. On the verandah, with his back to the street, he began marathon poems on Greek heroes which ran out of breath, lute songs, heroic tragedies, but these rhythms, the Salvation Army parodies, the Devil’s Christmas songs, and the rhythms of the street itself were entering the pulse-beat of the wrist. I do not remember if they played at savages with their cheap puppets; certainly poverty was never dramatized but what must have come out of all this later was a guilt; a guilt as well as an envy. One could envy the poor then, their theatre where everything was possible, sex, obscenity, absolution, freedom, and not only the freedom to wander barefoot, but the freedom made from necessity, the freedom to hack down forests, to hollow canoes, to hunt snakes, to fish, and to develop bodies made of tarred rope that flung off beads of sweat like tightened fish-lines. There were other theatres too. There was the theatre of degeneracy. Not clouds of heroes, but of flies. The derelicts who mimed their tragedies, the lunatics who every day improvised absurd monodramas, blasphemous, scabrous monologues, satirists, cripples, alcoholics, one transvestite, one reprieved murderer, several hunched, ant-crazy old women, including one who paused in the middle of the street to address her feet and reprimand the sun, one other fantasist dressed in black silk hat, gloves, frock-coat, soiled spats and cane, another, a leg lost bucking like a sailor, one parched, ravaged poet, exathlete and piano-fiend; all towns are full of them, but their determined, self-destructive desolation was performed. Johnnie Walker, Pepsi-Cola, Wild Bill Hickok, CatStrangler, Fowl-Thief, Baz the Dead, Wax-me-all-over-except-my-balls, Bull-voiced Deighton, Submarine the Bum-Boatman, the untranslatable N’Homme Mama Migrains (your louse’s mother’s man), Lestrade sallow and humped like a provincial Sherlock Holmes, Estefine Manger Farine, and the inestimable Greene, Bap, Joumard and Vorn. And there were vampires, witches, gardeurs, masseurs (usually a fat black foreignsmelling blackness, with gold-rimmed spectacles), not to mention the country where

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the night withheld a whole, unstarred mythology of flaming, shed skins. Best of all, in the lamplit doorway at the creaking hour, the stories sung by old Sidone, a strange croaking of Christian and African songs. The songs, mainly about lost children, were sung in a terrible whine. They sang of children lost in the middle of a forest, where the leaves’ ears pricked at the rustling of devils, and one did not know if to weep for the first two brothers of every legend, one strong, the other foolish. All these sank like a stain. And taught us symmetry. The true folk tale concealed a structure as universal as the skeleton, the one armature from Br’er Anancy to King Lear. It kept the same digital rhythm of three movements, three acts, three moral revelations, whether it was the tale of three sons or of three bears, whether it ended in tragedy or happily ever after. It had sprung from hearthside or lamplit hut-door in an age when the night outside was a force, inimical, infested with devils, wood-demons, a country for the journey of the soul, and any child who has heard its symmetry chanted would want to retell it when he was his own story-teller, with the same respect for its shape. The apparent conservatism of West Indian fiction, whether in fiction or in theatre, is not an imitative respect for moulds, but a memory of that form. Years later in another island you have formed a company so intimate that they have become limbs, extensions of your sensibility. You are rehearsing The Blacks, and you begin to see that their minds, whatever the variety of their education, are baffled by this challenge of the absurd. They resist the emphatic gaiety of that dance at the edge of the abyss. Its despair is another mimicry. They have the confused vitality of beginners, and like all beginners they are humanists. Presented with Gênet’s black and white dumbshow, its first half a negative, its second half a print, the actors hesitate to recognize their images. It may have to do with those subterranean charges that explode in their faces, for the play is mined with blinding flashes that cause a painful laughter. They catch, sidewise in the mirror of another’s face, images of what they have feared, projections of their own caricatures. But their genius is not violent, it is comic. The play becomes less a satire and more a Carnival. Their joy is its root. The madness of surrealism means nothing to their sensibility, and this lack is not a question of culture, but simply that their minds refuse to be disfigured. An actor feels a play through the nerves, not through the brain, and his instinct is to feel his body move, to tingle toward gesture, toward promiscuous exchange with fellow actors. It is not that they do not understand the absurd, but that they cannot enjoy its mincing, catamite dances of death. But as their society avoids truths, as their Carnival is a noise that fears everything, too many of the actors avoid the anguish of self-creation. So one closes West Indian plays in despair. Closes, and reopens them in the hope that the last, twilight-sodden sigh is mistaken and that morning will vigorously bring a stronger, exhilarating despair; not a despair that belongs to others, but a truly tragic joy. It is our damnation to sigh not only for the amenities of civilization, its books, its women, its theatres, but also for its philosophies; and when revenge is the mode and a black angst fashionable, or when deprivation is made a cult-guilt of our artists, we find ourselves enraged. We imitate the images of ourselves.

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An actor rises to a text and his tongue stumbles on words that have less immediacy than his dialect and he collapses, or fakes difficulty, abashed. He confronts proper speech as his body once confronted certain “inflexible” classic gestures. He stands torn between the wish to amuse or to illuminate his people. For imagination and body to move with original instinct, we must begin again from the bush. That return journey, with all its horror of rediscovery, means the annihilation of what is known. Some of our poets have pretended that journey, but with an itinerary whose resting points are predetermined. On such journeys the mind will discover what it chooses, and what these writers seek, like refugees raking debris, are heirlooms to dignify an old destitution. Even this destitution, carefully invoked, is pastoral. But if the body could be reduced once more to learning, to a rendering of things through groping mnemonic fingers, a new theatre could be made, with a delight that comes in roundly naming its object. Out of it, with patience, new reverberations would come. Yet this too, the haemophilic twilight said, with its sapping of the will before rehearsals: “Bourgeois, safe in a vague, pastoral longing, you pretend to reenter the bush, to imitate the frenzy of ancestral possession, your soul, with a fetid dampness, drifts between two temples, and the track to the grove is fenced.” You despise the banal vigor of a future, where the folk art, the language, the music, like the economy, will accommodate itself to the center of power which is foreign, where people will simplify themselves to be clear, to be immediately apprehensible to the transient. The lean, sinewy strength of the folk-dance has been fattened and sucked into the limbo of the night-club, the hotel cabaret, and all the other prostitutions of a tourist culture: before you is the vision of a hundred Havanas and mini-Miamis, and who dares tell their Tourism Boards and Cultural Development Committees that the blacks in bondage at least had the resilience of their dignity, a knowledge of their degradation, while their descendants have gone both flaccid and colorful, covering their suffering with artificial rage or commercial elation? Even the last one among us who knows the melodies of the old songs fakes his African, becoming every season, by Kodak exposure of his cult, a phony shaman, a degraded priest. The urge toward the metropolitan language was the same as political deference to its center, but the danger lay in confusing, even imitating the problems of the metropolis by pretensions to its power, its styles, its art, its ideas, and its concept of what we are. The core of this conflict was whether only a true city, by which one meant the metropolitan power, could nourish a theatre, or whether our cities, lacking all power, could be called cities at all. Ironically enough, the theatre at the heart of the metropolis was trying to reduce power to tribal simplicities of penitence and celebration, while our politics, as well as our arts, strove for sophistry even to the point of imitated decadence. For our frustrated avant-gardists and our radicals there was neither enough power nor decadence to justify experiment; they missed our de Sade, our Grotowski or the madness of an Artaud. While others, reactionaries in dashikis, screamed for the pastoral vision, for a return to nature over the loudspeaker. It was always the fate of the West Indian to meet himself coming back, and he would only discover the power of simplicity, the graces of his open society after others had embraced it as a style.

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VI Hence our confirmed lack of culture is astonished by certain grandiose anomalies; for example, on an island without any contact with modern civilization, the mere passage of a ship carrying only healthy passengers may provoke the sudden outbreak of diseases unknown on that island but a specialty of nations like our own: shingles, influenza, grippe, rheumatism, sinusitis, polyneuritis, etc. —Artaud: The Theatre and Its Double

I try to divert my concentration from that mesmeric gritted oyster of sputum on the concrete floor of a tinroofed shed in back of a choirmaster’s house, half shangochapel, half Presbyterian country vestry, but there are two people circling that filthy asterisk in search of a gramophone needle which the choirmaster bewails that he bought just, just this morning, with our bewilderment before the screw-ups of technology, as if the gramophone vindictively insisted that their voices should be enough and had magisterially withdrawn its contribution. The women of the choir are dressed in the standard imitation frippery of Mexican or Venezuelan peasants: black skirts appliquéd with cushion-sized flowers, low-necked, lace-edged cotton bodices, and prim shoes, the plainest of the women with, unless argument is dominating memory, a lurid bloody hibiscus in her greased hair. The men are modestly dressed. Onstage, they might wear the three-quarter-length cotton trousers of the peon, and, if they were dancers, rainbow-rippled sleeves, more feminine than androgynous. Piquancy, charm have already emasculated those. Their dances have been refined to a female essence, a grinning fragility, suffocating as cheap perfume, their jetés and turns false as the coquetry of the women whose sex at least pullulates with the appeal of sweating crotches, while the men, the finer-boned the better, can offer nothing but their tightened, scrotum-packed costumes and witty backsides. Leave that alone. It’s whoredom and they will be paid. We are gathered here for something votive, and the choirmen have a protestant demureness, an inward smiling modesty. But the night degenerates from decency to decency, offering, as though they were the shredded flesh and tree-sapped blood of the Savior, the little cakes, sweets, thinned drinks and papery crisps of processed corn, plantain, potato, even the last vegetal gods dried and distributed. Then they begin to sing. They sing from what they have learned from movies. They have acquired presentation, style. This consists of the women swaying gently from side to side without quite holding the edges of their flared skirts, like a child reciting, swaying their pressed heads, rounding their mouths, flirting with their eyes, and bowing, Jesus! bowing neatly, with the practiced modesty of professionals, except that the bow does not quite work like the professional’s wry, screw-you-if-you-didn’t-like-it smile, no, it contains the shrunken pride of the Community Center, the ambition of social achievement. The sour constipated earth is hard as cement. Once their heels, like the heels of the drummer’s on the palms carcass of the drum, would have made it resound. The worst song, the most sincerely sung, is an original, an anthem to the nation. The sentiments are infantile

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(though children are innocent of patriotism), the words and phrasing execrable. But the passion with which it is sung is its most desolating aspect. Furiously ungrammatical, emphatically crude, but patinaed with grace. It smells as soon as it is aired. It sickens everything, as crude and as natural as that dusted globule of splayed spit that has become the itch of your whole body. The flashing banana leaves, the thick, hot air, the thick, black voices straining for refinement, all these are mixed in one hallucination, slowly stunning into acceptance, if one is not to feel the old madness creaking the skull open again; the jet of spit on the gritty cement floor repeats, converts itself into saying, well it is all very touching and simple, it is sincere, it is real. Those dusty banana fronds are real, the gold teeth, and their thin gold watches, and the careful articulation of their small talk; and it is only you who are unnecessary, unreal. To create your reality, you must become part of them, spit, applaud, touch, eat with and sing with them, but what really sings in the dark hole of the heart is hollowness, what screams is something lost, something so embarrassed, like an animal that abandons its dying image in its cub, and moves deeper into bush. They are glad to see it go. I can feel it gone. It is gone in the precise signaling of those fine, fixed stars. Gone, with an odor of choking talc and perfume. Later, after the smiling Minister goes, and the distinguished guests, of which you are one, the drumming and the true singing jerked alive by the rum and the furiously sweating night, all that straining after the old truth may begin, but the bored animal has gone to sleep. It is too late. Too late.

VII The only escape was drama. —V. S. Naipaul

All these are affirmations of identity, however forced. Our bodies think in one language and move in another, yet it should have become clear, even to our newest hybrid, the black critic who accuses poets of betraying dialect, that the language of exegesis is English, that the manic absurdity would be to give up thought because it is white. In our self-tortured bodies we confuse two graces: the dignity of self-belief and the courtesies of exchange. For us the ragged, untutored landscape seems as uncultured as our syntax. So, like that folk-choir, my first poems and plays expressed this yearning to be adopted, as the bastard longs for his father’s household. I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from estrangement. I would learn that every tribe hoards its culture as fiercely as its prejudices, that English literature, even in the theatre, was hallowed ground and trespass, that colonial literatures could grow to resemble it closely, but could never be considered its legitimate heir. There was folk poetry, colonial poetry, Commonwealth verse, etc., and their function, as far as their mother

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country was concerned, was filial and tributary. I sighed up a continent of envy when I studied English literature, yet, when I tried to talk as I wrote, my voice sounded affected or too raw. The tongue became burdened, like an ass trying to shift its load. I was taught to trim my tongue as a particular tool which could as easily have been ordered from England as an awl or a chisel, and that eloquence which I required of its actors was against the grain of their raw and innocent feeling. This kind of aggression increased an egotism which can pass for genius. I was thus proclaimed a prodigy because I insisted on a formality which had nothing to do with their lives. It made me believe that twilight had set me apart and naturally I arrived at the heresy that landscape and history had failed me.

VIII And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded. —Hemingway

His defiance now a mania driven to the pitch where only vision was real, the leader would pray: Let me help others and be merciless to myself. But the torment of all selfappointed schizoid saints is that they enact their opposite. Thus, in his case also, strength of public purpose fed on private deterioration. So even righteous anger was corruptible; his self-sacrifice contained a fury that was really revenge. He alone would roll the Sisyphean boulder uphill, even if it cracked his backbone. The fuel of his ambition was no longer love but the ecstasy of nervous exhaustion and drink. This ecstasy, like all power, was heady, brutal and corrupting. Its rages were forgiven because they were abstract, but every explosion eroded and demeaned the soul. He began to imagine treacheries where there was only misunderstanding. Nothing less than their self-blinded obedience would satisfy him. He had been warned of this madness, and true enough, paranoia progressed with every inch of slope cleared. But who would help should he let go the stone, or, when he rested, help prop it with scotching heels and groaning back? On mornings of fitful remorse, after he had abused the actors, he would clinically study the symptoms: the blinding anger, the cirrhosis of suspicion, the heart-sickness of failure. Perhaps these were the exactions of courage, but they left his skin prickling, his head roaring with amnesia, his ego massively inflamed. Such fury was suicidal. It had broken, even killed a few, but he saw each breakdown as revenge. Well, as they said in this country, who send him? There were fights with actors coarser than anything imaginable, where exasperation reduced to tears, whose violence annihilated all self-respect. But even these explosions were better than the myth of the organic, ineradicable tsetse, the numbing fly in the mythically different blood, the myth of the uncreative, parasitic, malarial nigger, the marsh-numbed imagination that is happiest in mud. Anger was better than nothing, better than that embittered affection with which each

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called the other nigger. They moved from hall to basement to shed, and the parallel of all this was the cliché of the destitute, digs-deprived emigrant out on the gray streets; only this was supposed to be home, a launching place, a base of sorties and retreats from failure. After a time invisible lianas strangle our will. Every night some area in the rapidly breeding bush of the mind would be cleared, an area where one could plan every inch of advance by firelight. Yes, the director was developing a Christ-complex, a readiness for suffering and betrayal, a Salvation Army theatre for the half-literate, the ambitious, the frustrated. What sustained him was a phrase from childhood—”Wherever two or three are gathered in Thy name”—and this increased in Him, when only a handful of disciples showed up at rehearsals, an arrogant despair. It was more than a romance with the nobleness of failure, for his persistence was being complimented. One was now praised by those of one’s generation who had given up art and whose realism comprised “integrity” and “public good,” a new, brown meritocracy, who had accepted the limitations of their society, but whose solicitude concealed insult. You had to endure their respect, their vapid, reassuring smiles at parties and at those dinners you were summoned to electrify with abuse. You went, knowing how dead they would be behind eyes that, repeated in the Sunday features, showed the nervous belligerence of graduates. They were eyes that denied their power, bright with charity. The idea of a theatre and the possibilities of their cities bored them, because they had accepted failure as logic. Duty had delineated itself to him—to transform the theatrical into theatre, to qualify the subtlety between a gift and a curse, but this was a society fed on a hysterical hallucination, that believed only the elaborate frenzy now controlled by the State. But Carnival was as meaningless as the art of the actor confined to mimicry. And now the intellectuals, courting and fearing the mass, found values in it that they had formerly despised. They apotheosized the folk form, insisting that calypsos were poems. Their program, for all its pretext to change, was a manual for stasis, because they wanted politically to educate the peasant yet leave him intellectually unsoiled; they baffled him with schisms and the complexities of Power while insisting that he needed neither language nor logic, telling him that what he yearned for was materialistic, imitative and corrupt, while all his exhorters made sure that their wives were white, their children brown, their jobs inviolate. No, for the colonial artist the enemy was not the people, or the people’s crude aesthetic which he refined and orchestrated, but the enemy was those who had elected themselves as protectors of the people, frauds who cried out against indignities done to the people, who urged them to acquire pride which meant abandoning their individual dignity, who cried out that black was beautiful like transmitters from a different revolution without explaining what they meant by beauty, all of these had emerged from nowhere, suddenly, a different, startling “canaille.” Their rough philosophies were meant to coarsen every grace, to demean courtesy, to brook no debate, their fury artificially generated by an imitation of even metropolitan anger, now. Tristes, tristes tropiques! We had come from an older, wiser, sadder world that had already exorcised

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those devils, but these were calling out the old devils to political use. Witch-doctors of the new left with imported totems. The people were ready to be betrayed again. So with fatigued conceit he realized that to continue he would have to sustain the hallucination that the world revolved around him. He lied to himself by cherishing their devotion; he found not shame but promise in their near-literacy, because he had accepted this role of martyr. It gave him the perversity of remaining obscure while desiring fame, of being wrecked on a rock while hoping that his whirlpool was the navel of the world. It was he who thought for them, who had salted their minds with subtleties that they might have been happier to ignore. Exasperation nourished him. It urged him toward texts that were fantastical or violent, plays with the purgation of revenge. All he knew in those moods was that he wanted a theatre whose language could be that of the drowning, a gibberish of cries. It was fearful to carry that world within him alone. The contagion of that madness electrified them when they were all drunk or drunk on elation. Now he watched what he feared: the revolt that settles for security, the feeling in those still inadequate minds that they were message-bearers. They might subjugate their bodies to everything, but every growth of power exposed their deficiencies. When they were excellent in gesture they were thick in speech, they could rarely explain or repeat what instinct clarified, and now a few would approach him with frightening requests: to understand the technique of theatre as if it were something different from what their bodies instinctually practiced, for better speech when theirs had vigor that was going out of English. Now they wanted to be as good as others. Good enough to go abroad. They showed that cursed, colonial hunger for the metropolis. The desertions had begun. One does not lament the twenty years spent in trying to create this reality of a theatre, nor could one have contempt for its successes and the honors that “recognition” has brought, but the ceremony of reward is as misguided as the supposedly defunct system of long service, by which is meant self-sacrifice, for the reward itself acknowledges the odds which its donors have perpetuated by regarding art as monastic, by honoring the spirit after the body is worn down by the abrasions of indifference, by regarding the theatre as civic martyrdom. The theatre is a crass business, and money is better than medals. They thought in memorials, pensions, plaques. It is in that sense that nothing has changed, that one is still imprisoned in the fear of abandoning talent to despair. The messianic role is no longer flattering. It tires, it infuriates, it is sick of hearing “what would happen if . . .” It is not deceived by the noises of the State when it proclaims the power of folk-culture, nor by the wily patronage of merchants. Without knowing it the folk forms had become corrupted by politics. Their commercialization is now beyond anger, for they have become part of the climate, the art of the brochure. What to do then? Where to turn? How to be true? If one went in search of the African experience, carrying the luggage of a few phrases and a crude map, where would it end? We had no language for the bush and there was a conflicting grammar in the

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pace of our movement. Out of this only an image came. A band of travelers, in their dim outlines like explorers who arrived at the crest of a dry, grassy ridge. There the air was heady, sharp, threading the lungs finely, with the view hidden, then leveling off to the tin-roofed, toy town of his childhood. The sense of hallucination increased with the actuality of every detail, from the chill, mildly shivering blades of hill-grass, from their voices abrupted by the wind, the duality of time, past and present piercingly fixed as if the voluble puppets of his childhood were now frighteningly alive. A few pointed out the house with its pebbled backyard where they had had their incarnations a quarter of a century ago, the roofs from which that martial cornet had struck its sparks, while some turned toward the lush, dark-pocketed valleys of banana with their ochre tracks and canted wooden huts from whose kitchens, at firelight, the poetry which they spoke had come, and further on, the wild, white-lined Atlantic coast with an Africa that was no longer home, and the dark, oracular mountain dying into mythology. It was as if, with this sinewy, tuned, elate company, he was repaying the island an ancestral debt. It was as if they had arrived at a view of their own bodies walking up the crest, their bodies tilted slightly forward, a few survivors. It was not a vision but a memory, though its detail was reduced, as in dreams and in art. But knowing the place could not tell me what it meant. There was only this reduced image of real actors on a real, windy grass ridge, which was, of course, the Morne overlooking the harbor of Castries and the banana fields to windward, on the very spine of Saint Lucia. Perhaps it meant that I had brought us home. The cycle finished. Perhaps the ridge was a point of rest. Perhaps achievement. We would have to descend again. To leave that clear, heady air of achievement and go down again. I was with and not with them. I watched them but was not among them. They were they. They were there. They needed no more enthusiasm from the good guide, but for all the exhilaration of that air, I did not know where else to take them now, except up to the crest again, repeating the one image like a film. Henceforth no struggle, only the repetition of little victories. Had one closed their hopes or opened them? There was a value in darkness, in the cultivation of obscurity. On that little summit, where the air is spring-nipped or autumn-chilling, I may have lost them. The last image is of a rain-flushed dawn, after a back-breaking night of filming, in a slowly graying field where the sea wind is like metal on the cheek. In the litter of the field, among black boxes of equipment and yellow, sleekly wet tarpaulins, stands a shawled girl caught in that gesture which abstractedly gathers cloth to shoulder, her black hair lightly lifting, the tired, pale skin flushed, lost in herself and the breaking camp. She was white, and that no longer mattered. Her stillness annihilated years of anger. His heart thanked her silently from the depth of exhaustion, for she was one of a small army of his dream. She was a vessel caught at the moment of departure of their Muse, her clear vacancy the question of a poem which is its own answer. She was among the sentries who had watched till dawn. I am bound within them, neither knowing which is liana or trunk, which is the parasite, which is the host, since if I dared to confess to ambition I could be using them, and they the same. All their betrayals are quarrels with the self, their pardonable de-

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sertions the inevitable problem of all island artists: the choice of home or exile, selfrealization or spiritual betrayal of one’s country. Traveling widens this breach. Choice grows more melodramatic with every twilight. When twenty years ago we imagined cities devoted neither to power nor to money but to art, one had the true vision. Everything else has been the sweated blurring of a mirror in which the people might have found their true reflection. Petit Valley Trinidad February 1970

Gus Edwards

Caribbean Narrative: Carnival Characters— In Life and in the Mind

Historian Isidor Paiewonsky, in his book Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the Danish West Indies, describes the performative heritage and practice of Caribbean blacks from the Virgin Islands during their time of forced servitude. He describes the African drum music and the violent dancing, which planters came to fear as a source of rebellion and eventually outlawed. He also describes the tradition of “‘lunatic balls’ in which the imagination ran riot and the costumers and decorators outdid each other in preparing the weird, the grotesque, the comic, and satirical outfits for the masqueraders and the setting for the ball.”1 Elsewhere in that book he observes, “One of the links of attention between planters’ children and their Negro nurses might be traced directly to storytelling. Some of the Nanas on the plantations developed this form of entertainment into a fine art.”2 Of the storytellers, Paiewonsky says, “None were better known than Nana Bela, a member of the Bantu tribe of Angola. As a storyteller, Nana Bela’s variety of tales, her ability to express them, to convert African folklore into a West Indian setting earned her a wide reputation. She was in great demand at garden parties for children which were well attended by grownups as well.” Thus Paiewonsky suggests that public performance skills in drama, dance, storytelling, and mimicry are a key part of Caribbean/Virgin Island heritage. Although I was born and raised in the Caribbean, I remained unconscious of my rich heritage until I was an adult wrestling with questions of identity and seeking information about my culture. For more years than I care to admit to, I have worried and struggled over my identity and choice of profession. I live in the world of the theatre in the United States, where my plays have both been produced and published and where I teach Theatre Arts to aspiring dramatists, particularly aspiring black artists. I puzzled far too long over the question, “Was I an American writer who just happened to be born in the Caribbean? Or was I a Caribbean writer who just happened to be working in the United States?” I was born in

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Antigua, which was a British Colony at the time, brought up in St. Thomas, V.I., a U.S. possession, and educated to the theatre in New York City, one of the greatest cities, if not the greatest and most cosmopolitan city, in the world. So who was I? And out of what ethos did I write? These were profoundly important questions to me. If I could answer them, I thought, I would be able to bring clarity to a creative landscape that was confused and labyrinthine in the extreme. I spoke with a West Indian accent but my outlook and value system were definitely American. I worked in American theatre but I wrote like a Briton. One New York critic referred to my first professionally produced play as “Pinter comes to Harlem,”3 and indeed, culturally speaking, I was a man without a country. So it was only natural that I take up residence in someone else’s. I continued in this state of confusion and rootlessness for several years, even managing for long periods of time to shunt aside the nagging questions of cultural identity and place to which I could find no satisfactory answers. Then one day, at a symposium made up of theatre scholars and professionals, I was asked to define and discuss what the concept of theatre meant to me. Without preparation or hesitation I stood up and said, “My cultural heritage is Caribbean. Speaking specifically from the framework of this heritage, ‘theatre’ to me is a construct made up primarily of music, color, movement, some natural ingredients (vegetables, fruit, fish, etc.), sounds (music, cries, grunts, chants, etc.), and rhythm. Not the art but the rhythm of life. Life that was vivid, spontaneous, unpredictable, and natural. There was no formal sense of language or preplanned structure. No deliberate attempt at passion or spectacle, yet it was there for all to see in a variety of ways.” Once I had made this statement, a flood of memories animated the words I had spoken, presenting the characters and situations and textures of the world that had shaped me. If you’ve ever seen a hen decapitated, then plucked and cleaned for dinner, you never forget it. Every Sunday my brother and I would watch our father perform this ritual, which of course wasn’t a ritual to him, with fascination. There was, of course, the violence, the spectacle of the blood splashing all over, even the sense of pity, fear, and cosmic wonderment. My brother and I often speculated about whether the soul of that particular chicken went to heaven or hell. Often our verdict depended on our feelings about the specific fowl. Then of course there was satisfaction at dinnertime, when we finally sat down to eat the bird. Going for a haircut was another theatrical and highly suspenseful activity. The barber was a Puerto Rican man nicknamed “Chiki Thing,” who at four feet eleven inches was hardly taller than his young customers. He had fathered eleven children, and we joked about that such a small man being so fertile. His assistant was a harsh-looking Latino with a scar called “Color Rojo” for his bloody ways. It was rumored that he had killed a dozen men in the wilds of Puerto Rico and was living on our little island under an assumed name in order to escape the law and the wrath of the families of those he had slaughtered, allegedly with a machete, or sometimes a dagger. In the cruel use of those weapons he was thought to have no peer. Color Rojo never spoke. He just cut our hair in deathly silence and grunted whenever anyone addressed him

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directly. You can imagine the delicious shivers of fear that ran through us as we sat in his chair. We boys had one quietly spoken rule: we would never let Color Rojo shave us. We didn’t trust him around our throats with those sharp, shiny straight razors. Of course the rule was silly, since none of us was old enough to require a shave, but it suffused our biweekly trips to the barber with excitement and a vicarious sense of danger. The presence in this small barber shop of a near midget who was overpopulating the community, and his assistant, who, by mythic reputation, was decimating it in equal measure, provided an atmosphere charged with all the pity and dread we look for in theatre. Yet I never thought of it as “theatre,” because it was not accompanied by artifice or self-consciousness. These two men were just going about their lives, and so were we. Then of course there was Carnival, the weeklong spectacle of music, color, costumes, drumbeat, pan beat, dance, Ring Shot, Mambo, Jump Up, Play Mas’, Boot Dance, Shango, Voodoo—and just plain exhilaration. Errol Hill, playwright and educator, describes the Trinidad Carnival as providing “a striking record of mass participation in what is undoubtedly the greatest annual theatrical spectacle of all time,” an apt description indeed.4 In the Virgin Islands, planters started Carnival in imitation of the year-end feasts in ancient Rome, when seven days were given over to drinking, masquerades, and bloody games. The planters’ version of it began as a series of fashionable masked balls, where whites blackened their faces and danced to the music of African drums. Slaves were excluded from this celebration except when they provided special services. After slavery was abolished in St. Thomas, newly freed blacks created their own Carnival by adding mockery, history, voodoo, chant, and song, especially calypso, beginning with the first official Carnival on February 14, 1912. This tradition of Carnival was practiced informally and then formally, beginning in 1952, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. When I was a boy growing up on that island, Carnival was the central event of the year. And it was in its colorful array of songs, dances, and characters that my penchant for dramaturgy was born. Calypso and its varied forms “caliso” and “kaiso” have always been an important part of Carnival, and as a boy I remember being mesmerized by the variety of its musical beats and rhythms, as well as by the risqué nature of some of the lyrics. These could be quite pointed, especially during our week-long sing off, known as the “Calypso Tent,” as in this improvised lyric: “While I stand here I see the white girl smiling up in the black man’s face / Tonight she gone taste the milk of the African race.”5 Or: “Push it hard till she love you so pull it out till she beg for more.”6 As Errol Hill has observed, “As an instrument of social criticism and an escape measure for resentful public feelings, the effectiveness of calypso has long been known.”7 Calypso was the music in which we criticized the government, gossiped about our neighbors, commented on world affairs, and gave advice on everything from how to cook pig knuckles and rice to how to marry. “If you want to be happy and live a

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king’s life / Never make a pretty woman your wife.”8 These songs were sung by men with theatrical names like “The Mighty Panther,” “King Short Shirt,” “Duke of Iron,” “Lord Melody,” “The Mighty Sparrow,” and “The Mighty Chalkdust,” and they bombarded my senses, taking root in my subconscious. Our educational system emphasized Western European cultural values over those of local or indigenous peoples, but the lessons I learned at Carnival made a deeper and more lasting impression than anything I ever read in a schoolbook. The traditional and historical dances I saw at Carnival also had an impact on my developing theatrical sensibility, especially the “Bamboula,” “a dance that appeared in the elegant ballrooms of the Danish West Indian planters . . . [in which] specially selected teams of talented slaves performed the dance as no white man could.”9 This sensuous dance, full of violent movement and so-called “pagan manipulation of the body,”10 was later incorporated into the Carnival event and has remained an integral part of its public presentation. I responded to the primitive force and sexually suggestive movements of these dances in ways all the more delicious because they were forbidden. Of course these feelings were in direct conflict with my repressive Catholic upbringing. But Carnival forced me to confront them, and I used the experience later in developing the characters that people my plays. The strongest and most dramatic impressions that Carnival left on me came from the haunting, larger-than-life characters presented either by organized groups or passionately committed individuals. The Zulus were one of the oldest troops in the Carnival parade, created by a group of local black people who blackened their skin even further in order to impersonate characters from the heart of Africa. Then they decorated themselves with white markings all over their bodies, especially their faces. Now, these “Zulus” were aware that the look was not authentic in any true African sense, but the markings were meant to heighten the dramatic impression of the characters they wanted to create. The Zulus’ special talent lay in their powerful and athletic choreography. Their street dances were muscular, powerful, and fearsome. This Zulu troop was generally made up of about forty people who usually led the Carnival parade, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Their warlike appearance was frightening yet fascinating. Maybe it was some primitive element they seemed to exude. Or perhaps it was some deeply rooted ancestral memory they awoke in us, their spectators. I don’t know. But they made an indelible impression that has remained with me for more than fifty years. Other Carnival troops depicted other African tribes, but the Zulus always made the strongest impression. There was always something mythic, almost godlike, about them, and no Carnival parade was complete without the Zulus coming down to take over the town. Calypso singers sang about them, steel band players cleared the way, and everyone looked on with a mixture of fear, awe, and excitement. The Mocko Jumbi was a curious impersonation that demanded a number of special talents. Whoever undertook to play this character could not be merely performative but had to be athletic and acrobatic as well. To be a Mocko Jumbi one had to master

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the art of stilt walking, and the art of stilt walking was always judged as good, better, or best. The rankings were made according to the length of the stilt walked, danced, and jumped on. Four feet was good, six to eight was better, and those who went higher were masters, the best. The premier Mocko Jumbi of my boyhood years, who called himself Mambo, jumped, danced, and spun around on stilts more than ten feet high. Mambo had a magical and fearful effect thanks to the mask he wore—made of see-through wire mesh painted with the face of a skull, offering to all the face of death. The Mocko Jumbi figure was also androgynous, with a muscular, masculine upper half and a feminine lower half clothed in a multicolored skirt that hid where the Mocko Jumbi’s feet stood on the tops of the stilts. The image of this figure dancing down the street in time to music was simply awe inspiring, especially at night. He seemed a creature not of this world but of some twilight place where dark and light meet and dreams and nightmares run together. We boys all wanted to grow up to be Mocko Jumbis or Mambos. But when we considered the daunting skill one had to master, we were content with the role of appreciative audience. The Glass Bottle Man, another Carnival figure, was an island invention. I know of no other place or tradition where this character exists. It evolved out of the old island practice of people breaking bottles after they finished with them, in the superstitious belief that this kept ghosts and other spectral figures from taking up residence in the empty bottles, only to come out later to haunt people. The bottles were tossed against a tree or rock and the shattered pieces were allowed to remain where they fell. In time they became part of the ground one walked on and their edges became dulled over time. Now, there were people who for whatever reason began to collect these colored pieces of glass from the ground and sew them into clothing. This clothing became an outfit and then a costume for the character that would eventually be called the Glass Bottle Man. At first this practice was restricted to street people who decorated themselves in order to attract the attention of tourists who would take their picture. In time the Glass Bottle Man became a Carnival figure and took on certain mythic characteristics. This figure is supposed to suggest one’s ancestral ghosts, often representing someone from the past paying a brief, celebratory visit to the present. These creatures never threaten harm; they simply want to celebrate and join in the merrymaking. They are reputed to have a great capacity for drinking and carousing and are thus considered a welcome addition to Carnival, where dancing and drinking are the order of the day. The performer who plays the Glass Bottle Man is usually an older person, unless he is the direct offspring of the last celebrated Glass Bottle Man, in which case age is less important. If the figure is played by a young man, it is usually someone unconventional, defiant of social rules, even reputed to be a little “off” mentally. In a left-handed way, the idea of the Glass Bottle Man conforms to the African understanding of spirit accessibility, which says that the older you are, the closer you are to the ancestors. If you are young and somewhat bent, you are regarded as being

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in the sphere of spectral influence and allowed special access. The spirit can come through you as a kind of conduit to the present world. And the Glass Bottle Man, a more recent addition to Carnival, has now taken his place in the gallery of traditional and historic figures who come to life at Carnival time. The Saga Man, another Carnival figure that influenced me as a boy, is based on a real-life character but is often misrepresented during Carnival as a pimp or a criminal. In fact, however, the Saga Man, in the island definition of the term, is a male that women pay to simply be a man—their man. Sometimes he’s handsome, sometimes not. Whatever his visual or physical appeal, it is not always obvious to the disinterested observer; but the women know what they want and deliberately select this man. The Saga Man provides sexual service in return for support from the women who choose him. And if he has no other ambition for himself, he will acquiesce in this appointed role. The woman (or women) will pay his rent, buy and cook his food, give him spending money, and make sure he dresses well. The Sagas I’ve known have generally been easygoing men with low-key personalities who seemed to accept their station in life with a certain air of philosophical resignation. They engaged in no aggressive macho posturing or loud displays of manliness but expressed a quiet, sometimes bemused acceptance of the role life, or the fates, had assigned them. A Saga Man can be involved with more than one woman at a time, and sometimes as many as three. He will do service in this house tonight, that house tomorrow, and a third later in the week. The women express no jealousy or possessiveness about this arrangement. They will even say, “I have the Saga tonight” or “My Saga Man is coming to see me on Friday night.” This practice is so accepted in certain Caribbean countries that being a Saga is considered a viable, full-time occupation. One could argue that the Saga tradition affronts conventional Western morality, suggesting as it does that women have their own agency in sexual matters and do not need to follow a man’s lead. When the Saga Man figure takes part in Carnival, whether in a troupe, a dramatization, or even a song, his character is exaggerated to the point of caricature. His costume is always Harlequinade or clownish, and he behaves like a buffoon. He is never presented as serious or threatening, but neither is he portrayed as charming or seductive. He is always the idiot, the fool, the pawn. In this way island culture passes judgment on the real-life Saga Man. But the gap between the real thing and the impersonation is what made this figure riveting and memorable to me. There are other Carnival characters, many others, who wormed their way into my subconscious and who, over the years, have revealed themselves in my writing. The memories of these figures have provided me with whatever sense of theatre I have. They have helped make me who I am, and they have determined the location and the limits of my theatrical identity and imagination. Errol Hill makes a persuasive case for a national theatre in Trinidad by observing that great Athenian drama grew out of annual Dionysian festivities. “The drama of India originated in dances associated with fertility cult ceremonies. The earliest Ger-

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man comedy was a direct product of Carnival celebrations. . . . In France the grand court ballets of the sixteenth century with recited and sung dialogues had their origin in carnival masquerades.”12 The same source, Carnival, provided the material from which my own sense of national theatre evolved. Perhaps in my zeal to locate myself in another culture, I abandoned and consciously attempted to forget my own, in all its richness, color, and specificity. But when I did this, I was lost. Fortunately I was able to find it again, but it took a long time. My advice to anyone in a similar position is to hold on to the richness of your own cultural background, study it, explore it, investigate it, define it, glory in it, and become one with it. For it is in your own past, your own place, that true theatre resides, whether it lives on the stage or in the soul.

Notes 1. Isador Paiewonsky, Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the Danish West Indies (also graphic tales of slave happenings on ships and plantations) copyright 1987. Ch. 9, “Plantation Opulence and Folk Tales.” 2. Ibid. 3. Alan Wallach, Newsday, December 2, 1977. 4. Errol Hill, Trinidad Carnival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972). 5. “Mighty Sparrow” (1958), improvised Calypso lyric. 6. “Lord Melody” (1960), improvised Calypso lyric. 8. McRae Withoite (1957), Calypso. 9. Paiewonsky, Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery. 10. Andre Pierre Ledru, Voyage Aux Ilses the Teneriff (Paris: I.P. Publications, 1810), 153. 11. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 129.

Michael McMillan and SuAndi

Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain

It wasn’t until the mid 1970s that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the bastion of “balanced” broadcasting, decided it was time to take off the air The Black and White Minstrel Show. This program, based on the first American theatre tradition, says more about the hegemony of a colonial fantasy constructed in the nineteenth century as part of a racist ideology than about the black subject. In this Eurocentric discourse, we were always more body than mind, and black cultural traditions were represented as homogeneous, marginal to the European canon, and unsophisticated derivatives of Western forms and traditions. This historical and cultural political background provides a critical framework for discussing black theatre as developed and practiced in a British context. The framework will facilitate a critique of black theatre, live art (that is, performance art), and related practices in the context of a postcolonial discourse. While the term “black” has been used in other studies as a political definition to include African-Caribbean, Southeast Asian, Chinese, and other communities of color, in this context, “black theatre” will refer to theatre of African-Caribbean origin. British-based black theatre practitioners and related cultural practices have influenced and been influenced by the African Diaspora. Indeed, these trans-dialogues have sustained the existence of black theatre in exile. Moreover, as black diasporic communities from Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Africa, we share experiences of colonialism and political resistance to it. The struggles of black communities are reflected in the cultural and artistic practices, from music to film, from literature to live art, from theatre/performance to visual arts. Given the history of these struggles, the aesthetics, forms, practices, and critiques oppose the dominant regimes of power, while reinventing and subverting European culture. And yet, like our histories, memories, and ancestors, the work of black the-

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atre writers in Britain has been rarely produced, rarely published, and in some instances never documented. But we are just scratching the surface here, as Coco Fusco argues. The early modernist interest in performative practices of non-Western cultures as the keys that could unlock the Western unconscious and offer alternatives to realism and classicism has informed nearly every form of performance art in the United States. Even the contemporary trend of tattooing, piercing, and scarification by white performance artists relies to some extent on stereotypes of “primitive ritual,” retracing the steps of the Dadaists.1

The Back Story Black theatre in Britain has not been documented, criticized, or analyzed in any depth, from black (African-Caribbean) performers in the seventeenth century down to the postwar settlers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Historically black people in theatre were not writers or directors but onstage spectacles in the colonial imagination of the Other. Like Morgan Smith, Ira Aldridge came to Europe to escape racism in the United States during the nineteenth century, but he experienced similar discrimination in England and fled, eventually finding recognition and prominence in his tours of Western and Eastern Europe. His innovative contribution to the development of the Method School of Acting has still not been fully credited. In 1907 Kobina Sekeye’s The Blinkards was the first black play to be published in Britain. It was during the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, which produced such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Robeson, that racism in British theatre was challenged and the prophetic cultural and political seeds of a British-based black arts movement were sown. Like Aldridge, Robeson had a monumental impact on Shakespearean theatre during the 1930s with the Unity Theatre. He played Toussaint L’Ouverture in C.L.R. James’s 1936 play The Black Jacobins, which contained the germ of a theatre in Britain mediated through the experience of the colonialism of postwar black settlers from the Caribbean and Africa. With the post– World War II reconstruction of Britain came immigrants from the colonies who regarded themselves as British citizens and as meriting treatment as such. The politics of the independent struggles taking place in Africa and the Caribbean at this time meant that the black presence in English theatre accelerated the shift from work that blended “Western bourgeois aesthetic criteria and a sentimental racial awareness to the advocacy of Black ‘consciousness’ reflected in synthesis of dramaturgical and ideological presuppositions.”2 By the 1950s Britain did not want the dark strangers whom they had invited to rebuild their country after the war. The summer of 1958 saw the first postwar race riots in mainland Britain, first in Nottingham and then in Notting Hill, where Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from St. Vincent, was murdered by Teddy Boys. In that year Royal Court Theatre produced John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Errol John’s Moon

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on a Rainbow Shawl (which had won the Observer’s play competition in 1956), Wole Soyinka’s The Invention, and Barry Reckford’s Flesh to a Tiger. Around this time the Court also produced Derek Walcott’s Ti Jean and His Brothers and Reckford’s plays You in the Your Corner (1960) and Skyvers (1963), the latter with an all-white cast, as black actors allegedly could not be found.3 During the 1960s the ideological and political positions of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements provided the impetus for black activists and cultural practitioners in an emergent black arts movement in Britain. Claudia Jones, an activist exiled from the United States, began the first black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, and was instrumental when West Indians took to the streets in Notting Hill’s first Carnival in 1965. The diet of English culture on which many settlers had been raised was being challenged. Actors and activists like Pearl Connor, Nadia Cattouse, Yvonne Brewster, Norman Beaton, Alton Kumalo, Allister Baine, and Carmen Munroe, and writers such as Michael Abbensetts and Mustapha Matura, who came to the “mother country” in the 1950s and 1960s, ironically shared the same experience as the writer Biyi Bandele, who said in a 1955 interview: “When I arrived in the UK, the culture was not a shock except the weather. Because I knew western civilisation, I had to study their writers. . . . In one of Earl Lovelace’s short stories in his collection Brief Conversation, a Trinidadian man tries to leave on a false passport, thinking he knows America as well as any American. And so the knowing is one thing, being there is another, because one has to negotiate it. I believe in the black familiar. I go anywhere and write anything. I can touch that bottom.”4 George Lamming’s allegory, in which Caliban appropriates Prospero’s imperial language to usurp the master, is a metaphor for the ideological undercurrents that informed Caribbean and African writers. As Benjamin Zephaniah puts it, “you cannot talk to a hurricane in standard English.”5 Writers such as C.L.R. James, Roger Mais, Barry Reckford, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Errol John all shared the colonial experience and struggled for the liberation of the natural voice, “the rhythms of Walcott, the humour and satire of Soyinka, the vision of Mais and the politics of James.”6 But it was Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl that broke the tradition of writing in perfect conditioned English by using Creole, or what Kamau Braithwaite terms the “Nation Language” of his native Trinidad. Mustapha Matura’s Black Pieces, produced by Inter Action at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as part of a series of Black and White Power Plays in 1970, signified “the intellectual realisation of our history, how you could perceive yourself, I had to write about that, the political change, the metamorphosis happening to me and others around.”7 Black Pieces was directed by Roland Rees, who had directed Ed Bullins’s play The Electronic Nigger at the Ambience Restaurant in 1967, and produced by Ed Berman’s Inter Action at the ICA. Matura was then commissioned to write As Time Goes By, which he describes as his first mature play; it opened at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971 and played at the Royal Court, winning him the John Whiting and George Devine Awards. Fringe theatres such as the Royal Court, Almost Free, Soho Poly, and Open Space were inconsistent in producing black British plays, so black-run theatre companies

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started to emerge. The Dark and Light Theatre Company, later called the Black Theatre of Brixton, was founded by Frank Cousins in the early 1970s. By the time it folded, in 1977, it had produced Jon Hendricks’s Evolution of The Blues; Shiman Wincalbert’s Kataki; Amiri Baraka’s The Slave; Richard Crone’s The Tenant; Robert Lamb’s RAAS; Manley Young’s Anancy and Bre’r Englishman; T-Bone Wilson’s Jumbie Street March; Jimi Rand’s Seduced; and Jamal Ali’s Twisted Knot, Dark Days and Light Nights, and Jericho. The Black Theatre of Brixton and Temba Theatre Company, founded by Alton Kumalo, had produced more black plays in two years than the whole of English theatre had in the previous twenty-five.8 In this fragmented sector, with organizations struggling to survive, a number of other performing spaces appeared, including the Africa Centre and The Drum Centre. The Keskidee Centre, one of London’s first black arts centers in the 1970s, produced Derek Walcott’s Remembrance, directed by Anton Phillips; Lennox Brown’s Throne in an Autumn Room, and Edgar White’s Lament for Rastafari. White’s The Nine Night, directed by Rufus Collins, portrayed a modern British family and dealt with the opposing forces of “dominoes and chic disco music, curry goat and fish and chips,” in the words of Caryl Phillips.9 Onye Wambu has argued that Edgar White is one of few dramatists to bridge the gap between Africa, the Caribbean, and the British experience in his work. He himself has lived in all of these places. His early play Lament for Rastafari is part ritual, part panorama, the action moving from the Caribbean to London and finally to New York. The play is episodic, the one narrative thread being the transformation of a character called Lindsey from prisoner in Jamaica to JuJu man in a New York cemetery. “His plays are never peopled by characters in perpetual revolt, who by being elevated to the level of symbol, lose their human specificity. Rather the characters, bewildered and yearning for an end to their exile, live on in our psyches, prodding and prompting us into reexamining the vision we formerly vision.”10 Black theatre and related arts practices in the late 1970s and early 1980s emerged at a time of community resistance against ongoing racist immigration laws, police/state brutality, and marginalization in the labor market, housing, and education. These struggles culminated in uprisings at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival and inner city revolts in 1981 and 1985. Kobena Mercer has argued that these uprisings encoded militant demands for black representation within public institutions as a basic right. Public institutions such as the Greater London Council (GLC) responded with “benevolent” gestures of redistributing funds to the people. New opportunities for black arts practitioners and organizations generated a cultural renaissance of black creativity. This moment marked a historical juncture, as second-generation blacks and Asians born and educated in Britain affirmed their British citizenship, rejecting the second-class citizenship of their parents.11 Matura’s dream of creating an environment in which young black theatre practitioners could train was realized in the creation of Black Theatre Co-op (BTC). The desire for autonomous creative spaces and the right to exist continues to be a charged political issue, from the Roundhouse; the Double Edge Theatre (which occupies an

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unused church in Camden, London, that became The Cut); the Talawa Theatre (which had to leave the Cochrane Theatre and find another home); to Black Mime Theatre— these are only a few of the many independent black theatre companies that have emerged, and these are only in the London area. The creation of these companies is the result of the struggle by black cultural practitioners to assert the heterogeneous nature of their practices and work.12 The 1980 production of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf fused poetry, dance, and music in a choreopoem. This new form of production resonated in the work of the Theatre of Black Women, founded by Paulette Randall, Patricia Hilaire, and Bernadine Evaristo, authors of the performance pieces Silhouette, Pyeyucca, and Chiaroscuro. Munirah, a black women’s performance collective, adopted this new aesthetic, and writers such as Barbara Burford and Jackie Kay explored abstract dramatic forms as a way of unpacking complex identities. These women and others used non-naturalistic forms to explore black women’s identities and considered themselves “womanists,” a term Susan Croft defines as “usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or wilful behaviour.” Barbara Burford’s Patterns examined women’s labor; Jacqueline Rudet’s Basin explored lesbian themes; and Jackie Kay’s Twice Over All mixed symbolism, stylized movement, visual imagery, poetic language, and naturalism. “I want to find the woman who in Dahomey in 1900 loved another woman tell me what did they call her did they know her name in Ashanti, do they know it in Yoruba do they know it in Patois . . .”13 In the 1980s a discourse of black performance arose to counter the dominant performance discourse of colonialism. Amani Napthali’s play Ragamuffin displayed this fresh approach, when Double Edge Theatre toured to full houses. Ragamuffin is the archetypal young, black urban warrior on trial in a court of African justice. The defense and prosecution make lyrical social and political commendatory through an electronic sound system, in the style of competing MC’s. Sound system culture is a unique African-Caribbean phenonemon in which each sound has its own locality and following. The Haitian Revolution of 1802 and the police killing of Cythnia Jarrett and the ensuing Broadwater Farm riots are presented as evidence. The audience becomes, in effect, the jury, the theatre transformed into a dance-hall type of social arena with the MC calling and the audience responding. Ragamuffin essentially broke the “fourth wall” of the proscenium stage, which separates the audience from the stage and performers. Now the audience was coming to church, transformed into a congregation, participating through call-and-response with the performers. As Geneva Smitherman put it, “Black theatre is moving to the point where we’ve taken the ritual, passion, drama and intensity of the church and put it into secular music so it can be a functional kind of thing; so you can use your catharsis, your collective energy and collective prayer in your everyday life.”14 The construction of identity is a performative process, continually being negotiated through a “complex historical process of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, invention and revival.” Cultural identity is an “articulation fostered in

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a complex structure of diverse and contradictory, yet connected relations.”15 It is into this articulation of cultural identity, or identities, that much of black British theatre as an emerging discourse, practice, and aesthetic needs to be placed. Writers in theatre and performance such as Paulette Randell, Barbara Burford, Jenny McLeod, Maria Oshodi, Jackie Rudet, Zindika, Michael Ellis, Winsome Pinnock, Roy Williams, SuAndi, and Ronald Fraser Munro have explored this postcolonial hybridity in their work. For example, Caryl Phillips’s Strange Fruit and Where There Is Darkness, Killian Gideon’s England Is de Place for Me, Winsome Pinnock’s A Hero’s Welcome and Rock in Water, Trish Cooke’s Back Street Mammy and Running Dream, and Edgar White’s Redemption Song, to mention a few, all refer to the African Diaspora, specifically in the Caribbean. But these plays are ambivalent. The Caribbean is often romanticized as a backdrop in the search for identity in an alienating British landscape. Winsome Pinnock describes a journey through her writing of exploring cultural identities based on a process of interculturalism and change: “the impact of the first generation on the mainstream culture and vice versa.”16 Tunde Ikoli, son of a Cornish mother and a Nigerian father, examines these themes and issues in such works as Scrape off the Black, The Lower Depths, Sink or Swim, and Sleeping Policemen, co-written with Howard Brenton. Kobena Mercer’s term “burden of representation” describes accurately the 1980s obsession with the positive/negative image debate as part of a stereotyping theory in the representation of black communities, where fragmentation, objectification, and name substitution are common. Stuart Hall argues that in the politics of representation, questions of identity, subjectivity, and politics mark an “end of innocence” about the essential “good” black subject, often juxtaposed to the essential “bad” white subject.17 A further sign that black artists were beginning to recognize the speciousness of posting an essential “good” black subject can be seen in their ambivalent treatment of identity and desire. Psychoanalysts have explored the themes of otherness and difference and the tension between fear of and desire for the Other. And of course Franz Fanon has written eloquently about the internalization of the self as Other.18 Questioning the invisibility of the “essential black subject” reflects not only a subordination of form for a conjunctural imperative to transgress/deconstruct the dominant racial discourse, but the urgency of black cultural practitioners. As Stuart Hall and David Bailey have written, “to say it all, or at least to signal as much as we could . . . sometimes we can’t afford to hold anything back for another time, another conversation. . . . That is the reality of our experiences—sometimes we only get the one chance to make ourselves heard.”19 The renaissance of a black arts movement in the 1980s signified the coming of age of second-generation blacks who had grown up in Britain and were exploring questions of identification and representation. Could being black and British be reconciled, and what did this mean? Naturalism and social realism in theatre could not cope with this existential question about the black experience.

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The shift among black artists in formulating their identities shattered the racist view that blacks “all look the same.” The shift was further compounded by the body of writing emerging from cultural studies based on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and the black and feminist movements. With the impact of black American writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison on the black women’s movement in Britain, the statement that the personal is political signified a privileging of self as the black subject in process of cultural production. Theatre of Black Women and Munirah were only the beginning of a ground swell of black women practitioners who told “herstories” that addressed gender, sexuality, and sexual politics. These women constructed a discourse that ran counter to the dominant versions of reality produced by the colonial discourse of the Other.20 Just as theoretical expositions on identity, difference, desire, and cultural politics have interrogated cultural theory and studies, the fragmentation of the old politics paved the way for a postmodern paradigm, with its attendant postcolonial discourses. As playwright Julie MacDougall puts it, “As a displaced person moving between cultures, I am viewing identity as a work-in-process, a disappearing act, a performance.”21 This performative hybridity reflects not only an intercultural reality but an interdisciplinary process.

Rough Theatre Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that is always consistent: a roughness. Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that can’t be contained in a building, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back; theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes. It is most of all dirt that gives the roughness its edge; filth and vulgarity are natural, obscenity is joyous: with these the spectacle takes on its socially liberating role, for by nature the popular theatre is against authority, against tradition, against pomp, against pretence. This is the theatre of noise, and the theatre of noise is the theatre of applause. —Peter Brook22

Caribbean popular theatre over the past decade, in the form of plays such as Bups, Mama Man, Undercover Lover, all loosely called “Bups” dramas, has been dismissed as comic, sexist, and crude pandering to the audience. But it has brought black workingclass audiences to the theatre, something previous black theatre did not do. Audiences of recent Caribbean popular theatre are not alienated by the form or condescended to by didactic messages, but allowed to comment, cuss, participate, own, belong, reclaim. Comedy has played a leading role in the emergence of Caribbean popular theatre, from the “Bups” series to Oliver Samuel. Just as poets on the circuit in the 1980s came to prominence, comic artists such as Lenny Henry, Curtis Walker,

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Felix Dexter, Angela la Mar, Jeff Schmann, and Felicity Ethnic have gained popular acclaim without subsidy or funding. Indeed, television has attempted to cash in on this phenomenon with, for example, The Real McCoy, a black satirical revue written by the show’s performers. And Llwellyn Gideon’s You Know Dem Wey De, a revue of black female characters, has struck a chord with audiences in both its form and content. Paul Gilroy has questioned the limitations of an anti-modernist African orality, which looks back romantically to a time long gone.23 The Notting Hill Carnival, as a historical and contemporary cultural practice, carries with it memories and aspirations of cultural and political resistance, subversion, reinvention, and the celebration of emergence in the African Diaspora. Its aesthetic synthesis in the context of Caribbean cultures registers cultural syncretism/Creolization between the Caribs, African slaves, East Indian laborers, and the European colonizers of the Americas. In the essay “Carnival Theatre,” Wilson Harris uses the mystery of the bone-flute in the Carib legend of Yurokon as a metaphor for the redemptive edge of Carnival—“the edge of dialogue with the enemy, a dialogue hedged around by the lust of conquest.” Carnival dialogue is an imaginative necessity and strategy that engages word, dance, space, image, theatre, and mask (Mas) within the cross-cultural psyche of modern life.24 Then as now, the undercurrent of Carnival has been confrontation between the state and the black communities in terms of the control and policing of space, time, and territory; and the freedom of the sound system to “sign off” at will signifies the continuing power of the drum.25 The experience of the black communities forms a cultural and political backdrop and mediates the discourse of black performance in theatre and representation in Britain. The “claiming” of space within the negotiation of territorial control of the Notting Hill Carnival signifies a black ontology, establishing a sense of place and belonging in the web of the African Diaspora, according to Beth-Sarah Wright. In her essay “Dub Poet Lekka Mi,” black youths perform their ownership of territory, whether through language or physical behavior.26 In this space, “Otherness” becomes fetishized by performance and spectatorship, and during the Notting Hill Carnival these artifacts of blackness are not fixed in their identity or location but are performed, in Kobena Mercer’s words, as “floating signifiers.” There is much border crossing during Carnival—its hybridity is dialogic and polyphonic. The transgressive transformation of spaces other than those prescribed means that authority is willingly dismantled and disrupted as social meaning in this context, which depends on invoking “melancholy, displacements and alienation.”27 Keith Khan, a sculptor who works with materials, themes, and concepts in and beyond Carnival, has advocated that Carnival should question itself, not only through its position at the cutting edge of society but in order to subvert its traditional blindness. He has taken his Trinidadian Carnival skills and fused them with the South Asian side of his heritage to form the company Moti Roti, the first production of which parodied and subverted the Bollywood (i.e., the Indian film industry) genre.28 In the performance installation Wigs of Wonderment, Khan challenged Western notions of beauty, objectification, and the “exotic.” The audience is invited on a sensory journey to explore its relationship to black style and fashion. Bombarding his viewers

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with an array of wigs, beauty products, and costumes, Khan confronts internalized racism and the commodification and appropriation of black popular culture. Using visual and costume art, performance, film, and carnival, his work challenges the aesthetic boundaries of a range of art forms, in emphasizing hybridity over notions of taste and originality.29

Live Arts There has been an explosion of black performance art (live art) and related practices through collaboration with musicians, dancers, and digital and mixed-media artists. This interdisciplinary process, where European notions of art and convention are challenged, subverted, and reinvented, reflects a deeper undercurrent in British society. “‘The avant garde is no longer in the front but in the margins.’ To be avant garde . . . is to contribute to the decentralisation of art. To be avant garde means to be able to cross the border back and forth between art and politically significant territory, be it interracial, immigration, ecology, homelessness, AIDS or violence towards disenfranchised communities and Third World countries. ‘To be avant garde means to perform and exhibit in both artistic and non-artistic contexts: to operate in the world, not just the art world.’”30 If the roots of live art lay in Cubism and Surrealism, then its aesthetics were appropriated and fetishized elements of African art. Picasso, one of Cubism’s first exponents, when asked about the influence of “Negro” art on his work, replied, “What is Negro art? Never heard of it.” Is Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf ever acknowledged as an influence on performance writing? “Chronologies of the history of performance art that begin in Europe rarely, if ever, acknowledge the importance that indirect contact with non-Western performers played in giving shape to early twentieth-century avant garde artists’ concepts of aesthetic transgression.”31 Much of the work emerging from live art practices in Britain has been conceptual in nature, focusing more on the expression of ideas than the display of skills. Live art has been able to articulate, more than conventional theatre, the hybridized identities produced within the context of alienation, fragmentation, and disenfranchisement experienced by black communities. Issac Julien adapted his film Looking for Langston as a site-specific piece, in Camley Street near Kings Cross, “a street that is notorious as a cruising ground for straights,” as an “investigation of sexual identity, inter-cultural conflict and dialogue, and the historical and contemporary assessment of Black cultural expression.”32 Susan Lewis’s work is personified by risk and expressive subjectivity, and her choice of form reflects the alienation and frustration she feels with conventional practice. In Walking Tall and Ladies Falling Lewis investigates female oppression by using her own body to unpack historical and contemporary visual discourse around the black female body. Walking Tall, a movement-based performance piece, draws on the myth of Isis to explore the contemporary black female experience. Lewis’s mixed-

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race background motivates her interest in the cultural interweaving and the skin color hierarchies that persist within black communities. Ladies Falling uses tea, sugar, and rum as metaphors to map out a counter-history that reveals the different value of the same objects in different cultures. Lewis used movement, film, costume, and gesture to reflect the restricted and repressed nature of established value systems, which signify the alienation and fragmentation experienced in the African Diaspora.33 Performance artists such as Ronald Fraser Munroe subvert form and recontextualize popular stereotypes, using video projections as an integral element in their performance pieces, which include such twisted characters as Cesare Cappuccino, Coco Chamelle, M. C. Kamelhead, Sir Arthur Stuffed Shirt and His Revolving Monocle, and L’Homme Blanc. Fascinated and repelled by Nazis, likening them to the Ku Klux Klan, he places his central character on a pirate radio station broadcasting from outer space, admonishing and lecturing the listener via his numerous characters, many of which make use of masks. Performance poets have also gone through their own transformations. SuAndi’s multimedia performance piece This is all I have to say enables the audience to relax as if in her front room, as she creates an intimacy with her conversational style of poetry and poignant chat. Meanwhile the audience tries to digest British Nazi Party (BNP) and Ku Klux Klan propaganda left on their seats, while images of black people’s resistance to racism are projected and excerpts of BNP and KKK songs are played over the sound system. SuAndi’s work is in the oral tradition of the African griot. In The Story of M, she explores the subject of interracial marriage and one woman’s struggle to raise her children properly. The woman loses one child to the system; the other she manages to keep on track. Ironically, the narrator is the voice of a white mother.34 For more than ten years SuAndi has also been at the helm of the Black Arts Alliance (BAA), a nonprofit network of artists working in all media founded to offset the marginalization of black art and culture, currently numbering 350 members in the UK. The BAA has presented many opportunities for black live artists. Following their groundbreaking performance at the ICA, the Los Angeles–based Hittite Empire were invited by BAA to collaborate on a number of performance projects that told a familiar story of black masculinity in a unique narrative style. An ensemble of black male performers led by Keith Antar Mason, the Hittite Empire has created performance pieces that break the “fourth wall” between performers and audience. Mason’s Revisionist Examination explores the dialectic between image and the spoken word. Character List White man guest lecturer Black man in need of education At Rise (Let’s describe the black man in need of education: he is tied to a wooden chair wearing only a pair of black silk boxers. He is spitting up blood and has been badly beaten. He cannot escape and he is mumbling. The boxers should fit very tightly. The fear of his masculinity is the image that is being constructed. He is sitting in an area that is covered with white flour. There is a wooden desk across from him. On top of it is the white man guest

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lecturer. He is smoking a cigarette and drinking a 40 oz. He is wearing only a pair of white long johns and aiming a gun at the ceiling shooting at some unseen target. In the background we faintly hear side one of Young Americans by David Bowie. It plays through the entire event.)35

After a workshop led by the Hittites, Michael McMillan was inspired to tell stories about black masculinity in a British voice, as opposed to the usual dominant African American discourse. Brother to Brother 36 is a performance piece featuring three black male performers that attempts to situate a black male narrative within a British context, linked to but separate from the mainstream popular representation via the “black Atlantic.”37 The Hittites returned to produce with BAA Man in the Belly of a Slave Ship.38 In the bowels of an actual ship as dark and as eerie as any slave vessel, they told their stories. Brecht said that art is not truly revolutionary unless it is revolutionary in form. In the work of the black live artists discussed here, we see a subversion and fusion of art forms, a hybridized form of practice that reflects more than the polyphonic nature of black culture. These aesthetic representations signify a reinvention and reimagining of the self in a cultural and political context, where identities are continually fragmented and hybridized. As Hall and Bailey point out, “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain . . . have been transformed. White hegemony is gradually being painted darker and darker. A kind of hybridisation is happening to the English, whether they like it or not, and in this long process of the dismantling of the West, the new perspectives in Black cultural practice represented here may have to make this a real cultural and historical turning point.”39 What does this say about black theatre in the African Diaspora, indeed the African continuum? The idea of identity as a work in progress is reflected in the process of hybridization and eclectic aesthetic desires found in the work of black live art practitioners. This work challenges the critical orthodoxy and paradigmatic discourse of black theatre, and complicates the term by bringing within its compass a heterogeneous range of practices and aesthetic desires in the twenty-first century. Much of the history and critical analysis of black performance in Britain is yet to be done, and a lot of it will be found not in university libraries but on the lips of pioneers, practitioners, and players. Black performance, given its ephemeral and oral nature, is itself a living phenomenon continually reinventing itself for the universe. And people in a time of oppression appropriate, reappropriate, subvert, and reinvent as a counter to the culture of alienation and disenfranchisement in which they live. At its best black live art explores oppositions: institutional and technological control versus the quest for fusion of mind, body and spirit; fascism and barbarism in Rwanda and Bosnia versus a cultural politics that celebrates difference. We must view the question What is black theatre? through the lens of the African continuum, which can embrace the diverse narratives of the past as a way to transform the present and future. “The colonized cultures are sliding into the space of the colonizer, and in doing so, they are redefining its borders and culture. (A similar phenomenon is occurring in Europe with

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African Caribbean immigration.) . . . We need to find a new terminology, a new iconography and a new set of categories and definitions. We need to rebaptise the world in our own terms.”40

Notes 1. Coco Fusco, “Performance and the Power of the Popular,” in Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (London: ICA/Bay Press, 1995), 161. See also Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks (New York: Bantam Books, 1974); Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993); Jatinder Verma Towards a Black Aesthetic in Black Theatre in Britain (London: Performing Arts International, 1995). 2. Kwesi Owusu, The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain (London: Comedia, 1986). 3. Yvonne Brewster, “Introduction,” in Black Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1989). 4. Interview with writer Biyi Bandele Thomas by Michael McMillan, 1995. 5. Interview with poet Benjamin Zephaniah by Michael McMillan, 1995. 6. Brewster, “Introduction.” See also Kenneth Parker, “The Revelation of Caliban: ‘The Black Presence’ in the Classroom,” in The Black Presence in English Literature, ed. David Dabydeen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 205. 7. Interview with playwright Mustapha Matura by Michael McMillan, 1998. See also Kamau E. Braithwaite, The History of the Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). 8. Roland Rees, “Black Theatre,” in Fringe First: Pioneers of Fringe Theatre on Record (London: Oberon Books, 1992), and Norman Beaton, Beaton but Unbowed (London: Methuen, 1990). In terms of dates for productions mentioned, unfortunately they are not available. Temba Theatre Co. folded circa 1990. 9. Caryl Phillips, quoted in Owusu, The Struggle for Black Arts, 97. 10. Onye Wambu, “Trinity,” in Artrage (winter 1986). 11. Kobena Mercer and Issac Julien, “Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity,” in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 153. 12. Owusu, The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain. 13. Quotation from Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro; see Susan Croft, “Black Women Playwrights in Britain,” in British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958: A Critical Handbook, ed. Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (London: Open University Press, 1993), 84–98. 14. Geneva Smitherman, “We Are the Music: Ron Milner, People’s Playwright,” Black World 25 (April 1976). See also Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of AfricanAmerican Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), and Darwin T. Turner, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic,” in The Harlem Renaissance, ed. Victor A. Kramer (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 9–30. 15. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/ Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American and Caribbean Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 16. Interview with playwright Winsome Pinnock by Michael McMillan, 1995. 17. Stuart Hall and David A. Bailey, “The Vertigo of Displacement: Shifts within Black Documentary Practices,” in Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s, ed. Stuart Hall and David A. Bailey, Ten 8 Photo Paperback 2, (spring 1992).

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18. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986). 19. Hall and Bailey, “The Vertigo of Displacement.” 20. Ibid. 21. Julie MacDougall, in an article discussing the plays of Lebanese woman writer Abla Farhoud, cited in bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Ugwu, Let’s Get It On, 213. 22. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1968). See also Judy Stone, Study of the Literature of West Indian Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 59. 23. Paul Gilroy, “To Be Real”: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture,” in Ugwu, Let’s Get It On. 24. Wilson Harris, “Carnival Theatre: A Personal View,” in Masquerading: The Art of the Notting Hill Carnival (London: Arts Council, 1986). See also Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972). 25. Catherine Ugwu, “Keep on Running,” in Ugwu, Let’s Get It On. 26. Beth-Sarah Wright, “Dub Poet Lekka Mi,” in Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader, ed. Kwesi Owusu (London: Routledge, 1999). 27. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). See also Awam Amkpa, “Floating Signification: Carnival as a Transgressive Display of Hybridity,” in Hybrid Magazine 3 (June/July 1993); Kwesi Owusu and Jacob Ross, Behind the Masquerade: The Story of the Notting Hill Carnival (London: Arts Media, 1988). 28. “Bollywood” refers to the Indian film industry, based in Bombay (now Mumbai), which produces more films annually than Hollywood does. The typical Bollywood film would be a musical filled with spectacular songs and dancing. 29. David A. Bailey, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference, and Desire (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1995). 30. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “Hybrid America (the National Review of Live Art 1993),” Hybrid Magazine, Oct./Nov. 1993. 31. Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” Drama Review 38 (spring 1994). 32. Ugwu, Let’s Get It On. 33. Ibid. 34. Bailey, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference, and Desire. 35. Keith Antar Mason, “Revisionist Examination,” in Ugwu, Let’s Get It On. 36. The title was inspired by Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991). Marlon Riggs popularized the phrase “Brother to Brother” in the film Tongues Untied. The piece did not limit itself to a black gay agenda but opened up a discussion of black masculinity. 37. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 38. Man in the Belly of a Slave Ship, floating theatre ship, Hittite Empire (Keith Antar Mason, Gerard Williams, and Kirk Washington Junior), and UK artists Douglas Russell, Joseph Jones, and Delroy Williams (performed 1997). 39. Hall and Bailey, “The Vertigo of Displacement.” 40. “The Multi-Cultural Paradigm, An Open Letter to the National Arts Community,” in High Performance (fall 1989, Los Angeles).

Part II Mythology and Metaphysics

Overleaf: Sankofa signifies the search for knowledge, which results from diligent research and, particularly, exploration of original sources. In Akan culture, one can always return to the source to remedy error.

Victor Leo Walker II

Introduction

The actual events which make up the enactments . . . in ritual theatre [are] a materialization of [the] basic adventure of man’s metaphysical self. Theatre then is one arena, one of the earliest that we know of, in which man has attempted to come to terms with the spatial phenomenon of his being. . . . And this attempt to manage the immensity of his spatial awareness makes every manifestation in ritual theatre a paradigm for the cosmic human condition. —Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. . . . The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. Nor does the commonwealth know any more potent unwritten law than the mythic foundation which guarantees its union with religion and its basis in mythic conception. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

The essays in this section on Mythology and Metaphysics seek to explain, through select African diasporic epistemologies, the connection between performative rituals and the phenomenology of myth and metaphysics as the culmination of the dramatic experience. The epistemological underpinnings of these essays are rooted in the belief that “ritual is the affective technique common to most theatrical exercises in the Black world. . . . It is, rather, a creative elixir—Nommo force—that activates the dramatic mode. . . . Embedded in this mode are references to . . . myths and significations that define the collective moral universe.”1 Ritual drama rooted in the Nommo force of myth and metaphysics is a drama that is a “cleansing, binding, communal, recreative force,”2 where all aspects of life, whether complementary or contradictory, absurd or sublime, poetic or prophetic, are integral to human experience. Nearly all of the essays in this section deconstruct the complex landscape of Yoruba myth and metaphysics. As in Greek mythology, the orisas (gods, deities) of Yoruba

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mythology represent aspects of nature and humankind. But unlike Greek mythology, Yoruba mythology was conceived in an act of resistance, and that resistance translates into the creative spirit that is represented by the orisa Ogun. According to Yoruba myth, there was a time when there was only one being in the universe—the “Original One” or “Essence.” The Original One had a slave named Atunda (which means “re-creation”) who rebelled against the first ancestor by rolling a giant boulder down a hill onto the Original One’s farm, shattering the ancestor into a thousand and one fragments. Some of the fragments became orisas and the rest became the people who inhabited the earth. Separated by an abyss, both humans and orisas were feeling incomplete, so the orisas attempted repeatedly to cross over to the other side but failed. Then came Ogun, the god of iron, artistry, creativity, and its obverse, destruction. Ogun carved a path from the spirit world to the material world, from heaven to earth. According to Wole Soyinka, “The creation of the multiple godhead began a transference of social functions, the division of labor and professions among the deities whose departments they were thereafter to become. The shard of Original Oneness which contained the creative flint appears to have passed into the being of Ogun, who manifests a temperament for artistic creativity matched by technological proficiency. His world is the world of craft, song and poetry. . . . With creativity, however, went its complementary aspect, and Ogun came to symbolise the creative-destructive principle.”3 Yoruba myth and metaphysics are critical to Wole Soyinka’s philosophy of theatre and drama—hence the topic of his essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy.” The fourth stage is the metaphysical landscape situated outside and between the dead (the past), the present (the living), and the future (the unborn). For Soyinka, the fourth stage is the heart of the Yoruba mysteries, “the fourth space, the dark continuum of transition where occurs the intertransmutation of essence—ideal and materiality,” “the vortex of archetypes and home of the tragic spirit.”4 In addition, the fourth stage is cemented in the conviction that the essence, the roots, of African drama and literature (as well as African cultural criticism and worldview) can only be extracted from the traditions, intellect, and cultural artifacts “characteristic of a continuously changing and lived African world; the elicitation, implicit or explicit, of aesthetic, theoretical, and critical criteria from African sources, epistemologies, and cosmologies; and the general move away from European thought systems except as illuminating analogies to concepts and principles locally derived.”5 The fourth stage, steeped in Yoruba myth and metaphysics, includes select data from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and rests on comparisons of the Yoruba and Greek gods. Although Soyinka does acknowledge Nietzsche and a few similarities between certain Yoruba orisas and Greek deities, “inevitable key, departures”6 lie at the heart of Soyinka’s comparison. Even though the deities from both traditions are guilty of folly and sometimes commit egregious acts against their earthly subjects, the idea that gods may extend reparations for their misdeeds against humanity is part of Yoruba spiritual belief, “while the morality of reparation appears

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totally alien to the ethical concepts of the ancient Greeks. . . . The Greek catalog is one of lust, greed, sadism, megalomania and sheer cussedness.”7 Tejumola Olaniyan asserts that “the Yoruba insistence on the moral character of their deities constantly forces into focus the dialectic of communal continuity, of restitutions and disharmonies.”8 Moving from the other side of the Atlantic, from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, we find in the essay by Marta Moreno Vega documentary evidence of the presence of Yoruba traditional belief systems throughout the Americas, but more specifically in Brazil and Cuba. Her essay, “The Candomblé and Eshu-Eleggua in Brazilian and Cuban Yoruba-Based Ritual,” is a persuasive examination of “the sacred philosophy and aesthetics of Yoruba decedents as manifested in the continued practice of Candomblé in Brazil and Cuban Santería.” Vega demonstrates the cultural synchronicity between the Yoruba cosmogony in West Africa and the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas. The enslavement of more than 13 million West Africans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by Europeans who transported those slaves to destinations in North America, South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, is the principal reason why Yoruba mythology and metaphysics are practiced today by more than 100 million people throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The belief systems that the Yorubas brought with them to the so-called New World were transplanted into that world in various guises and masks. All slaves were indoctrinated in Christian belief systems, the most common of which was Catholicism. According to Vega, Yoruba slaves in Brazil and Cuba cleverly disguised the “divinities behind the image of Catholic saints.” By the mid-eighteenth century the inability of religious and governmental authorities to stop the syncretizing of Yoruba orisas with Catholic saints in parts of South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean led some European Catholics to become regular worshippers in Yoruba belief systems. According to Wole Soyinka, “A determination to replant the displaced racial psyche was one reason for the ease and permanence with which the African gods were syncretised with Roman Catholic saints. The process was so complete that these ditties became part of the spiritual lives of the white Roman Catholic themselves who, in Brazil or Cuba, became regular worshipers in the candomble and bembe (the respective Brazilian and Cuban terms) adopting the Yoruba orisa in their full essence as their patron gods.”9 Because the sacred and the secular are so interrelated in many African cultures in the Diaspora, Vega draws no distinction between the two. Her theoretical position is that for most African peoples, even in the United States, the metaphysical and the material share the same cosmic space. The sacred energy aroused in formal worship is referred to in Condoble and Santeria as ashe, and Vega sees vestiges of ashe in African American dance and musical forms such as Cubop, an extension of Be-bop developed by jazz composer and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who incorporated Santeria drum rhythms to call upon the orisas. Sacred African rituals of worship and spiritual celebration are also “natural sources of inspiration for the secular ritual we call theatre.”10

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The final section of Vega’s chapter is a discussion of the Yoruba trickster god/divine messenger, Eshu-Eleggua, who mediates between the interactions of spiritual forces and humans. In Bahia, Brazil, Eshu is the primary orisa in the ritual ceremonies of Candomblé and retains a similar position in Cuba in the Lucumi ceremonies. EshuEleggua represents the point where heaven and earth merge, that place between absolutes—good and evil, felicity and misery, lust and chastity. He is also the archetypal trickster god manifested throughout the African Diaspora: Stagger Lee and the “Signifyin’ Monkey” in African American folklore; Anansi in Ghanaian ritual storytelling; Eshu the “Trickster” in Brazilian Candomblé; and so on. The presence of Eshu-Eleggua in black theatre and drama is the subject of the essay that follows, “Legba and The Politics of Metaphysics: The Trickster in Black Drama,” by Femi Euba. The different spellings and pronunciations of his name throughout the African Diaspora suggest Legba’s archetypal trickster status. He is the orisa who appears most often in human form. Femi Euba notes that no other ritual archetype has spoken more clearly for blacks in the African Diaspora than the Yoruba trickster and god of fate, the dissembling lord of the crossroads and satirist. To the god’s trickster attributes should be added his power of diplomacy, and any consideration of the relationship between ritual and politics should look to him for clues. Euba discusses the political implications of Legba’s diplomacy within the creative process of black drama throughout the African Diaspora. He illuminates the ways the writers discussed in his essay have applied their Legba—or culture-powered creative senses—wittingly or not, in their works. The protagonist of August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for example, is dealt numerous blows by Legba in the guise of what Euba calls fateful/fatal encounters, including imprisonment, chain-gang labor (another form of slavery), and loss of perceived identity. Legba is rarely featured in the plays of African Americans in the United Sates but appears often in South American and Caribbean plays, a difference that Euba attributes to the different experiences of slavery in these regions. In the United States, African spiritual belief systems were deemed satanic, primitive, and barbaric, and this attitude prevailed among Christian missionaries in Africa, where Legba became the manifestation of Satan. Even today, European and European American intellectuals characterize Legba or Eshu as “perpetual child,” “badman,” “devil.” But in Latin America and the Caribbean the trickster god was a saint and therefore continues to be a physical presence in the plays, masquerades, and festivals there. In the American South the Legba character was typically seen in the African slave’s dissembling powers. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, colonialism, and apartheid required that African Americans learn to dissemble as a natural response to the oppressive conditions in which they found themselves. Euba posits that Legba is manifested, in both real life and theatre, in the dissembling mask of black survival, be it serious, satirical, or tragic. Folkloric characters like Stackolee, B’rer Rabbit, and Anansi honed the strategies necessary for survival in white American culture. “Art for Life’s Sake: Rituals and Rights of Self and Other in the Theatre of Aimé Césaire,” by Keith L. Walker, examines the drama of the Martinique philosopher, poet,

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and father of the Negritude movement. Walker sees Césaire’s drama “not as the traditional drama of the well-made play, but rather as a therapeutic ritual of community engagement for social and psychological transformation.” Césairian negritude is evoked in his dramatic works as a metaphysical life force in the “affirmation of black identity, black solidarity, and cultural values of African origin.” And it is those cultural values, the mythology and metaphysics of African origin, that define Césaire’s poetry, politics, and drama. Césaire’s theatre is a product of the rich legacy of Africans in the Caribbean, a legacy rooted in a cultural metadigm that has survived slavery, colonization, decolonization, Western imperialism, apartheid, and mass genocide. Those historical events, and the culture of Africans in the Caribbean, have had a profound impact on the drama of Césaire. The primal forces of both man and nature are the ingredients for the ritual theatre that he constructs using archetype, mythology, and history. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) was the first major work to articulate Césaire’s political, cultural, and aesthetic vision. Within that long dramatic poem is contained Césaire’s “statement on the sacred and agonistic ceremony that must be found in order to constitute a Césairian theatre of ritual consciousness raising, selftransformation and assertion of human rights,” according to Walker. Césaire wanted to create a theatre that would shift the drama from a form of spectator entertainment to a communal ritual of psychic and spiritual healing where Africans, Europeans, and people of all backgrounds could commune in the spirit of the metaphysical Nommo force of African ritual theatre. Césaire asserted that “under the circumstances which are ours, our literature, must have as its greatest ambition to tend towards becoming sacred literature, our art, towards becoming sacred art.” Yoruba metaphysics and mythology are central to Césaire’s dramatic vision. His art is steeped in the Yoruba concept of Ifogbontáayése, of “using wisdom to make/improve the world.” Through his ritual dramas he channels Yoruba “wisdom” and the African-centered sociocultural philosophy of negritude. The mythos of Yoruba metaphysics informs the performative rituals of Césaire’s theatre. It is a theatre that calls forth the Nommo force of the Yoruba orisa Sango, the god of lighting and electricity; Ogun, god of creativity and iron; and Legba/Eshu, the trickster god of the crossroads. These orisas are characters and spirit guides in the plays of Césaire. The tensions between African and Western cosmogony, a reflection of the hostilities between colonized Afro-Caribbeans and their European colonizers, is an important theme in his dramas. Whether it is Yoruba orisas or warrior saints, African mythology and metaphysics are central to Césaire’s project of racial and cultural self-retrieval and the political liberation of African people everywhere. In the “Sycorax Mythology,” May Joseph introduces the mythic ethos of Sycorax— “queen, slave, mother, witch, and revolutionary.” Joseph asserts that “Sycorax draws our attention to the history of colonial conquest and national liberation that has confined women to the shadows of modern nation formation.” Sycorax is the mother of Caliban, the half man/half beast character in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Prospero, the protagonist of The Tempest, has been removed from the seat of power by his

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brother in the state of Milan. He then unlawfully seizes an island in the “West”— probably in the Caribbean—the home of Caliban and his mother Sycorax. We know of Sycorax only through the comments of other characters in the play. She is manifested as a force but not as an actual character in the play. According to Joseph, Prospero and Sycorax are mythic figures occupying contested space within the arena of expansionist imperial frontiers; Prospero is the embodiment of “the narratives of Enlightenment and the emergent modern states of sixteenth-century Europe,” while Sycorax “manifests the powerful sorcery of self-determination and sovereignty that echoes through the seamless and tumultuous landscape of Enlightenment history.” Sycorax is that mythic figure that resonates within African societies throughout the Diaspora—virgin nature, mother earth, maternal spirit. The metaphysics of Sycorax stand in contrast to Prospero’s “technologies of imperialism and domination”; she embodies both the forces of nature and the spirit world, rooted in an African cosmogony. Joseph contrasts Aimé Césaire’s play A Tempest to Shakespeare’s play, on which it is based. Césaire’s play, a francophone drama about resistance to Western colonialism, links the struggle for independence in the Caribbean with the struggle for independence in Africa. Césaire has Caliban articulate the revolutionary spirit by chanting the slogan Uhuru, a revolutionary pan-Africanist slogan used by the rebel forces of the Mau Mau and the Maji Maji in East Africa during the bloody battles for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. But the voices of women in the struggle for African independence are largely silent in Césaire’s play. Sycorax becomes the mythological figure in the struggle against colonialism but she is present in name only. The narratives of the masculinist agendas of national liberation (Césaire) and imperialism (Shakespeare) “refuse to hear the meaning in the screams of Sycorax.” In her essay “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood,” Joni Jones analyzes “conjuring” and memory in the plays of dramatist and conjure woman Shay Youngblood. Youngblood has produced a body of work that embodies the cosmological worldview of women of the African Diaspora. Youngblood’s work is inspired by her collaboration with black women artists and by ritual meditations with Aje, that is, “women who are the bearers and guardians of women’s mysteries,” often associated in the United States with Vodoun priestesses. Jones examines the way in which conjuration serves as a metaphor within Youngblood’s work but also as a distinct practice with roots in West African spiritual belief systems. Her essay connects the practice and metaphysics of conjuration with several dramatic works by Youngblood, including Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, Talking Bones, and Black Power Barbie. Jones argues that there is a kinship between conjuration and theatre in that both are performance rituals driven by word force. According to Paul Carter Harrison, “the word is not simply a mechanism for discourse, it is, rather, a creative elixir . . . that activates the dramatic mode (context of experience) and reveals the symbolic gesture of the Mask (characterizations). Embedded in this mode are references to common experiences, myths, and significations that define the collective moral universe.”11 In the works of Youngblood conjuration becomes a metaphysical act of ancestral mem-

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ory, an act that connect blacks in the Diaspora with West African spiritual traditions —manifested in Condoble in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Voodoo in Haiti, and Vodoun in New Orleans; as well as in African American church ceremonies in Southern Baptist, Holiness, and Sanctified churches. In most diasporic communities in which conjuring is integral, women are most often the most powerful conjurers because they are thought to have a closer “connection to nature through menstrual/moon cycle, childbirth, breastfeeding, and menopause.” The spiritual belief systems of the Yoruba hold that as women grow older they become more powerful; they become Aje, elder women of the community, midwives, conjurers, diviners, priestess, and herbalists who are the bearers and guardians of women’s mysteries. Youngblood’s play Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery demonstrates the metaphysical power of Aje to right wrongs and thereby maintain the cosmic harmony of the community. Youngblood’s plays are peopled by characters who are the manifestation of Aje, ritual archetypes that represent the intellectual and metaphysical power of black women. These ritual archetypes underscore each play’s reliance on African antecedents, such as the enactment of a traditional Yoruba praise song by Big Mama and the Daughter in Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, or the use of voodoo in Black Power Barbie to initiate a process of healing and self-discovery. Youngblood’s plays are steeped in the metadigmatic Nommo force of “the word.” They are powerful rituals that evoke ancestral re/membering and conjure a black woman’s “audacity to control” and construct her ontology and to embrace the myths that empower the metaphysics of her being. The final essay in this section is my “Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” Dutchman is ritual theatre “heaped in modern myth,”12 reflecting “through physical and symbolic means the archetypal struggle”13 of two opposing forces engaged in a confrontation where the choice is either life or death. Lula, “the white bitch-goddess,” and Clay, “the castration of Black manhood,”14 wear the masks they have chosen in a masquerade in which their true identities lie not beneath the mask but beneath the skin. As theatre, Dutchman is what W.E.B. Du Bois claimed art to be—”propaganda.” Dutchman reflects the black nationalist ideology of the black arts movement, of which Baraka was the founder and chief spokesman. His associate in the movement, Larry Neal, wrote: The Black Arts Movement . . . is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. . . . As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concepts both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.15

Baraka uses the mask as a ritual device to disguise the “marrow” of Clay’s ontology, which is deemed by Western standards to be outside of the “pale” of humanity.

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In Frantz Fanon’s words, “Ontology . . . does not permit us to understand the being of the Black man. For not only must the Black man be Black; he must be Black in relation to the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”16 Collectively, the essays in this section are committed to the task of racial and cultural self-retrieval through theoretical, historical, cultural, and critical inquiry of the social, spiritual, intellectual and creative sensibilities of Africans and their descendants in the African Diaspora. The book as a whole speaks to what the African American artist Romare Bearden termed “the prevalence of ritual,” inherent in the art, plays, theatre, drama, music, masquerades, carnival, performance art, and ceremonies of blacks in the African Diaspora. As Wole Soyinka puts it, “the stage becomes the effective, rational and intuitive milieu of the total communal experience, historic, raceformative, cosmogonic.”17 The essays that follow present a worldview of drama and theatre that reject European and European American theatre as the standards by which all others are measured. Both academic and commercial theatre in Western Europe and the United States have established criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of works deemed either marginal or acceptable to the project of Western cultural hegemony. What has been defined as “theatre” according to Western standards, particularly in Europe and the United States, is primarily popular entertainment that serves no communal purpose beyond the collection of money from hordes of tourists willing to pay high prices for a Disneyland-type spectacle. African Diaspora drama, by contrast, provides a communal ritual theatre experience. Western standards of “dramatic excellence” must therefore be called into question as a measurement of the validity and quality of the aesthetic/ritual methods and practices of African Diaspora theatre and drama. In Wole Soyinka’s words, “For cultures which pay more than lip-service to the protean complexity of the universe of which man is himself a reflection, this European habit of world re-definition appears both wasteful and truth-defeating.”18 Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that “only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture”19 speaks to the collective content of the essays in “Mythology and Metaphysics.” Each of these essays addresses some aspect of the power of myth and ritual to reflect the metaphysical phenomena of human experience. Ritual draws on the collective cosmology of the community to reaffirm communal values and address the collective moral and social beliefs that define its cosmic universe. From the Yoruba belief systems of West Africa to the practice of Condoble in Brazil, from the Santeria ceremonies in Cuba to the African-based Christian practices in the United States, from the ritual dramas of Shay Youngblood to the Negritude theatre aesthetics of Aimé Césaire, from the mythology of Sycorax to the black arts aesthetic of Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, blacks in the African Diaspora share a common belief that ritual is the metaphysical life force that speaks to the cosmic human condition of both

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the individual and the community. Ritual affirms the human/communal spirit, a spirit that soars in “the infinite cosmos within which the origin of the community and its contemporaneous experience of being is firmly embedded.”20

Notes 1. Paul Carter Harrison, Totem Voices (New York: Grove Press, 1989), xii. 2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 4. 3. Ibid., 28. 4. Ibid., 26, 149. 5. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46. 6. Ibid., 140. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Ibid, 48. 9. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 17. 10. Harrison, Totem Voices, xv. 11. Ibid., xii. 12. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Dutchman (New York: William Morrow, 1964), 3. 13. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 43. 14. Larry Neal, Visions of a Liberated Future (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), 69–70. 15. Ibid., 62. 16. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 108–9. 17. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 43. 18. Ibid., 49. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), 136. 20. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 43.

Wole Soyinka

The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy

The persistent search for the meaning of tragedy, for a re-definition in terms of cultural or private experience is, at the least, man’s recognition of certain areas of depthexperience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories; and, of all the subjective unease that is aroused by man’s creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as “tragedy” is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. There, illusively, hovers the key to the human paradox, to man’s experience of being and non-being, his dubiousness as essence and matter, intimations of transience and eternity, and the harrowing drives between uniqueness and Oneness. Our course to the heart of the Yoruba Mysteries leads by its own ironic truths through the light of Nietzsche1 and the Phrygian deity; but there are the inevitable, key departures. “Blessed Greeks!” sings our mad votary in his recessional rapture, “how great must be your Dionysos, if the Delic god thinks such enchantments necessary to cure you of your Dithyrambic madness.” Such is Apollo’s resemblance to the serene art of Obatala2 the pure unsullied one, to the “essence” idiom of his rituals, that it is tempting to place him at the end of a creative axis with Ogun,3 in a parallel evolutionary relationship to Nietzsche’s Dionysos–Apollo brotherhood. But Obatala the sculptural god is not the artist of Apollonian illusion but of inner essence. The idealist bronze and terra-cotta of Ife which may tempt the comparison implicit in “Apollonian” died at some now forgotten period, evidence only of the universal surface culture of courts and never again resurrected. It is alien to the Obatala spirit of Yoruba

From Myth, Literature, and the African World by Wole Soyinka. Copyright © 1976 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

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“essential” art. Obatala finds expression, not in Nietzsche’s Apollonian “mirror of enchantment” but as a statement of world resolution. The mutual tempering of illusion and will, necessary to an understanding of the Hellenic spirit, may mislead us, when we are faced with Yoruba art, for much of it has a similarity in its aesthetic serenity to the plastic arts of the Hellenic. Yoruba traditional art is not ideational however, but “essential.” It is not the idea (in religious arts) that is transmitted into wood or interpreted in music or movement, but a quintessence of inner being, a symbolic interaction of the many aspects of revelations (within a universal context) with their moral apprehension. Ogun, for his part, is best understood in Hellenic values as a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues. Nor is that all. Transcending, even today, the distorted myths of his terrorist reputation, traditional poetry records him as “protector of orphans,”, “roof over the homeless,” “terrible guardian of the sacred oath”; Ogun stands for a transcendental, humane but rigidly restorative justice. (Unlike Sango, who is primarily retributive.) The first artist and technician of the forge, he evokes like Nietzsche’s Apollonian spirit, a “massive impact of image, concept, ethical doctrine and sympathy.” Obatala is the placid essence of creation; Ogun the creative urge and instinct, the essence of creativity. Rich-laden is his home, yet decked in palm fronds He ventures forth, refuge of the down-trodden, To rescue slaves he unleashed the judgment of war Because of the blind, plunged into forests Of curative herbs, Bountiful One Who stands bulwark to offsprings of the dead of heaven Salutations, O lone being, who swims in rivers of blood.

Such virtues place Ogun apart from the distorted dances to which Nietzsche’s Dionysiac frenzy led him in his search for a selective “Aryan” soul, yet do not detract from Ogun’s revolutionary grandeur. Ironically, it is the depth-illumination of Nietzsche’s intuition into basic universal impulses which negates his race exclusivist conclusions on the nature of art and tragedy. In our journey to the heart of Yoruba tragic art which indeed belongs in the Mysteries of Ogun and the choric ecstasy of revelers, we do not find that the Yoruba, as the Greek did, “built for his chorus the scaffolding of a fictive chthonic realm and placed thereon fictive nature spirits . . .” on which foundation, claims Nietzsche, Greek tragedy developed: in short, the principle of illusion. Yoruba tragedy plunges straight into the “chthonic realm,” the seething cauldron of the dark world will and psyche, the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death and becoming. Into this universal womb once plunged and emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within the abyss. His spiritual re-assemblage does not require a “copying of actuality” in the ritual re-enactment of his devotees, any more than Obatala does in plastic representation, in the art of Obatala. The actors in Ogun Mysteries are the communicant chorus, containing within their collective being the essence of that

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transitional abyss. But only as essence, held, contained and mystically expressed. Within the mystic summons of the chasm the protagonist actor (and every god-suffused choric individual) resists, like Ogun before him, the final step toward complete annihilation. From this alone steps forward the eternal actor of the tragic rites, first as the unresisting mouthpiece of the god, uttering visions symbolic of the transitional gulf, interpreting the dread power within whose essence he is immersed as agent of the choric will. Only later, in the evenness of release from the tragic climax, does the serene self-awareness of Obatala reassert its creative control. He, the actor, emerges still as the mediant voice of the god, but stands now as it were beside himself, observant, understanding, creating. At this stage is known to him the sublime aesthetic joy, not within Nietzsche’s heart of original oneness but in the distanced celebration of the cosmic struggle. This resolved aesthetic serenity is the link between Ogun’s tragic art and Obatala’s plastic beauty. The unblemished god, Obatala, is the serene womb of chthonic reflections (or memory), a passive strength awaiting and celebrating each act of vicarious restoration of his primordial being. (We shall come later to the story of that first severance.) His beauty is enigmatic, expressive only of the resolution of plastic healing through the wisdom of acceptance. Obatala’s patient suffering is the well-known aesthetics of the saint. For the Yoruba, the gods are the final measure of eternity, as humans are of earthly transience. To think, because of this, that the Yoruba mind reaches intuitively toward absorption in godlike essence is to misunderstand the principle of religious rites, and to misread, as many have done, the significance of religious possession. Past, present and future being so pertinently conceived and woven into the Yoruba world view, the element of eternity which is the god’s prerogative does not have the same quality of remoteness or exclusiveness which it has in Christian or Buddhist culture. The belief of the Yoruba in the contemporaneous existence within his daily experience of these aspects of time has long been recognized but again misinterpreted. It is no abstraction. The Yoruba is not, like European man, concerned with the purely conceptual aspects of time; they are too concretely realized in his own life, religion, sensitivity, to be mere tags for explaining the metaphysical order of his world. If we may put the same thing in fleshed-out cognitions, life, present life, contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living and the unborn. All are vitally within the intimations and affectiveness of life, beyond mere abstract conceptualization. And yet the Yoruba does not for that reason fail to distinguish between himself and the deities, between himself and the ancestors, between the unborn and his reality, or discard his awareness of the essential gulf that lies between one area of existence and another. This gulf is what must be constantly diminished by the sacrifices, the rituals, the ceremonies of appeasement to those cosmic powers which lie guardian to the gulf. Spiritually, the primordial disquiet of the Yoruba psyche may be expressed as the existence in collective memory of a primal severance in transitional ether,4 whose first effective defiance is symbolized in the myth of the gods’ descent to earth and the battle with immense chaotic growth which had sealed off reunion with man. For they were coming down, not simply to be acknowledged but to be re-united with human

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essence, to reassume that portion of re-creative transient awareness which the first deity Orisa-nla possessed and expressed through his continuous activation of man images—brief reflections of divine facets—just as man is grieved by a consciousness of the loss of the eternal essence of his being and must indulge in symbolic transactions to recover his totality of being. Tragedy, in Yoruba traditional drama, is the anguish of this severance, the fragmentation of essence from self. Its music is the stricken cry of man’s blind soul as he flounders in the void and crashes through a deep abyss of a-spirituality and cosmic rejection. Tragic music is an echo from that void; the celebrant speaks, sings and dances in authentic archetypal images from within the abyss. All understand and respond, for it is the language of the world. It is necessary to emphasize that the gods were coming down to be reunited with man, for this tragedy could not be, the anguish of severance would not attain such tragic proportions, if the gods’ position on earth (i.e., in man’s conception) was to be one of divine remoteness. This is again testified to by the form of worship, which is marked by camaraderie and irreverence just as departure to ancestorhood is marked by bawdiness in the midst of grief. The anthropomorphic origin of uncountable deities is one more leveler of divine class-consciousness but, finally, it is the innate humanity of the gods themselves, their bond with man through a common animist relation with nature and phenomena. Continuity for the Yoruba operates both through the cyclic concept of time and the animist interfusion of all matter and consciousness. The first actor—for he led the others—was Ogun, first suffering deity, first creative energy, the first challenger, and conqueror of transition. And his, the first art, was tragic art, for the complementary drama of the syncretic successor to Orisa-nla, Obatala’s “Passion” play, is only the plastic resolution of Ogun’s tragic engagement. The Yoruba metaphysics of accommodation and resolution could only come after the passage of the gods through the transitional gulf, after the demonic test of the self-will of Ogun the explorer-god in the creative cauldron of cosmic powers. Only after such testing could the harmonious Yoruba world be born, a harmonious will which accommodates every alien material or abstract phenomenon within its infinitely stressed spirituality. The artifact of Ogun’s conquest of separation, the “fetish,” was iron ore, symbol of earth’s womb-energies, cleaver and welder of life. Ogun, through his redemptive action became the first symbol of the alliance of disparities when, from earth itself, he extracted elements for the subjugation of chthonic chaos. In tragic consciousness the votary’s psyche reaches out beyond the realm of nothingness (or spiritual chaos) which is potentially destructive of human awareness, through areas of terror and blind energies into a ritual empathy with the gods, the eternal presence, who once preceded him in parallel awareness of their own incompletion. Ritual anguish is therefore experienced as that primal transmission of the god’s despair—vast, numinous, always incomprehensible. In vain we seek to capture it in words; there is only for the protagonist the certainty of the experience of this abyss—the tragic victim plunges into it in spite of ritualistic earthing and is redeemed only by action. Without acting, and yet in spite of it he is forever lost in the maul of tragic tyranny.

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Acting is therefore a contradiction of the tragic spirit, yet it is also its natural complement. To act, the Promethean instinct of rebellion, channels anguish into a creative purpose which releases man from a totally destructive despair, releasing from within him the most energetic, deeply combative inventions which, without usurping the territory of the infernal gulf, bridges it with visionary hopes. Only the battle of the will is thus primally creative; from its spiritual stress springs the soul’s despairing cry which proves its own solace, which alone reverberating within the cosmic vaults usurps (at least, and however briefly) the powers of the abyss. At the charged climactic moments of the tragic rites we understand how music came to be the sole art form which can contain tragic reality. The votary is led by no other guide into the pristine heart of tragedy. Music as the embodiment of the tragic spirit has been more than perceptively exhausted in the philosophy of Europe; there is little to add, much to qualify. And the function and nature of music in Yoruba tragedy is peculiarly revealing of the shortcomings of long accepted conclusions of European intuition. The European concept of music does not fully illuminate the relationship of music to ritual and drama among the Yoruba. We are inhibited even by recognition of a universality of concepts in the European intuitive grasp of the emotions of the will. First, it is “unmusical” to separate Yoruba musical form from myth and poetry. The nature of Yoruba music is intensively the nature of its language and poetry, highly charged, symbolic, myth-embryonic. We acknowledge quite readily the technical lip-service paid to the correspondence of African music to the tonal patterns (meaning and allusion) of the language, but the aesthetic and emotional significance of this relationship has not been truly absorbed, one which springs from the primal simultaneity of artforms in a culture of total awareness and phenomenal involvement. Language therefore is not a barrier to the profound universality of music but a cohesive dimension and clarification of that wilfully independent art-form which we label music. Language reverts in religious rites to its pristine existence, eschewing the sterile limits of particularization. In cult funerals, the circle of initiate mourners, an ageless swaying grove of dark pines, raises a chant around a mortar of fire, and words are taken back to their roots, to their original poetic sources when fusion was total and the movement of words was the very passage of music and the dance of images. Language is still the embryo of thought and music where myth is daily companion, for there language is constantly mythopoeic. Language in Yoruba tragic music therefore undergoes transformation through myth into a secret (masonic) correspondence with the symbolism of tragedy, a symbolic medium of spiritual emotions within the heart of the choric union. It transcends particularization (of meaning) to tap the tragic source whence spring the familiar weird disruptive melodies. This masonic union of sign and melody, the true tragic music, unearths cosmic uncertainties which pervade human existence, reveals the magnitude and power of creation, but above all creates a harrowing sense of omnidirectional vastness where the creative Intelligence resides and prompts the soul to futile exploration. The senses do not at such moments interpret myth in their partic-

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ular concretions; we are left only with the emotional and spiritual values, the essential experience of cosmic reality. The forms of music are not correspondences at such moments to the physical world, not at this nor at any other moment. The singer is a mouthpiece of the chthonic forces of the matrix and his somnabulist “improvisations”—a simultaneity of musical and poetic forms—are not representations of the ancestor, recognitions of the living or unborn, but of the no man’s land of transition between and around these temporal definitions of experience. The past is the ancestors’, the present belongs to the living, and the future to the unborn. The deities stand in the same situation to the living as do the ancestors and the unborn, obeying the same laws, suffering the same agonies and uncertainties, employing the same masonic intelligence of rituals for the perilous plunge into the fourth area of experience, the immeasurable gulf of transition. Its dialogue is liturgy, its music takes form from man’s uncomprehending immersion in this area of existence, buried wholly from rational recognition. The source of the possessed lyricist, chanting hitherto unknown mythopoeic strains whose antiphonal refrain is, however, instantly caught and thrust with all its terror and awesomeness into the night by swaying votaries, this source is residual in the numinous area of transition. This is the fourth stage, the vortex of archetypes and home of the tragic spirit. It is necessary to recall again that the past is not a mystery and that although the future (the unborn) is yet unknown, it is not a mystery to the Yoruba but co-existent in present consciousness. Tragic terror exists therefore neither in the evocation of the past nor of the future. The stage of transition is, however, the metaphysical abyss both of god and man, and if we agree that, in the European sense, music is the “direct copy or the direct expression of the will,” it is only because nothing rescues man (ancestral, living or unborn) from loss of self within this abyss but a titanic resolution of the will whose ritual summons, response, and expression is the strange alien sound to which we give the name of music. On the arena of the living, when man is stripped of excrescences, when disasters and conflicts (the material of drama) have crushed and robbed him of self-consciousness and pretensions, he stands in present reality at the spiritual edge of the gulf, he has nothing left in physical existence which successfully impresses upon his spiritual or psychic perception. It is at such moments that transitional memory takes over and intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his progress through the gulf of transition, of the dissolution of his self and his struggle and triumph over subsumation through the agency of will. It is this experience that the modern tragic dramatist recreates through the medium of physical contemporary action, reflecting emotions of the first active battle of the will through the abyss of dissolution.5 Ogun is the first actor in that battle, and Yoruba tragic drama is the re-enactment of the cosmic conflict. To recognize why Ogun was elected for his role (and the penalty of horror which he had to pay for his challenge) is to penetrate the symbolism of Ogun both as essence of anguish and as combative will within the cosmic embrace of the transitional gulf. We have said that nothing but the will (for that alone is left untouched) rescues being

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from annihilation within the abyss. Ogun is embodiment of Will, and the Will is the paradoxical truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man. Only one who has himself undergone the experience of disintegration, whose spirit has been tested and whose psychic resources laid under stress by the forces most inimical to individual assertion, only he can understand and be the force of fusion between the two contradictions. The resulting sensibility is also the sensibility of the artist, and he is a profound artist only to the degree to which he comprehends and expresses this principle of destruction and re-creation. We must not lose sight of the fact that Ogun is the artistic spirit, and not in the sentimental sense in which rhapsodists of negritude would have us conceive the negro as pure artistic intuition. The significant creative truth of Ogun is affirmation of the re-creative intelligence; this is irreconcilable with naive intuition. The symbolic artifact of his victory is metallic ore, at once a technical medium as it is symbolic of deep earth energies, a fusion of elemental energies, a binding force between disparate bodies and properties. Thus Ogun, tragic actor, primordial voice of creative man is also, without a contradiction of essences, the forerunner and ancestor of palaeotechnic man. The principle of creativity when limited to pastoral idyllism, as negritude has attempted to limit it, shuts us off from the deeper, fundamental resolutions of experience and cognition. The tragic actor for the future age (already the present for Europe) is that neo-technic ancestor Sango,6 god of electricity, whose tragedy stems similarly from the principle of a preliminary self-destruction, represented (as in a later penalty of Ogun) in the blind ignorant destruction of his own flesh and blood. What, for Ogun, was a destructive penalty leading to a secondary drama of “Passion” was in Sango the very core of his tragedy. The historic process of dilution in tragic challenge is manifested in the relationship of these two myths. Sango is an anthropomorphic deity; his history revolved around petty tyranny; his self-destruction was the violent, central explosion from ego-inflation. Where Ogun’s human alienation was the postscript error, an exaction for his basic victory over the transitional guardians of the gulf, Sango’s was “in character,” a wild vengeful slaughter upon menials who had dared to defy his authority. But the “terror and pity” of Sango is undeniable, only it is the “terror and pity” of human disavowal for that new disciple standing on the edge of the sublimating abyss already subdued by Ogun. We will not find the roots of tragedy in the Mysteries of Sango. Yoruba myth is a recurrent exercise in the experience of disintegration, and this is significant for the seeming distancing of will among a people whose mores, culture and metaphysics are based on apparent resignation and acceptance but which are, experienced in depth, a statement of man’s penetrating insight into the final resolution of things and the constant evidence of harmony. What moral values do we encounter in the drama of Obatala, representative though it also is of the first disintegration experienced by godhead? We are further back in Origin, not now engaged in the transitional battle of Ogun, but in the fragmentation of Orisa-nla, the primal deity, from whom the entire Yoruba pantheon was born. Myth informs us that a jealous slave rolled a stone down the back of the first and only deity and shattered him in a thou-

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sand and one fragments. From this first act of revolution was born the Yoruba pantheon. The drama which stems from this is not the drama of acting man but that of suffering spirit, the drama of Obatala. Yoruba myth syncretizes Obatala, god of purity, god also of creation (but not of creativity!), with the first deity Orisa-nla. And the ritual of Obatala is a play of form, a moving celebration whose nearest equivalent in the European idiom is the Passion play. The drama is all essence: captivity, suffering and redemption. Obatala is symbolically captured, confined and ransomed. At every stage he is the embodiment of the suffering spirit of man, uncomplaining, agonized, full of the redemptive qualities of endurance and martyrdom. The music that accompanies the rites of Obatala is all clear tone and winnowed lyric, of order and harmony, stately and saintly. Significantly, the motif is white for transparency of heart and mind; there is a rejection of mystery; tones of vesture and music combine to banish mystery and terror; the poetry of the song is litanic, the dramatic idiom is the processional or ceremonial. It is a drama in which the values of conflict or the revolutionary spirit are excluded, attesting in their place the adequacy and certainty of a harmonious resolution which belongs in time and human faith. It is antithetical to the tragic challenge of Ogun in man. Proportion in tragedy is governed by an element of the unknown in the forces of opposition or by a miscalculation by the tragic victim of such powers. The drama of Obatala dispenses with the effect of the unknown, and his agony is an evocation of the loneliness of the first deity, for this drama is, as we have stated, all pathos. And the essence is the emotional prelude to the creation of man, the limited, serene aesthetics of moulding man, not to be compared to the cosmic eruption within consciousness brought about by the re-creation of the self. The sympathetic need to be redeemed by evidence of love and human contact, by extension of the self into recognizable entities and other units of potential consciousness—this is the province of Obatala, the delicate shell of the original fullness. The profounder aspect of self-recreation, the anguish of the Will, is the portion of original restoration which has been left to the peculiar talents of Ogun, and the statement of Yoruba tragic rites is the complement of his Will to the essence of anguish. The latter by itself is crystallized in the Passion play. The drama of Obatala is prelude, suffering and aftermath. It symbolizes firstly the god’s unbearable loneliness and next, the memory of his incompleteness, the missing essence. And so it is also with the other gods who did not avail themselves, as did Ogun, of the chance for a redemptive combat where each might recreate each by submission to a disintegrating process within the matrix of cosmic creativity, whence the Will performs the final reassemblage. The weightiest burden of severance is that of each from self, not of godhead from mankind, and the most perilous aspect of the god’s journey is that in which the deity must truly undergo the experience of transition. It is a look into the very heart of the phenomena. To fashion a bridge across it was not only Ogun’s task but his very nature, and he had first to experience, to surrender his individuation once again (the first time, as a part of the original Orisa-nla Oneness) to the fragmenting process; to be resorbed within uni-

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versal Oneness, the Unconscious, the deep black whirlpool of mythopoeic forces, to immerse himself thoroughly within it, understand its nature and yet by the combative value of the will to rescue and re-assemble himself and emerge wiser, powerful from the draught of cosmic secrets, organizing the mystic and the technical forces of earth and cosmos to forge a bridge for his companions to follow. It is true that to understand, to understand profoundly, is to be unnerved, deprived of the will to act. For is not human reality dwarfed by the awe and wonder, the inevitability of this cosmic gulf? It must be remembered that within this abyss are the activities of birth, death and resorption in phenomena (for the abyss is the transition between the various stages of existence). Life, the paltry reflection of the forces of the matrix, becomes suddenly inadequate, patronizing and undignified when the source of creative and destructive energies is glimpsed. Suffering cancels the opaque pleasure of human existence; suffering, the truly overwhelming suffering of Sango, of Lear, of Oedipus, this suffering hones the psyche to a finely self-annihilating perceptiveness and renders further action futile and, above all, lacking in dignity. And what has the struggle of the tragic hero been, after all, but an effort to maintain that innate concept of dignity which impels to action only to that degree in which the hero possesses a true nobility of spirit? At such moments he is close to the acceptance and wisdom of Obatala in which faith is rested, not on the self, but on a universal selfhood to which individual contributions are fundamentally meaningless. It is the faith of “knowing,” the enigmatic wisdom of spiritual serenity. It is this which is often narrowly interpreted as the philosophy of the African. But philosophies are the result of primal growth and formative experience; the oracular wisdom of a race based on and continually acted upon by the collective experience of the past, present and unborn (prognostic) realities, complements the intuitive glimpse and memory of the heart of transitional being. Yoruba “classical” art is mostly an expression of the Obatala resolution and human beneficence, utterly devoid, on the surface, of conflict and irruption. The masks alone occasionally suggest a correspondence to the chthonic realm and hint at the archetypes of transition, yet even the majority of them flee the full power of cosmic vision, take refuge in deliberately grotesque and comic attitudes. Such distortions are easily recognized as the technique of evasion from the fullness of numinous powers. Terror is both contained by art in tragic form and released by art through comic presentation and sexual ambience. The tragic mask, however, also functions from the same source as its music—from the archetypal essences whose language derives not from the plane of physical reality or ancestral memory (the ancestor is no more than agent or medium), but from the numinous territory of transition into which the artist obtains fleeting glimpses by ritual, sacrifice and a patient submission of rational awareness to the moment when fingers and voice relate the symbolic language of the cosmos. The deft, luminous peace of Yoruba religious art blinds us therefore to the darker powers of the tragic art into which only the participant can truly enter. The grotesquerie of the terror cults misleads the unwary into equating fabricated fears with the exploration of the Yoruba mind into the mystery of his individual will and the intimations

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of divine suffering to which artistic man is prone. Ifa’s cycle of masonic poetry—curative, prognostic, aesthetic and omniscient—expresses a philosophy of optimism in its oracular adaptiveness and unassailable resolution of all phenomena; the gods are accommodating and embrace within their eternal presences manifestations which are seemingly foreign or contradictory. It is no wonder therefore that the overt optimistic nature of the total culture is the quality attributed to the Yoruba himself, one which has began to affect his accommodation toward the modern world, a spiritual complacency with which he encounters threats to his human and unique validation. Alas, in spite of himself, from time to time, the raw urgent question beats in the blood of his temples demanding, what is the will of Ogun? For the hammering of the Yoruba will was done at Ogun’s forge, and any threat of disjunction is, as with the gods, a memory code for the resurrection of the tragic myth. Yoruba morality has also contributed to the mistaken exclusion of tragic myth from present consciousness; for, as always, the placid surface of the process of healing for spiritual or social rupture is mistaken for the absence of the principles of psychic experience that went into the restoration. Morality for the Yoruba is that which creates harmony in the cosmos, and reparation for disjunction within the individual psyche cannot be seen as compensation for the individual accident to that personality. Thus good and evil are not measured in terms of offenses against the individual or even the physical community, for there is knowledge from within the corpus of Ifa oracular wisdoms that a rupture is often simply one aspect of the destructive-creative unity, that offenses even against nature may be part of the exaction by deeper nature from humanity of acts which alone can open up the deeper springs of man and bring about a constant rejuvenation of the human spirit. Nature in turn benefits by such broken taboos, just as the cosmos does by demands made upon its will by man’s cosmic affronts. Such acts of hubris compel the cosmos to delve deeper into its essence to meet the human challenge. Penance and retribution are not therefore aspects of punishment for crime but the first acts of a resumed awareness, an invocation of the principle of cosmic adjustment. Tragic fate is the repetitive cycle of the taboo in nature, the karmic act of hubris witting or unwitting, into which the demonic will within man constantly compels him. Powerful tragic drama follows upon the act of hubris, and myth exacts this attendant penalty from the hero where he has actually emerged victor of a conflict. Sango’s taboo is based on an elementary form of hubris. Overreaching even beyond the generous toleration due to a monarch, he fell victim to a compulsion for petty intriguing which finally led to his downfall. A final, desperate invocation of unnatural strength gave him temporary ascendancy and he routed his disloyal men. Then came the desecration of nature in which he spilled the blood of his kin. Ogun not only dared to look into transitional essence but triumphantly bridged it with knowledge, with art, with vision and the mystic creativity of science —a total and profound hubristic assertiveness that is beyond any parallel in Yoruba experience. The penalty came later when, as a reward and acknowledgement of his leadership of the divinities, gods and humans joined to offer him a crown. At first he declined but later he consented to the throne of Ire. At the first battle the same de-

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monic energies were aroused but this was no world womb, no chthonic lair, no playground of cosmic monsters, nor could the divisions between man and man, between I and you, friend and foe, be perceived by the erstwhile hero of the transitional abyss. Enemy and subjects fell alike until Ogun alone was left, sole survivor of the narrowness of human separation. The battle is symbolic of tragic hindsight common alike to god and man. In the Ogun Mysteries this drama is a “Passion” of a different kind, released into quietist wisdom, a ritual exorcism of demonic energies. There is no elation, not even at the end of purgation, nothing like the beatified elation of Obatala after his redemption, only a world-weariness on the rock-shelf of Promethean shoulders, a profound sorrow in the chanting of the god’s recessional.7 Once we recognize, to revert to his Hellenic equation, the Dionysian–Apollonian– Promethean essence of Ogun, the element of hubris is seen as innate to his tragic being, requiring definition in Yoruba terms, taking it to its cyclic resolution of man’s metaphysical situation. Of the profound anguish of Dionysos, the mythic disintegration of his origin is the now familiar cause, and the process of the will, no less, is what rescues the ecstatic god from being, literally, scattered to the cosmic winds. The will of Zeus is as conceptually identifiable with that of Dionysos as the elemental fragmentation of Orisa-nla can be recognized as the recurrent consciousness within Ogun (and other gods) of this kernel of terror of a previous rendering. Ripped in pieces at the hands of the titans for the (by him) unwilled acts of hubris, a divine birth, Dionysos–Zagreus commences divine existence by this experience of the destruction of the self, the transitional horror. For it is an act of hubris not only to dare the gulf of transition but to mingle essences for extra measure. We approach, it seems, the ultimate pessimism of existence as pronounced by Nietzsche’s sage Silenus: it is an act of hubris to be born. It is a challenge to the jealous chthonic powers, to be. The answer of the Yoruba to this is just as clear: it is no less an act of hubris to die. And the whirlpool of transition requires both hubristic complements as catalyst to its continuous regeneration. This is the serene wisdom and essential art of Obatala. All acts are subordinate to these ultimates of the human condition and recreative will. To dare transition is the ultimate test of the human spirit, and Ogun is the first protagonist of the abyss. The Phrygian god and his twin Ogun exercise irresistible fascination. Dionysos’ thyrsus is physically and functionally paralleled by the opa Ogun borne by the male devotees of Ogun. But the thyrsus of Dionysos is brighter; it is all light and running wine, Ogun’s stave is more symbolic of his labors through the night of transition. A long willowy pole, it is topped by a frond-bound lump of ore which strains the pole in wilful curves and keeps it vibrant. The bearers, who can only be men, are compelled to move about among the revelers as the effort to keep the ore-head from toppling over keeps them perpetually on the move. Through town and village, up the mountain to the grove of Ogun this dance of the straining phallus-heads pocks the air above men and women revelers who are decked in palm fronds and bear palm branches in their hands. A dog is slaughtered in sacrifice, and the mock-struggle of the head priest and

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his acolytes for the carcass, during which it is literally torn limb from limb, inevitably brings to mind the dismemberment of Zagreus, son of Zeus. Most significant of all is the brotherhood of the palm and the ivy. The mystery of the wine of palm, bled straight from the tree and potent without further ministration, is a miracle of nature acquiring symbolic significance in the Mysteries of Ogun. For it was instrumental in the tragic error of the god and his sequent Passion. Like Obatala also, the gods commit their error after an excess of the potent draught. Ogun was full of wine before his battle at the head of the Ire army. After his dark deed, the wine fog slowly lifted and he was left with nothing but dread truth. Obatala, moulder of men, fell also to the fumes of wine; his craftsman’s fingers lost their control and he moulded cripples, albinos, the blind and other deformed. Obatala the eternal penitent therefore forbids wine to his worshippers in or out of his seasonal rites while Ogun, in proud acceptance of the need to create a challenge for the constant exercise of will and control, enjoins the liberal joy of wine. The palm fronds are a symbol of his wilful, ecstatic being. And how else may the inhibiting bonds of man be dissolved when he goes to meet his god, how else may he quickly enter into the god’s creative being, or his inner ear and eye respond to the fleeting presences which guard the abode of gods, how else partake in the psychic revelry of the world when it celebrates a crossing of the abyss of non-being? The sculpted rites of the worship of Obatala are rapturous also, but lacking in ecstasy. It is a dance of amelioration to tyrannic powers, not a celebration of the infinite will of the Promethean spirit. The one is withdrawal, the other an explosion of the forces of darkness and joy, explosion of the sun’s kernel, an eruption of fire which is the wombfruit of pristine mountains, for no less, no different were the energies within Ogun whose ordering and control through the will brought him safely through the tragic gulf. Even through the medium of this ecstasy, a glimpse is obtained of the vastness of the abyss; the true devotee knows, understands and penetrates the god’s anguish. In the center of the swaying, milling, ecstatic horde where his individuation is routed and he submits to a union of joy, the inner being encounters the precipice. Poised on the heights of the physical mountain-home of Ogun he experiences a yawning gulf within him, a menacing maul of chthonic strength yawning ever wider to annihilate his being; he is saved only by channeling the dark torrent into the plastic light of poetry and dance; not, however, as a reflection or illusion of reality, but as the celebrative aspects of the resolved crisis of his god.

Notes 1. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. 2. Obatala: God of creation (by syncretist tradition with Orisa-nla), essence of the serene arts. Obatala moulds the forms but the breath of life is administered by Edumare the Supreme deity. The art of Obatala is thus essentially plastic and formal. 3. Ogun: God of creativity, guardian of the road, god of metallic lore and artistry. Explorer, hunter, god of war, Custodian of the sacred oath.

152 wole soyinka 4. I would render this more cogently today in terms of race origination, uprooting, wandering and settling. This group experience is less remote, and parallels the mythology of primordial chaos, as well as the rites of transition (birth, death, etc.). See reference to Sango’s drama in chapter 2. 5. Or again the collective memory of dispersion and re-assemblage in racial coming-into-being. All these, and of course the recurring experience of birth and death, are psycho-historic motifs for the tragic experience: the essence of transition. 6. Sango: God of lightning and electricity. A tyrant of Oyo, he was forced to commit suicide by factions, through his own over-reaching. His followers thereupon deified him and he assumed the agency of lightning. 7. In contemporary (public) festivals of Ogun the usual intermingling of idioms has occurred—the ritual dismembering of a surrogate dog, enactment of the massacre at Ire, the dispute between Sango and Ogun, Ogun’s battle triumphs, etc. The note is summatively festive.

Marta Moreno Vega

The Candomblé and Eshu-Eleggua in Brazilian and Cuban Yoruba-Based Ritual

Candomblé and Santería are two of the many African-derived, Yoruba-based religions that emerged in the Americas and continue to have a major impact on the lives of New World Africans. The re-creation of these religions in the Americas can be traced to the overwhelming population of Yorubas of West Africa and their influence on other ethnic groups brought to the Americas during the more than four centuries of European slave trade, from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. This essay focuses on the sacred philosophy and aesthetics of Yoruba descendants as manifested in the continued practice of Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in Cuba. The persistence of these African religions reflects the conscious effort of African descendants in the Americas to forge a sacred philosophy grounded in an African ancestral legacy. Central to the Yoruba cosmos in West Africa and the Americas is the concept that we live within two realms, orun, the spirit world, and aye, the visible world. The relationship between these realms is negotiated by the divinity Eleggua, the divine trickster and messenger of Olorun, the supreme god, the other gods and goddesses (orisás), and humans. The trickster and divine messenger is an orisá who reflects the contradictions that humans must resolve in order to live a balanced, healthy, and prosperous life.

Historical Background Historically, religion is an integral part of the lives of traditional Africans on the continent, and it was transported to the Americas when millions of enslaved Yorubas were taken to Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, and other locations. Art historian Babatunde Lawal describes the traditional Yoruba religion of West Africa as follows:

154 marta moreno vega Traditional Yoruba religion centers on a belief in life after death and on the worship of divinities called òrìsà, who mediate between the Supreme Being (Olodumare) and humanity (ènìyàn). Olódùmarè (a.k.a. Olórun, Owner of Sky) is regarded as the source of existence and the wielder of power (àse) that activates and sustains the universe. (Lawal: 5)

A synergetic relationship exists between the invisible world orun and the visible world aye in the Yoruba cosmos. The sacred spirits and orisás reside in orun and intervene from there in the world of the living, aye. Balance between these two realms is essential for the well-being and prosperity of those in the world of the living. The Yorubas brought to the Americas in the latter part of the nineteenth century were major contributors to the reconstruction of a traditional way of life for millions of New World Africans. An indispensable part of the rituals that paid tribute to African gods and goddesses was the accompanying iconography that continues to be reflected in the aesthetic vision and creative expressions of Africans and their descendants. The Yoruba and their descendants introduced an aesthetic vision to the Americas that called the spiritual forces to earth through recitation of special prayers, performance of particular songs, dances, colors, symbols, and instruments. Like other ethnic groups, the Yorubas carried with them belief in the power of ancestral spirits and the forces of nature which carry the elusive invisible energy force, àshe. The power of the word, the energy generated through the sacred art disciplines, had the power to evoke this elusive sacred power. Àshe, the domain of the supreme Yoruba deity Olorun (also called Olódùmarè), is distributed through a complex hierarchy of spirits, ancestors, and orisás that affect the lives of human beings. According to African art historian Robert Farris Thompson, the spirits and divinities are the messengers of Olorun. The Yoruba religion, the worship of various spirits under God, presents a limitless horizon of vivid moral beings, generous yet intimidating. They are messengers and embodiments of àshe, spiritual command, the power-to-make-things-happen, God’s own enabling light rendered accessible to men and women. The supreme deity, God Almighty, is called in Yoruba Olorun, master of the skies. Olorun is neither male nor female but a vital force. In other words, Olorun is the supreme quintessence of àshe. (Thompson: 5)

The orisás, the intermediaries of Olódùmarè, spread their àshe, power, through the forces of nature, which include humans. It is through the system of Ifá divination that diviners identify the patron orisá of their clients, interpret personal destinies, and solve problems.

The Yorubas in the New World From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries more than 13 million West African slaves were dispersed throughout the Americas. The Yoruba-speaking people of West Africa were one of the major ethnic groups to leave an indelible mark on the Americas. The Yorubas trace their origins to the sacred city of Ile Ife, today located

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in Nigeria. According to archeological findings in the ancient cities of Ile Ife and Oyo, the Yorubas probably date back to AD 800–1000. These were only two of numerous complex city-states headed by sacred rulers (both women and men) and councils of elders and chiefs. The dynasty of kings of Ife, for example, regarded by the Yoruba as the place of origin of life itself and of human civilization, remains unbroken to the present. (Drewal, Pemberton, Abiodun: 13)

The impact of the millions of Yorubas that survived the middle passage vibrates in the communities of their descendants in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago, among other locations. Lawal explains their influence as follows: For example Yoruba divinities (òrisà) constitute the driving force behind new religions known as Candomblé and Macumba in Brazil, Shangó in Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and Barbados, Kele in Saint Lucia, and Santería in Cuba, Venezuela, the United States, and other countries. Yoruba influence is also evident in other new World “Africanisms” such as the Voodoo of Haiti and Orisa-Voodoo of Oyótúnjí, South Carolina. (Lawal: 3)

The philosophy and divinities of the Yorubas were re-created and transformed in the New World but maintained the fundamental African cultural principles. Like other ethnic groups, the Yorubas developed creative methods of protecting their traditional beliefs against the Christianizing onslaught of the Catholic Church. Joseph M. Murphy describes the method of enslavement in Cuba: The Spanish brought Africans not only into a way of work but also into a way of life. To justify the terrible sufferings of slave life, Spanish law insisted that slaves be baptized as Roman Catholics as a condition of their legal entry into the Indies. Spanish jurists argued that a life of servitude was a small price to pay for the opportunity of eternal life with Christ. Royal decrees repeatedly emphasized the necessity of baptizing and catechizing African slaves. (Murphy: 27).

The Portuguese also imposed their religious faith on the Africans they took to Brazil. Pierre Fatumbi Verger notes that most of the slave ships carried the name of Catholic saints in the attempt to justify their horrific mission: “The slavers, professing a variety of forms of monotheism, took great care to save the souls of the Africans, which were plunged in the gloom of idolatry. In Bahia, all the Saints of Heaven were invoked to aid in this ‘respectable’ activity: the patron saints of slavers, their ships and the merchandise they carried” (Verger: 235). Africans in the Diaspora sought to ameliorate their suffering by practicing their traditional religions. As Albert J. Raboteau puts it, The gods of Africa were carried in the memories of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. To be sure, they underwent a sea change. African liturgical seasons, prescribed rituals, traditional myths, and languages of worship were attenuated, replaced, and altered, or lost. Still, much remained, and particularly in Latin America the gods lived on in the beliefs and rituals of the slaves’ descendants. Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, Shango in Trinidad and Vaudou in Haiti, all attest to the vitality and durability of African religious perspective. (Raboteau: 16)

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Although there have been transformations, it is important to note that in Cuba and Brazil the isolation of enslaved Africans served to maintain an ancient form of the Yoruba language and even to preserve the worship of divinities that no longer exist in Africa. In three international Yoruba conferences I organized as executive director of the Caribbean Cultural Center, it was evident that specific sacred practices survived in Yoruba communities in the Diaspora. The worship of divinities like Ochosi (the hunter), and Nana Burukú (still waters, lagoons and marshes), and Oshumare (serpent-rainbow) is more common in the Americas than it is in West Africa.

Cultural Resistance: Candomblé and Santería Cuba and Brazil are two of the many locations in which African descendants re-created and transformed their sacred African practices in a valiant effort to combat their colonial oppressors and resist attempts at cultural annihilation. Developing covert systems of fighting back, Africans and their descendants successfully adapted their ancestral beliefs in the New World, often using the religion of their colonizers to protect African gods and goddesses. Robert Farris Thompson writes, Especially in Cuba and Brazil, New World Yoruba were introduced to the cult of Roman Catholic saints, learned their attributes, and worked out a series of parallelisms linking Christian figures and powers to the forces of their ancient deities. Thus the smallpox deity was equated, in some places, with Saint Lazarus because of the latter’s wounds illustrated in chromolithographs. Thus the Virgin Mary was sometimes equated with the sweet and gentle aspect of the multifaceted goddess of the river, Oshun. Thus Shàngó the Yoruba thunder god, in Cuba was frequently equated with Saint Barbara, whose killers were struck dead by God with lightning. (Thompson: 18)

Enslaved Yorubas in Cuba and Brazil developed similar methods to guard the orisás, disguising and hiding the identities of these gods behind the images of Catholic saints. The orisá Shangó in Brazil was hidden behind the image of St. Jerome; Yemanjá (the sea goddess, mother of the orisás) was identified with Our Lady of Conception; and Obaluayé (Babaluayé) was hidden by St. Lazarus. The father of creation, Oshalá in Brazil, was protected by Christ crucified, and in Cuba the same divinity, Obatalá, was safeguarded by Las Mercedes. Pierre Fatumbi Verger provides an example of the practice of cultural resistance in Brazil: The Saints of the Catholic Heaven, it is certain that they helped the slaves to fool and mislead their masters as to the nature of the dances the blacks were authorized to hold on Sundays, when they regrouped in batuques according to their nations of origin. . . . Seeing their slaves dance according to their customs and sing in their own languages, [the masters] believed that this was nothing more than a pastime for nostalgic blacks. The masters actually had no idea that what was being sung during those meetings were actually prayers and praise for their Orishás, Voduns, and Inkissis. When obliged to explain the

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meaning of their songs, the slaves declared that they were praising the Saints of Heaven in their own languages. Actually, they were invoking the aid and protection of their own gods. (Verger: 236)

The use of the specific colors of the orisás during celebrations often signaled to others when uprisings were to occur. Red indicated the color of the warrior orisá Shangó and green the warrior Ogun. The creative process of using Catholic images to hide the orisás and other African gods has often been misunderstood by European scholars as syncretism. In Cuba the religion of the Yorubas, Lucumí or Regla de Ocha, was labeled Santería by Europeans who mistakenly assumed that the Yorubas were observing Catholic rites in their own way rather than using Christianity as a mask to protect African gods and goddesses. Under the cloak of the Catholic Church, Africans and their descendants also developed mutual aid societies, sisterhoods, and brotherhoods, called cabildos in Cuba and irmandades in Brazil, that enabled them to reconstitute African practices with the aesthetic iconography integral to the worship of the orisás. Without violating the orisás, Africans selected Catholic images that reminded them of the colors and principles of their sacred gods and goddesses. The white dress of the Catholic saint Las Mercedes hides the image of Obatalá, the god of creation in Cuba, while Christ crucified (Senhor Do Bonfirm) whose color is also white, was used to hide the same divinity, called Oxalá in Brazil, as previously noted.

The Development of a Common Aesthetic Cultural Vision The preponderance of Yoruba-speaking peoples in Brazil and Cuba provided a cultural homogeneity and hegemony, according to scholars Joseph Murphy and Miguel Barnet, that nurtured the orisás in their new geographic locations. Quoting the French consul in 1848, Murphy highlights the impact of the Nagôs in Bahia, renamed the Yorubas in the Americas: “The Nagos . . . probably account for nine-tenths of the slaves at Bahia and can be recognized by three deep lateral marks tattooed on each cheek. They are nearly all embarked at Onim (Lagos) or Porto Novo” (Murphy: 45). The Yorubas in Bahia contributed the greatest cultural influence in the reestablishment of their traditional belief system. Miguel Barnet notes a similar situation: “those from sub-Saharan West Africa, particularly the Yorubas, wielded the greatest influence in the process of integration into Cuba’s cultural religious systems, succeeding most quickly in holding sway over other African cultures established here long before their arrival” (Barnet: 79). The late introduction of Yorubas into the Americas, coupled with the late emancipation of Africans in Brazil (1888) and Cuba (1880) also influenced the forging of Yoruba religion in the New World. They rekindled, reinvigorated, and reinforced the

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sacred philosophy of the Yorubas by worshipping the multifaceted powers of the orisás, carriers of Olodumare’s àshe. They also influenced the development of African art forms in the New World. In Thompson’s words, “Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to the New. There they took on a new momentum, intermingling with each other and with New World or European styles of singing and dance” (Thompson: xiii). The Yoruba art forms that persist depart from the traditions of song, dance, and music found in Western European cultures. The West African slaves used these forms to call on the spirit of the ancestors by reciting verses and songs and performing dances and music intended to entice the orisás to earth. The colors, symbols, altars, and the body of practitioners serve as sacred receptacles for the sacred energy force, àshe, of the orisás. Lawal stresses that “the visual arts often combine with poetry, music, and dance to create the right atmosphere for worship” (Lawal: 11). Anthropologist, choreographer, and dancer Pearl Primus notes that “to understand African dance adequately, one should have some knowledge of African religions. For in the ecstasy of a religious experience the dancer becomes a god form and the body frees itself of its structural limitations. Legs, bodies, arms, heads move in seemingly impossible counterpoint” (Vega: 161). Artists like Dizzy Gilliespie, Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Primus, Chano Pozo, Wilfredo Lam, Mario Bauza, Frank “Machito” Grillo, and others have used these interrelationships to redefine the Yoruba creative experience in the African Diaspora. Historian Natalía Bolivar Aróstegui describes the impact of the Yoruba-speaking people in Cuba as follows: Por su influencia entre nosotros, ninguna etnia más importante que de los yorubas, entre los que sobresalia los Egwadó, Ekiti, Yesa, Ebga, Fon, Cuévanos, Agicon, Sabalú y Oyó. . . . Una de estas tribus fué la Ulkumí, mencionada ya en 1728, y origen de la palabra lucumí, denominación que durante much tiempo fué aplicada a todos los yorubas que llegaron a Cuba durante la trata. [Because of their influence, the varied Yoruba ethnic groups were the most important, which included the Egwadó, Ekiti, Yesa, Ebga, Fon, Cuévanos, Agicon, Sabalú and Oyó. . . . One of these tribes were the Ulkumí, whose presence is recorded in 1728, and who were the group from which the word lucumí emerged, which was applied to all the Yoruba-speaking ethnic groups that were brought to Cuba during the slave trade.] (Aróstegui: 3, translation by Marta M. Vega)

The seamless vision of art as part of sacred life is essential to the creative expression of Africans in the Diaspora. The Yoruba concept of beauty provides insight into the creative imperative that infused the work of traditional artists and their contemporary descendants. “Art looms large in Yoruba life and religion not only because of its implication in the existential process, but also because it generates ewà (beauty). Ewà is a quality of the well-formed, stimulating a pleasant experience” (Lawal: 10). Lawal explains that beauty has two aspects, one external and the other internal. Ìwà, or inner beauty, ultimately defines the beauty of a person. The Yoruba conception of art is alien to the fin-de-siècle Western European concept of “art for art sake” and instead

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links creative expression with attracting spiritual energy and enhancing the character of the artists and viewer/participant.

Yoruba Cosmology in the Americas In both Brazil and Cuba traditional African Yoruba-based communities have continued to live within a cosmological legacy that views their creation in the sacred ancient city of Ile Ife. The cosmos of the Yorubas in Africa and the Americas seeks a balance between orun, the spirit realm, and aye, the world of the living, through the performance of rituals that include prayers, music, song, and dance. The positive interaction between both spheres confirms to the living that the spirits and orisás have accepted their rituals and sacrifices, assuring them a steady flow of the positive effects of sacred àshe. The coming together of these two worlds is represented by two tightly fitted halves of a calabash. It is also symbolized by Ifá priests on the round divining board, Opon Ifá, when they draw a midline, orita meta, on the specially prepared sacred powdered yam, covering the surface of the board. The intersecting lines drawn by the diviner from east to west and north to south open lines of communication between both worlds. Scholars John Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun describe how African diviners prepare their divining boards: These lines are always drawn by Yoruba priests at the outset of divination to “open” channels of communication before beginning to reveal the forces at work and to interpret their significance for a particular individual, family, group, or community. Thus the Yoruba worldview is a circle with intersecting lines. Such an image also has temporal implications since the Yoruba conceive of the past as accessible and essential as a model for the present. They believe that persons live, depart, and are reborn and that every individual comes from either the gods or one’s ancestors on the mother’s or father’s side. In addition, rituals are efficacious only when they are performed regularly according to tenets from the past and creatively re-presented to suit the present. (Drewal, Pemberton, Abiodun: 14)

This vision of the world persists in traditional Yoruba communities in Brazil and Cuba, as do the intricate ceremonies in tribute to the ancestors and orisás that intervene on behalf of the living. The Ifá priests of Cuba also divine with Opon Ifá, divining boards, dividing the surface in a similar manner. Historian Miguel Barnet describes the central role of the diviner in Cuba: But the true ruler in Santería, because of his function as diviner, is the babalao, possessor of the attributes granted by Orula, god of divination, for the execution of the rituals of prophecy through the use of the tablero of Ifa (divining board), a series of configurations drawn on special sawdust in accordance with the casting of the opele, or okuele (divining chain). The babalaos introduced the Ifá system of divination once Santería took hold in

160 marta moreno vega Cuba, and on this basis other means of divination, such as dilloggun, (cowry shells) similar in complexity and richness to the tablero of Ifa were introduced. . . . Divination is the pivot of Santería . . . the Lucumí initiation ceremonies are ruled by the verdict of the gods, who determine, through the tablero de Ifá, whether a person is or is not to receive the aché, or divine grace, that will entitle him or her to proceed in the liturgical continuum that characterizes Santería. (Barnet: 84)

In Brazil diviners perform the same function that they do in Africa, using palm nuts, divining chains, Opelé Ifá, or sixteen cowries to identify their clients’ problems and predict their future.

Hierarchy of the Orisás According to Yoruiba legend, human beings select their Orí, their guardian orisá, in heaven before being born. Orí determines a person’s destiny on earth, but once they are born, people forget the choice they made while in heaven. It is through Ifá divination that people become aware of their destinies. According to historian Ben Burt, Olorun, the supreme Yoruba deity (called Olodumare or Olofi in Cuba), is a distant god who is worshipped only through intermediaries. No one worships Olorun directly. He is a rather distant god who makes his wishes known and accepts offerings only through lesser gods in the same way that a king acts and must be approached through his chiefs and officials. Olorun himself gives every person his destiny, from which there is no escape. Before birth the person’s spirit kneels before Olorun and chooses their destiny with his approval. To bring himself good fortune a person makes offerings of food and wine to his own head, which is the symbol of their personal destiny. (Burt: 6)

The Yorubas of West Africa worshipped hundreds of gods, some common throughout a wide region, some restricted to a particular village. In the Americas, the intermingling of different West African ethnic groups, with their different gods, led to Yoruba worship systems particular to the New World. The religions that emerged generally reflected the dominance of a particular ethnic group, although the contributions of other cultural communities were also felt. In Cuba, for example, Voodoo was a variation on the Yoruba practice of Santería. As Janheinz Jahn explains, “The Santería honours the orisha (Cuba: orichas), who correspond to the loas of Haiti. The ceremony is called güemilere, a word which contains the Yoruba word ilé-ere, ‘house of images’. The ‘house of images’, corresponding to the hounfort, is also called iléocha, presumably a contraction of ‘Ile Orisha’, Orisha house” (Jahn: 62). Yoruba divinities are not transcendent, in the Western sense of the word, whether they are being worshipped in East Africa or the Americas. In Jahn’s words, the divinity is “concretely present during the act of worship—or better, it is produced by the congregation during the act of worship. This occurs in the African cults, in Haitian Voodoo, in the

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Cuban Santería, in the Jamaican pocomania, in the Brazilian macumba, in the Winti cults of Guiana and in the Negro churches of the United States” (Jahn: 219).

Orisa Worship, Candomblé, and Santería In Brazil and Cuba the Yoruba communities developed a hierarchy of orisás that reflects a common vision. Table 1 presents a sampling of the many orisás to cross the Atlantic, bringing with them the elaborate rituals, sacred music, song, and dance that called the power of àshe to earth. The Yoruba aesthetic vision has continued to influence the work of artists of African descent in the New World, including Afro-Asian Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, and African American jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie’s collaboration with the Afro-Cuban drummer Chano Pozo, which gave birth to Cubop in the 1940s, shows the influence of Santería drum rhythms. The Yoruba aesthetic has also influenced African American writer Larry Neal. In Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic, Neal developed a chart tracing the continuity of a black aesthetic by comparing mythology, formal manifestations, race memory, neo-mythology, middle passage, history of unitary myth, blues god/tone as meaning and memory, transmutation and synthesis, and black arts movement/black art aesthetic (Neal: 13).

The Trickster and Divine Messenger One of the most important orisás to survive in New World religions is the trickstermessenger of West Africa, Eshu-Elegba. As with other orisás, the spelling of his name table 1.

Orisás

Principle

Africa

Brazil

Cuba

Colors

Supreme God

Olorun

Olorun

Olodumare

White

Creation

Obatala

Oxalá

Obatalá

White

Sea

Yemoja

Iemanjá

Yemayá

Blue and White

Thunder

Shàngó

Shangô

Shangó

Red and White

Messenger/Trickster

Elegba

Exu

Eleggua

Black and Red

Iron

*Ogún

†Ogum

‡Ogun

*Green †Dark Blue and Green ‡Green and Black

Hunter

*Ochosi

†Oxóssi

‡Ochosi

*Violet †Turquoise blue ‡Lavender and Blue

Sweet Water

Oshun

Oxum

Oshun

Golden Yellow

Knowledge

Orunmila

Orunmila

Orula

Green and Yellow

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varies, but the power he wields remains the same throughout the Americas. In West Africa Eshu-Elegba is the divine messenger of the orisás, uniting aye, the world of the living, with orun, the invisible sacred world. Eshu/Elegba, the divine messenger, facilitator, transformer, and provocateur mediates between the interactions of spiritual forces and humans. He intercedes on behalf of humans in their appeals to spiritual beings, if appropriately treated and honored, but garbles messages and wreaks havoc if angered. Since Eshu is crucial to peoples’ positive relationship with their divine origins and interactions, each individual has a personal Eshu who assists in interpretations and actions in specific situations. (Drewal, Pemberton, Abiodun: 29)

In Bahia, Brazil, the divine messenger Eshu is a central orisá in the ceremonies of Candomblé. According to Verger, Eshu’s elusive qualities are impossible to describe fully. Eshu is an Orishá with multiple and contradictory aspects, which makes it difficult to describe him coherently. This irascible divinity enjoys provoking dissension and disputes, as well as causing accidents and calamities, both public and private. . . . If he is well treated, he will respond favorably, showing himself to be officious and helpful. If, however, people forget to give him sacrifices and offerings, they can expect all sorts of catastrophes. Thus, Eshu reveals himself to be the most human of the Orishás, neither completely bad nor completely good. (Verger: 245)

As in Africa and Brazil, the Yorubas of Cuba are fervent followers of the divine messenger-trickster orisá. In Cuba, All the Lucumí ceremonies begin with an incantation, either in song or by means of three knocks on the surface, to request his permission to initiate the practitioners. Elegguá has always held a privileged position. Ruler of the roads in worship, he opens or closes paths, indicates the crossroads, and is master, in some sense, of the future, the hereafter. One must consult with him about any step planned in life, especially if it involves travel or initiative. If any offering is to be made to any santo, he has to be served first, whether the offering is one of money or simply food. He is also happiness, joviality. He is fond of mischievous pranks, of playing with the believers; but he can be at the same time an implacable judge who applies the most severe punishment to those who fail to fulfill his commands. (Barnet: 88)

Generally envisioned as a precocious young orisá, the divine intelligence he possesses is often misunderstood because of his trickery. He is best comprehended through the many legends, patakis, that are recited to clients during divination sessions. One of the most popular Cuban legends demonstrates how Eleggua taught a wayward village to respect him. According to the myth, Eleggua was disturbed because the villagers had not honored him, so he decided to turn their lives upside down in order to teach them a lesson. Everything that was right he made wrong. He dried the wells and filled them with sand. He made wild animals tame. When he had completed his mischief, he departed.

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Eleggua’s actions caused tremendous confusion in the village. The villagers could not light fires to cook their food. They had no water to drink and their farms were barren and dry. The angry villagers went out looking for Eleggua on the same road he had taken. They knew they could identify him because he had been seen dressed in black. In fact, however, he wore his traditional ritual colors—red hidden on one side and black on the other. As he walked on, Eleggua had a change of heart. He decided to return to the village and give the villagers the opportunity to repent of their disrespectful behavior and honor him properly. But when he saw that they were consumed with anger he decided to play a trick on them, in order to teach them a lesson. One of the villagers, noticing Eleggua dressed in red, asked him if he had seen a man dressed in black. Eleggua shook his head, smiled, and said, “No, I have not seen this man.” So the villagers continued on the road looking for Eleggua, while Eleggua returned to town, sat down, and waited. He knew that after a fruitless search, the angry villagers would return to their town with a change of heart. And, of course, he was right. The villagers returned, tired and chastened, having recognized the error of their ways. They then set about preparing the ritual ceremonies required by Eleggua, and he in turn set their lives in balance once again. In this pataki Eleggua teaches we must look at all sides of a situation in order to make an informed decision. He reminds us that the obvious is not always the correct answer. He teaches that there is much more to gain if we stop and think before forming an opinion or reaching a decision. In a Brazilian pataki, Eshu’s mischievous side is further explored. According to this legend, there was once a king who ignored his queen, favoring another. Eshu went to the queen and told her to cut some hairs from her husband’s beard with the knife he provided her, promising that the king would come to his senses. Then Eshu went to the king and told him that his wife was going to kill him. Eshu then went to the prince and told him that the king wanted him to lead the army into war at dawn. That evening the queen went into the king’s chambers to cut some of the hair from his beard. When the king saw her with the knife, he screamed and tried to wrest it away from her. The prince, hearing the struggle, entered the king’s chamber with an army ready for battle. The king, thinking that the prince was plotting with the queen, called in his guards, who proceeded to fight the army. Eshu sat on a ceiling beam, enjoying the confusion he had caused. In this pataki we learn that misbehavior invites dire consequences and that misunderstanding can have fatal consequences. Another Cuban pataki explains how Eleggua was given his powerful position. It is said that Olorun, the supreme god, was very sick and could not get out of bed. All the orisás brought Olorun medicinal remedies that they hoped would cure him, but none of the medicines worked. Eleggua asked his mother, Yemayá, to take him to Olorun, believing that he, a child, could cure the powerful deity where the older orisás had failed. Eleggua went deep into the forest and brought plants that he prepared into a bitter-tasting beverage. He promised Olorun that he would be cured if he drank the mixture. Grudgingly Olorun took

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the medicine and was immediately cured. In gratitude Olorun decreed that Eleggua, from that day forward, would receive the first sacrifice in all ceremonies and that all rituals were to begin and end with a tribute to him. In this pataki we are reminded that children must be respected and that they possess intelligence that must be acknowledged and valued. Elders are reminded that they do not have all the solutions. In West Africa, Brazil, and Cuba, Eleggua is also the guardian of homes, and in addition serves as divine messenger, transporting sacrifices from humans to orisás in heaven. Initiates must have the sacred protective symbols of Eleggua in their homes, and he is widely worshipped in the Candomblé and Santería belief systems. Possessing both positive and negative qualities, Eleggua is often considered the most human of the orisás. As Robert D. Pelton describes him, Eleggua “exercises the High God’s creative and recreative energies to probe, pick apart, and reshape the social order. Yet Echu’s mastery of the market suggests the real depth of his sociotherapy. He does more than to link the two great central forces of Yoruba life, the center above and within and the center beneath and without. Rather, he forms in complex association with them part of that center himself, in order to reveal it as a fully human center” (Pelton: 161).

Walking the Line between Heaven and Earth Eleggua occupies the invisible point where heaven and earth merge. It is in this elusive space that balance between good and bad, humor and gloom, health and sickness, order and disorder occurs. Eleggua’s antics are often seen as evil, but that is an incorrect reading. He reminds initiates that there is a thin line between love and hate, pleasure and pain, life and death. Eleggua speaks to the delicate balance required to place initiates on an enlightened path that will safeguard their lives and offer them health and prosperity. As the guardian of the crossroads, Eleggua lives at the point where roads converge, which is symbolic of the intersecting lines connecting heaven and earth, east and west, north and south. Living at the point of conversion provides access to secular and divine intelligence for practitioners. Eleggua is the energy force that allows Orula access to knowledge of the past, present, and future. The following Cuban pataki explains how Orula learned the art of divination. It is said that Orula enjoyed living between heaven and earth. Constantly in motion, he took no time to learn a skill and was therefore unable to earn a living. Wearing tattered clothing, hungry, and desolate, he was walking along a road one day when he met Eleggua. Upset by the sorry state of his brother, Eleggua offered to teach him the art of divination. He instructed Orula to find sixteen palm nuts and bring them back to him so that he could begin his lessons. Eleggua told Orula that he must promise to praise him each time he divined and must set a part of his earnings on Eleggua’s altar. In gratitude, Orula promised always to work cooperatively with his younger brother.

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Honoring Eshu-Eleggua: The Trickster Understanding his uncanny power to destabilize situations, worshippers in Cuba offer rum, tobacco smoke, and palm oil to Eshu (Eleggua), requesting that the roads of opportunity remain open to them. Similar offerings are made to Eshu in Brazil. Probably the most extraordinary feature of the trickster-divine messenger in the New World is the number of characteristics assigned to him. Brazilian and Cuban initiates recognize twenty-one types of Eshus or Elegguas, each possessing a different authority; yet it is understood that all twenty-one manifestations are encompassed in the one divinity. It is the trickster quality of Eleggua that is most important to African descendants. His engaging prankster characteristics are ingrained in the philosophy and cosmology of practitioners of Candomblé and Santería and other African religions in the Americas. Eleggua is the essence of duality, reaching into the innermost part of our souls and challenging neutrality and indecisiveness. The trickster insists on living on the edge, pushing borders, and creating new possibilities by maintaining a constant tension between the visible and invisible worlds. Whether he is called Stagger Lee, Anansi, Echu, Eleggua, Elegba, or Eshu, the trickster embodies a playful sense of mischief that belies his deep knowledge of inner truths. Both observer and participant, he views the world through the divine power, àshe, of the spiritual and secular realms. A manipulator of situations, the divine messenger of Olorun demands certitude and stability since he relishes the opportunity to create havoc and imbalance in the world. The keen duality of Eleggua is a principle that is ingrained in the philosophy of Africans and their descendants in the Americas, for reasons Verger explains: “The archetype of Eshu is very common in our society, where there are many people with ambivalent natures, both good and bad. . . . There are people who master the art of inspiring confidence and then abusing it, but who also have the gift of intelligently understanding the problems of others and giving them thoughtful advice with such zeal that they expect a reward” (Verger: 246). In a nation of contradiction, the divine messenger and trickster can turn everything upside down and still survive at the juncture between the spirit world and the visible world. This is the sacred space that Africans in the Diaspora have occupied in order to resist and survive enslavement and its aftermath. It is also the space that has provided them the authority to re-create a unique, New World version of the sacred African aesthetic vision.

References Aróstegui, Natalia B. Los Orishas en Cuba. Havana: PM Ediciones, 1994. Barnet, Miguel. “La Regla de Ocha: The Religious System of Santería.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 79–100. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

166 marta moreno vega Drewal, John H., John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art in association with Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989. Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. Lawal, Babatunde. “From Africa to the Americas.” In Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Murphy, Joseph M. Santería: An African Religion in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Neal, Larry. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Thompson, Robert F. Flash of the Spirit. New York: First Vintage Books, 1984. Vega, Marta M. “Yoruba Philosophy: Multiple Levels of Transformation and Understanding.” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1995. Verger, Pierre F. “The Orishás of Bahia.” In Os Deudes Africanos No Candomblé Da Bahia, ed. Carybé, 235–261. Bahia: Bruno Furrer Editoria Bigraf, 1993.

Femi Euba

Legba and the Politics of Metaphysics: The Trickster in Black Drama

The trickster in black culture, whether represented in animal form (as tortoise, spider, or monkey), or as a divinity such as Esu-Elegbara or Legba in West Africa, has often been used to convey an important moral or cultural message, implied in the action the trickster describes. Through the message, an individual, family, community, or society is made aware that certain dangers, possibly fatal, may arise if the message is not heeded. The message consequently reaffirms and transmits cultural mores from generation to generation. The trickster’s action therefore places the trickster in an important role in black culture with serious implications for the fate of the individual or community involved. It is a role that identifies the trickster as more than just a performer of tricks. Perhaps no other trickster better personifies this dynamic than Esu-Elegbara of the Yoruba cosmogony, a god whose primal importance in worship has remained intact through the transatlantic slave crossing. I have come to terms elsewhere with Esu not only as a god of fate, master of peripeteia, ironist, and satirist, but also, in his New World manifestations, as the fateful/fatal satiric complex and concept in the black drama.1 In this essay I pursue this concept further, particularly in terms of the dramatic and diplomatic resources implicit in Esu’s objective action of affecting human awareness, and the way this diplomacy is a characteristic factor in the dramatic expressions of the black in Africa and the Diaspora. A consideration of the structure of a ritual process should elicit the dramatic and trickster-diplomatic potential of Esu. A ritual process, which Wole Soyinka straightforwardly identifies as the drama of the gods,2 presupposes a crisis, whether a natural disaster such as drought, or a manmade accident such as an automobile accident or a plane crash. The crisis anticipates a need that usually requires some form of sacrifice in order to bring relief, which may or may not be the desired objective of the

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sacrifice. Esu stands at the crossroads, the transitional point of sacrifice. He3 is the factor of change and therefore the most important element of the ritual, and he must be coaxed with the right kind of sacrifice. But what exactly constitutes the right kind of sacrifice is difficult to determine. Esu’s praise-chants are full of allusions to this difficulty, in keeping with his identity as a trickster. When his devotees chant, “Ès.ù Òdàrà ló sòro,” they are relating to a metaphysical entity, the confusionist whose “legerdemain is difficult to fathom” in the physical realm. Esu has to be assuaged and coerced, in his own terms, by a diplomatic persuasion that often points up his ironic and satirical expressions, as for instance in this praise-chant: Esu sleeps in the house But the house is too small for him Esu sleeps on the front yard But the yard is too constricting for him Esu sleeps in the palm-nut shell Now he has enough room to stretch at large

Or: He throws a stone today, it hits a bird of yesterday . . .

In addition to identifying him as the difficult ironist and satirist of sacrifice, such praise-chants also establish his dramatic potential. Since life is full of conflicts needing resolution, and since Esu makes resolution difficult by his dissembling, suspenseful, and peripetic elusiveness, he is not only trickster but metaphysical evolver of the drama of diplomacy. This is dramatized in Obotunde Ijimere’s play, The Imprisonment of Obatala.4 Here Obatala, the god in charge of creation, has his attributes of patience and endurance tested by Eshu (Esu) through successive stages of humiliation. On the one hand, Obatala’s suffering is retribution for a cosmic crime he has committed, and therefore the action he describes—going on a forbidden journey to visit his friend, Shango (Sango)—is a passage rite of that passion of suffering and endurance. On the other hand, his journey, an action he needs to take to expiate his cosmic crime, is the sacrifice-factor of the ritual process by which he offers himself to the trickster Eshu. The three stages of humiliation he has suffered are three stages of sacrifice to a god whose fateful/fatal trickster-actions are difficult to understand and therefore difficult to control. At each stage Obatala reacts with diplomatic tolerance and attempts to placate Eshu with praise-chants. It is important that we not dismiss the concerns of this drama, and therefore of Esu, as mythic and divine rather than human. The Imprisonment of Obatala is a literary representation of the ritual drama of Obatala, performed at the annual festival of the god. Devotees gather at these festivals to celebrate their god and, more importantly, to renew their covenant with a god whose attributes they persistently strive to emulate. In this regard, the ritual process or passage rite of Obatala is also their passion and passage rite, and as the ritual is reenacted they, the audience-communicants, are intoxicated and possessed by the passion of their god-essence.

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Perhaps a clearer human concern is described by the New World re-creation of the Obatala ritual in Zora Seljam’s The Story of Oxala.5 While allowances should be made for a transatlantic modification of the ritual regarding the syncretic nature of the African myths that have survived in New World black cultures, in terms of objectives and the human condition Seljam’s drama (at least as the author expresses it6) would seem to be more productive. Actually, in this drama Exu’s (Esu’s) action is not directly dramatized, as in The Imprisonment, and the god has acquired the superficial personality of syncretic values—for instance, his trickery is more one-dimensional, a mere practical joke, than its more profound, pietistic objective of self-awareness. As Wole Soyinka points out, the play ultimately dramatizes essences of the gods, centrally Oxala (Obatala), as opposed to the human qualities of the gods in The Imprisonment.7 However, if according to Seljam her syncretic re-creation represents an attempt of the Brazilian or New World African slaves and descendants “to expiate a racial burden,” the productive possibilities of the rite of passage become clearer, since the burden being expiated is that of slavery. For the New World black, Oxala’s passion recalls the middle-passage journey to the West. Hence the suffering and endurance of Oxala is that of the slave, along with the continued suffering and endurance of black people through the persistent tests imposed by the “trickery” of the fate-essence. It is true that the god who inflicts such suffering on Oxala is hardly synonymous with the white slaver who inflicted it on the slave. But further explanation of Esu, the trickster god of fate, should clarify the apparent difference. The trickster-potential of Esu, or fate, is not really separate from the human devotee or any individual experience. As I argued in the introduction of Archetypes, everyone possesses his or her own fate or Esu, metaphysically and physically realized as the embodiment of one’s fateful/fatal construct of character, personality, and will, all of which shape one’s destiny. Hence, in reality, one’s fate or Esu, along with the trickery it fashions, derive from oneself. In this sense every black person, by nature of his or her African origins and in terms of Esu concept, is an Esu devotee and has trickster potential. I shall come back to this, but we can proceed from this with Zora Seljam’s idea of expiating a “racial burden.” The trickery imposed on Oxala by Exu, like all other divine characteristics in the play, is a condition of essence, albeit a syncretized one. As essence it is an attribute to be emulated, just as Oxala’s suffering and endurance are to be emulated. In terms of its Yoruba origins, suffering and endurance have a profound influence on the selfawareness on which people must constantly reflect for self-control. Slavery, the “racial burden” that needs to be expiated, was the fate imposed on the African by Esu through the exploitive aspirations of the white slavers. As Africans did not seem to deserve this, it was a catastrophic practical joke and inscrutable action of Fate. But, through the dual perception of Esu’s fateful/fatal and satiric action, it is possible that the action has a more positive objective. The drama of the passion of Oxala offers a means of expiation, which allows the self-awareness of the communicant/reader/ audience to reflect on the essence of suffering and endurance. The slavery-crisis of the ritual process objectifies the need for positive aspects of acculturation through the

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sacrificial example of Oxala, whose eventual acknowledgment as a divinity reestablishes the quintessence of black cultural roots. For the New World black culture, like Seljam’s or the Brazilian’s whose retention of African culture has been very strong through its particular slave experience, the need for a positive and productive syncretism of the African and the Western is very real. We should not forget that the strong retention has been effected in the first place through the adaptive (and adoptive) dissembling of the slaves, a dissembling that points back culturally to the dissembling qualities of the trickster god, Esu-Legba. Seljam’s drama, therefore, is one of reaffirmation, and it reflects the need for such a reassessment of syncretic values of acculturation, since it has its obvious conflicts and dangers, as expressed in Abdias do Nascimento’s Sortilege.8 In Sortilege Esu, defined by the playwright as “the basis for dialectical interchange,” is focused as “fate,” as “color,” as “race” whose cultural precepts must be respected as legitimate in the syncretic bind of acculturation. Consequently the play dramatizes the Brazilian social conflicts of that syncretic bind, which the playwright calls fraudulent in present-day Brazil as depicted by the play’s protagonist, Dr. Emanuel. In his attempt to survive, Emanuel has prostituted the syncretic bind by denying and violating his cultural roots—first by having a black lover who is seduced by white sensibilities, and second through his relationship with his white wife, who is attracted to black sexuality. These relationships describe his own syncretic conflicts, expressed as he is lured up a hill to the shrine of Exu by the trickster-legerdemain of his fate. At this shrine he must confess his “crime” of fraudulent acculturation and assimilation, and then die. His death is a symbolic gesture for black awareness, for Dr. Emanuel, as the name suggests, dies “to save us all.” He represents the black race, whose conflicts of syncretism, raised by the traumas of survival, should not be allowed to compromise black cultural affirmations. By contrast, the dramatized concerns in Sortilege, in terms of black awareness and symbolic representation of blackness, recall August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.9 At the end of the play, when Loomis finally realizes the “song” for which he has been searching through his wife and his identity, he symbolically slashes himself across the chest. It is an affirmative gesture of the salvation of his black identity, and it stands in opposition to his wife’s (Martha Pentecost) Western religious beliefs. Hence he becomes a representative of the black who, in order to search for his or her “song,” must be compelled by an inner cultural recollection rather than by outside influences. Here, as in most African American plays, representations of the trickster are different from those in South American and Caribbean plays, due to the different experiences of slavery. Although Esu is not physically present, his trickster qualities and their metaphysical diplomatic manipulations are evident. Fate has played many mind-boggling tricks on Loomis, as he has striven to survive. He is the descendent of slaves, a sharecropper who, with his wife, has adopted white man’s religion, even becoming a deacon in the church—a survival strategy that he erroneously considers safe, peaceable, and life-promoting. But fate dealt him another trickster-blow through Joe Turner, who had hurled Loomis into another kind of

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slavery in his chain-gang empire, where Loomis was humiliated, disenfranchised, and figuratively emasculated. Thus the present action of the play addresses the need to come to terms with this fateful/fatal violation of his human process, which seems to Loomis, Christian that he is, a cruel joke. Bynum, a conjure-man and representative of black origins, is the fate agent by which Loomis finally finds his “song” and himself. Through Bynum and his objective of finding a “shiny man,” Loomis is able to reconnect himself with his metaphysical black origins in order to confront the demons of slavery and acculturation. Bynum’s objective, which runs parallel to Loomis’s, is a diplomatic one. It is engaged through the ritual hit-and-miss connections that he daily makes with the metaphysical world, through the psychical investigation and questioning of Loomis, Bynum’s sacrificial vehicle, and through the narrative incantatory power, all of which are reminiscent of and consistent with the rituals of African oracle-priests. Through Bynum, Loomis’s fate process (his Legba), and its objective of inducing awareness, allows him finally to find his “song.” Because of the different forms of slavery practiced in the Americas, Esu, or Legba, rarely appears in African American plays in the United States, as he does in South American and Caribbean plays. Under the austere conditions of slavery that prevailed in North America, and the prohibition of African religions as barbaric, pagan, and satanic, Esu became the evil genius of the slave that must be exorcised by any means necessary. As in the interpretations of Christians missionaries in Africa, Esu is synonymous with the Christian devil, a marked contrast to his depiction as saint in Latin America and the Caribbean—a status that is manifested through the tricksteringenuity of the black. Since Esu expresses a cultural character, his psychic impact on blacks is very difficult to eradicate. Esu’s influence on Africans’ response to enslavement can be seen in a range of actions, from running away, transmitting secret codes, inciting insurrections, and, perhaps most in keeping with the character of Esu, in the art of dissembling. The dissembling nature of Esu has been expressed in such characters of African American folklore as Signifyin’ Monkey, Stackolee, Shine, MacDaddy, and others. These characters have in turn given expression to the more realistic characters in black drama, dramatizing the survival strategies of the black in white America. Seeing Esu in these folkloric heroes of African American literature need not obscure the distinctions between, for instance, the trickster and the badman.10 But I think it is a mistake to make clear, if contradictory, distinctions such as Roger Abrahams has attempted to do.11 To interpret the trickster as a “perpetual child,” for example, and the badman as a “devil” incarnate, risks replicating the very categories that white slavers and Western colonialists invented. If instead we see the erratic and seemingly contradictory characteristics of Esu as part of the art of the dissembler, then we can better grasp the complementary good and evil identity that Esu embodies. For it is an attribute that has implications for his followers who emulate him in an attempt to survive in an oppressive and discriminatory universe. As a black cultural construct, Esu is a potential for all black people, who therefore, by derivation, have the capacities of a trickster. But to have the capacity is different from mastering it. To emulate Esu is to

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attempt to find and maintain the balance of good and evil, which is precisely the difficult challenge that Esu (Fate) poses. In a world fraught with fateful/fatal encounters, the attempt to maintain balance can involve the mastering of one’s tricksterpotential, the development of which depends on one’s character and will, both conditions of Fate. Blacks’ attempts and strategies under slavery and colonial domination, both to survive and to preserve their cultures, have induced the creation of trickster characters like B’rer Rabbit, Signifyin’ Monkey, Stackolee, and Shine. An excellent example of African American drama that depicts some of these characters in different stages of trickster-development is Paul Carter Harrison’s The Great MacDaddy.12 Harrison calls this ambitious play a “ritualized African-American event” of Amos Tutuola’s phantasmagoric African novel, The Palmwine Drinkard,13 which explains Harrison’s storytelling form and technique. But the playwright is also faithful to the novel’s story, even while situating it in African American experience and spirituality, as opposed to the African (Yoruba) metaphysical worldview of the novel. In Harrison’s words, “the content of the event might be considered a translation of African mythic and cosmic references as they appear in African/American modes of experience which receives cosmic focus from the Black Church.”14 To understand the full meaning of the play, its African source must be addressed. In the dream world of the novel, the narrator and central character, Lanke, a drinkard who can out-drink anybody in the world, journeys into the land of the dead to find his palmwine tapper and bring him back to the living world. The tapper has died falling off a palm tree, and Lanke’s wine drinking and merriment have therefore come to an end. The narrative describes Lanke’s journey and his various encounters with good and evil in the form of various tricksters—animals, witches, ghosts, etc.— all presented in human form. It is a magical world of opera, musical drama, and pantomime in which Lanke meets a woman of his dreams and tries with her, and through his own trickster qualities, to overcome the fatal dangers in his path. By the time Lanke finally finds his tapper, it is too late to reclaim him; he has already gone through a final ritual of the dead and been committed irrevocably to death. However, Lanke is given a magical egg that will always provide him with a substantial flow of his favorite drink. Unfortunately, when he returns to the world of the living, he accidentally drops the wine-producing egg and it breaks. At this point Lanke wakes up from his drunken dream. The moral of the story is that good and evil forces coexist, and whereas the potentially good will always overcome the potentially evil, man, in order to survive, can learn only through experience to distinguish between good and evil impulses. In terms of the concept of Esu, we can modify this a little: the good and evil complementarity that exists in the world of survival must be mastered by man’s own good and evil impulses of fate. As we have seen, the mastering of one’s good and evil potential in order to survive is characteristic of many trickster characters. In tales featuring these characters, the trickster learns and masters his principal trait— the art of dissembling, which can involve anything from quick wit to magical feats.15

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In The Great MacDaddy, the African setting and ideas acquire an African American realism in their New World environment. Palmwine (now simply wine) is still the survival agent, but its emphasis has shifted from mere consumption to capitalistic commercial power. MacDaddy has inherited his father’s palmwine industry and business status. We are informed that this is a new and thriving brand of wine, which makes sense because it is African; but it is particularly fitting in its new California environment in that it signifies African roots. MacDaddy means to be greater and more powerful than his father, with plans to expand to big cities like Chicago and New York, where, he says, “Lotta niggas . . . ain’t never had their lips on my Palm Wine.” Instead of the wine-tapper of the original, we have a man by the name of Wine who runs the business for MacDaddy. Wine is a personification of palmwine and of black business power that runs the risk of getting caught in the competitive and dangerous world of business; and indeed, Wine is suddenly crushed by The Man, the power of white America. Wine dies without passing on the formula for the palmwine he manufactures for MacDaddy, and MacDaddy becomes powerless as a result. A cultural dilemma seems to be implied here: the death or loss of black power through loss of black identity, which Big MacDaddy, the old power and spirituality, represented.16 In order to regain that power and identity, MacDaddy must learn and master the art of survival, and the rest of the play depicts just that—MacDaddy’s gradual mastery of himself, his fate, and his black trickster potential and identity. Consistent with the African original, MacDaddy goes in search of the power, in search of Wine, his distiller, and in his search he learns how to survive. The only things of value that MacDaddy has as he embarks on this search are his pride and vestiges of the old spirituality. His pride constantly locks him up in his quest, and he expresses it with a ritual conviction and hypnotic presence reminiscent of Muhammed Ali: “I am the Great MacDaddy, son of the Big MacDaddy who is dead, making me the greatest Daddy of all the MacDaddies who can do anything in this world.” This verbal front is particularly intrusive. It is part of a trickster’s stock-intrade and art of dissembling. It is similar to the incantatory, hypnotic chant of the old spiritual rituals; it is Esu’s diplomatic, fateful/fatal power of the Word. In the New World, this ritual agent acquires a capitalist dimension. Here, where the accoutrements of the old spirituality (a “juju” or voodoo cane17) appear powerless against the exploitation of the capitalistic world, MacDaddy’s ritual chant is consistent with the Western creed of individualism and egotistic supremacy. In a world where survival is a struggle, one’s fate intersects with another’s, and one’s ritual objective is in conflict with another. Survival therefore depends on the level of fate’s power (character, will, and ritual power of efficacy), indeed on one’s mastery of the trickster’s art of dissembling. In The Great MacDaddy, MacDaddy’s fate and ritual objective encounter various other fates and objectives that can be grouped into good and evil forces. Since fate, one’s fate, is an embodiment of good and evil, these forces can be seen as complementary impulses for developing maturity. Good forces, such as Old Grandad, Soldier, Poppa, and Mother Faith—manifestations of

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Wine, as they possess the secret of the old power—are mature personages whose potential for positive action outweighs their negative characteristics. At first they are preoccupied with using their knowledge and wisdom to obstruct progress, but through the survival mechanism of MacDaddy they provide the necessary impetus and challenge for black survival—the channeling of black potential for productive use. The evil or less balanced characters such as Stackolee (now Scagolee) have been influenced and corrupted by the evils of capitalism, such as heroin. Scagolee is himself an influence on Signifyin’ Baby, a product of his union with Leionah, a woman led astray by false trappings of survival. Shine seems to have set the pace for MacDaddy’s experiences. He says his real name is John Henry, the mysterious, powerful, and honest slave-trickster of the chain gang. As a result of all his fateful/fatal encounters, the MacDaddy we encounter at the end of the drama is a mature, aware, experienced person. If his involvement in the wine industry is finished, and there is no need to go back to the old spirituality, he accepts the new challenges—the ability to be sensitive and exploit new black ideas in the ever-changing, ever-vicious capitalist rat race. In this respect he seeks inspiration from the forces of the new black spirituality, actually a creative combination of the old and the new, or the syncretic and ancestral black force called the Great Guggah Muggah. The fate of the black in the New World has been the subject of drama since the first slaves were brought across the Atlantic. This fate describes the fateful/fatal encounters and experiences that must be mastered and overcome in order to forge and establish a new identity that retains aspects of the old, since the old provides the ritual drive to overcome obstacles to knowledge, opportunities, and acquisition. Survival strategies in oppressive circumstances often require dissembling because of the impossibility of productive dialogue and confrontation with the enemy. Marita Bonner’s pioneer play The Purple Flower18 subtly dramatizes the ritual drive needed to make the “White Devils” recognize and treat black “Us’s” like equals instead of like Sisyphus, the mythical Greek figure who was condemned to the perpetual task of rolling a huge stone up a hill, only to watch it roll back down the hill and begin the whole process over again. When the naive Finest Blood wants to attack one of the white devils directly, the Old Man cautions, “Not that way. The White Devils are full of tricks”; and he suggests a more subtle way, using the hypnotic power of music— the pipe-strains of the immortal Pan—which will “soothe” and “lure” the White Devils into a revolutionary confrontation.19 Although Bonner eventually left the possibility of such a confrontation and its outcome open-ended, her play addresses the trickster potential of oppressed blacks. First is the dissembling approach of the Old Man. The music of Pan is Western music, and as such it will achieve the desired effect of soothing and luring the white devils; it is clearly a dissembling strategy. Second, a distinction is made between the white devil “trick” and the black dissembling strategy. Finest Blood questions the strategy on the grounds that killing an unwary white devil in cold blood would make him as bad as the white devil. Old Man’s answer to this objection is that “an Old Us will never tell you to play White Devil’s games,” and goes on to clarify his strategy.20 The operative word is “games,” however, which is

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reminiscent of the “tricks” of Hermes, which usually are designed to no point or purpose,21 as opposed to Esu’s dissembling tricks, which often pose a definite moral objective. In short, the Old Man’s strategy is more African-oriented than it first appears. The blood of sacrifice must be shed for a “New Day” and a new conception of the black. Knowing full well the inscrutable and indeterminate demands of fate, and aware that each individual or culture has its own fate, the Old Man leaves up to fate the question of whose blood is to be shed. The dissembling strategy depicted in The Purple Flower seeks a revolutionary change in race relations. Such a change is deemed justified even though it will involve violence and bloodshed. But the open-ended conclusion of the play leaves open the question of the timing of such a revolution. While it can be argued that this suggests the uncertainty of Fate (Esu-Legba), it probably also has to do with the futile results of actual slave insurrections, for instance, of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the American South. Significantly, in early plays like The Purple Flower or Randolph Edmonds’s Nat Turner22 the question of insurrection or revolution is left open, in contrast to later plays, such as Amiri Baraka’s The Slave23 or Jello24 and Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence.25 In these later works the trickster strategy has been developed and fine-tuned by experience and maturity, and the ambivalence of the earlier plays gives way to confidence and determination. In fact The Slave, when contrasted with Dutchman26 by the same author, provides a case in point. In Dutchman, accommodating Clay imbibes white sensibilities by using his assimilationist mindset to strategize his intentions. He revels in the calculated, cold-blooded “games” of seduction with which white Lula taunts him. He suggests his trickster potential when he cites Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker as African Americans who feigned assimilation while secretly cursing white folk. But whereas Smith and Parker were true to their black identity through their music, Clay compromised his, for instance, when he described himself as a black Baudelaire. At any rate, his adoption of the trickster persona comes as a last resort, and too late—hence his unpreparedness for the deathblow dealt him by Lula. Clay is a contented black man with white middle-class values, but he is naïve as a possible revolutionary. The real trickster at work in Dutchman is the author himself, who uses Clay’s demise as a subtle but firm warning to his black audience—and to assimilationists like Clay. Walker Vessels, by contrast, a character in The Slave,27 has a more mature approach than Clay and more clearly represents the trickster art of dissembling. With a white wife and white intellectual friends, he has been something of a Clay in the past but has finally rejected the accommodationist viewpoint in favor of black revolutionary agency. He has consequently divorced his wife and abandoned his children but finds himself still dissatisfied, his revolutionary objectives lacking completeness. He has resolved to cut himself off completely from any lingering ties to the white world—a difficult task that requires that he sacrifice his own human compassion and logic. In order to muster up the resolve required for the fateful/fatal demands of his ritual process, he attempts to justify his choice through a revolutionary ideological stance,

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while aware of the difficulties involved.28 He knows that it would be easy to realize his objective through cold-blooded violence, but he restrains himself. He wants to mount his political ideology against the intellectual, psychological, and emotional reasoning of Easley and Grace, the objects of his anger and rejection. So he adopts the mask of the trickster in order to deflate the intellectual-other, and in the process he achieves a level of maturity that has hitherto eluded him. His success in severing white ties comes indirectly: Easley dies through miscalculation of Vessels’s dissembling of weakness; Grace dies in the falling debris from the revolutionary explosions going on outside; and the children presumably also die as a result of these explosions. Walker Vessels himself, in the rather prolonged justification of his dissembling, nearly dies in the process, as he drags himself out of the way of the falling debris. Rochester in Jello29 is even more explicit, confident, and consistent in pursuing his ritual objective. He has pretended for a long time to be comfortable with the mask of a slave, in his role as servant to Jack Benny, producer and star-host of a lucrative TV show. This pretense has demanded experience in the art of dissembling; Rochester has had to feign loyalty, stupidity, devilishness, and buffoonery in the service of his master. When he decides to make his move he does so with systematic strategy, using all the resources of his dissembling experience. While continuing to play the buffoon as servant of Jack Benny, Rochester gradually strips his master of all he has, in fact, to nakedness, then kills him. The mask of slavery was always a mask of dissembling. Although there were slaves who wore this mask so well that it eventually became their reality, their true self image —as, for example, in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom30—such internalization could itself be an act of dissembling.31 That many slaves rebelled in various ways against the inhuman conditions in which they lived should support such a view. One of the most difficult aspects of slavery was the necessity to endure the humiliation and ridicule of whites, in which the white entertainers of blackface minstrelsy reveled. Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence dramatizes an inverted trickster irony implicit in the black characters who paint themselves in white face. In this way the play expresses the critical and alarming factor of white dependency on black expertise and survival. Here, again, the art of dissembling is the demonstrable objective. Black characters behind white masks, who are used to the pretense of internalizing white servitude, portray the chaotic and paralytic helplessness that whites must suffer when blacks refuse to work. The irony lies in the upending of the white assumption that blacks are menial servants with no right to white privileges and status. Before turning from African American drama, I should pursue what I suggested in passing with Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, that is, the drama that establishes the art of the playwright as a trickster’s art. Suzan-Lori Parks, in her preoccupation with the discrepancies in historical constructs in The America Play,32 projects the African American as a master expressionist-impersonator. Her central character, ironically named the Foundling Father, is a grave digger turned theme park actor. In a comparative analysis of himself, a lesser known in history, with designated great men of history

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such as Abraham Lincoln (a lookalike he impersonates artfully), the Foundling Father calls attention to the validity of historical facts and raises the question: Is the historical reality that establishes Abraham Lincoln, the “great Man by trade [as] President,” any more valid than the reality and fame that surround the “Lesser Known . . . a Digger by trade”? For, on second thought, both men seem to be driven by opportunism—one the political opportunism of status, the other the socioeconomic opportunism of survival, both being conditions of self-worth. What, indeed, makes one a Founding Father and the other a Foundling Father (by implication the easily forgotten castaway and dehumanized black)? Ultimately, however, it is the playwright we must see as the ironist-signifier of what she herself calls the “Great Hole of History.” Theatre, for Ms. Parks, is a place for making history, and as an African American playwright her objective is to “locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.”33 Consequently she sees the processes of theatre and history as relative and synonymous, for both are “recorded and remembered events” of the dead, one through painstaking research and inquiry, the other through a rigorous attempt to find the truth of performance. At the ritual site of her creativity, through jazz-like incremental repetition-and-revision (“Rep & Rev”) progression of her complex dramaturgy, Ms. Parks signifies the ironies of the investigative process by using the process of theatre to devalue that of history. The seemingly aimless but visually engaging ritual enactments of Act One (in which the Foundling Father dramatizes his story), and the figurative but definitive structure of the play’s idea in Act Two (in which Lucy and Brazil dig up the Foundling Father’s probable history and fame), are dissembling strategies that recall the artful trickster diplomacy of Esu-Legba. Here the playwright is the creative trickster whose objective is to satirize problematic discrepancies in the pursuit of probable facts. In Caribbean drama we see another kind of trickster, one with a more direct link to African trickster figures, although it has been transformed through slavery in Caribbean folklore. The proliferation of stories of the African Anansi—the spider in the slave colonies of the New World—has compelled a syncretic union of the spider with a French folkloric villain, Baron le Samedi (Baron Saturday), which has appeared in many literary and dramatic works. In terms of its potential, the syncretized character seems to replicate fateful/fatal characteristics of the trickster god, and therefore can be seen as a manifestation of Esu-Legba. His dissembling is directed toward the positive objective of awareness rather than toward the Hermetic, sadistic pleasure effected by the negative action of the Western villain. In Dream on Monkey Mountain,34 a play in which a black man must come to terms with his self-perception in an alien New World setting, we see such a character in Basil the Carpenter. The central character, Makak, intoxicated and made delirious by alcohol and gangere, must grapple with the complexities of black identity in the Americas. In a therapeutic dream that takes him back in time to Africa, he identifies his complexes in the various characters he has encountered in his isolated environment on Monkey Mountain, and one by one he confronts and overcomes them. Two

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of these are Moustique and Lestrade. Moustique represents the negative, the shallow, exploitive, opportunistic manipulator of black potential. Lestrade, the white-aping mulatto, is a chronic hater of everything black, which he constantly derides and humiliates. Both meet their end at the hands of Basil, always seen in his mask of good and evil complementarity. At the marketplace, Esu-Legba’s favorite habitat, the megalomaniacal Moustique is rendered powerless through his terror of the spider that Basil evokes, while Lestrade is confronted by Basil in the forest at night, and in a raging delirium is stripped naked of his complexes. The playwright depicts in the mulatto Lestrade the dilemma of the colonized, the basis of identity crisis in the black psyche. His complex makes him reject his black identity in favor of white sensibilities, those falsities that endanger the quest for the expression of black selfhood. By his stripping in a virgin forest, Lestrade is made to regard his original nakedness in the mirror of nature. He is purified and becomes the champion of the black cause. With Basil, the fate-agent of the black, Walcott indicts all the enemies of black progress. The use of the character as a trickster figure is significant. He is the ever-present fate—the destructive and restorative potential—of the black who seeks to resolve the complexities of identity. The trickster is similarly used to ridicule, warn, and challenge the megalomaniacal pursuits of Christophe in Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe.35 The character of Hugonin, described as “a combination of parasite, buffoon and political agent,” embodies the dissembling trickster in his capacity both to fawn and to ridicule his victim, with the goal of bringing about his victim’s downfall. Hugonin’s songs are always flavored with satiric barbs that deflate the grandiose ideas and intentions of Christophe, and that irritate him and prick his conscience. Hugonin procures for Christophe the crown he badly wants by causing confusion among the market crowd and manipulating the people into accepting Christophe as King. But at the height of Christophe’s intoxication with power, the trickster leads him to his downfall, only then revealing himself as “Baron Saturday.” We are reminded of the ironic praise chant of the trickster god Esu-Legba: “Throwing a stone today, Esu kills a bird of yesterday.”36 The retributive stone here is cast by Hugonin, repayment for Christophe’s heedless intoxication with self. These are a few of the ways in which black dramatists have expressed and explored the trickster figure. The trickster’s characteristics derive ultimately from Esu, the Yoruba trickster god, whose influence is manifest in the literature and drama of many black cultures in Africa and the New World. His affinities with other tricksters in folklore (in both black and non-black cultures), be they animal, human, or divine, suggest a common emphasis on the art of dissembling, his defining characteristic. But EsuLegba, in his fateful/fatal oppositional constitution, suggests a more complex and functional purpose than mere dissembling, one that has the potential to deflate human excesses and stupid drives, such as arrogance, megalomania, and pompousness, thereby forcing self-awareness and, ultimately, self-mastery.

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Notes 1. Femi Euba, Archetypes, Imprecators and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989). 2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1976), 2. 3. I have used the masculine pronoun in this essay in the generic sense. 4. Obotunde Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala, in The Imprisonment and Other Plays, ed. Ulli Beier (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1966). 5. Zora Seljam, The Story of Oxala: The Feast of the Bomfim (London: Rex Collings, 1978). 6. Ibid. 7. See Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 24–25. 8. Abdias do Nascimento, Sortilege: A Black Mystery (New York: Third World Press, 1976). 9. August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (New York: New American Books, 1987). 10. See John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 11. See Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle . . . Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia, rev. ed. (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970). 12. Paul Carter Harrison, “The Great MacDaddy,” in Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African-American Continuum, ed. Paul Carter Harrison (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 257–352. 13. Amos Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard (London: Faber and Faber, 1956). 14. Ibid., “Author’s Note,” 259. 15. For various essays on the trickster, see Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Zande Trickster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Paul V. A. Williams, ed., The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979); Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle; Roberts, From Trickster to Badman. 16. See Deacon Jones’s speech in Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard, 266–67. 17. Ibid., 269. 18. Marita Bonner, The Purple Flower, A Prize Play in The Crisis (January 1928): 9–11, 28–29. 19. The Crisis, 11; Hatch, Black Theatre U.S.A., 206. 20. Ibid. 21. For Hermes’ stories, see Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: An Evolution of a Myth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1947). 22. Randolph Edmonds, Nat Turner, in Six Plays for a Negro Theatre (Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1934), 63–82. 23. In Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Two Plays by Leroi Jones: Dutchman and The Slave (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1964). 24. Amiri Baraka, Jello (Chicago: Third World Press, 1964). 25. See Douglas Turner Ward, Two Plays (New York: William Morrow, 1970). 26. See Baraka (Jones), Two Plays by Leroi Jones. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., “Prologue.” 29. Ibid. 30. For instance, see Stanley Elkins, Slavery: The Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

180 femi euba 31. See Euba, Archetypes, Imprecators and Victims of Fate, chap. 3, esp. 97–111. 32. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995). 33. Ibid., “Preface,” 4. 34. Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). 35. Aimé Césaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Grove Press, 1969). 36. See Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala, 19, 24; see also Judith Hoch-Smith and Ernesto Pichardo, “Having Thrown a Stone Today Eshu Kills a Bird of Yesterday,” in Caribbean Review 7, no. 4 (1978).

Keith L. Walker

Art for Life’s Sake: Rituals and Rights of Self and Other in the Theatre of Aimé Césaire

“Poetry and Knowledge” is considered to be Aimé Césaire’s ars poetica, his theoretical statement on the nature of poetry.1 No similar statement by Césaire on the nature of theatre has been published. But Césaire’s poetry, prose, plays, and interviews are full of statements that point to a conceptualization of theatre not as the traditional drama of the well-made play but rather as a therapeutic ritual of community engagement for social and psychological transformation. Aimé Césaire. What is a poet? According to Rimbaud’s definition, a poet is a visionary; consequently, the poet who has as a defining characteristic, the capacity to create and to visualize for himself, becomes a man of the theatre the very instant he attempts to make others see, the instant he attempts to transmit his vision to others.2 Theatre will fulfill its social function, not only in helping people to see, but also in assisting them in understanding and in coming to consciousness. That is closely akin to the ideas of Brecht. My theatre has a critical function, it must incite the public to think critically.3

Aimé Césaire comes from the French overseas department of Martinique, a mountainous, vegetally luxuriant island formed by volcanic eruptions in the Windward Islands archipelago of the Caribbean Sea.4 In 1502 Christopher Columbus arrived in Martinique; in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais, who was born in Martinique; and in 1902 Mont Pélée, 4,800 feet above sea level, erupted and destroyed Saint Pierre, formerly the largest city on the island. The phenomenological dramas of the meteorological and telluric forces, including the dramas of the flora, fauna, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions in the Caribbean and Africa, are mimed and staged in Césaire’s theatre.

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For Césaire, the Caribbean is a theatre. There is, of course, the public masking and masquerade of Carnival, calypso, limbo, the ceremonial pageantry of voodoo or Santería, and the bloody spectacle of cockfights. There are also the majestic ruins of the Sans souci palace and the adjacent towering grandeur of one of the architectural wonders of the world, the fortress near Cape Haïtian, Haiti, the Citadelle Laferrière. Both structures were born of the draconian forced labor policies of Henri Christophe (1767–1820), who was born on the island of Grenada and rose from the condition of slave to cook to general to king of Haiti (1811–1820). Paralyzed by a stroke and opposed by disgruntled generals after he failed to lead an attack on Port-au-Prince against his arch rival Pétion, Christophe committed suicide. The Tragedy of King Christophe stages all of these elements of Caribbean culture, history, and phenomenological theatre, and is Césaire’s analysis of the lessons to be drawn from the excesses and maniacal obsessions of this cruelest of heroes and maddest of visionaries of the Haitian Revolution.5 The construction of the impregnable Citadelle Laferrière in the wake of that revolution, which repelled the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, is a reminder that geopolitically, during its colonial history, the Caribbean has been a theatre—a staging ground for colonial expansionism, a theatre of strategic military operations. Struggles for control in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made the Caribbean an arena of “imperial frontiers,”6 where Britain, France, Spain, and the United States tested their might and guile against one another for the world’s most prime agronomic real estate and cheapest labor force. The military entanglements of the imperial economies intensified and climaxed with a series of events, proclamations, and amendments that have shaped the destiny of the Caribbean: the Haitian Revolution (1802–1804) and the attendant Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which asserted that “the American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers”; the Platt Amendment (1901), which granted the United States a military base in Guantánamo Bay and authorized subsequent military intervention in Cuba; the DominicanAmerican Convention (1907), which granted the United States absolute control over the island economy’s finances through direct control of all customs transactions and the republic’s political development; the American Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934); the Cuban Revolution (1959); and the more recent embargoes of Cuba and Haiti. The opening cantos of Césaire’s long dramatic poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) are statements of lament, rage, and love before the sterility, voicelessness, and dormant potential of the Caribbean wasteland.7 They are delivered in the voice of an inspired young person who would return to the wretchedness of the native land. The canto of return is a confession, a profession of faith, and a statement of vocation by the poet who would in 1946 be elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, a position to which he has been reelected to this day. In this inaugural work of 1939, the canto of return is also a potentially significant statement on the sacred and agonistic ceremony that must be found in order to constitute a Césairian theatre of ritual consciousness-raising, self–transformation, and assertion of human rights.

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To go away. My heart was pounding with emphatic generosities. To go away . . . I would arrive sleek and young in this land of mine and I would say to this land whose loam is part of my flesh: “I have wandered for a long time and I am coming back to the deserted hideousness of your sores.” I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: “Embrace me without fear. . . . And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak.” And again I would say “My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who founder in dungeons of despair.” And on the way I would say to myself: and above all my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.8

For me, this canto is the moment of origin of Césaire’s ritual theatre. This prayerful canto constitutes not only an appeal for an inclusive humanism that recognizes the humanity and human rights of all who are dispossessed and violently brutalized, but also, in theatrical terms, it is an appeal for a shift from drama, as the spectacle observed, to ritual, as the event that dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, between self and other. As Kimberley W. Benston suggests in The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama, “the Black beholder is theoretically transformed from a detached individual whose private consciousness the playwright seeks to reform, into a participatory member of tribal or in this case, national ceremony that affirms a shared vision.”9 For Césaire, it is also a diasporic ceremony of shared passions, solidarity, and globally shared fate. The canto highlights Aimé Césaire’s lifework, which has been to rouse the modern world from its indifference to human suffering and to expose, as he does in “The Discourse on Colonialism” (1950),10 the lie of the European civilizing mission and the false ethnography used to justify human exploitation. Césaire’s position as a man of culture has always been that the artist has moral and social responsibilities and should be the most useful citizen of his “tribe.” Through the 1950s, the artist’s duty was to hasten not only the decolonization of the French colonies, but also to promote the decolonization of the mind of the formerly colonized subject who had internalized the systematic ideological devaluation of black humanity and culture. Césaire’s agenda has been the reconstruction of black nations after independence and the development of new concepts of the self. In the decolonization, independence, and postindependence moments, artists, as Césaire states in the essay “The Intellectual and His Responsibilities,” become “inventors of being, propagators of a new spirit, engineers of souls, multipliers of new men and women.”11 As poetry had always been for Césaire, theatre was to become one of the miraculous weapons of cure, healing, and exorcism in the transformational, therapeutic work of undoing the cognitive, ethical, aesthetic, political, and psychological consequences of the violence of the discourse of colonialism.12 Césaire was unequivocal in stating the sacredness of the literary and artistic act because of its intimate role and responsibility in the rehabilitation process of performative personal and national identity:

184 keith l. walker Under the circumstances which are ours, our literature, must have as its greatest ambition to tend towards becoming sacred literature, our art, towards becoming sacred art. In raising to the level of the universal, the particular situation of our people, in linking them to history, in placing them on a trajectory that is precisely one of becoming and therefore, a negation of stagnation, artistic creation, by its power, must mobilize untapped emotional forces and thereby, at its summons, will rise unsuspected psychic resources which will contribute to restoring the social body that has been so traumatized, in its stamina to rebel and its will to carry on, by the impact of colonialism.13

Art for Life’s Sake: Ifogbontáayése For Aimé Césaire the work of art is not only an aesthetic object but above all a practice and process. Césaire’s theatre emerges from an intellectual project that is a sociodiagnostic of the legacy lived and yet to be lived of colonialism: this socio-diagnostic inspires rage and an emancipatory vision and practice. It is not a question of art for art’s sake, but art for life’s sake. For Césaire, theatre is work, the transformational work and process of critical consciousness-raising and dis-alienation, hence his penchant for the psychodrama. In A Tempest, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for a Black Theater, Césaire’s notes indicate “the ambiance of a psychodrama.”14 Psychodrama involves powerful interactions between the audience and the stage. It has been described as “a half-way house between theatre and off-stage existence.”15 Psychodrama is therapeutic theatre whose goal is the exploration of human motives. It seeks to restore mental health, and indeed the soul, through psychotherapeutic and pedagogical dramatic action. Césaire’s psychodrama exorcises the neuroses and complexes that are the scars of the colonial experience. It is dangerous in that it attacks and accuses, places the self and others on trial, and is uncompromising in its introspection, self-examination, and unmasking of the motives and desires of self and others. In this sense, the chorus in Et les chiens se taisaient,16 Hugonin, the trickster-Baron Saturday figure in The Tragedy of King Christophe,17 the Sanza player in A Season in the Congo,18 and the master of ceremonies in A Tempest all function as therapists inciting action, reaction, and encounters or clarifying behavior and its consequences. The role players are not only actors but actants in the process of personal, social, and political liberation.19 The dis-alienating, ritual acting-out of Césairian psychodrama has an unequivocal revolutionary purpose. It is precisely as Tejumola Olaniyan states, quoting Wole Soyinka: “ritual has a revolutionary imperative to it, located as it is at ‘that point where the cementing communal roots of theatre are made one with the liberating dimension of the present.’”20 In Yoruba ritual, (ètùtù), as in Césairian psychodrama, the “main objective is to use aesthetics to neutralize evil (ibi) and stimulate warm affection (iyónú) at the same time.”21 A Tempest begins with a masking ritual: Ambiance of a psychodrama. The actors enter singly, at random, and each chooses for himself a mask at his leisure.

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Master of Ceremonies. Come gentlemen, help yourselves. To each his character, to each character his mask.

In commenting on Yoruba gèlèdé (masking) spectacle, African and diasporic art historian Babatunde Lawal makes an important distinction for understanding the ambiance of Césaire’s play. “Masking in Gèlèdé is ritual ètùtù and play (eré) at the same time. The ritual is aimed at promoting fertility, longevity and prosperity; and the play to entertain and socialize.”22 Césaire’s use of psychodrama, his insistence on the responsibilities of the intellectual and his conviction that “our literature, must have as its greatest ambition to tend towards becoming sacred literature, our art, towards becoming sacred art” are akin to the Yoruba concept of Ifogbontáayése. Discussing the function of art, Lawal translates the term as “using wisdom to remake/improve the world,” and he further defines Ifogbontáayése as “the application of knowledge, religion, ethics, diplomacy, and creativity in all its ramifications to improve the human condition.”23 It serves to combat the dehumanizing effects of modernity.24 Ifogbontáayése is what Césaire is writing for, is what the actors are performing for, and is the defining impulse of the Césairian revolutionary protagonist in all four plays, the wise man who “forgives.” What is most obvious, even in Shakespeare’s version, is the man’s absolute will to power. Prospero is the man of cold reason, the man of methodical conquest—in other words, a portrait of the “enlightened” European. And I see the whole play in such terms: the “civilized” European world coming face to face for the first time with the world of primitivism and magic. Caliban is the man who is still close to his beginnings.

Storm As the upheaval of earth and the collision of air, fire, and water, the hurricane, tornado, storm, and tempest are signs of alteration, mutability, flux, and contest. The psychodramatic space is in effect that of the storm or tempest. Be it the storm of emotions evacuated by the black slaves and the rebel prey to madness and death in the carceral space of Et les chiens se taisaient; be it the flurry of feathers in the opening cockfight scene of The Tragedy of King Christophe, or its setting—the wuthering northern heights of Cape Haitian punctuated with invocations of the fire, lightning, and storm warrior gods Ogoun, Ogoun Badagry, and Shango; be it the precipitation of action by hurricane and shipwreck in A Tempest—all of Aimé Césaire’s plays inhabit the cosmic, emotional, and sacred violence of the catastrophic and transformational space of the storm. Time in Césaire’s plays is that of the storm—an indistinct twilight moment of transition and epistemic shift, a razing of the old and a raising of the new. In other words, it is the time of tragedy—that terrifyingly promising moment in a life or in history when the future emerges from the destruction of the past.25 What can I do? One must begin somewhere Begin what? The only thing in the world

186 keith l. walker worth beginning! The end of the world of course.26

As twilight moments of transition, the storm and tragedy imply cycles of death and rebirth. Also evoked in Césaire’s poetry and theatre is the regenerative power of the snake biting its tail and emerging from the sloughed-off dead skin of the past. It is the power of Damballah, deity of fertility and springs, who is represented by the snake, or couleuvre, that is often depicted in voodoo paintings. Weak, ill, and alienated, Damballah is the deity to whom Madame Christophe prays to regain her strength in act 3, scene 7. This passage is not included in the Manheim translation: La Reine moin malad m-couché m-pa sa levé M-pal nan noé, mpa moun icit-ô . . . Solé, Solé-ô, moin pa moun icit Moin cé moun l’Afric . . . Fé youn vévé pou loa yo (bis) Damballah mvédo Ago yo mvedo (bis) Fé youn vévé pou loa yo (bis) Damballah mvédo [The Queen I am sick, I am prostrate, I cannot lift myself I shall go towards the North, I am not from here . . . Sun, O Sun, I am not from here I am of the people from Africa . . . Make a vévé for their loas (bis) Damballah mvédo Make a vévé for their loas (bis) Damballah mvédo]

In ritual fashion, Césaire’s poetry and theatre convoke the powers of the setting and rising sun and their attendant images of decapitation, sacrifice, baptism, phoenicism, and renaissance: From the regenerative flames and blood of the dying past, the new day is born. As the light fades, the SANZA PLAYER passes, singing. Oh little sparrow hawk, oh! oh! Oh little sparrow hawk, spread your wings, The sun’s drinking blood, oh oh! Little sparrow hawk, little sparrow hawk. What blood is the sun drinking? (A Season in the Congo, act 3, scene 3)

Ultimately, the site of epistemic shift or the eye of the storm in Césairian theatre is the global black political revolution of the 1960s: Prospero [to Ariel, speaking of Caliban]. My dear Ariel, did you see how he looked at me, that glint in his eye? That’s something new. (A Tempest, act 1, scene 2) . . . By his in-

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subordination he’s calling into question the whole order of the world. (A Tempest, act 3, scene 3) Lumumba. I for my part shall never forget that it was in Ghana—thanks to Nkrumah— that the African first threw off the chains of colonialism and stood up a free man. (A Season in the Congo, act 2, scene 10)

The “African first threw off the chains of colonialism and stood up.” This line recalls the other moment of epistemic shift that straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. Césaire studies this moment of epistemic shift in a historical work, Toussaint L’Ouverture: La Revolution française et le problème colonial27 and celebrates it in The Notebook, in which he writes, “Haiti where négritude stood up for the first time and declared its humanity.”28 Anticolonialist sentiment reached its peak in the years 1956 to 1973, a period of growing black consciousness around the world and of decolonization in the Caribbean and Africa. It was a time when, as Césaire wrote in The Notebook, “reeking of fried onions the nigger scum rediscovers the bitter taste of freedom in its spilled blood. . . . The nigger scum is [standing up].”29 This worldwide tempest was punctuated by events such as Moroccan Independence (1956); the Cuban Revolution (1959); the Algerian Revolution (1957–1962); the Kenyan Mau-Mau Movement (1952–1956) (with its Swahili freedom cry of “Uhuru,” adopted by Lumumba and Mama Makosi in A Season and by Caliban in A Tempest); the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (1954–1972) (and its attendant intraracial indecision on appropriate political strategies, reflected in act 2, scene 1 of A Tempest, in which Caliban and Ariel represent Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, respectively); the Trinidadian Black Power Movement (1967–1972); and, finally, the Congolese Katanga province secession crisis, which is treated by Césaire in A Season in the Congo. While flying to Elisabethville in the midst of a tropical hurricane, Lumumba makes explicit the connection between storm and revolution and explicates in part the play’s title: Lumumba. Damn weather! Look! Look! The winds uprooting the tree. And the rain! The weather’s as bad as the situation in the Congo, and that’s something. Looks like a herd of phantom elephants stampeding through a bamboo forest. Isn’t it a little early for the rainy season to be starting? (A Season in the Congo, act 1, scene 10)

Inhabiting the cosmic, emotional, political, and sacred violence of the storm, Césairian theatre is possessed by the will of Shango, the thunder deity, who is explicitly invoked throughout The Tragedy of King Christophe as a military and spiritual guide to Christophe, and by Caliban in A Tempest as a natural primitive force to counter Prospero’s artificial technological power. Power of night, tide of day Shango I salute you. O . . . as you ride through the halls of heaven mounted on the flaming ram of the tempest. (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 3, scene 7)

188 keith l. walker Shango is gatherer of the rain He passes, wrapped in his fiery cloak His horses’ hoofs strike lightning On the pavements of the sky! Shango is a great knight! Shango, Shango ho! (A Tempest, act 3, scene 4) Shango is a fire-bearer his steps shake the heavens and the earth Shango, Shango, ho! (A Tempest, act 3, scene 5)

Caliban summons all the natural forces and beings to his aid, reminding the reader of Toussaint’s reliance on the natural forces of tropical rains and fevers to help decimate the invading European forces. Caliban declares: “I’m setting forth to conquer Prospero! Unimaginable! Prospero is the Anti-Nature! And I say, down with Anti-Nature!” (act 3, scene 4). Césaire himself explains the contrast between Prospero and Caliban and his purpose in refashioning Shakespeare’s Tempest: “I was trying to ‘demythify’ the tale. To me Prospero is the complete totalitarian. I am always surprised when others consider him whose link with the natural world has not yet been broken. Caliban can still participate in a world of marvels, whereas his master can merely ‘create’ them through his acquired knowledge. At the same time, Caliban is also a rebel— the positive hero, in a Hegelian sense. The slave is always more important than his master—for it is the slave who makes history.”30

Then and Now Temporally, the psychodrama effects the virtual reality of the present.31 It is the here and now of “a second time” where the past is completely relived in the present. Césaire presents the situation of nineteenth-century leader Henri Christophe not only as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of post-independence government but also as a mirror reflection of contemporary African and Caribbean leaders; and Césaire’s purpose is to inspire critical reflection on the part of his audience. It is in this temporal capacity that Césaire’s psychodrama is ritual. According to the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, ritual is “a metaphor for the perennial, and the perennial is not located in any one such and such event. Birth is a perennial event, so is death. So are courage, cowardice, fear, motion, rain, drought, storm. Ritual is the irreducible formal agent for event-disparate and time-separated actions of human beings in human society.”32 If one considers merely The Tragedy of King Christophe and A Season in the Congo, the latter dealing with the assassination of 1960s Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba and the murderous military strongman Mokutu (thinly disguised as the recently deceased President Mobutu Sese Sekou), Césaire’s theatre is unabashedly rooted in history. As sacred ritual psychodrama, however, the play transcends the particularity of the historic moment and draws out the mythopoeic revelations of the past and present for the benefit of the future.

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Césaire’s literary and political work form a seamless whole, and one of his overarching preoccupations is the question of what to do with freedom, independence, autonomy, and equal rights. In his capacities as mayor of Fort-de-France, Martinique, and representative to the French National Assembly, Césaire has spoken candidly to his constituency concerning the day-to-day demands of independence. “It will have to be said to my fellow Martinicans: That’s all well and good, you will be independent, but take care! It is going to be necessary that you work, roll up your sleeves. You must not say to me ‘I can’t work today because the sun is too hot’ or ‘I can’t go out because, today, it’s raining.’ We shall have to make an immense effort to overcome ourselves.”33 In A Season in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, president of the National Congo Movement on the eve of independence in 1960, contemplates the enormous task at hand and sees himself and his compatriots as, of necessity, voluntary slaves condemned to work for the salvation of the nation: Lumumba. They say I ask too much, they say I’m adventurous, foolhardy and so on. Is that it? They say I’m trying to go too fast. Well you no-good snails, let me tell you this. We’ve got to go fast, we’ve got to go too fast. Do you know how much time I have to catch up with fifty years of history? Three months, gentlemen. And you think I can afford to take it easy? (A Season in the Congo, act 1, scene 8)

In The Tragedy of King Christophe, Madame Christophe implores Christophe, in effect, to “slow down” in the wake of Haitian independence and not to drive the people with such strict discipline in their work of nation-building. While his methods are undeniably mad and cruel, there is lucidity in Christophe’s analysis of the dilemma of newly independent black nations. Christophe. I ask too much of men? But not enough of black men, Madame. If there’s one thing that riles me as much as slaveholders’ talk, it’s to hear our philanthropists proclaim, with the best of intentions of course, that all men are men and that there are neither whites nor blacks. That’s thinking in an armchair, not in the world. All men have the same rights? Agreed. But some men have more duties than others. That’s where the inequality comes in. In the challenge. Does anyone believe that all men, all I say, without privilege, without special exemption, have known capture, deportation, slavery, collective reduction to the level of animals, the monstrous insult, the total outrage that we have suffered, the all-denying spittle plastered on our bodies, spat in our faces. We alone, Madame, do you hear me, we blacks. From the bottom of the pit we cry out, from the bottom of the pit we cry out for air, light, the sun. And if we’re going to climb out, don’t you see that we need tense muscles, clenched teeth, and cool clear heads—ah yes, heads! And that’s why I have to ask more of blacks than of other people, more faith, more enthusiasm, a step, another, and still another, and never a step backward. (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 1, scene 8)

In delineating the responsibilities of the artist and the intellectual34 during the anticolonialist period of 1959, Césaire, at the risk of displeasing some of his more optimistic comrades, warned of the conditions that would thrust liberated nations not into the “sunlight” of independence but, as Patrice Lumumba says in A Season, into

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“the scaly coils of malignant darkness come down on the whole continent.”35 Césaire feared that certain colonial and colonialist structures would too easily be reconstituted in the very heart of what he called those “imperfectly decolonized nations.”36 He was aware of the danger that a class of individuals would develop a hierarchical society, colonize certain ethnic groups, and use the same instruments of repression that European imperialists had used to keep the masses in check. When the roles in Césaire’s theatre are not historically specific, they are composite characters, historical types such as Caliban and Prospero in A Tempest, or the Rebel, the Architect, the Great Promoter, the Jailer, and the Ambassador of the Grand Occident in Et les chiens se taisaient. As one ponders the post-independence monocratic regimes in Africa and the Caribbean, the words of the nameless international banker figure in A Season are painfully prophetic: Fifth Banker. To handle savages, there are two ways: One is the club, but that’s seen better days. The other is the purse. Second Banker. Go on. Fifth Banker. All right, I’ll spell it out. Just pay attention. What do their leaders want? They want to be Presidents, ministers, living in luxury. In short, the purse! High-powered cars, Villas, high wages, cushy bank accounts. Spare no expense. Just grease their palms and stuff Them. The investment will pay off. You’ll see, their hearts will melt. And presently Those smirking, smiling politicians will be A special class between us and their people. They’ll hold the people down provided we Tie them with bonds—well, maybe not of friendship, That’s out of date in this sad century— But knots and tangles of complicity. First Banker. Bravo! Good man! We’re with you. Chorus of Bankers. Hurrah! Hurrah! Three cheers for independence (A Season in the Congo, act 1, scene 4)

Later in the play Lumumba laments not having foreseen and forestalled the emergence of this new caste of African oppressors. When I appointed the first black officers, how could I imagine that quicker than lava spurts from a volcano, a new caste would be born, the caste of colonels and new masters, and that those voracious, insatiable dogs would monopolize all the benefits of Congolese freedom. (A Season in the Congo, act 3, scene 1)

Unfortunately, Haiti replaced colonialism with a feudalistic society that endures to this day: “It’s time to teach those niggers a lesson who think the Revolution means taking the place of white men and behaving the same way” (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 2, scene 4).

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Ourika and Négritude In A Tempest, “le meneur de jeu,” often translated as “the Master of Ceremonies,” should be distinguished from the European instructor of dance and etiquette on a civilizing mission of international aid to the court of King Christophe (act 1, scene 3). “Le meneur de jeu” is more “the leader-instigator of interplay or interaction,” in effect the principal therapist who plays no major role but rather makes them available in the form of masks, to be assumed by the actor, actant, analysand. The protagonist is the one for whom the psychodrama is unfolding. Structured around a triadic model of a couple and the therapist, the couples are antagonistic pairs whose relationships draw out the complexes and obsessions of the protagonist and those within the orbit of discourse that defines him. The pairs, the elements of which shift and permutate, proliferate to form the encounter group that is the larger object of psychotherapy. Thus in A Tempest we have, among others, Caliban and Prospero, Caliban and Ariel; in A Season, Lumumba and Mokutu, Lumumba and Hammarsjold, Lumumba and Pauline Lumumba; in The Tragedy, Christophe and Pétion, Christophe and Hugonin, Christophe and Metellus, Christophe and Brelle, Christophe and Madame Christophe; and in Et les chiens se taisaient, the Rebel and the Architect, the Rebel and the Mother, the Rebel and the Lover, the Rebel and the Jailer, the Rebel and the temptress, and so on. In the dynamics of Césaire’s psychodramas, certain female characters, such as the Rebel’s Mother, Madame Christophe, and Pauline Lumumba are tragic figures of Calpurnian caution, attempting in vain to steer the protagonists away from their rendezvous with death.37 Of all the female figures and presences—feminine essences and forces—in his work, perhaps the most haunting is the one whose intertextual destiny migrates between French romantic literature, francophone literature, feminist theory, and film. She is Ourika, the black nun of despair, from the 1823 French novella Ourika, by Claire de Durfort, duchesse de Duras, noble friend and spiritual companion of the writer Chateaubriand. Saved from drowning by the French governor of Senegal (after having been taken from her dead mother, who had been captured for slavery), the two-year-old black girl is reared in Paris by the governor’s aunt, Mme de B—, a noblewomen who loves the little girl as her own daughter. Ashamed of her black skin, embarrassed by the bloody and successful revolt of her Haitian revolutionary brothers, Ourika becomes suicidal, convinced that her blackness prevents her adopted French brother from loving her passionately. Her Catholic faith prevents her from committing suicide, and instead Ourika retreats from life into a monastery, where, on her deathbed, she recounts her story to the attending physician. In The Tragedy of King Christophe, Césaire uses the tragic self-discovery of this character—fatefully named Ourika, from the Greek “Eureka” or “I discover”—to explore the alienating psychological effects of slavery, racial shame, and the tension between white male and black female. After the successful slave rebellion against the French, King Christophe, wary of the fledgling nation’s vulnerability, challenges his people to build an impregnable citadel atop an almost unscalable peak on a cape in northern

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Haiti. But the grander project of Christophe, the builder, is the rehabilitation of his humiliated people’s self-esteem: Martial Besse. Majesty. These are terrifying slopes to build on Christophe. Exactly. This people has to want, to gain, to achieve something. Against fate, against history, against nature. That’s it. Extravagant venture of our bare hands! Insane challenge of our wounded hands! (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 1, scene 8)

In act 2, scene 2 of The Tragedy of King Christophe, during an Elizabethan musical interlude, Césaire recalls the name and the tragedy of Ourika in order to explain the significance of King Christophe’s tyrannical love and exceptional demands of his recently decolonized Haitian people. First Lady. Enough of politics! Isabelle, do play the harpsichord. She has a ravishing voice, this child. Isabelle, sing for us that beautiful romance, the story of Ourika. Vastey [Baron and Secretary of the King]. And who is this charming child, Ourika? First Lady. The heroine of a novel that has all of Paris crying. It is the story of a little black girl reared in an important white family, who suffers because of her color and dies consequently. Vastey. Ah! Interesting! Very Interesting! Isabelle, singing. Child of Black Guinea Distant flower of a scorching sky Ourika, unfortunate girl thus deplored her misfortune. France, you who had charmed me You who greeted my transport You hid me on your shores Where I would never be loved. White color, color of angels My soul is worthy of you O powerful God, what praises to you Had you but granted me that. But for oblivion you made me The fate of Ourika is ending Death is such a great deliverance For one who cannot be loved. First Lady. Bravo! Bravo! It is to die for! What do you think of it, Monsieur Vastey? Vastey. It makes me think of Christophe, Madame. Do you know why he works day and night? Do you know why he undertakes these wild whims, as you call them, this work of a madman? It is so that henceforth, there will no longer be in the world any little black girl who is ashamed of the color of her skin and who finds in her color the obstacle to the realization of the wishes of her heart.

The extravagant dream of the black king of Haiti has not yet been realized, for the problems treated in the dilemma of Ourika persist today, as this 1991 interview of a South African girl attests:

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Journalist. Who is better? White people or Black? Black South African school girl. White people. Journalist. Why? Black South African school girl. Because they can do whatever they want. Journalist. What would you prefer to be: White or Black? Black South African school girl. I would prefer to be White, but there is nothing I can do about it because I am Black. Journalist. How do you feel about that? Black South African school girl. Sad.38

Here it is appropriate to evoke Césairian négritude, that triple affirmation of black identity, black solidarity, and cultural values of African origin. A student of Greek and Latin, Césaire coined the word in the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Haiti where négritude stood up for the first time and declared its humanity. Parsing the semes of the term négr-itude implies a new and distinctly black attitude, an étude (study) of black history and people (multitudes), and an additional wide semantic field of associations: black lassitude, beatitude, pulchritude, fortitude, and plenitude. Césairian négritude is above all a cultural affirmation and a performative process of identity and dis-alienation. For some, along with the postmodern and the postcolonial, we are in a post-négritude era. Césaire responds: People ask: “Is there still something relevant in Négritude? Isn’t it interesting only at a purely historical level?” This is not true at all. I think that as long as you will have Negroes a little bit everywhere, Négritude will be there as a matter of course. The Martinican grievance that we wanted to voice out forcefully is not so much physical misery, economic exploitation, even if this was really the case, as the aliénation which as policy has made the Martinican conscience founder. And believe me this fight against aliénation is never totally over.39

It is not only the self-hatred of the fictitious Ourika but also the sense of powerlessness and inferiority that burdens the little South African girl that leads us to question whether we are, in fact, in a post-négritude era where the humanity of blacks is no longer in question.

Blood, Baptism, Memory, and New Saints The first scene of The Tragedy of King Christophe features a mini-drama with two fighting cocks named Christophe and Pétion, after Christophe’s rival, the mulatto president of the southern part of the Haitian republic. For King Christophe, all the world’s a cockfight. Poor Africa! Poor Haiti, I mean. Anyway, it’s the same thing. There: tribes, languages, rivers, castes, the jungle, village against village. Here: blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, witch

194 keith l. walker doctors, and heaven knows what else, clans, castes, shades of color, distrust and competition, cock fights, dogs fighting over bones, flea fights! (act 1, scene 7)

Césaire’s psychodrama has, indeed, the intensity of a cockfight. His text is intricately structured on an elaborate system of contrary pulls, hence the agonistic tensions between the role players as polemical pairs—fighting cocks, master and slave, the capitalist and the exploited, the good Negro and the bad nigger, the mulatto and the black, those who have invented, controlled, founded, discovered everything and those who have “done nothing.”40 On the stylistic level the tension is between poetry and prose, serious declaration and satire, and the atmospherics of storm and calm. And on more abstract psychological and cultural levels, reflecting the constitutive and contradictory elements of colonial and post-independence societies, the tension is maintained between Western cultural values and African cultural values, assimilation and revolt, death and life, technology and nature, historical time and mythical time, the universal and the particular, French and Creole/Swahili, rationalism and madness, and the tension between Western and African religions. In Césaire’s poetry blood is memory, and his ritual theatre stages this diasporic plasmatic dimension of black collective memory. Césaire is interested in the “plasma” of the accumulated, inherited experiences buried in the collective memory and unconscious of people of African descent. Chiens enacts a sacramental blood memory that summons the power and ancestral energies of Egypt41 and Ethiopia, specifically of the fallen African kingdoms of “Ouagadougou the city of dried mud, Djenné the red city and Tombouctou” (act 2), and the deep historic and alluvial memory of the Congo and Mississippi rivers. In The Notebook the blood memory of black rebels, maroons, and slave revolts is summoned: monstrous putrefactions of stymied revolts marshes of putrid blood trumpets absurdly muted land red, sanguineous, consanguineous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the splendor of this blood will it not burst open.42

In Chiens, the Rebel’s religion is liberation. The Rebel’s consciousness is radicalized the day he realizes that the Master saw only a future slave in the Rebel’s infant son. The Rebel’s salvation is in the ritual killing of the Master. Much of the play is devoted to the Rebel’s contemplation of the significance of that defining moment of his existence. His crime is simultaneously an act of liberation for the community, his own death sentence, and a sacred moment of personal rebirth through blood: The Rebel (harshly). My name—an offense; my Christian name—humiliation; my status—a rebel; my age—the stone age. . . . My race—that of the fallen. My religion . . . but it’s not you that will show it to me with your disarmament . . . ’tis I myself, with my rebellion and my poor fists clenched and my wooly head. . . .

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Killed . . . I killed him with my own hands. . . . Yes, ’twas a fruitful death, a copious death. . . . It was night. We crept among the sugar canes. . . . We were running like madmen; shots rang out. . . . We were striking. Blood and sweat cooled and refreshed us. . . . We broke in the doors. The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master. . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season. . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.43

In A Season in the Congo, Lumumba rejects the role of a man of God—the Christian God—assumes the pacifism of Gandhi, and in a gesture that recalls the young poet in the canto of return in The Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, declares himself, in effect, “the mouth of those miseries that have no mouth and of those who founder in dungeons of despair.” The white men confiscated God for their own benefit, and Simon Kibangu tried to win him back. But they robbed us of more than God, they robbed Africa of herself. Africa is hungry for its own being. And that’s why I don’t want to be a Messiah or a prophet. My only weapon is my tongue. I speak, I awaken, I’m not a redresser of wrongs. I don’t perform miracles, I’m a redresser of life. I speak, I give Africa back to herself. I speak, and I give Africa to the world. (A Season in the Congo, act 3, scene 2)

The tension between Western and African religion is explicitly dramatized, indeed contrapuntally chanted, in act 3, scene 2 of The Tragedy of King Christophe. At the Church at Lemonade during the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the entire court is present and King Christophe and the queen are kneeling. During the mass, there appears the ghost of Corneille Brelle, the former Archbishop whom Christophe had killed because he wanted to retire. While the new Archbishop, Juan De Dios, is hailing Holy Mary, Mother of God, Mystical Rose full of Grace, Christophe conjures the voodoo goddess of love, grace, and fecundity, Herzulie Freda Dahomey, along with “Lecco, Petro, Brisé Pimba and all the gods of thunder and fire.” Juan de Dios calls upon Mary, Queen of Angels, and Christophe in turn convokes “Zeide Baderre Codonozome—she stood in the mouths of our cannons and pointed them.” Finally, when Juan de Dios invokes the Lamb of God who took on the sins of the world, Christophe prays to the spilled blood of the ancestors, elevated as saints of Haitian liberation. The pantheon of voodoo gods and goddesses served not only as spiritual resources but also as political guides and military defenders. As a counter to Christianity and the colonial discourse it was used to justify, voodoo was a liberation theology: St. Toussaint, who died for our sins, parce nobis

196 keith l. walker St Dessalines, who died at Red Bridge like a god caught in a trap— The black fire of the earth spewed from the awful cleft when he with his thunder defied deceit with the thousand arms Miserere Miserere nobis (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 3, scene 8)

Eshu (Esù), Shango (Sângó), and Ogoun (Ogún) Thus far, certain patterns have asserted themselves as fundamental to the dynamics of Césaire’s theatre: the sacred responsibilities of art in the restoration of the social body, the transformational purposes of psychodrama, the intimate compact between performers and the public, the cosmic, social, political, and spiritual significations of storm, and the tension between Western and African religions. The accumulated elements of this analysis orient us toward an appreciation of the connections of Césaire’s theatre to certain Yoruba traditions, myths, and philosophy. As ritual (ètùtù), as play (eré), and as a practice and process to improve the human condition (Ifogbontáayése), Césaire’s theatre is under the triple interrelated sovereignty of the Yoruba deities Sângó, the god of thunder and the divine messenger, Ogún, the iron and war deity, and Esù, the trickster god of the crossroads, protean figure of transformation and supreme master of ritual. The Rebel, Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Patrice Lumumba, Caliban, and Louis Delgrès are not indecisive Hamlets debating existentialist or Marxist whys and wherefores. They are all ready to die a sacramental death. A profound phoenicism is at the core of the self-abnegating revolutionary gesture of Césairian heroes through whom the people will be revitalized, reinspirited, indeed reborn from the sacred spilled blood of fallen blacks. Such was the case for Louis Delgrès, subject of the Césaire poem entitled “Mémorial à Louis Delgrès.”44 Of Martinican origin, the poem’s forewords explain, rebelling against the 1802 Napoleonic revocation of the French decree of 1793 that had abolished slavery, and against its imminent enforcement by an expedition led by the French General Richepanse, Delgrès fell with his Guadeloupean companions at Fort Matouba in Guadeloupe. Delgrès’s example was particularly poignant for Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussant’s lieutenant. On June 28, 1802, Louis Delgrès, sitting in a cannon portal of the fort, brandished a violin and played ecstatically to inspire his comrades. Having known freedom, he preferred to be blown to bits rather than return to slavery. It is in the simultaneity of the voluntary and literal volatilization of his body in the flames of the cannon’s explosion, as the last strains of his galvanizing violin music still hung in the air, that Louis Delgrès incarnates the consuming flight of the phoenix, the transcendent embrace of death for the renewal of the community, and the

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fearless warrior-father love of the Yoruba òrìsà Ogún. Césaire’s poetry and theatre reenact Delgrès’s gesture. In the volume of poetry entitled Soleil cou coupé/Sun throat slit with its sunset/sunrise images of tragedy, decapitation, birth, and redemptive, regenerative suicide, one finds the following oath: “I pledge my allegiance to everything that sprays the sky with its insolence to everything that is loyal and fraternal to everything that has the courage to be eternally new to everything that knows how to give its heart to the fire to everything that has the strength to emerge from an inexhaustible dream.”45 The Rebel in Césaire’s densely poetic and allegorical first play, Et les chiens se taisaient, expresses Delgrès’s passion in ecstatic language: Day and ordeal [by fire] be welcome.46 . . . let me run from a chain without break all the way to the confluence of the fire that can volatilize me, purify me and set me ablaze. . . .47 I want to be the one who refuses the unacceptable In your life of compromise, me, I want to build . . . the . . . monument of Refusal48 I shall perish but naked. Intact I am naked I am naked in the stones I want to die.49 I do not know how grateful this people will be to me but I know that it needed something other than a beginning something like a birth From my blood, from my blood let me found this people50 I walk . . . I assume . . . I embrace . . .51

As Christophe hears the Mandoucouman, the sacred and military drum of retreat— suggesting death—he does not turn away in fear; rather, he embraces cosmic rhythms and the vital rhythm of drumming heartbeats, invoking the birds that symbolize the transition from the physical to the spirit world: I’m coming and you won’t see me stumbling. Yes, Congo. You have, we have, a proverb that says: “When you see an arrow that’s not going to miss you, throw out your chest and meet it head on” You hear me? Head on. (Addresses Page directly) Congo, I’ve often watched the impetuous hummingbird in the datura blossom and wondered how so frail a body can hold that hammering heart without bursting Africa, rouse my blood with your big horn Make it open like a giant bird. Ah, cage of my chest, don’t burst Beat, drums of my heart.

198 keith l. walker The toucan cracks the fruit of the raffia palm with his beak: Hail toucan, great drummer Cock, the night bleeds at the ax-edge of your cry: Hail cock, toiling ax. Snapping at pennants, blade by blade, the kingfisher composes a banner of drunken sunlight; Hail kingfisher, great drummer. Cock drum, toucan drum, kingfisher drum drum of my blood Drum, drum my heart My children, when I die, the big drum will stop. So let it beat while it beats, let the big drum beat a river of blood for me a hurricane of blood and life. My body! (The Tragedy of King Christophe, act 3, scene 5)

The action of The Tragedy of King Christophe is punctuated by the presence of symbolic birds and a progressive elevation of their prestige from the almost earthbound fighting cock to the penetrator of air and water, the kingfisher, to the incomparable stamina of the hummingbird and the annunciatory toucan that also appear in A Season in the Congo: Lumumba. . . . I wish I were a toucan, that wonderful bird, to cross the skies announcing to races and tongues that Kongo has been born to us, our king. Long live Kongo! . . . Uhuru! Freedom! A moment of ecstasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let us advance rejoicing to my unanimous step Into the new day! Into the solstice (A Season in the Congo, act 1, scene 6)

The hierarchy of birds culminates with the mythical splendor of the phoenix. With Vastey’s prayer, King Christophe, the fighting cock, is buried under the sign of the phoenix: O pollen-swarming birds fashion for him imperishable arms: an azure field red phoenix crowned with gold. Funeral fanfares, cannon salutes.

In A Season in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba identifies with the toucan and the hummingbird. Instead of the phoenix, his totem is another sacred bird, the ibis. Lumumba refuses the traditional leopard skin, the raiment of Congolese kings: Lumumba. Friends don’t make me do that. One day in the bush I met my animal soul: it had the form of a bird. My sign is a bird, that’s better than a leopard. To enter the new day, the bronze wings of the ibis. (A Season in the Congo, act 2, scene 4)

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Lumumba senses the fratricidal betrayal that awaits him and, like Toussaint Louverture 150 years before him, goes to “die his life,” that is, to die for all he had lived for. As he speaks of his premonition of death and assumption of his destiny, spent twilight, the plenitude of dawn, the embrace of the storm, the baptism in blood, and the poignant ecstasy of the voluntary disintegration of the Ogunian figure are all majesterially orchestrated in a platonic and tragic lyric to a dance partner. We have danced the dance of my life! When I am gone, when I am spent like the blinding blind meteor in the night sky, when the Congo is no more than a season seasoned with blood, be beautiful, still beautiful, keeping of the terrible days no more than the few drops of dew that make the hummingbird’s plumes more beautiful for having traversed the storm. No sadness, darling. Dance with me till dawn and give me heart to go on to the end of the night. (A Season in the Congo, act 2, scene 6) Msiri. You arrogant son-of-a-bitch! Can’t you see death looking you in the eye? You’re living your death and you don’t even notice it. Lumumba. I’m dying my life, and that’s good enough for me. Msiri. Look! (He thrusts a blade.) All right, prophet, what do you see now? (A Season in the Congo, act 3, scene 5)

The self-sacrificing Césairian heroes are Tantalic in their thirst for the absolute, Apollonian in their lucidity and blindness, Dionysian in their embrace of the earth or the chthonic realm, and grandly Promethean in their daring love of community. The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka explains the Promethean will in the following manner: “To act, the Promethean instinct of rebellion, channels action into a creative purpose which releases man from a totally destructive despair, releasing from within him, the most energetic, deeply combative inventions which, without usurping the territory of the infernal gulf, bridges it with visionary hopes.”52 These Greco-Latin mythological descriptions of the impulses of Césaire’s heroes are in no way inconsonant with Césaire’s African and Caribbean theatre. In an interview with Jacqueline Leiner, Césaire explains the connections he makes between primitive Mediterranean, African, and voodoo rituals: Césaire. . . . What interests me is primitive Greek poetry, primitive Greek tragedy. Moreover, I appreciate the Latin and Greek worlds only in their primitivism. Aeschylus, for example, seems to me more important than Euripides. Basically, one comes to recognize that Roman civilization or Greek civilization are not, in their beginnings, so removed from African civilization. . . . JL. That is what struck me in “voodoo” ceremonies.

200 keith l. walker Césaire. But it is obvious. . . . JL. I said to myself: I am in Greece. Césaire. Exactly. Only, let’s be careful. In Greece in the time of Dionysos. . . . It is not so terribly surprising, it is not a matter of race, but a matter of civilization. All agrarian peoples—in Rome, in Greece, in the Mediterranean—have had propitiatory divinities, divinities that they had to have on their side.53

The figure that contains the Mediterranean, African, and Caribbean contingencies under consideration here is Ogún. In the brilliant chapter on Wole Soyinka in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama, Tejumola Olaniyan explains that the Ogun principle “is a male principle par excellence, the sumptuous celebration of virility that constitutes the symbolic fabric of his passion, the gargantuan will, the penetration of the chthonic realm, the phallic opa ogun.”54 Further, Ogun is the Yoruba “God of ecstasy and creative daring, but Ogun’s daring willfulness is not an end in itself, his creativity is a prelude to creation itself and he is thus associated with Apollo. The manic will which he unleashed on behalf of the community, tells us that Ogun is, in addition, something else: Prometheus. Thus Soyinka’s claim that ‘Ogun is best understood in Hellenic values as the totality of Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues.’”55 Toussaint Louverture exemplifies the Ogunian ideal. What is mine: a little cell in the Jura, a little cell, the snow lines it with white bars the snow is a jailer mounting guard before a prison What is mine a lonely man imprisoned in whiteness a lonely man defying the white screams of white death (Toussaint, Toussaint L’Ouverture)56 Swellings of night in the four corners of this dawn convulsions of congealed death tenacious fate screams erect from mute earth the splendor of this blood will it not burst open? 57

An incomparable military tactician who repelled the armies of Napoleon, affectionately known as “Papa” Toussaint by the masses, in a combination of martyrdom and a sense that he should remove himself from the scene in order for Haiti’s destiny to be fulfilled, Toussaint allowed himself to be captured and went unflinchingly to his death in a prison of snow in the Jura mountains of France. During the night of June 7–8 aboard the frigate Hero en route to France, Toussaint wrote, “In overthrowing me,

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one has cut down—in Santo Domingo—only the trunk of the tree of freedom of the Blacks; it will grow back up again through its roots because they are deep and in great numbers.”58 In the trajectory of their lives as visionaries, liberators, and nation-builders, clearing the way for their people, Césaire’s protagonists reflect details of the life of Ogún. In his study of the Gèlèdé spectacle, Babatunde Lawal offers tantalizing insights into the attributes of Ogún and the eventual relationship between Sângó and Ogún. According to one Yoruba myth: When the òrìsà first arrived on the Earth, the primeval jungle was so thick as to be impenetrable, but Ogùn used his iron cutlass to cut a path through it. (Idowa 1962: 85–86) In short Ogùn’s iron has enabled humanity to transform the surface of the Earth from a primeval jungle into what it is today: a comfortable environment and an ordered society where the individual is subject to a set of values without which a given community cannot hold together. Despite the fact that Ogùn, as portrayed in myths, is fierce, restless and belligerent, he hates liars, traitors, thieves, and all those who break the ethical code. To swear falsely on an iron implement is to incur the wrath of Ogùn. Thus Ogùn is not only a symbol of industry and invention but also a guardian of human morality, on which depend social stability and progress. It would appear that Ogùn (iron deity) was once associated with the polished stone ax before the Yoruba acquired the knowledge of iron-working; for stone axes constitute the most sacred symbol in some shrines dedicated to the deity. Although the polished stone ax is now commonly linked with Sângó (who hurls it down from the sky during thunderstorms), the thunder deity depends on Ogùn for its production. Little wonder, tradition requires the inhabitants of a house struck by lightning to seek refuge in a blacksmith’s workshop. (See Johnson 1921: 35; Williams 1973: 140)59

At the Crossroads Césaire’s protagonists are essentially the same figure, the revolutionary. His plays progress from esoteric, densely poetic and allegorical drama with an archetypal rebel figure (Et les chiens se taisaient), to the historical dramas about Caribbean Henri Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) and African Patrice Lumumba (A Season in the Congo), to the broadly drawn, exoteric figuration of the slave-rebel Caliban in A Tempest. From the characters of these four rebels emerges the perennial black experience. Césaire’s theatre stands at the crossroads of the black colonial, anticolonial, and postindependence experiences. All four plays end ambiguously. Chiens ends with the death of the rebel and a vision of the blue Caribbean Sea strewn with silvery and golden islands in the light of dawn. The Tragedy of King Christophe ends at a construction site in the mountains with scaffolding, the dead King Christophe’s body, and a heraldic vision of resurrection, the red phoenix crowned with gold on an azure field. A Season in the Congo ends with Independence Day 1966 in the Congo being celebrated in a speech of lies and politi-

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cal calculation by the military strongman Mokutu and a procession of coffins on the day of the nation’s birth. And A Tempest ends with the barely audible freedom cry of Caliban, and with the colonizer Prospero remaining on the island, suggesting in his final lines that independence will not easily undo the ties that bind them. All four plays end at the crossroads of the unfinished business of nation-building. Césaire makes this point in discussing a dimension of Christophe that European scholars have overlooked. For Césaire, behind the pomp and excess of Christophe there is something pathetic, and it is this pathos that European historians never perceive. It is the pathetic dimension of a man who comes out of slavery and wants to raise his people, and who raises himself to an extraordinary kind of mystique. He uses all the means available to him in his time; but these means were not always the best ones. But there is something great that redeems Christophe, which explains why he can never be a Haitian petit-bourgeois like a Papa Doc. There is Christophe’s greatness behind the ridicul[ous]. And this is why Christophe is great, in spite of his methods, in spite of his ridiculous aspects (he is a parvenu). There is behind this a sort of tragic grandeur. There is something promethean. This does not mean that I am a Christophe fan or that I take him as a model. Through him I try to understand the attitude of a man who rises from slavery, who is haunted by the necessity of building a nation, and who gets lost in there.60

In these respects—at the crossroads of the black colonial, anticolonial, and post-independence experiences, at the crossroads of the unfinished business of nation-building, at the crossroads of tragedy—Césaire’s theatre is also under the sovereignty of Eshu, Papa Legba or Esú, who is, in fact, the Haitian loa or Yoruba òrìsà of the crossroads. Esú, the deity of transformation,61 trickster and messenger of all the òrìsà, also called Esù Elégbára; the agency of change.62 Esù (the divine messenger), an instigator of disagreements and conflicts.63 Esù’s importance lies in the fact that he is the divine messenger and the principle of dynamism. Without his cooperation no ritual can take place, no process can be effective. The marketplace . . . is his domain.64 As the divine trickster and custodian of àse (the power to make things happen), Esú is the agency of change. An aspect of Esú . . . inheres in all things, both animate and inanimate, charging them with existential power and at the same time subjecting them to change. Esù is associated with the rhythm of time, motion, and statis [sic], the beginning and the end, the old and the new, the positive and the negative, life and death, north and south, east and west and all the ups and downs of human existence (iwà).65

In Césaire’s A Tempest, Prospero is the incarnation of totalitarian rationalism, repressive technological power and control, and Western notions of propriety and order. Calban’s deities reside at the crossroads of good and evil, and even Shango is a trickster, as Caliban’s song reveals: Forget to give him room if you dare! He will make himself at home on your nose! Refuse to have him under your roof at your own risk! He’ll tear off your roof and wear it as a hat!

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Whoever tries to mislead Shango Will suffer for it! Shango, Shango ho! (A Tempest, act 2, scene 1)

The wedding ceremony of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, whose virtue he has protected from the imagined advances of Caliban, is the occasion upon which Eshu makes his appearance.66 Miranda. But who is that? He doesn’t look very benevolent! If I weren’t afraid of blaspheming, I’d say he was a devil rather than a god. Prospero. . . . What are you doing here? Who invited you? I don’t like such loose behavior even from a god! Eshu. But that’s just the point . . . no one invited me. . . . And that wasn’t very nice! Nobody remembered poor Eshu! So poor Eshu came anyway. Hihihi! . . . Eshu can play many tricks, Give him twenty dogs! You will see his dirty tricks. . . . Eshu plays a trick on the bride And on the day of the wedding She gets into the wrong bed. . . . Eshu can throw a stone yesterday And kill a bird today. He can make a mess out of order and vice-versa. . . . Oh, Eshu is a merry elf! Eshu is a merry elf, And he can whip you with his dick He can whip you, He can whip you. . . . with his dick He can whip you, whip you (A Tempest, act 3, scene 3)

Eshu’s appearance marks the beginning of the end of Prospero’s power over Caliban. Eshu turns the world upside down and in that sense is a revolutionary agent of change, reinforcing Caliban’s rebellion and accelerating his transformation. Thus, possessed by the thunder of Shango, by the warrior courage of Ogùn, by Eshu’s capacity to change and the miraculous weapon of Eshu’s seminal power (he can whip you with his dick), Caliban marches off to do battle with Prospero, and to seize the power language in order to express his radicalized consciousness: Caliban. You must understand a few things, Prospero: For years I have bowed my head For years I have accepted my condition Accepted, accepted it all! Your insults, your ingratitude Worse still, more degrading than all the rest

204 keith l. walker your condescension But now, it’s all over. Finished, do you understand. Your power, I don’t give a damn, The same goes for your blood hounds, Your police force, your riot control intervention And do you know why I don’t give a damn? Do you want to know why? It is because one day I know that I am going to have you Impaled. And on the very stake that you will have sharpened for me. Impaled upon yourself Prospero you are a magician, a prestidigitator, an illusionist deceiving yourself. Ah lies, you are familiar with lies And you have lied to me so thoroughly Lied to me about the world, lied to me about me So much so that you imposed upon me an image of myself that I almost, that I almost was convinced of. Me—underdeveloped as you say, incapable of mastering basic skills. That is how you would have me see myself. and this image you have given me of myself, I loath it And it is false But now, and oh it has taken such a long time, now I know you, you cancer in my heart and I also know myself By the way, you do have the opportunity to get out now. You can pack up, get the hell out You can return to Europe AH you aren’t listening to me I am certain you won’t leave Oh it makes me laugh, your so-called “mission” Your “vocation” Your calling is to make my life miserable, to stay on my ass to give me shit.67 (A Tempest, act 3, scene 3)

Ecstatic Humanism As Césaire states in The Notebook, his love for the black race is tyrannical but not racist: for entrenched as I am in this unique race you still know my tyrannical love . . . that what I want is for universal hunger for universal thirst

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As A Tempest dramatizes, and Caliban’s speech above, in particular, illustrates, Césaire is a humanistic critic of European colonial practices, a critic of the European will to dominate, to define and represent colonized peoples and places through the Prosperian gaze. The rise of European humanism paralleled the European entry into the reciprocally dehumanizing colonial practices of violence, exploitation, enslavement, massacre, and extermination. European humanism was exclusive: it did not include the colonized. Aimé Césaire counters with an alternative, all-inclusive, universal humanism. It is an aspect of Ifogbontáayése: in the quest to remake and improve the world, a search for “Unity in Diversity.”68 In his very first play, written in 1946, Césaire posits a vision of unity in diversity and universal humanism in the Rebel’s forest reverie. The Rebel renounces hate as a form of dependence and enslavement. Above all, what he seeks is freedom in all its humanistic plenitude. It is a vision of society that the world is still challenged to realize: The Rebel. Vindictiveness? No. To hate is to still be dependent. What is hatred, if not the ole piece of wood tied to the slave’s neck and that gets him all tangled up or the great bark of the dog that seizes you by the throat and I have, once and for all, refused, I, to be a slave I suppose the world might be a forest. Good! There are baobabs, some lively oak, some dark pines, some light walnut I want them to grow all, thick and stout, different in wood, in bearing, in color but equally brimming with sap and without one encumbering the other different at their base but oh Ecstatic let their heads meet, yes, up in the ethereal heights so as to form for humanity one single roof I am saying the one and only protecting roof. (Chiens, act 2)69

Notes 1. Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et connaissance,” Tropiques no. 12 (1978). 2. “Qu’est-ce qu’un poète? Selon la définition de Rimbaud, c’est un voyant; par conséquent, le poète qui a pour qualité première de faire, de voir pour son compte, devient homme de théâtre dès le moment où il essaie de faire voir, de transmettre sa vision aux autres.” Régis Antoine, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe d’Aimé Césaire, lectoguide francophonie. Collection “Pédagogie moderne” (Paris: Bordas, 1984), 97. 3. “Le théâtre remplira sa fonction sociale, non seulement en faisant voir, mais aussi en faisant comprendre et prendre conscience. Cela rejoint les idées de Brecht. Mon théâtre a une fonction critique, il doit inciter le public à juger.” Ibid., 38. 4. Departmental status corresponds to the status of a state in the United States. 5. Aimé Césaire, La Tragedie du Roi Christophe, trans. Ralph Manheim (Paris: Présence africaine, 1963).

206 keith l. walker 6. “Imperial frontiers” is a term employed by the Dominican scholar Juan Bosch in Juan Bosch, De Cristobal Colon a Fidel Castro: el Caribe, frontera imperial (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1970). 7. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Volontés 20 (1939) (bilingual ed. of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith), in The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 8. Césaire, Cahier d’un retour. 9. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 23. 10. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 11. Aimé Césaire, “l’Homme de culture et ses responsabilites,” Présence africaine 23 (December–January 1959): 118. 12. Miraculous weapons refers to the title of a volume of poetry by Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). 13. My translation. Césaire, “L’homme de culture,” 121. 14. Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, trans. Ralph Manheim (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 15. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theater as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 261. 16. Aimé Césaire, Et les chiens se taisaient, originally published in Les Armes miraculeuses. Translations of Chiens are my own except where indicated. Reprinted in Aimé Césaire: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Fort-de-France: Éditions Désormeaux, 1976), 13–94. The title can be translated as And the Dogs Were Silent but will be referred to in French. 17. Baron-Saturday or Baron Samedi, a Haitian god or loa of cemeteries, transitions, and crossroads. 18. Aimé Césaire, Une Saison au Congo, trans. Ralph Manheim (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967). 19. See Michel Corvin, Dictionnaire Encyclopédique du Théâtre (Paris: Bordas, 1991), 681–82. 20. Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 62; Soyinka, “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal” Art, Dialogue 54, 60. 21. Babatunde Lawal, The Gèlèdé Spectacle: Art Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 93. 22. Ibid., 269. 23. Ibid., xvii. 24. Ibid., 289. 25. On the idea of tragedy in twentieth-century drama and the eventual relationship of Césaire’s work to that of Beckett, Ionesco, Artaud, and Nietzsche, see Sandra Williams, “La Renaissance de la tragédie dans l’oeuvre dramatique d’Aimé Césaire,” Présence africaine 76 (1970): 63–81. 26. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Eshleman and Smith, 55. 27. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture: La Revolution française et le problème colonial, in Aimé Césaire: Oeuvres complètes. 28. Négritude will be discussed later in the context of The Tragedy of King Christophe. 29. Césaire, Notebook, 81. 30. Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of the Tempest,” Critical Inquiry, 13, no. 5 (spring 1987): 557–78. 31. John A. Rassias, “From the Page to the Stage: Naturalism, Symbolism, Surrealism,” lecture on twentieth-century theatre, Dartmouth College, January 1997. 32. Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 62; Wole Soyinka, “Who’s Afraid of Elesin?” Art, Dialogue 120.

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33. My translation. Il faudra dire à mes bons Martiniquais: “C’est très bien, vous serez indépendents, mais attention! Il va vous falloir travailler, retrousser vos manches. Il ne faudra pas me dire “Je ne travaille pas parce qu’il y a trop de soleil” ou “Je ne sors pas parce que, aujourd’hui, il pleut.” Nous aurons à faire un immense effort sur nous-mêmes,” in Régis Antoine, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe d’Aimé Césaire, 60; Césaire in an interview with the French magazine Paris-Match. 34. Césaire, “L’Homme de culture,” 119. 35. Césaire, A Season in the Congo, act 2, scene 11. 36. Césaire, “L’Homme de culture,” 119. 37. On the role of women in Césaire’s plays, see Clément Mbom, “La femme dans le théatre d’Aimé Césaire,” in Aimé Césaire ou L’Athanor d’un alchimiste (Paris: Editions Caribéennnes, 1987), 223–37. 38. Included in interview of F. W. de Klerk and broadcast on ABC Nightline by Ted Koppel, February 14, 1991. 39. Interview with Aimé Césaire by Charles Rowell, Callaloo 12 (winter 1989): 55. 40. On the subject of polemical pairs, see Georges Ngal, “Le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire: une dramaturgie de la décolonization,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 35 (October–November 1970): 613–36. 41. On the Egyptian elements of Chiens, see Frederick Ivor Case, “Eléments de civilisations égyptienne, grecque et romaine dans Et les chiens se taisaient,” in Soleil éclaté, ed. Jacqueline Leiner (Tubingen: Gunter Narr 1984), 69–80. 42. Césaire, The Notebook, 47–49. 43. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 86–89. 44. Césaire, Ferrements, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 189. 45. Césaire, “Aux écluses du vide,” Soleil cou coupé, in Oeuvres complètes, vol 1, 248. 46. Césaire, Chiens, act 3, 67. 47. Ibid., 72. 48. Ibid., 53. 49. Ibid., 73. 50. Ibid., 54. 51. Ibid., 92. 52. Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 54. 53. Aimé Césaire, interview with J. Leiner (my translation) in Tropiques, vol. 1 (1978): xix. 54. Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 48. 55. Ibid., 49. 56. Césaire, The Notebook, 47. 57. Ibid., 49. 58. Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 322. 59. Lawal, The Gèlèdé Spectacle, 252–53. 60. Interview with Aimé Césaire by Charles Rowell, 61. 61. Lawal, The Gèlèdé Spectacle, 279. 62. Ibid., 293. 63. Ibid., 26. 64. Ibid., 124. 65. Ibid., 273–74. 66. See A Tempest, act 1, scene 2:

208 keith l. walker 67. Marianne Wichmann Bailey is the author of an insightful and comprehensive study of Césaire’s theatre as liturgical spectacle—perhaps the best recent book-length study of Césaire’s theatre. This scene of Caliban’s transformation illustrates what Bailey describes as “a process of refusal-devaluation and reversal-revaluation” in which there is a “smelting of new values in the crucible of old injuries.” See Marianne Wichmann Bailey, The Ritual Theatre of Aimé Césaire (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1992), 35. 68. Speaking of aspects of Ifogbontáayése, Babatunde Lawal observes, “Gèlèdé is Art for Humanity’s Sake, a paradigm of Unity in Diversity.” Lawal, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 289. 69. My translation. On universal humanism see also Césaire, “L’homme de culture,” 122: “Let it be known: while articulating our effort of liberation of colonized peoples, while fighting for the dignity of our people, it is definitely for the whole world that we are fighting and to liberate it from tyranny, hatred and fanaticism. Then and only then shall we have been victorious, and our final victory will mark the coming of a new era . . . we shall have assisted in founding universal humanism” (my translation).

May Joseph

Sycorax Mythology

Spirit of Exchange and the Cannibalistic State Sorceress, queen, slave, mother, witch, and revolutionary—Sycorax ruptures the narrative of visual modernity with her vociferous howls of dissent in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A mythic representation mother earth, virgin nature, or the maternal spirit, Sycorax embodies a radical revisioning of gendered power within nationalist struggles. Until recently a neglected figure in Shakespeare’s final play, Sycorax offers a provocative critique of the erasure of women as political participants in the modern state. She draws our attention to the history of colonial conquest and national liberation, which have consigned women to the shadows of modern nation formation. Recent feminist reflections on Sycorax respond to earlier colonial and postcolonial adaptations of The Tempest that neglect her and focus solely on Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero. As Roberto Fernández Retamar points out in his essay Caliban (1971), the metaphorical power of Caliban/Cannibal—evidenced by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Montaigne’s On Cannibals (1580), and Shakespeare’s The Tempest—has generated an elaborate reworking of North-South readings of the emerging state in relation to colonial and post-independence narratives of state power.1 Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodo’s Ariel (1900), French Jean Guéhenno’s Caliban Speaks (1926), O. Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950), Martinican Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Barbadian George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “Africa and Cultural Decolonization (1971), John Pepper Clark’s The Example of Shakespeare (1970), David Wallace’s Do You Love Me Master? (1977), and Martinican Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) offer the most interesting treatments of Caliban. The omission of Sycorax in these texts reveals the gendered nature of the struggle for postcolonial statehood. As the unspoken source of Caliban’s servitude, Sycorax is read through Prospero’s own history of possessing and being possessed. She is the first term of the appropriation of property, the last term of desire as alchemy.

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Sycorax impinges upon the terrain of male protagonists of nation-state formation as a disruptive presence, more often heard than seen. Unlike Prospero’s daughter Miranda, whom Coco Fusco reminds us is the other significant female character in The Tempest, Sycorax embodies gendered indigenousness.2 She is invoked as the primordial occupant of Argier, the precolonial pristine territory outside Europe’s cartographic imagination. In its evocative historic import, her emergence as aural black subjectivity outside Europe’s ocularity is already posed as an interlocking system of signs: she is heard, not seen, and therefore occupies a place outside the visuality of Europe’s language of reason. Yet it is the coerced visual silence of her incarcerated “irrational” body on which Prospero’s own tenuous reason hinges. Her cacophonous barbarism confirms Prospero’s wordy civility. Her sonic silence is deafening indeed, as her threatening “bestiality,” ability to reproduce, magical powers, and rights to the land by virtue of her nativeness all mark the limits of European male anxiety, and must therefore be hidden, repressed. But, as Sycorax suggests, you can incarcerate the body of the historically disempowered subject, but its aurality cannot be erased. As a citizen of New World modernity, Sycorax, the racialized, colonized, gendered subject, returns to the scene of her repression. This time her tale is reversed, as she travels to the former empire turned island nation, Britain—and by extension the West —and interrupts notions of universalist humanism by staging her own modern sorcery: the claim to democratic citizenship. The scream of Sycorax exposes the ideological ambivalence of the democratizing discourses of the West and challenges the limits of Prospero’s science of privileged white citizenship in Britain. The aurality of Sycorax is a powerful diasporic link between African, European, Caribbean, and New World subject formations. Her voice evokes the obscured historic terrains through which subaltern struggles must materialize. She is the resounding force behind the nascent state as she elaborates the selective narration of possessor and possessed, cannibal and cannibalized. Sycorax disarticulates Empire, Englishness, and masculinity while simultaneously shaping the discourse of modernity, desire, and indigenous rights in the diabolical encounter of Europe with its fantasies of elsewhere. As a key to unraveling the psychic boundaries of power, gender, and nationalist sentiment, Sycorax is simultaneously native woman and modern subject of the new nation. Her screams unleash the unspoken economies of exchange. She forces on the pragmatism of emerging capitalist world systems a nervousness of subaltern agency and resilience. Her presence creates growing unease in the colonial occupier. If Prospero embodies the narratives of Enlightenment and the emergent modern states of sixteenth-century Europe (in this case, Milan and Naples), Sycorax represents the terrifying logic of Prospero’s own experience of loss and possession. Sycorax marks Prospero’s own disenfranchisement when overthrown by his brother in Milan. She also serves as a reminder of Prospero’s unlawful seizure of her territory, yet to be narrativized as state. Shakespeare’s Sycorax embodies the diabolical magic of esoteric geographies associated with the pagan god Setabos of the Patagonians, considered to be the “devil himself.”3 Prospero, by contrast, is white magic, the magic

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of the legitimated space of Western cartography, the alchemy of Western history legitimated through the technologies of imperialism and domination. Sycorax marks the outer limits of Europe’s knowledge of itself, geographically and politically. She makes audible the epistemic and psychic rupture in the written, engraved, etched, and codified world of Enlightenment cartography that inform the narratives of European civility and statehood. Collision with Sycorax, whom Ariel announces to be from Argier (Algiers), erodes Prospero’s authority over the known and reveals his own terror of other epistemological realms wrenched open through this encounter.4 Reduced to the untranslatable witch of the most “unmitigable rage” in Prospero’s reading, Sycorax explodes the space of Western knowledge with her grasp of a different epistemological magic. Her incarceration by Prospero and her mysterious, unquestioned death contaminate Prospero’s discourse of civilization and conquest through the uncontainable and radical subjectivity of indigenous rage. Sycorax manifests the powerful sorcery of self-determination and sovereignty that echoes through the tumultuous landscape of Enlightenment history. When she first appears in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sycorax is described as the monstrous manifestation of the now usurped island nation, whose imaginative geography spatially compresses the New World, imbricating Algiers and the Bermudas, the site of blackness. A sign of the unspeakable violence of history, Sycorax is proferred as the tortured gift of the stolen island nation. Her presence in turn provides Prospero with the parameters of fear and prohibition through which to fashion his rule. Sycorax’s value shifts from sovereign queen to stolen slave, enabling Prospero to become the unlawful owner/king of the island nation. She is the repressed horror at the center of Prospero’s terror-filled state, the indigenous agent whose rightful access to the island property is thwarted by Prospero’s power. Sycorax’s encounter with Europe in The Tempest enacts the alchemy of the cannibalistic state. The Brazilian poet and dramatist Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” launched during the Brazilian modernist period of the 1920s, popularized anthropophagy, or cannibalism, as a theory of exchange.5 Moving the notion of cannibalism away from the anthropological and anecdotal accounts of colonial travelers, anthropophagy offers an analysis of consumption and desire in the colonial encounter. De Andrade’s project was the creation of a national culture through “the consumption and critical elaboration of both national and foreign influences. Imported cultural influences were to be devoured, digested, and reworked in terms of local conditions. In the words of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Brazilian director of the film Macunaíma (1969), an adaptation of the 1928 modernist novel by Mario de Andrade, “Cannibalism is an exemplary mode of consumerism. . . . Every consumer is reducible . . . to cannibalism. . . . Those who can, ‘eat’ others through their consumption of products, or even more directly in sexual relationships. . . . The new heroes . . . try to devour those who devour us.”6 Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy complicates economic theories of use value and exchange, adding an insurgent, corporeal dimension. His nuanced reading of capital as consumption addresses the violent and reductive realms of conquest and

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subjugation, confounding simplistic accounts of the good colonized and the bad colonizer. In anthropophagy’s overlapping terrains of desire and repression, Sycorax— like Prospero—is an exiled magician, sharing in an anthropophagous exchange of diabolical magic to possess the other. Each invents the other as evil and the self as righteous. Yet Sycorax’s alchemy is reduced to malevolent power. She is described as Cannibal, while Prospero’s magic is art harnessed to Enlightenment science.7 In his extensive genealogy of the term cannibal, Peter Hulme archives the social histories surrounding the narrativization of cannibalism as the devouring of human flesh, unpacking the ideological role of anthropophagy.8 By reading scenes of the spiritual, libidinal, legal, and material consumption of indigenous bodies like Sycorax, Hulme exposes the political, social, and narrative process of state formation. Hulme’s analysis disrupts the colonizer-versus-colonized dialectic, revealing a seething cauldron of ambivalent and contested identities and territories. Described through the language of anthropophagy (for instance, the Mandevillian motif “men / Whose heads stood in their breasts?”)9 popularized in numerous travelogues, such as the Bermuda Pamphlets of 1610, Raleigh’s account of Guiana, and those by John Smith, Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and Samuel Purchase, among others, the New World—Sycorax’s island nation—is imbued with what Frantz Fanon calls “maleficent power.” The legality of possession emerges as one arena of struggle in the colonial collision between men, in Hulme’s archive “Prospero and Caliban.” Hulme does not, however, discuss whether or how an ideological cannibalism might actually enable a nonteleological reading. Here, Oswald de Andrade’s theory is helpful in thinking through the notion of ideological cannibalism as postcolonial critical practice. Andrade’s anthropophagous irreverence allows Sycorax to tear apart the structuring frame of history between men and rewrite it in radically different terms. Sycorax challenges her assumed animality, which is linked to her pregnant, maternal body. She exceeds the anthropological and historical anecdotes of cannibalism available by revealing their discursive limits. Sycorax’s shriek both manifests the “maleficent power” of the bestialized native and exposes that power. As Fanon observes, in the violent exchange of territorial ownership in the colonial market, the settler bestializes natives, describing them in zoological terms of foul gestation and breeding swarms.10 Sycorax as native woman figures in this economy as the “blue-ey’d hag” whose pregnant body produces the free though maleficent labor of “A freckled whelp hag-born—not honour’d with / A human shape” whom Prospero will “keep in service.”11 She emerges cannibalized by the systems of capital through which her enslaved pregnant black body is consumed as free labor. She is the expendable commodity of an unmarked island in the outer peripheries of Europe’s imagination. Sycorax is both cannibal and cannibalized. She makes visceral the anthropophagic economy of capital through which the production and representation of the sovereign state—one European, the other of the New World (though geographically located in the “uninhabited” old world of North Africa, presumably Algeria in Shakespeare’s text)—are forged. Through the deployment of cannibalistic logic, of devouring and being devoured, a colonial, preindustrial, and yet very contemporary theory of use/ exchange value can be read in the play. Sycorax, indigenous native of the island na-

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tion, is invested with all that the settler is not, Fanon’s “maleficent power,” radical subalterity. In this economy Prospero must project onto Sycorax all that he fears in himself and his modernity. He reads Sycorax as cannibal to enable his own cannibalizing logic of devouring indigenous rights in the island nation. By scarring, torturing, incarcerating, demonizing, mythologizing, and projecting onto the native bodies of Sycorax and Caliban the barbarism of European modernity, Prospero inscribes European law onto his stolen territory. His system of government is replete with torture, incarceration, and surveillance. What gets lost in Prospero’s mechanisms of government are the complexities of citizenship of the ruled, the subjugated, and the colonized. The incarcerated body of Sycorax—the “malignant thing! . . . who with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop,” the absent presence of woman embodying the nation as the voice of Sycorax, “of sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing,” is erased in the visual rhetoric of statehood.12 It is this paradoxically familiar act of consumption that draws me to inquire into the way Shakespeare’s Sycorax figures (or does not) in the projects of the proletarian revolutions of decolonization.

Writing Sycorax: Disarticulating Empire and the Spatializing of History As Edouard Glissant argues in Caribbean Discourse, the ideologies of state formation “concealed under the surface” of history writing propel the Bard’s great tragedies. Shakespeare’s interrogation of the metaphysical questions of legitimacy and succession to the English and Dutch thrones—foregrounded in his history plays, particularly the treatise on perfect kingship in Henry V—culminates in his avowal of the superiority of the West, even as the Dukedom of Milan collapses through internal feuds in The Tempest. In other words, Europe’s violent mapping of its elsewhere, projected as the horror and bestiality of the New World, is aided and abetted by a teleological notion of development and progress manifested in The Tempest. Caliban is nature from below, with degrees of elevation capped by Prospero as the Western ideal.13 Glissant gestures toward Shakespeare’s gendering of the nature of statehood. This gendering shapes the founding myths of the perfect king, as the antithetical treatises of Richard III and Henry V demonstrate. But for Glissant Shakespeare’s history plays map the impossibility of the ideal state. Caribbean Discourse splits open the “epistemological deficiency” that Glissant traces in his radical reconceptualizing of modernity’s self-narrative. In a relentless critique of the economies of exchange that generated modernity’s circulation and consumption of black bodies as slave labor, Glissant raises the question of how to write from this epistemological bind. By staging the dramatic geographies of alienation and dispossession behind the slave trade, he poses for us the spatializing violence of the transatlantic migrations from Africa to Europe to the Caribbean to Virginia. In such a monstrous journey, Shakespeare’s own tempest gets devoured, or rather drowned, in

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what Glissant calls the transversality of the Caribbean. By this Glissant means “the implosion of Caribbean history.” Glissant’s transversality becomes one way to imagine writing in this epistemological bind. The spatially mobile metaphor of transversality locates the transatlantic slave trade as a site of traumatic shock, imploding the notion of a linear and hierarchical History. In his “quarrel with history,” Glissant dispels the ridiculous claim that a people “have no history.” “History (with a capital H) ends where the histories of those peoples once reputed to be without history come together.” The shaping transversality of postcolonialism relieves writing of the seamless illusion of a single history that would run its unique course. Instead Glissant narrates the “subterranean convergence” of multiple, interlocking histories, unfurling this dispossessed historical space through montaged moments of traumatic shock. The relationship of shock in writing to a dispossessed historical space is most profoundly embodied in Sycorax. Her screams shatter the violent regimes of desire in reading and writing the colonized body, depicted in Kamau Brathwaite’s Barabajan Poems (1994). Here Brathwaite performs Glissant’s implosion of history through a transversal writing journey. The name of Sycorax in the section “Sycorax // O’Grady” becomes Brathwaite’s vehicle of dispossession and transversality as she occupies the crucible of transatlantic naming. Limuru Kinta Kunte Sycorax // O’Grady Missile // O Nation Language and the fight for NommO Name/Nam/Manding O14

Brathwaite raises the ghosts of Sycorax’s naming by situating her within the transversality of crossing histories: East Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, the transatlantic slave trade, emergent narratives defying linearity. In Brathwaite’s exegesis on naming, he splits open the forms of ideological cannibalism contained in the naming of Sycorax, native woman whose indigenous name is erased. Says Brathwaite, “Well you all know the Biblical & Shakespearean references to name . . . throughout history . . . you have people concerned with name.”15 Rerouting this process of writing history at the transverse junctures of an accrued past of slave memory (“Kinta Kunte”) and the present within modernity’s optic, Brathwaite invokes naming as a means of imploding teleological notions of self. This liminal experience of naming that transforms the New World subject is located, for Brathwaite, in East Africa. Limuru, Kenya, becomes the scene of the poet’s reinscription. Brathwaite evokes Sycorax as the medium of his renaming: And in the case of my own self—that xperience I had in Kenya—I wd like to share with you a little more about the meaning of my Kikuyu name Kamau/ given to me at her home, outside in the grounds, on the ground, one afternoon in Limuru by Ngugi wa

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Thiong’o’s grandmother . . . kneeling on the ground with the wind on my face & the great sky of Eden all around me in front of these old women who like ripped open my shirt & like spat upon my chest . . . & began chanting deep deep down inside their chests & deeper down into their very bellies searching for my nam so they cd find my name.16

The Sycoraxian image Brathwaite creates in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s mother offers a sonorous, incantative reworking of the process of naming. Naming is the phenomenological site of unbecoming for Brathwaite, through which his name “Kamau” can be arrived at and through which it is unraveled. It situates the poet’s own body at the transversal limits of experience and memory, present and past. The ceremony of naming alters the poet’s body through Sycorax materialized as sound. For Brathwaite, Sycorax is “perhaps the most important person/element in the drama. The Invisible (she doesn’t even appear in Shakespeare), the submerged mother . . . the Igbo Damballa women I witness (eye of the navel) in D’Ogou, the carpenter’s shop in M&Q/ Barbados.”17 In Barabajan Poems, Sycorax is simultaneously bearer of culture/indigenous woman and the metaphoric space of split form, disjunctured selves. The invocation of Sycorax as the space of ritual is synonymously juxtaposed with the spatialized writing of a history hidden from view, embarked upon in the dialectical spaces of the Barabajan narrative. Sycorax is simultaneously the place of modernity’s spiraling present and its repressed past. For Brathwaite, she is both embodied and heard in the chasms between words. Sycorax evokes the archetypal scene of modernity in the same space that her voice dismembers language to forge new dreams of modernity’s reinventions, like “Kamau,” the name spun forth. Writing from a different historical space, that of the poet-citizen envisioning a history that extends beyond the confines of an island nation, Canadian Marlene Nourbese Philip wrenches open the kernel of writing itself, located transnationally between islands and continents. She scoops out the tender possibilities of language through the recuperable rites of naming in states of dispersal, in passage across water. Naming in Philip’s work bears the shock of a historically dispossessed space, the space of Sycorax. Philip’s she tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (1989) searches the remote peripheries of writing for a way of narrating the disjunctures of postcolonial wandering. In this archive of dispossession, a whirling vortex of stolen lands, decimated bodies, and anguished mother tongues forged out of many linguistic worlds, Philip keeps sight of Sycorax hovering in the background. Like Brathwaite, Philip archaeologizes naming: this chattel language o as in what am I offered for this babu english ‘lot’ of slaves slave idiom OW as in they faced the ‘shroud’ of nigger vernacular their future collie pidgin OI as in they paid for their slaves wog pronunciation with coin (I say old chap how goes it, what ho?) this lingua franca arrrrrrrrrrgot of a blasted soul18

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Excavating the detritus of history through the layered ruins of language, Philip stages a dialogic dance of sonic and ocular reverberations. The anthropophagic logic of modernity that consumed slave bodies also devoured the master’s language, spewing forth chattel language, babu english, slave idiom, and coolie pidgin. This cannibalistic space of modernity is the burdened backdrop against which Philip’s historical excavation unfolds. It is the echo of intertwined history, cutting across colonizer and colonized, then and now. It is the space of writing the present. Read in the light of ideological cannibalism laid out earlier, Philip’s decentering of Englishness along with masculinity recalls Glissant’s transversality. The allegorical wounding continues through Philip’s rewriting of dispossession, as it is spatialized in transversal relationships within the churning of history: oath moan mutter chant time grieves the dimension of other babble curse chortle sing turns on its axis of silence praise-song poem ululation utterance one song would bridge the finite in silence syllable vocable vowel consonant one word erect the infinite in memory19

For Philip, writing sound is the preferred space for Sycorax’s alchemy. Writing itself becomes a sonic reinscription that permeates the allegorical wounding of history, a balm that transfigures even as it returns as an echo of the violent past. As Philip points out so clearly, this writing is aural—it reverberates, ricocheting off the encrusted walls of the past while impinging on the audibility of the present with a ferocious vocality. Philip creates waves of this vocality through the power of enunciation—silence is rich with the tremors of alternate histories and subaltern movements. The crevices of sound need to be revisited with care, she suggests. Our ocularcentrism, if you will, has blinded us to other forms of inscribing history, the sonic among them. Philip’s writing transcribes some of these unheard moments of modernity.

Remembering Sycorax: Decolonization and the Erasure of Women Caliban. Uhuru Prospero. What did you say? Caliban. I said, Uhuru! Prospero. Back to your native language again. I’ve already told you, I don’t like it. You could be polite, at least; a simple “hello” wouldn’t kill you.20

Aimé Césaire’s Caliban shouts uhuru three times in A Tempest (1969). In a francophone play about decolonization, it is striking that Caliban’s articulation of struggle is the Kiswahili word for freedom. Uhuru was the slogan of revolutionary pan-

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Africanism, audible throughout East Africa in the turbulent 1950s, with the Mau Mau and the Maji Maji rebellions, and the decolonizing 1960s. A founding concept for two of Julius Nyerere’s watershed formulations, Uhuru Na Umoja and Uhuru Na Ujamaa, the word uhuru links the process of indigenization that Césaire raises in his critique of the master’s language, Discourse on Colonialism, to the struggle for African independence.21 Written after Discourse, A Tempest explores the masculinist lines along which the independent, anticolonial state is fashioned. The play is structured as an embattled dialectic between Caliban and Prospero; between Ariel, a mulatto slave, and Caliban, a black slave; and between Ariel and Prospero. In Césaire’s eloquent travels through the psychic economies of colonialism, woman is absent except as shadow framing the peripheral state. The struggle against colonialism is a struggle of white man against enslaved black and mulatto men, while the native land emerges as the sensualized embodiment of woman, alive but dreamlike:22 Prospero. What would you be without me? Caliban. Without you? I’d be the king, that’s what I’d be, the King of the Island. The king of the island I inherited from my mother, Sycorax. (act 1, scene 2)

Caliban’s fetid landscape of internment and revolutionary possibility is profoundly marked by the all-pervading material force of maternal love: Serpent, rain, lightning. And I see thee everywhere! In the eye of the stagnant pool into which I gaze Unflinching, through the rushes, in the gesture made by twisted root and its awaiting thrust. In the night, the all-seeing blinded night, the nostril-less all-smelling night! (act 1, scene 2)

It is at once intuitive and autonomous in its relentless struggle towards sovereignty. Says Caliban: “Dead or alive, she was my mother, and I won’t deny her! Anyhow, you only think she’s dead because you think the earth itself is dead. . . . It’s so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that it is alive, and I know that Sycorax is alive. Sycorax. Mother” (act 1, scene 2). Césaire’s treatise on decolonization uses as its founding logic Prospero’s primordial act of theft. Sycorax’s incarceration precedes Caliban’s coming to political consciousness and a sense of self through which his claims to indigenous right can emerge. Sycorax figures here only as a prior moment, a precursor to the drama of modernity. She is the native sorceress whose magic cursing terrorizes and haunts the colonizer. Caliban has forgotten how to perform this anticolonial sorcery, and must retrieve it by repeating the lessons of his mother, Sycorax, through the colonial encounter between master and slave. This is the curse of the cannibalistic Law of Ex-

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change. Caliban must learn to produce his own alchemy, the language of self, indigenous rights, and property, “To get back my island and regain my freedom.” Césaire avoids grappling with Sycorax in his mise-en-scène of modern nation formation, even though he alludes to her continuing existence through Caliban’s conviction: “I know that Sycorax is alive.” In A Tempest, Sycorax is both a primordial presence and an afterthought that frames the struggle for liberation among men. As the precursor to revolution in Césaire’s play, Sycorax marks the limits of representation. She is at once hidden from history and invisible and ever present. As a counterpoint to the unfolding of the revolutionary state, invoked by the call for uhuru, or freedom, Sycorax’s absence can be read as a loud but unheard rejoinder to the masculinist agendas of national liberation and its notion of freedom. Her curses haunt the independent state in its reworking of national interests. But learning how to curse, as Fernando Retamar points out in his essay on Caliban, will not alone bring about revolution. Both Ariel and Prospero are ultimately slaves of the same system and must realize that social transformation lies beyond hurling curses.23 The primordial curse—women’s yet-to-be-contended-with struggle for visibility within the modern state—is dismissed as an ancient relic. In their narratives of socialist emancipatory alliances forged between Caliban and Ariel, Césaire and Retamar refuse to hear the meaning in the deafening screams of Sycorax.

Performing Sycorax: Disrupting Masculinity in the Cannibalistic Postcolonial State In “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot,” Michelle Cliff raises the powerful specter of Sycorax “the aboriginal mother,” “the precolonial female.” This is Sycorax, the savage mother of Caliban, witch, “wildwoman,” the imagined mother of Jean Rhys’s Bertha Rochester/Antoinette Cosway, the woman “whose fury implodes, the woman who is defined from the outside, who according to that foreign definition cannot be whole, whose dark blood is the source of her betrayal and a constant danger.” For Cliff, it is only with “the magic of this precolonial woman that Caliban counters the spells of the colonizer” in Césaire’s Tempest:24 “Caliban . . . Often, in my dreams, she speaks to me and warns me. . . . Yesterday, even, when I was lying by the stream on my belly lapping at the muddy water, when the Beast was about to spring upon me with that huge stone in his hand.”25 Cliff’s essay makes it possible to consider a feminist theory of the state.26 She underscores the magic of Sycorax, a magic that exceeds death and incarceration, as Caliban confirms in Césaire’s Tempest. Sycorax’s alchemy is too terrible to be remembered except as a shadow of the archetypal scenes of national and colonial encounters. Her alchemy is always narrativized as a struggle between men, between nations: Prospero and Caliban, Caliban and Ariel, Europe and Africa, Algeria and France, Britain and India. Sycorax corporealizes the allegorized masculinity that takes for granted the presence of women as backdrop in the performance of statehood.

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Nuanced by Cliff’s critique, this reading of Sycorax raises interesting questions about the translatability of state power. As woman, Sycorax is invisible as the arbiter of statehood for Prospero. Yet it is his fearful perception of her presence that motivates his acts of incarceration and state control. Sycorax’s intranslatability marks the dilemma of bodies without official history through which the state is produced. She is the material enactment of the terrified state. From the founding moment of the fledgling nation, the rhetoric of modern statehood assumes certain unequivocal rights, such as universal franchise, which again obfuscate the specific ways through which the gendered state materializes: always as the body of woman (as in Eugene Delacroix’s image of Liberté leading the nation) but always with the male king, the feminized body politic but irrevocably masculine head of state. Within the imperialist logic of colonialism and patriarchy, natives are cannibals to be civilized. The extremity of this barbarism is the body of the indigenous woman, on the one hand virgin landscape, on the other the site of abjectness through which notions of nationhood emerge, both invisible, “banish’d,” and visible “blue-ey’d hag.” The bloated and emaciated body of Sycorax—first to be sacrificed on the altar of nationhood, last in line for sovereign selfhood—encapsulates the dilemma of indigenous struggles in modern nation-states.

Embodying Sycorax: Autonomy and the Imbuing of Selfhood The intranslatability of Sycorax as active participant in the invention of sovereign selfhood is addressed in the fictive landscapes of black diasporic women writers. The archteypal image of Sycorax, absent presence, violently undone between the grounds of law and desire, becomes a historical backdrop for the competing narratives of black women’s selfhood. Now a legal case in real time, at other times a self-conscious reinvention, at yet other times an anachronism, the powerfully enunciative figure of Sycorax weaves its way through diasporic accounts of modern black citizenship and belonging. The historical representation of the abject black woman is infused with material and psychic possibilities for autonomy within the modern state. As bodies caught within the bounds of law and desire prior to their enunciation as sovereign subjects within the modern West, black women embody the multiple regimes of discipline and punishment as well as the transformative possibilities to reinvent and radicalize. Canadian Lorris Elliot’s dramatic adaptation of the documented Canadian crime “The Burning of Montreal by the Negress Marie-Joseph Angelique,” Who All Was There, poignantly gestures to these contradictory meanings. Through the diabolical legal tale of Marie-Joseph Angelique, “wife, mother, mistress, adulteress” who on June 21, 1734, was brought to Montreal as a Negress and slave, to be sentenced for the “most spectacular crime committed by a slave in Canadian history,” Elliott ingeniously unravels the intertwined realms of law and desire that constitute Angelique as

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a dispensable commodity rather than a subject of history. She is invoked as mother, lover, adulteress, and subject of the law even as she is dehumanized as a nameless person without rights, through the decontextualized description of “Negress” and “slave”:27 Clerk. La negresse Angelique (appelee aussi Marie-Joseph Angelique), esclave d’un marchand de Montreal, Francois Poulin de Francheville, has been tried and found guilty of le crime le plus spectaculaire qu’un esclave ait accompli dans notre histoire.28

This sensational enunciation of the feminized black subject as guilty, which in turn inscribes the desire for unspeakable violence through the rational discourse of the law, is Elliott’s departure point. Elliott pursues the language of reason, which conjures the material conditions for a modern Sycorax such as Angelique. Denounced as “Black witch” she emerges at the peripheries of the nation (Canada) and the city (Montreal) as a propertyless, gendered individual with no rights to citizenship or subjecthood.29 Yet Angelique is central to the imagination of what the city, and by extension the nation, is. Elliott’s analysis of the complicity between the rationale of law and the irrational spaces of desire that enable Angelique to be tortured four times, forcing her to admit to her “crime” in the presence of a priest, opens up the dense spheres of jurisprudence and the unconscious that produce and manage the racial subject within the social imagery of the state. In Elliott’s enactment of the tale, Angelique’s crime of setting fire to the city of Montreal is an accidental act of fear that gets transformed into a monstrous gesture of revolt. The incendiary movement is at once an unconscious and a willful expression of her terror of being resold by her mistress/owner on the market place. No hatred . . . nor revenge . . . but fear and perhaps anger. That night . . . I paced the floor of my allotted quarters . . . quite impatient. Then, in a silent gesture of frustration . . . I cast my arms apart like this (tries to demonstrate, but is hindered by her bindings) . . . but in the act, I overturned the solitary lamp that burned upon the table in my room. The flames . . . happy to escape the prison of its shade, winked slyly at me several times. And then, as if it took pity on me standing there, it huffed and puffed and reared itself into a mighty blaze, rushing here and there . . . and then out into the streets, loudly denouncing, with its many tongues, the injustice of my plight as slave and woman too . . . consuming all the while the polished wooden floors, the brightly papered walls, wildly flouncing drapes of finest cotton and many other such things.30

Departing from Shakespeare’s Sycorax, whose audible screams haunt the colonial state while she is herself located outside the horizon of the visible, this modern Sycorax of a New World colony viscerally engulfs the site of her dispossession, “loudly denouncing, with its many tongues” the histories of her subjugation, enslavement, and torture. The cannibalizing of the enslaved Angelique leads to the unmapping of the city of Montreal—through the burning of the streets of her dispossession. This act of consumption, enveloping the city of her captivity in flames, irrevocably grafts the city’s imagination onto the disassembled gendered black body of Angelique. She is invested with selfhood even as the city burns around her. For this excessive act of de-

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vouring, Angelique must pay in kind, parts of her body weighing in as remuneration for the burning city. She will be stripped naked, her hands cut off, her exposed person displayed publicly, chained to a post and burned alive. This primal scene of Western modernity, the violent consummation of the resistant black body, is once again reenacted through the rule of law. Clerk. Her sentence is as follows: first she must make public amends, then stripped to the waist, a rope around her neck and holding a two-pound torch, she must stand before the main church of the city of Montreal, from which place she would be taken by the Executioner (pointing to him) of the High Justice. . . . She must fall down upon her knees, declare her responsibility for the fire, repent and plead for God’s forgiveness and the King’s. For this, she would have her hands cut off and spiked upon a post before the church, after which time she would be taken in the very cart to the public square, chained to a post and burned alive.31

For Angelique, the burning of Montreal is a consummate act of agency and desire. Sensuously watching the flames flicker and explode in complicity with her own rage, she pursues the reinscription of her self as a subject within history, through her own willful act, which incites her public death by hanging. Angelique. Une esclave noire. A negress and a slave, the property of another human being, a merchant of Montreal, Quebec, New France. You hear that, mon amie? A merchant’s property . . . that’s what I was and always will be known as. Un esclave noire . . . slave child of mother slave and father slave, slave gran’ child of man and woman slave . . . deracinee . . . how do you put it en Anglais? . . . uh . . . rooted up. That’s it . . . rooted up and, against my will, brought here to be transplanted . . . here within this snow-cold land . . . this very land in which you, mon amie, now seek retrenchment . . . entrenchment, you call it.32

Burning the place of her subjugation produces the conditions of Angelique’s own transformation from nameless slave, a property of whiteness, to that of unwilling but conscious participant in the violent scenario of colonial enslavement and torture. Angelique reinvents Sycorax as one who is seen and heard and who acts. She consumes all who stand in the way of her selfhood and autonomy. Her will to freedom is indestructible, and the conditions of her possibility greater than the imaginations of her enslavers allow for.

Sycorax and Becoming: Mythic Imaginary and Modern Subjectivity This myth of Sycorax is reworked in more urban, everyday ways in the experimental performance work of the Jamaican theater collective Sistren, located in Kingston, Jamaica, from 1977 to the early 1990s. The Sistren Collective, an urban theater company rooted in the Caribbean, explores the innocuous crevices of working women’s imaginations and lives. The collective’s distinct style of storytelling through local ethnography, interviews, historical archives, and self-ethnography opens up a rich and vi-

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brant venue for unpacking the tedium and hope of modernity. A result of collective collaborations by women of different class and sexual identities, stories such as “A Working Woman,” “The Emancipation of a Household Slave,” and “Ole Massa and Me” portray the subjugation and self-invention that structure the lives of Jamaican and other women from the Caribbean. The tales, narrated by the Sistren Collective, explore two foundational myths of the black woman that structure popular perceptions of Caribbean womanhood: the warrior woman personified by Ni (Nanny), rooted in the cultural traditions of Ohemaa (the Ashanti Queen-Mother) and the maroon leader of the eighteenth century, and the figure of the domestic nanny. In tension with the supernatural and revolutionary qualities of Ni, the antithetical image of the nanny of the big house as self-effacing, passive, and maternal emerged during the colonial era as means of curtailing the radicalism of Ni.33 The stories of the Sistren Collective elaborate on contemporary interpretations of these competing images that inform the narratives of working-class Caribbean women. The collective portrays Ni, the warrior priestess of the slave era, invested with magical religious powers, as well as with the military acumen of rebel communities of the colonial period, as the positive side of the domestic nanny. The militancy of Ni in this rendering, and the maternal qualities of the self-effacing nanny, provide a link to the image of Sycorax, the indigenous radical and expendable commodity whose body is rendered at the same time militant and domestic. Sycorax merges the revolutionary spirit of Ni, the maroon leader who is also an herbalist and agriculturalist, with that of the woman as nurturer. Through a modern reinvention of older myths, the qualities of both Ni and nanny, rebel and mother, fuse to create a Sycoraxian representation of postcolonial Caribbean woman. This image is that of a woman gripped by difficulties but one whose belief in personal as well as social transformation transcends her material circumstances. Interweaving the two narratives of militancy and domesticity in a contemporary reworking of the Caribbean imagination, the Sistren Collective’s stories offer many representations of the agency of rural and urban women within Caribbean society. These representations, they suggest, are more interconnected than colonialism would have us believe. Through short performances, the collective portrays the everyday reality of working- and middle-class women in ways that resonate with their audiences. Betty, the narrator of Rebel Pickney, begins her story with the line, “All my life me live in fear,” and proceeds to take us on a journey through her fear of the dark, of being beaten and abused as a child, and her eventual migration out of the small town in which she grew up.34 Another tale, “Ole Massa and Me,” has the protagonist Didi discuss the difficulty of surviving as a young girl in Mount Salem, living in conditions of transient employment. “Sometime when yuh no have notten and yuh have di pickney dem and dem a look to yuh fi food and fi shelter, yuh haffi do sometings weh yuh no really waan fi do, just fi survive.”35 Her brutal but lively narration of hunger, poverty, unemployment, prostitution, and abandonment criticizes a system that forces women into the vicious cycle of dependency on men. These humorous, tragic,

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and gripping tales of real lives on the peripheries of society caught up in the heartless process of industrialization, trapped in an inadequate educational system, violence, bankrupt political structures and poor housing, are full of political commentary on the nature of individual rights and autonomy for Caribbean women, as the narrator G in “A Working Woman” suggests: Ah don’t save no money, but ah tink ah get more enlighten and ah learn and understand more as di years go by. Ah get fi find out lickle more bout history and government and di rest of di world. It open me eye and what ah realise is dat di working class people change a lot even though we still have plenty leave to achieve. In our lickly country Jamaica, history move forward from slavery when we deh-deh a work fi notten and dem usually beat we grand parents. Dem have maternity leave for women now, which never exist when ah was working first time. On a whole ah tink dis generation tek tings more serious dan we.36

Doreen, in “The Emancipation of a Household Slave,” expressly develops a sense of autonomy and freedom through her life as an urban working woman. Her desire to realize her dreams and experience pleasure is radically different from G’s painful growth to a sense of self: To dis very day, my stepmadda say me tek way her work. Even though we understand each odder better now, we still have conflict. Me see her as a victim of di kind a society we live iina. She no have no freedom in her life. Is just going to work and coming home. . . . She never know ho fi deal wid di exploitation she face. . . . Her generation never get fi meet up and reason wid odder women like demself dat face di same problems. I get di chance fi do dat. . . . As a child, me never know yuh have grassroots actresses. Me did tink di only actresses yuh have a dem glamorous woman weh come pon di screen. I like to put grassroots reality on stage because it can help young working class people become aware of their potential. Before me know bout people like Marcus Garvey, I used to look up to black entertainers. Dey were among di first to teach me date black people are not born to be poor and exploited. I hope my work can do di same.37

These tales open up the spheres of sexuality and motherhood as difficult conditions of becoming that are otherwise shrouded by ignorance, silence, and isolation. Committed materialists in their approach to telling the tale, the vignettes of the Sistren Collective are grounded in the economy of labor. Their journeys into humble dwellings generate a history of the modern Sycorax. The stories mark the range of these women’s lives through these windows of change. Through their workshops and performances, the Sistren Collective offers audiences ways of coping with the grim reality of power and possibilities for resisting a developmental model of society.

Sycorax and Modernity The scream of Sycorax encapsulates the founding violence of modernity, and her disembodied presence remains a mnemonic trace of modernity’s logic of uneven convulsions through history. In a manner reminiscent of Sycorax’s persistent critique of modernity’s thrust, Suzanne Césaire offers a utopian vision of hope for Caribbean

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modernity from a different place and time, Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1945: “Thousands of images of gleaming factories, unwrought steel and liberating machines have swelled the hearts of our young workers. In hundreds of sordid sheds where scrap iron rusts, there is an invisible vegetation of desires. The impatient fruits of the Revolution will inevitably gush forth from it.”38 Unlike the muffled howls of Sycorax in Aimé Césaire’s Tempest, Suzanne Césaire’s writing flows with the confidence of one who responds with ease to those of her milieu such as Freud, Leo Frobenius, André Breton, Michel Leiris, René Menil, and René Depestre. Her intellectual contribution to negritude and surrealism ruptures the very antinomies that construct her as a Caribbean, Third World, or non-Western woman. A passionate advocate of liberty and rights from the 1930s, Césaire sought through her work to eradicate injustice and hypocrisy. She was a stringent critic of oppression and had a political passion that went beyond anticolonialist and formulaic Marxist sentiment. Poetry and politics are inextricably linked in Césaire’s articulation of modernity. What is most noteworthy about Suzanne Césaire is her extraordinary awareness of the difficulties inherent in comprehending modernity. For Césaire there is no linear progression of development, no clear boundaries between civilized and savage. The violent epistemological rupture that brought about the modern era demands new frameworks as well as fresh ways of writing. “We are now called to recognize ourselves, and before us are splendours and hopes. Surrealism has given us back some of our possibilities. It is up to us to find the others. In its light.”39 This move away from the teleological notions of development and progress articulated at the very time when such notions were being celebrated by the power elites in Europe and the United States, is a theoretical breakthrough that was fundamental to the theorists of negritude. For Suzanne Césaire and others of her circle, such as Etienne Léro, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Jules-Marcel Monnerot, modernity’s unevenness, seen through the lens of blackness, exploded theories of what was unfolding in Europe as well in as the Third World. These black intellectuals, with their Western education and non-Western roots and knowledge, their cosmopolitan worldview and nationalist agenda, were well positioned to pose the more difficult philosophical questions embedded in the terms of modernity. Their various poetic investigations into the nature of science, epistemology, and being dismantled the positivist assumptions about the civility of Western civilization that framed colonial perceptions about the savagery of the non-West. This challenge was most vividly captured in what Suzanne Césaire describes as technological desire. At the darkest hour of world history, during the 1940s, Césaire invoked the seductive dream of machines and labor implied by modernity, pointing out that a successful global modernity can only be realized in an equal and just world system of workers. Such a society could only be dreamed of at that point in history: Millions of black hands will thrust their terror into the raging skies of world war. Delivered from a long slumber, the most disadvantaged of all peoples will rise up across plains

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of ashes. Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilized/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be rediscovered. Surrealism—the tightrope of our hope. 40

Like Sycorax, Suzanne Césaire’s writings resound with her call to dream boldly. And our dreams, she suggests, must be filled with a poetry that makes us alive and moves us to action. Let it be clearly understood. It is not at all a matter of a return to the past, of the resurrection of an African past that we have learned to understand and to respect. It is a matter, on the contrary, of the mobilization of all the combined vital forces on this land where race is the result of continual mingling. It is a matter of becoming conscious of the formidable mass of different energies that until now have been trapped within us. We must now use them in their plenitude, without deviation of falsification. Too bad for those who consider us dreamers. The most disturbing reality is ours. We will act. This earth, our earth, can only be what we want it to be.41

Notes Acknowledgment: My thanks to Paul Carter Harrison for his inspiration and imaginative edits. 1. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 2. Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 6–7. 3. Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 1, scene 2, lines 321, 375. 4. Ibid., 65. 5. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 307–10. 6. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, “Cannibalism and Self-Cannibalism,” quoted in Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 82. 7. Peter Hulme, “Prospero and Caliban,” in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), 114–15. 8. Ibid., 87. 9. The Tempest, act 3, scene 3, lines 46, 47. 10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 42, 55. 11. Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 1, scene 2, lines 275–86. 12. Ibid., lines 259–64. 13. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 74–75. 14. Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems (Kingston and New York: Savacou North, 1994), 235. 15. Ibid., 236.

226 may joseph 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 317. 18. Marlene Nourbese Philip, she tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (London: Women’s Press, 1993), 47. Originally published in 1989. 19. Ibid., 64. 20. Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1986), 13. Originally published in 1969. 21. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 22. Césaire, A Tempest, 15. 23. Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, 45. 24. Michelle Cliff, “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot,” Frontiers 12, no. 2 (1991): 40–42. Cliff draws on Jean Rhys’s reading of Bertha Rochester/Antoinette Cosway from Wide Sargasso Sea, in her reworking of the significance of Sycorax. 25. Césaire, A Tempest, 15. 26. Such a theory of the state has been narrated by Michelle Cliff, Gayatri Spivak, Mervat Hatem, Assia Djebar, Norma Alarcon, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Fatima Mernissi, among others. 27. Lorris Elliott, “The Trial of Marie-Joseph Angelique Negress and Slave,” in Other Voices, ed. Lorris Elliott (Toronto: Williams-Wallace Publishers, 1985), 59. 28. Ibid., 57. 29. Ibid., 63. 30. Ibid., 63. 31. Ibid., 57. 32. Ibid., 59. 33. Sistren Collective, with Honor Ford Smith, “Introduction,” in Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (London: Sister Vision, 1987). 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid., 221. 36. Ibid., 106. 37. Ibid., 128. 38. Suzanne Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (London: Verso, 1996), 160. 39. Suzanne Césaire, “A Civilization’s Discontent,” in Refusal of the Shadow, 99. 40. Suzanne Césaire, “1943: Surrealism and Us” in Refusal of the Shadow, 126. 41. Césaire, “A Civilization’s Discontent,” 100.

Joni L. Jones

Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood

Making art affords one the opportunity to create that which did not previously exist. Likewise, the act of conjuring brings into being something that would not otherwise have occurred. Conjuring, then, has a direct kinship to art, as both seek to release their vision upon the world. Conjuring makes use of natural properties—herbs, roots, blood, soil, water, hair— and the appropriate ordering and repetition of words that activate the ase, or life force, of the material elements. Conjuring’s reliance on the power of words gives it a very particular union with theatre. This connection is not lost on playwright Shay Youngblood, for whom “words are impetus for magic, for community” (Youngblood 1993: 4). In Youngblood’s work conjuring is a conscious act engaged in by the characters or an unconscious connection to ancestral memory. The use of conjuring demonstrates Youngblood’s link to African American folkways and West African spiritual traditions. For Youngblood, conjuring is the tool for recovering identity, balance, and power. It stands in absolute opposition to the pain, horror, or disorder that may prevail prior to the shifting of ase; it is also radical in its centering of a female reality, a centering that often constitutes a breach in a patriarchal social order. Conjuring involves a radical re/membering, a profound reordering and revisioning, and it is this perilous journey on which Youngblood’s characters embark.

Conjuring The way we tell it, hoodoo started way back there before everything. Six days of magic spells and mighty words and the world with its elements above and below was made. And now, God is leaning back taking a seventh day rest. When the eighth day comes around, He’ll start to making new again. —Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

228 joni l. jones WE ARE HERE TO PERFORM AN ACT OF MAGIC . . . WE’RE GOING TO WEAR THE MASK OF THE JOLLY MAMMY PITCH OURSELVES OFF THE PANCAKE BOX . . . OH MAMMY, DON’T YOU KNOW WE’LL RESCUE YOU WITH MAGIC WE ARE HERE TO PERFORM AN ACT OF MAGIC AN ACT OF MAGIC TO PERFORM. —The Company from Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show

Conjuring takes place in various ways. It works in conjunction with divination to determine the appropriate action to take, and it is used as a medicinal practice to heal the sick. Its preparations for shifting the ase are variously known as gris gris, mojo, and hoodoo. This profoundly spiritual act requires a supplicant, a conjurer/diviner/ healer, a problem or question to be addressed, and an ebo, or sacrifice. The supplicant must pay for the services of the conjurer and is expected to offer the necessary sacrifice upon request. The sacrifice is part of the pact made between the earth plane, in which human and other animate beings reside, and the spiritual plane of deities and ancestors. It demonstrates a relationship of mutual aid and respect. Although conjuring is not exclusive to women, women’s physical connection to nature through the menstrual/moon cycle, childbirth, breastfeeding, and menopause make women particularly powerful conjurers. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria believe that a woman’s power grows as she ages, and this power is attributed to aje, women who are the bearers and guardians of women’s mysteries. Aje are typically the elder women of the society and may be midwives, herbalists, or diviners. They are charged with the “magic” of the community and are “the point of all initiations and commencements in this life” (Washington: 2). The practice of Vodoun in New Orleans, which shows the influence of the Fon, the Yoruba, and the Bakongo, as well as French Catholicism, showcased the prowess of conjure women such as Marie Leveau and Madam Lola, but the public practice of the art was eventually taken over by houngans, conjure men. Historian Jessie Gaston Mulira notes that this shift of magic from women to men took place in New Orleans during the 1940s. While both men and women continued to meet secretly to conduct private religious services, the men took charge of the public practices of medicine and divination. Shay Youngblood’s work reclaims conjuring for women. Aje, the female elders, exist in communal union with each other and with the several members of their communities. Some are feared for their power, though most are sought for their wisdom. Aje might be compared to the Western concept of the witch, though the differences are important to note. While aje and witches share the ability to conjure, aje tend to work more freely in their communities as they offer the important social services of counselor, confidant, and confessor. As the wise women in society, aje are more akin to crones than to witches. Unlike the crone, however, aje are often considered quite beautiful. As women grow more beautiful with age, so do their powers to shift ase. This union between the deeply attractive aje and the practice of conjuring may have

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led to the association of conjuring with sexual activity. This erotic version of conjuring stands in sharp contrast to the Western crone, who is frequently depicted as unappealing at best. Unfortunately much of the most prominent literature on witches and witchcraft does not address aje or the particular conjuring practices that draw from West African spirituality.1 Osun, the Yoruba orisa, or deity, of female sensuality and fertility, is the leader of aje. As such “she has the ‘knowledge’ of, and is the source of, [aje] manifested powers” (Bádéjò: 80). To understand aje, one must understand Osun. Female power lies in the union with nature and in an understanding of practical knowledge. It is a dynamic blend of wit and awo, or mystery. Osun is known not only for her captivating beauty but also for her ability to think quickly and effectively in virtually any situation. She represents the full spectrum of female power as she grants children to women, defends her people against attack, is sexually independent, practices divination, and keeps counsel with other women. All aje share some of Osun’s characteristics. Many contemporary African American women playwrights have demonstrated an interest in aje through the use of what Sydné Mahone calls “spiritual realism.” For Mahone, “spiritual realism is a form of social activism” and “a call for collective transformation that begins with the process of self-definition” (Mahone: xxxii). Near the end of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the women gather around each other in need of “a layin’ on of hands.” This is an act of conjuring, a shifting of ase from the often self-effacing poems early in the play to the final self-determination that generates the choral, “I found god in myself & I loved her/ I loved her fiercely” (Shange: 67). In Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West, women conspire to eliminate a physically abusive husband through the expert conjuring of food preparation. Before this dramatic decision is reached, the women circle under the stars for “the ritual” and chant, Fan and Minnie. Because we are free Negro women. . . . Sophie. Born of free Negro women. . . . Both (Fan and Minnie). Back as far as time begins. . . . [...] Sophie. We choose this day to declare our lives to be our own and no one else’s [ . . . ] and went west together to be free women as a sacred bond between us with all our trust [ . . . . ] And all our strength [ . . . . ] And all our courage [ . . . . ] And all our love. (Cleage: 63; bracketed ellipses added)

Oni Faida Lampley opens Mixed Babies with a note about the possible inclusion of a sixth character called the Goddess. Lampley writes, “She represents the indelible African and female presence which can be obscured, but never erased . . . a priestess who . . . guides or coaxes the actors in and out of place so that the story can be told. She’s always there, in the corners of the girls’ consciousness, or in the way they move their hips when they dance” (Lampley: 20). In Rhodessa Jones’s performance of Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women, there is an altar on stage to which Jones pays homage

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at the opening and closing of the piece. Jones’s reverence for the ancestors she invoked and her embodiment of the incarcerated women she portrayed is reinforced by the presence of the altar. All of these playwrights use elements of conjuring in their work, a conjuring designed to move their characters and, I believe, their audiences toward a deeper sense of self and an acknowledgment of re/membered African realities.

Re/Membering The words of the texts . . . are the maps, the mothered instructions for the ritual reawakening of the feminine spirit within us all. —Sydné Mahone, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun A true PraiseSinger is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. —Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood”

Of Youngblood’s major plays, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery makes the most specific use of conjuring for a most necessary re/membering. As the play opens, Daughter has returned to the house of her childhood to bury the last of her “Big Mamas,” the women who raised and nurtured her in the absence of her birth mother. Through a series of flashbacks, Daughter introduces each Big Mama to the audience and reveals the key moments in her journey to discover the truth surrounding the mysterious absence of her mother. This journey begins just as her moon cycle begins, a significant moment in the journey toward womanhood. Daughter must piece together the details before finally learning the real events. She must re/member her past, her identity, so that she can successfully pass through the threshold that the rising blood in her body beckons her toward. It is telling that she receives the last bits of information about her mother while having her hair pressed by one of her Big Mamas. The union of hair with conjuring is common in Vodoun and Yoruba practice. Yoruba initiates have their heads shaved in order to allow the orisa to enter. In Vodoun, especially in New Orleans, hair is a major element for shifting the ase. The hair is often likened to snakes, a comparison that evokes images of the central serpent of Vodoun practice known as Damballah. And in African American beauty shops, the discarded hair is disposed of with great awareness that the hair could be used to harm the owners. By having Daughter recover her mother through the central action of hairdressing, Youngblood echoes the various African-based traditions that recognize the power of hair. In the very brief dreamscape “There Are Many Houses in My Tribe,” Youngblood once again uses hair as a sign of transformation. The protagonist Estelle describes the beginnings of her self-regeneration as “the day snakes began to grow from the roots

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of my hair [ . . . . ] They made love there on the floor [ . . . . ] Then they crawled back into my head and slept, exhausted, content” (Youngblood 1995: 538). From Estelle’s head, as the hair morphs into snakes and then branches, springs a rich new world of beautifully diverse beings. She conjures a world in which her own uniqueness can thrive. Throughout Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, the Big Mamas conjure to bring justice. The two most dramatic examples of this conjuring occur after racist acts have been committed against the Big Mamas. In the first incident, the Big Mamas have been forced from a public bus and spat upon by a white man. Miss Mary, “a maid with unearthly powers,” exacts her own brand of justice: Big Mama. . . . Now Mary was behind me calling on her West Indian spirits and making signs. The white man laughed then he got into his Cadillac with his woman and pulled onto the highway. He drove right into the path of a tractor trailer truck. Miss Mary. You know the Lord works in mysterious ways. Miss Corine. And he sure don’t like ugly. Big Mama. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was mess of twisted white Cadillac, smoke and burning white flesh. Just a mess. [to Daughter] Don’t you never forget where we been, or that we got a long way to go. (Youngblood 1994: 17)

Miss Mary draws on ancestral traditions in full awareness that the U.S. judicial system will bring her friends no justice. Her conjuring is a re/membering of ancestral traditions and a restoration of African American dignity. The other major act of conjuring occurs when Miss Shine, a governor’s maid, punishes the governor for disrespecting a group of African American children. Miss Shine grinds glass and puts it in his food, an evocation of the long history of resistance of enslaved Africans against their white enslavers. Miss Lamama tells the story with a little help from Miss Shine. Miss Shine. . . . Miss Shine’s mind eased back, way, way back. She heard a chant far off and deep as slave graves and old Africa. Miss Lamama (beats her calabash in time). Blood, boil thick, run red like a river, slave scream, wail, moan after they dead. Daddy lynched, Mama raped, baby sister sold down river. Slaves scream, wail, moan after they dead. The cook knew what to do to save the race, stop the screams. Miss Shine. Miss Shine all of a sudden knowed what she had to do to save the race. She was possessed by her power. . . . [Miss Lamama, Miss Shine, and Daughter finish the last moments of conjuring together with Daughter and Miss Lamama’s words offering a counterpoint to Miss Shine’s actions.] Daughter and Miss Lamama. Blood boil thick. Miss Lamama. She kept hearing whispers. She poured the boiling water over the tea leaves and strained it into the big silver teapot. Daughter and Miss Lamama. Nobody know how the master get sick.

232 joni l. jones Miss Lamama. Miss Shine put everything on the big tea cart. Daughter and Miss Lamama. Nobody know how he die. (Youngblood 1994: 30–31)

In these passages, Youngblood makes clear the union of conjuring with re/membering. When the women need the deepest spiritual work, they strive to uncover the necessary ancestral residue. It is also important to note that the Big Mamas employ conjuring as a natural element of their church service. When the “sisters of the number 2 Mission Prayer Circle” met on Tuesday nights they would sing, pray, and offer healings as needed. Like the women undergoing spiritual transformation in for colored girls who have considered suicide, the Big Mamas offer a “layin’ on of hands.” Daughter. . . . In the middle of one meeting Aunt Mae fell out. I knew she was dead. But Big Mama laid hands on her and it brought her back to life. Big Mama be dealing serious. Looking at Big Mama nobody could tell just how much power she had over people and folks was constantly giving credit to God. Eight weeks to the day after the first prayer meeting was called Aunt Mae reported that her tumor had disappeared. (Youngblood 1994: 27)

Aunt Mae, who was having an affair with Miss Lamama’s husband, is described as an “independent woman. A sensuous sister. Her clothes and jewelry are flashy. She has a wicked laugh and sexy walk” (Youngblood 1994: 46). This description recalls Vodoun’s Erzulie or Ezili Freda, the spiritual twin of Osun. Because of Osun’s association with fertility and childbirth, she governs the pelvic region of the body. If she wants to get someone’s immediate attention she disturbs the stomach, bowels, womb, or genitalia. Osun is also the principle of attraction and governs romantic and erotic relationships. It is no surprise then that Aunt Mae would have acquired a tumor in her stomach as a result of betraying Miss Lamama. Osun offered the tumor as a warning, and the women appeased Osun by setting Aunt Mae straight with a “layin’ on of hands.” Their conjuring literally allows them to re/member Aunt Mae, to put her together whole and healthy. Youngblood underscores the play’s reliance on African antecedents with the inclusion of a Yoruba praise song—Yemenjah, Yemenjah olodo, Yemenjah ee ah mee olodo. The last phrase might more accurately be written Yemonja iya mi olodo, which loosely means Mother of Fish (of the Big Waters), my Mother of the Water. Oriki or praise songs are offered for orisa, for ancestors, and for powerful living human beings. This tradition among the Yoruba is a way of maintaining the reciprocal relationship between the earth plane and the sacred plane. Singing oriki is also a way for skillful praise singers to earn money at large gatherings as they move among the crowd improvising complex clever commentaries on prominent attendees. Personal attributes are often noted, and the expert use of comedy frequently generates cheers from the other participants. Before the audience meets Daughter’s Big Mamas, this praise song in honor of all mothers is sung. It marks the piece as African diasporic. Youngblood populates Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery with a diverse group of independent women. They function as aje in close association with each other and in their collaboration to create order in the world. The intimacy they share can also be sexual,

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as in the case of one Big Mama, Miss Tom, a lesbian who teaches Daughter that “there’s all kind of possibilities for love” (Youngblood 1994: 39). In declaring the centrality of women, Youngblood feels free to offer that distinctive brand of feminism defined as “a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually” (Alice Walker: xi). In another of Youngblood’s plays, Black Power Barbie, Vodoun practices are also demonstrated through the dominant image of a black Barbie doll outfitted with full Afro, miniskirt, and boots that make her the one and only revolutionary Barbie. This doll holds tremendous spiritual energy for the two main characters as they compete to gain ownership of the doll. The characters believe that the Barbie doll, like the much-maligned “voodoo doll,” holds the key to their peace of mind. They have invested the doll with the ability to make them feel successful and important. Both characters eventually come to a fuller understanding of themselves and the world, no longer needing the doll to act for them. Theologian Joseph M. Murphy notes that “this process of self-discovery lies behind vodoun spirituality” (Murphy: 40). In Talking Bones, an unpublished Youngblood play, three generations of women try to live comfortably with the spiritual gifts they have been given. They can see and hear the spirits that populate their small shop—Ancestors’ Books & Breakfast—and must determine which world requires their allegiance. Elia straddles the physical world and the world of the ancestors. Her mother, BayBay, fears Elia for her abilities but also worries that she may leave this world for good. Elia is figured as unusual adult abiku, “a child ‘born to die,’ that is, one who is thought to be allied with spirits who attract it from the world of the living” (Drewal and Pemberton: 248). The women here are in a liminal world in which re/membering ancestors and unseen landscapes has the potential for profound enrichment as well as enormous destruction. Shay Youngblood’s plays lend themselves to production choices that maximize the conjuring potential of theatre. Circular staging reflects many Yoruba and Vodoun ceremonies and allows the audience deeper participation, as spectators look across the stage and see other audience members. Unlike much proscenium staging, circular staging invites the audience in. When the audience sees itself across the circle, it becomes aware of itself and is more likely to feel a collaborative role in the theatrical experience. The collaboration is a kind of embodiment that deepens the possibility for transformative conjuring within the audience, thereby extending the magic beyond the stage and into the entire performance space. The understanding of the power of the word provides fertile ground for another production choice that responds to elements of conjuring. The plays allow for verbal repetition, word play, and lyrics in production. The verbal repetition is never static. As in the highly repetitive oriki, the repetition gathers force through accretion. Finally, both Yoruba and Vodoun practices make heavy use of dance as conjuring; the musicality of the language and the fluid sense of time and space suggest the use of rhythmic movements to underscore the conjuring in the plays and to feature those moments of intense re/membering.2 Shay Youngblood’s plays are infused with the shifting of ase. Her women characters gather to heal one another and themselves, to offer wise counsel, to right injustices.

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They call upon ancestors and latent powers, herbs and word force, to make life livable. In these works, conjuring grows from a radical re/membering, a woman’s audacity to control her world, to honor the blood she releases in youth and the blood she stores inside as adult wisdom.

Notes 1. See Barbara Walker’s excellent compendium Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper Collins, 1983). This is an exceedingly well-documented collection of information on women’s spirituality, sexuality, and everyday practices, but it draws heavily on Western traditions. For example, the only African deity discussed is Isis, thereby leaving out the pantheon of sub-Saharan African female deities. Even the popular “voodoo queen” Marie Leveau is not mentioned in this work. 2. Many of these production techniques were used effectively by director Daniel Alexander Jones, who has studied the elements of a jazz aesthetic under the tutelage of Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, and Aishah Rahman. In Jones’s productions of Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery for First Stage Productions, and Talking Bones and Black Power Barbie for Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre, all of these strategies were used to varying degrees. The most thorough use was in Shakin’ the Mess, where the circle, rhythmic movements, and repetition through accretion yielded a work with resonance in many regions of the African Diaspora. Indeed, Talking Bones might have benefited from circular staging and spiritually derived rhythmic movement rather than the proscenium staging and literalized movements that were used.

References Bádéjò, Diedre. Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996. Clarke, Breena, and Glenda Dickerson. Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show. In Colored Contradictions, ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Robert Alexander. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Cleage, Pearl. Flyin’ West. In Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, ed. Kathy A. Perkins and Roberta Uno. New York: Routledge, 1996. Dickerson, Glenda. “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward A Womanist Attitude in AfricanAmerican Theatre.” In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Drewal, Henry John, and John Pemberton III. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art, 1989. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper & Row, 1935. Lampley, Oni Faida. Mixed Babies. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1992. Mahone, Sydné. Moon Marked and Touched by Sun. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. Mulira, Jessie Gaston. “The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans.” In Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Murphy, Joseph M. Working the Spirit. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

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Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: Harper Collins, 1983. Washington, Teresa. “A Study of Literary Gelede and Analytical Aje: Soulforces of Africana Literature.” Unpublished paper, Obafemi Awolowo University, 1997. Youngblood, Shay. Genesis Festival, Crossroads Theatre Company, Production Program, 1993. ———. Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery. Woodstock, Ill: Dramatic Publishing, 1994. ———. Black Power Barbie. Unpublished script, 1995. ———. “There Are Many Houses in My Tribe.” In The Actor’s Book of Gay and Lesbian Plays, ed. Eric Lane and Nina Shengold. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. ———. Talking Bones. Unpublished script, 1996.

Victor Leo Walker II

Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

We all gonna come from behind those wigs and start to stop using those standards of beauty which can never be a frame for our reference; wash that excess grease out of our hair, come out of that bleach bag and get into something meaningful to us as nonwhite people—Black people . . . —LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, “Nittygritty”

Amiri Bakara uses archetype and masking in creating the characters who people his play Dutchman. The play is a political statement about the need for social action against racism and the racial assimilation of African Americans into white society. The character Clay is depicted as an African American assimilationist, and Baraka suggests through his demise that assimilation is destructive to the individual as well as his race. In the wake of the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B. Du Bois advised the culturally invigorated “New Negro” to respect art as a potent vehicle for sociopolitical empowerment, claiming “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” (757). Claims like Du Bois’s fueled the black arts movement of the 1960s and inspired many African American artists to combat white racism through their work. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” examines the social archetype of the mask, a formative factor in African American identity: We wear the mask that grins and lies, lt hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —

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This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, [ . . . ] We smile, but O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. [ . . . ] But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! (Dunbar: 896)

Dunbar’s words describe an important dynamic of racist society, in which the dominant race defines the terms in which the subordinate race will be viewed, while the latter must “wear the mask” of those terms, or that archetype, in order to survive in that society. White America has historically controlled African American public images in this manner, using symbolic types such as “Uncle Tom” to represent assimilationist roles that have been “forced upon [African Americans] by the adverse circumstances of social dependence” (Locke: 961). Nationalistic cultural movements that aim to inspire social change must therefore subvert the masks of racial stereotype and portray the silent suffering and repressed rage of the oppressed race. The intent of Amiri Baraka’s black arts ideology, however, was to eradicate black stereotypes and archetypes once and for all. The eminent historian Joseph Boskin asserts that overt black stereotypes, archetypes, and caricatures in the post–World War II period were, to some extent, laid to rest with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of black nationalism, and the violent uprisings in black urban communities throughout the United States in the 1960s. Through the work of artists who created art that reflects the ideals of the black arts movement, overt images of Sambo, Mammy, and all the other Uncle Toms would finally be laid to rest: here interred lie the remains of the man sambo Born three hundred-odd years ago, the exact date obscured by distorted memories: danced and pranced and laughed across the stages of American life in blackface and bravado; An Image born in the inner reaches of white minds, extending in childlike grin and gait, entertaining and regaling all who came into contact: that pearly smile, those rounded eyes, rhythmical steps, that rollicking laughter; Gone, gone but hardly forgotten, his name etched on cultural arches: Tambo, Bones, Jim Crow, Uncle Remus, John, Sam, Boy, Sambo:

238 victor leo walker ii the national jester in the popular culture; May he rest in Peace, Never to be Resurrected. Amen. (Boskin: 3–4)

Baraka used archetype and masking in his early dramatic works to advance revolutionary themes by depicting characters and situations that black audiences could identify with. According to Paul Carter Harrison, black arts theater was “first directed to the ears and hearts of black people, then to the world” (Harrison: vi). Baraka’s Dutchman is a good example of this kind of drama. The legacy of Dunbar’s mask in particular has influenced the evolution of postmodern African American theory, for its inherent depiction of public/private divisions has elucidated various aspects of the African American experience during the twentieth century. Ralph Ellison’s writing, for example, bears the Dunbarian imprint in its treatment of the masking process as one of the defining concepts of American identity. In the context of Baraka’s Dutchman, Ellison’s theory of masking can be seen not only in the character of Clay but also that of Lula. In his essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Ellison describes the ambiguities and disunities of identity that develop from the American will to mask: The joke . . . always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man’s creation, not God’s. . . . America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future as well as preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals. . . . [Masking] is a strategy common to the culture . . . [that] grows out of the joke at the center of human society. (Ellison: 53–55)

In this passage, Ellison makes the distinction between the public and private realms typical of both white and black American thinking in the late twentieth century. Baraka likewise portrays postmodern conceptions of identity in the Dutchman, where Clay and Lula don different masks for the purposes of manipulation, denial, seduction, intimidation, and so on. First produced in 1964 by Theater 64 in New York City, Baraka’s Dutchman manipulates the archetypal “Uncle Tom” character in Clay and the scheming white seductress character in Lula in order to expose the victimization of the socially assimilated African American. His characters engage in a provocative and stereotypical game of temptation, revealing their true nature only when they remove their masks and confess their racial hatred for each other. Baraka pins Clay’s murder on his adoption of white America’s values, thereby exposing the tragic consequences of assimilation. Dutchman remains an emblematic representative of Revolutionary Black Theatre, an artistic movement led by Baraka that challenged the racism of white America and confronted African American assimilators with their betrayal of their African identity. Baraka discusses the themes of Dutchman in his manifesto, “The Revolutionary

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Theatre,” in which he asserts that revolutionary theatre “should force change; it should be change,” “must expose,” “must accuse and attack anything that can be accused and attacked,” and “is a theatre of assault” (Baraka 1997: 1899–1902). Baraka attacks Euro-American cultural hegemony and advocates a separate African American social and cultural identity: “White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. . . . [White] Americans will hate the Revolutionary Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real” (Baraka 1997: 1899–1900). According to Baraka, The revolutionary theatre must accuse and attack . . . because it is a theatre of victims. It . . . moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies. Clay, in Dutchman, Ray in The Toilet, Walker in The Slave, are all victims. In the Western sense they could be heroes. But the revolutionary theatre, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling of the West. Even as Artaud designed The Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and show the missionaries and wiggly liberals dying under blasts of concrete. (Baraka 1997: 1899–1900)

For Baraka, the black revolutionary theatre will undermine the social, cultural, and political hegemonic dasein (design) (Heidegger: 154–76)—for example, the movement from a constructing ontology or cosmology to a constructed ontology or cosmology where the other—the so-called “minority”—is denied the right to cultural signification by the limitations imposed by cultural hegemonists who continue to define the “minority” without allowing the “minority” the power of self-definition. Hence Baraka’s revolutionary theatre constructed a countercultural design as an affront to the dasein of the cultural hegemonists. The purpose of his plays is to empower African Americans as subjects in their cultural constructions of themselves. Cultural hegemony requires the exclusion of others not only from power sharing but from the construction of their own identities. The cultural hegemonist is not a being in the world but a being constructing the world according to a prescribed agenda. The modus operandi of the white supremacist is embodied in the archetype of Lula, who fulfills her agenda by murdering Clay and starting all over again the process of manipulation and seduction. According to Baraka, “Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims” (Jones/Baraka 1997: 1900). Baraka employs archetype and masking to expose the hypocrisy of the so-called American democracy that both Clay and Lula represent. His intent is to transform the audience from passive spectators into active participants in the social action taking place both on and offstage. Baraka’s notion of revolutionary theatre shares common ground with the concept espoused by Augusto Boal: In order to understand this poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people—“spectators,” passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon— into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action. . . . But the poetics of the oppressed focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to the character (or

240 victor leo walker ii actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change— in short, trains himself for real action. In this case, perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. . . . All the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theater so that the people themselves may utilize them. The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it. (Boal: 122)

In Dutchman Baraka portrays the American racial dynamic in microcosm; that Clay and Lula represent opposing archetypes explains the magnetism that pulls them together and forces them to react with each other until one is destroyed. Clay wears the mask of the African American that has adopted the ideology of white America. Lula realizes immediately that Clay is “a well-known type”; for his “three-button suit and striped tie” and his awe in being alone with a beautiful white woman mark him as an assimilationist. Lula does not represent a specific type of white American but rather “the spirit of America” as a whole (Gates: 1879). The scheming and conniving racism of white America is embodied in Lula’s warning: “I lie a lot. It helps me control the world,” suggesting what Hoyt Fuller considers “the vast distance between the nation’s principles and its practices” (Fuller: 1813). Lula’s racist nature is emphasized by her “premeditated” actions and the manner in which she “searches [Clay] out” so as to seduce and ultimately kill him. Lula’s statement that she “know[s Clay] like the palm of [her] hand” not only foreshadows the manner in which Lula will manipulate Clay but suggests that her familiarity with Clay’s “type” is a measure of her own (white America’s) construction of Clay’s assimilationist mask, one more weapon in the white arsenal of control of the African American race. Just as Lula symbolizes the Euro-American standard of beauty, the prospect of Clay’s having sex with her represents his social success and affirmation. In his 1968 manifesto “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal makes use of Frantz Fanon’s writing on black manhood to summarize Clay’s fatal “fantasy” as “the [African American’s] belief that he can acquire the oppressor’s power by acquiring his symbols, one of which is the white woman” (Neal: 1966). Clay shows his utter dependence on Lula by asking her the questions she tells him to ask and playing her game as she makes up the rules. Lula’s words at the end of scene 1 define the masks that both she and Clay wear, and her proposition to “pretend” represents the mask of the play itself: “So we’ll pretend the air is light and full of perfume. . . . And we’ll pretend the people cannot see you. . . . And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history.” In these lines, Baraka reveals the archetypal nature of the encounter by depicting the fraudulent ideologies that uphold white racism and black assimilation, and portrays the manner in which Euro-American cultural hegemony constructs blacks’ perceptions of themselves. Lula’s suggestion that Clay can be “free” of his history represents white America’s historical attempt to debilitate and divide the black race by suggesting that its past sufferings should be forgotten. Clay in turn reveals his absorption of white values by agreeing to partake in Lula’s subversive game of “pretend” and ac-

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cepting the role she assigns him. He demonstrates his gratitude for Lula’s freeing him from a past that he desperately wants to deny by coquettishly “sniffing at her blouse,” while she pulls him away from his true self. In the second and final scene, Baraka illustrates the manner in which the African American assimilator is victimized by white society. After effectively turning Clay into an assimilationist, Lula castigates him for his acquiescence and then murders him when he expresses his suppressed rage. Lula despises Clay for his weak dependence on her and chastises him for his wearing a mask that hides who he really is: “What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and a striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard. . . . I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger.” In his desire to possess Lulu, Clay lets these insults slide, begging her to describe the sexual encounter she has planned for him. But finally Lula ends the game by removing her mask and challenging Clay to reveal his true anger toward white America: “You ain’t no nigger, you’re just a dirty white man. . . . Clay, you got to break out. Don’t sit there dying the way they want you to die. Get up” (31). Clay obeys, removing his assimilationist mask and giving voice to his repressed black rage, to which Lula responds with the ultimate sentence for the African American assimilator: death. Like Dunbar, Clay defines his public image as an “act” that he has been forced to wear in order to hide his true emotions: “You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure black heart, the pumping black heart. . . . And I sit here in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats” (34). In revealing his rage and frustration, Clay essentially “snap[s] off the shackles of imitation and [wears his] skin, [his] hair, and [his] features natural and with pride” (Fuller: 1813). Baraka equates Clay’s suppressed anger with the “double-entendre” that characterizes the music of blues singer Bessie Smith and jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker. In the words of jazz musician Archie Shepp, whose ethic echoes that of Smith and Parker, “Music is . . . either a weapon in our struggle or it is nothing at all” (Putschogl: 263). Similarly, the sharp, pulsing melodies and rhythms typical of Charlie Parker and the be-bop movement contained messages of musical revolution that embodied the spirit of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s. Ralph Ellison describes the double-entendre inherent in the word “be-bop”: “[Be-bop is] a word which throws up its hands in clownish self-deprecation before all the complexity of sound and rhythm and self-assertive passion which it pretends to name; a mask-word for the charged ambiguities of the new sound, hiding the serious face of revolution” (Ellison: 204). Just as Clay masks his real hatred of white America, Bird and Smith “sing curses at white America in code” (Baraka: 34–35): “Before love, suffering, desire, anything [white America] can explain, [Bessie Smith is] saying . . . ‘Kiss my black ass.’ . . . If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music,” and “Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he had just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw” (Baraka: 35). Baraka’s evocation of well-known musicians serves the same pur-

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pose as the stereotypical representation of his characters, for African American audiences in particular can identify with the music of Smith and Parker and are potentially able to understand the message. In the climactic scene of Dutchman, Baraka shows how African American assimilationists are victimized by white society. In his description of what Baraka considers “the revolution,” Clay reveals his belief that African Americans will ultimately use their assimilationist masks as a subversive tactic in preparing for revolution. Clay explains his desire to beat white America at its own game when he tells Lula, “And on that day, as sure as shit, when [white America] really believe[s it and] can accept [African Americans] into [its] fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject peoples . . . [t]hey’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own” (Baraka: 36). Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of relief, or perhaps simply because her actions are motivated by racism, Lula stabs Clay to death. Larry Neal interprets Lula’s reaction as stemming from fear: “Lula understands, and she kills Clay first. In a perverse way it is Clay’s nascent knowledge of himself that threatens the existence of Lula’s idea of the world” (Neal: 1966). Clay is victimized in this manner by the racism of white America, for he adopts its values and plays its game, yet is consequently unable to express his true emotions without being persecuted. Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman depicts and manipulates archetypal masks in order to expose and attack the notion of assimilation. Baraka portrays Clay as an archetypal example of the African American assimilationist and suggests through his demise that assimilation is destructive to the individual as well as his race. Putting Du Bois’s notion that “all Art is propaganda” to dramatic use, Baraka employs archetypal characterization to instill in his audience the revolutionary spirit of the black arts movement.

References Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Boskin, Joseph. SAMBO: The Rise & Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature,” ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, 752–59. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear the Mask.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, 896. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Fuller, Hoyt. “Towards a Black Aesthetic.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, 1810–1816. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “The Black Arts Movement, 1960–1970.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, 1791–1806. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

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Harrison, Paul Carter. “Mother/Word. Black Theatre in the African Continuum: Word/Song as Method.” In Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory, ed. Paul Carter Harrison. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. “Fundamental Problem.” In Being and Time, trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988. Jones, LeRoi/Amiri Baraka. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1964. ———. “The Revolutionary Theatre.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, 1899–1902. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. ———. “Nittygritty.” Unpublished poem. Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, 1960–1972. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1997. Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, 961–70. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Putschogl, Gerhard. “Black Music—Key Force in Afro-American Culture: Archie Shepp on Oral Tradition and Black Culture.” In History and Tradition in African-American Culture, ed. Gunter H. Lenz. New York: Campus Verlag, 1984.

Part III Dramaturgical Practice

Overleaf: Nkyimkyim signifies liberation or changing one’s self. The Akan idea of freedom rests in the belief that each person can influence destiny.

Paul Carter Harrison

Introduction

Affirm the tradition, transcend the condition. —Playwrights Development Initiative (PDI), ETA Theatre/Chicago

A play-wright, by definition, does not write a play, but rather constructs a dramatic event. This dramatic event is a construction of characters in a time/space mode that has elasticity and is guided along a road map or plot with a heightened poetic language that creates a spectacle in the process of revealing the hidden meaning, the mystery, of an event. Space is the place, intoned the late meta-musician Sun Ra, the spectral navigator of an intergalactic arc-kestra. Designation of place, however, requires a language with cultural signifiers that are transformative, that is, never subordinated to the fixed boundaries of social space. A night in Tunsia, a dawn at Minton’s, an afternoon at the Apollo Theater, the morning after Stompin’ at the Savoy—all contain a universe of signifiers that reside in the collective consciousness. But it is not necessary to squeeze the universe of collective experience into a finite locale, draining it of its cosmic potential as place, a place that resonates a night in New Orleans’s Congo Square, a dawn at Pittsburgh’s Crawford Lounge, an afternoon at Chicago’s Regal Theater, the morning after Jumpin’ Juba at a praise house on Daufuski Island. Construction does not imply the erection of the perfect arc that leads to predictable closure, but rather the manipulation of space with characters, words, and actions that reveal light in Darkness, as suggested in the dramaturgical strategies of Suzan-Lori Parks, who observes that her pursuit of dramatic illumination is in “the place where light is not . . . there are places in space, like black holes, where there is no light. We sometimes think of vision as the light, or we’re reaching for the light, but actually I’m more interested in the things that are unseen. The darkness is what I look for, the unknown” (Mahone: 244). Construction implies the conscious manipulation of performance strategies needed to illuminate the path toward epiphany: the rhythm and repetition of sound, motion, and visual landscape. The devices used to advance the strategies depend on the cultural locations that inform the playwright’s iconographic

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placement of characters in a specific relationship to time and place. However, as George C. Wolfe observes, dramatic vision need not be circumscribed by cultural locations that allow merely a parochial intimacy with “the syncopation of Drum Corps, the exhilaration of church.” All performance devices can be incorporated into the construction of the event, whether they be the stilt walker in a Carnival parade, the gestural behavior of the masked puppets of the Bunraku, or the blackface characters of minstrel shows. African American dramatists cannot deny consciousness of the Euro-American traditions that have influenced their dramaturgical practice, nor can they disclaim an appreciation of European classics that depict events on a mythic scale that is larger than life. Black dramatists have shown great appreciation for the passion of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the existential inquiry of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (although we were not seduced by the vacant hubris of his Long Day’s Journey into Night), the expressionistic devices of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (which affirms the equal dramatic value of corporeal and spiritual forces), the metaphysical challenges of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice, and the examination of America’s mythic firmament in Sam Shepherd’s Operation Sidewinder. And we experienced a sense of kinship with the spiritual sensibilities of Ireland through bearing witness to the dramaturgical power of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But it was France that provided the most lasting impact in Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1961). Rather than exploit the tradition of Western realism, masked archetypes were assembled in a ritual reenactment of colonialism that offered a nonlinear stylization consistent with African dramatic traditions. The Blacks satisfied our ideological need for equity within a society antagonistic to our economic and political desire for social change. If the descriptive narrative of black life in the South were merely a matter of retelling events, William Faulkner would qualify as one of the most celebrated black authors in American literary history. But the truest barometer of black experience is how the story is told. In dramas that chronicle experience, the theme is the first thing that touches our hearts and allows us to respond empathetically. As George C. Wolfe has noted, “when everybody has pre-programmed expectations for language or suffering, nobody is available to no one. And if nobody is interested in anyone because we think we know everything, theatre has no point in life. So, it becomes necessary to strip it down, make it that which everybody thinks is commonplace, new.” Theatre, as a ritual reenactment of experience, must necessarily avoid the linear, descriptive storytelling typical of television dramas. While television produces easy emotional responses through formulaic sitcoms and melodramatic biographical narratives, it cannot speak in tongues, magically releasing the parabolic wisdom of a scat song, for instance, that carries the mythopoetic residue of black experience. In her discernment of the empowering word force in Aishah Rahman’s Mojo and the Sayso, Andrea Nouryeh notes that the title of the play becomes clearer through an “understanding of a spiritual heritage of the black community where the secular and sacred realms are not separate.” Sayo is understood to be the “power of the word to

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evoke the spirits” that influence material life. Mojo is the capacity of human of beings to “utilize this unique power” in the rituals of secular life. It requires an “accumulation of knowledge” to maintain the relationship between “oneself in the present” and the “spiritual ancestors” in the past “through action and words,” negotiating the “dynamic matrix of forces” in life without becoming overwhelmed. Word force in the service of ritualistic illumination of an event is not restricted to verbal expression, as demonstrated by the gestural articulation of black experience revealed in the Savion Glover–George E. Wolfe collaboration, Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, or the inventiveness of Gil Moses’s late-1960s production of Amiri Baraka’s Slaveship, a ritual reenactment of the Middle Passage that managed to avoid sentimentalizing that horrific journey. The ritual mode of theatre allows the audience/participant to bear witness to a story that weaves through time and space to link logos with history, as the dramaturgist Sydné Mahone has observed in the writings of black female playwrights: “Word weavers. Wor(l)d weavers. Literary quilters placing memories alongside imaginings; threading testimony through ritual; myth-making, uncoiling truth from skeins of make–believe. These diviners nestle with their dreams and nightmares in the bosom of night, knowing it to be the womb of light. Their plays live in that embrace of dark and light, where life reveals its magical and mystical meanings.” One of the principal weavers of words has been Ntozake Shange, whose for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is the progenitor of a new ritual form, the choreopoem. Jean Young notes that “orality” is central to Shange’s dramaturgical process. It invests the choreopoem with a “ritualized force of words, music, and dance” that represents a departure from “the traditional Western Aristotelian paradigm of mimesis or drama that serves as a mere imitation of material life or simply the representation of an action and catharsis.” At the core of the Aristotelian method is the concept of catharsis, a purging of painful or disagreeable elements that have entered the mind of the spectator, and a resulting sense of relief. Catharsis absolves the spectator from any personal commitment to evaluate what is being staged, so that an atrocity like the Middle Passage would be depicted as a human event that achieves emotional resolution on the stage, thereby distancing the audience from any moral responsibility. Unlike mimesis, a dramatic exercise in which “the audience and the performers are rigidly separated and detached from the action,” the methexis drama of the choreopoem demands full audience engagement. The African tradition of oral performance is preserved in the choreopoem. Much like a blues rap, choreopoems reach beyond descriptive commentary to reveal encoded nuances of experience. The human voice plays the rhythmic riffs that tap into the invisible world to make incarnate a symbolic language inspired by the mythic layers of visible experience. We discover in the storytelling of Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and August Wilson rhythmic incantations that codify and amplify the myths of mundane experience through a narrative performance. One is reminded of Paul K. Bryant’s analysis of the construction

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of symbols in the work of Adrienne Kennedy, whose “preoccupation with myth forces her to abandon mimetic representation on the physical stage and substitute an altar upon which she stages an ontological argument in which nothing is certain except the mutable resisting image before us.” Richard K. Priebe has argued that narratives that reduce experience to simile constrain the metaphoric potential of myth to “resolve the primary ontological, psychological, and physical contradictions that man has recurrently faced” (Priebe: 13). Realist narratives depict “an outer reality that is like the historical one we daily experience and is thus controlled by a corresponding continuity” that supports the conventional wisdom that the play is the thing. By contrast, narratives fueled by the imagination of a “mythic consciousness” engage myth as an “ahistorical inner reality, though that reality is necessarily revealed in objective symbols that we can recognize” and has a “cyclical rhythm that we can feel” (Priebe: 13). While realism is tied to “an ethical consciousness” that requires a fixed representation of reality, the symbolic actions of myth, located in both sacred and secular experiences as ritualized events, own the capacity to reveal the symbolized thing that is “transformative more than representational” (Priebe: 13). In the dramaturgy of the African Diaspora, the fullest exposure of the event depends on the culturally resonant language that owns the power to illuminate the path of the spectacle in order to affirm the spiritual essence of the event. It is critical, then, that this process be guided by a dramaturg who is fully acquainted with the historical, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic underpinnings of black texts. A dramaturg, as described by Debra Holton, “is responsible for mapping the intellectual, physical, and metaphysical terrain, [is] a cartographer of the dramatic landscape, naming what she sees and relating her vision of the playwright’s intention to the director.” It is essential, then, that the construction of performance devices meant to depict the symbolic underpinnings of black social life be undertaken by culturally informed dramaturgs who can recognize the spiritual signifiers of the African diasporic social universe. Their analysis should liberate experience from the limited frame of social realism. The objective should be to achieve a style that is animated and spontaneous and that gives the appearance of being improvisational in form, unshackled by the predictable, orderly constraints of Western realism.

References Mahone, Sydné, ed. Moon Marked and Touched by Sun. Theatre Communications Group, 1994 Priebe, Richard K. Myth, Realism, and the West African Writer. Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1988. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Deborah Wood Holton

The Dramaturg’s Way: Meditations on the Cartographer at the Crossroads

As we meet at the crossroads and survey the terrain of the Black experience in its textural array—the kente, the mudcloth, the indigo—patterned in a call and response. . . . As we rest here, contemplating our journey and where we go from here, viewing the multiple paths that led us all, now, to this reading, this meeting. . . . To preserve and serve our future with our honoring of that vast past, We Gaze and Wonder. That which I carry, that which I bring, are the tools of the dramaturg’s way. I sit at the crossroads as artist/scholar applying the knowledge, using the tools, to illuminate our vision, our interpretation of our World. —A reflective response to the task before me; these words are mine.

When you think or hear the word dramaturg, what comes to mind? The dramaturg is gaining prominence in the professional theatre and I welcome the chance to explain what a dramaturg does. The dramaturg is a cartographer of the dramatic landscape and is responsible for mapping the intellectual, physical, and metaphysical terrain, naming what she sees and relating her vision of the playwright’s intention to the director. Practically speaking, she is the academic link to the professional theatre and as such she engages in research and textual analysis. She is an advocate for the playwright, assisting in the clarification of the dramatic vision, and a champion for the text’s integrity in production. In addition, the dramaturg contributes to or creates program notes, lobby displays, and study guides, as well as visual and aural materials for use in production. Sometimes the dramaturg is like the young child who claims the “emperor is wearing no clothes,” for the dramaturg should also spot flaws in the script that the playwright may not want to see and the director may miss. The dramaturg is a person of courage, sometimes going against the wishes of the play-

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wright her- or himself to make the playwright’s vision clearer. The dramaturg is a guide, as well, because she must also chart the obscure referential territory to make meaning from the unknown. Dramaturg as cartographer—an unlikely way to think about a role that has only recently been accepted among professionals as being worthy to breathe the rarefied air of American theatre. My journey began as a playwright, and I was fortunate to see several of my plays produced while in college. A prominent Black theatre showcase in another city produced one of my dramas in repertory. Prevented by geographical distance from attending rehearsals, I had to rely on the director’s vision. When I saw my play performed on opening night, I was displeased to discover that the text had changed. And while the work was successfully realized in a later production, I lamented that there had been no one present to speak on behalf of the text, no dramaturg with whom I could have communicated to make clear whatever was unclear. That experience propelled me toward another path entirely, and my expedition to know the dramaturg’s way began. While there are basic resources that a dramaturg can use to analyze a text— history, philosophy, psychology, the arts and aesthetics, and more—additional tools are essential for understanding Black texts. In the United States, “good” plays are the ones that stay within the American dramatic tradition. The value of a dramatic work is measured against the Millers, O’Neills, Albees, and other giants. When it comes to African American plays, however, it is often presumed that we know all there is to know about the African American experience, because we have been indoctrinated in what African American identity is supposed to be. And while experience may inform our knowledge of Black life, assumptions about what can be generalized from that understanding, and what can be presented on stage, can be problematical. Stereotypical interpretations are common, even among the well meaning. Just as we do the dramas of other writers who are rooted in their cultural traditions, we must research what is also African about the text, in ethos, language, texture, and rhythm, and begin the work there, moving from analysis to its presentation on stage. As James Hatch observed in “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” “for the last 150 years Afro-American theatre has been drawing its energies from both sides of the hyphen, sometimes consciously, sometimes intuitively. As acquaintance with things African grows, as the essential and difficult work of tracing Africanisms in American culture continues, we will come to know how really vast and invisible the African influence on all American theatre has been” (Hatch: 28–29). African influences must be located in even more specific terms, for what is African—and what that means— shifts, based on our awareness of the complexities of African life. In order to understand what is African in African American texts, we must understand the variety of ways in which African heritage is uniquely located in this society, and we must take account of regional, class, gender, and generational differences (Harrison: lxi–lxii). We must also learn more about how our histories are connected to others. When we look at the Diaspora created by the slave trade and colonization, we see how circumstances produced different responses and results. Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson’s Re-membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show offers a conscious decision to

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locate such connections. A work that resurrects the minstrel tradition by its “menstrual-sy,” it features an “interlocutor” who is multi-textured. “Though today most people abhor Aunt Jemima as the ultimate degrading stereotype of African-American women, we see her as an icon rooted in the ancient African tradition of household orisha. We liken her to the Santeria figure, La Madama, the orisha who fearlessly guards the peace of our homes as she presides over our bread-baking and clothesmaking. Aunt Jemima is not a joke to us” (Clarke and Dickerson: 34). To view Aunt Jemima in this way is to look at the syncretic intertwining of Black religious belief systems and to acknowledge the textures, and dramatic possibilities, it creates. The play relies on an archetype, rather than a stereotype, and transforms history from “his” to “hers” in the telling. Historical insight into the icons of Black life, into the figures that have achieved mythic stature in the consciousness of African Americans, will be reflected in the way these symbolic figures are portrayed on the stage. To serve as dramaturg to a Black play, then, is to be aware of and attendant to the complexities of the Black experience. It is to be a person who interprets the history and reviews the literature and aesthetics of the Black experience from within—as an insider. Hatch has noted that there may be similarities between other cultures and that the modes of engagement are different: “The particular manifestation of these sensibilities in drama may often appear to be identical or congruent with that of other cultures. For example, other ethnic groups have proverbs or leader-chorus responses, but the philosophical intent as well as the mode and feeling of performance may be quite distinct. Hence the need for Black directors, actors, designers, and even theatre architects” (Hatch: 28). Similarly, Gayl Jones has remarked on the Black oral literary tradition, finding “characterizations more suitable to African Americans in the subtlety and range of roles the characters may play, since Western literary characterizations of Africans and African Americans make continuous reductions of the African American and African type to comedy, villainy, or noble savagery” (Jones: 183). It is also necessary to mediate between the tendency to assign sociological and psychological explanations to a text and those elements that signal core values of spiritual strength, resilience, and belief in a creative force. OyamO’s play Let Me Live comes to mind; it appears to lend itself well to a socio-psychological examination. The play is set in July 1932, in Fulton Tower Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, and is based on a true story. The action takes place in a specific cell in a specific location within the prison. Seven Black men, some victims of circumstance, some willful criminals—diseased, tormented, depressed, and degenerated—inhabit the cramped, filthy cell. The drama centers on young Angelo Herndon, accused of being a communist, who is put into the prison cesspool that is the men’s life. An idealist, Angelo offers them hope, only to be beaten and raped by one of his “comrades.” The play ends with hope restored, but only at the price of murder. The dialogue is raw, brutal, and the psychic and physical violence that infuses the action leaves little to the imagination. It would be easy to see this work as yet another story of Black men, victimized and humiliated by white oppression, turning on each other with violent aggression. Interestingly, the Chicago production transcended that predictable interpretation and

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was transformed by the insistent presence of the blues throughout the performance, which became an uplifting counterpoint to the dialogue. The effect was civilizing; there was humanity present in this cell, so muted that only music could call it out, perhaps, but still there for the men to hold onto until the next humiliation. The actor and musical director, Mississippi Charles Bevel, conjured in our collective memories the stories of incarcerated blues men like Leadbelly and Robert Johnson, invoking a story within a story. As a character itself, the blues became the woman-force the men longed for, summoning in them expression and release in its moaning lamentations, marking the ritual passing when one inmate died, helping them to remember that they were once men, keeping their spirits and hope alive. To know Let Me Live is to recognize the authority of the oral tradition, and how it mediates the sociological and psychological realities revealed in the text. Without the humanizing force of this music—the blues—the play could have easily been dismissed as just another story of Black violence. Perhaps a more accessible work is Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which illustrates what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called the “double voiced” aspect of the Black oral/literary tradition. “Black writers, like critics of Black literature, learn to write by reading literature, especially the canonical texts of the Western tradition. Consequently, Black texts resemble other, Western texts. These Black texts employ many of the conventions of literacy that comprise the Western tradition. . . . But Black formal repetition always repeats with a difference, a Black difference that manifests itself in specific language use. And the repository that contains the language that is the source—and the reflection—of Black difference is the Black English vernacular tradition” (Gates: xxii–xxiii). A Raisin in the Sun, inspired by Sean O’Casey, employs the conventions of Western dramatic form. It is an American work, rooted in American dramatic realism, and also a play with strong African elements that talk to other African American texts in the Black literary tradition of the “double-voiced talking book” (Gates: xxv). As a “double-voiced talking book,” A Raisin in the Sun has elements that stem from African core values inherent in the Black American experience. It also contains affectations of what is imagined to be “African” as interpreted by Beneatha and Walter Lee, the two sibling characters in the play. Beneatha’s comical yet sincere interpretation of a Nigerian folk dance in act 2 shows both her ignorance of and her desire for a connection with Africa. In fact, what unifies Beneatha and Walter Lee is their mutual pride in their African heritage. Beneatha, dressed in African clothing, embraces an African aesthetic; her brother, a frustrated warrior hero, evokes Kenyatta and seeks an affirmation of his manhood that eludes him in his position as chauffeur (Wood: 150–65). I have written elsewhere about Hansberry’s preoccupation with Africa, but not about the only character in Raisin who is not visible to the audience and whose presence permeates the play—the father, Big Walter. Big Walter, whose life insurance policy becomes the Younger family’s way out of the ghetto after his death, is constantly summoned by members of the family. The Younger family is no single-parent household; ironically, Big Walter’s death makes his presence even stronger. As spirit,

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he is a constant force, and his insurance money enables his son, Walter Lee, to come into his manhood. As an ancestor, the values Big Walter stood for—family and freedom—are clearly articulated by his wife, Lena. As the archetypal trickster figure, he becomes the ultimate material manifestation, money, to teach his son a lesson with far-reaching consequences for the family. Walter Lee must earn his manhood by going through a ritual unwittingly set in motion by his parents, in which he must choose between the conflicting values with which he is confronted. When he makes the right choice, he restores familial balance, cohesion, and continuity. The concept of the trickster is seen in film as well, a medium in which dramaturgs can also be useful. Harry Mention, the character played by Danny Glover in Charles Burnett’s excellent work To Sleep with Anger is such a figure. A film about a southern family living in Los Angeles who takes in an old friend from “down home,” To Sleep with Anger portrays Harry, the old friend, as neither good nor evil, but certainly as transformative. It is he who reunites the tense and conflicted family, driven apart by generational and other differences, with his devious manipulations. Like Big Walter, Harry enables a disrupted family to find strength in adversity and to reaffirm their core values. Harry becomes the glue that sticks the family back together again, and even his death, like that of Big Walter, becomes an opportunity for reunion and affirmation. The dramaturg can open possibilities for interpreting African American texts that honor African sensibilities as they influence Western traditions, with particular attention to the African American experience. As our texts become more complex, dramaturgs will be essential contributors to the production process, and will help enhance the experiences of our audiences through their knowledge and talents. They are ready.

References Clarke, Breena, and Glenda Dickerson. “Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show.” In Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology, ed. Kathy A. Perkins and Roberta Uno, 32–45. London: Routledge, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Unabridged 25th anniversary edition. New York: Plume, 1987. Harrison, Paul Carter, ed. “Mother/Word: Black Theatre in the African Continuum: Word/ Song as Method.” In Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory, ed. Paul Carter Harrison, xi–lxiii. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Hatch, James. “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre.” In The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill, 13–29. New York: Applause, 1987. Holton, Deborah W. “Who Do You See When You Look at Me? Black Core Values and African American Identity in Performance.” In Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, ed. Marc Maufort, 31–43. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

256 deborah wood holton Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1991. OyamO. Let Me Live. Dir. Ron OJ Parson. Performed at Goodman Theatre by the Onyx Theatre Ensemble, Chicago, May 8, 1998. To Sleep With Anger. Dir. Charles Burnett. Starring Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Carl Lumbly, et al., 1990. Film. Wood, Deborah J. “The Plays of Lorraine Hansberry: Studies in Dramatic Form.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1985.

Sydné Mahone

Introduction to Moon Marked and Touched by Sun

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind —Audre Lorde, from “A Woman Speaks”

The Social Context When I consider the status of African-American women playwrights within the social context, my first thoughts wrap around the high-profile ascensions of black women in the larger American society. Call the roll on recent “first black woman” titleholders: Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature; Dr. Joycelyn Elders, surgeon general; Illinois Democratic senator Carol Moseley Braun; Sharon Pratt Kelly, mayor of Washington, D.C.; Dr. Johnetta Cole, president of Spelman College; Queen Latifah, ruler of her own rap empire, the Flavor Unit; Oprah Winfrey, the only African-American woman owner of a television studio, the wealthiest black woman of all (prime) time. And the list rolls on. As we entered the nineties, more than fifteen million strong, we made up eight-and-one-half percent of the American population, twelve-and-one-half percent of American women and fifty-two percent of African Americans.1 No question: African-American women wield power in certain circles. My second thoughts wrap around the various crises facing all women in America. Every day five women lose their lives in domestic violence, murdered by men they

From Sydné Mahone, ed., Moon Marked and Touched by Sun. Published in 1994 by Theatre Communications Group. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher.

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know. More women end up in hospitals because they have been raped and battered by men than women needing treatment for cancer and heart attack. Clearly, black women are among the victims and casualties of our losing battle against drugs and violence in our communities. The number one cause of death for us is AIDS; fifty-two percent of the women with AIDS-related illness or diagnoses of HIV-positive are black. The fragility of the black family translates into one in four black children born to teen mothers. Fifty percent of all black households are headed by single mothers, many of whom swell the ranks of the working poor. One-quarter of all black families are living below the poverty level; more than two-thirds of these families are headed by single mothers. Forty-three percent of the women incarcerated in federal prisons are African-American. Our median income is still below that of black men, and of white women and men. It’s all true. In terms of economics and power, a few of us are at the top, many of us are at the bottom and most of us are in the eye of the storm. I place the African-American women playwrights represented here in the thick of it all. They’re clockin’ it, bringin’ it down front and unlocking our own code/conspiracy of silence.

The Theatre Industry Like every other African-American woman—be she first or last—the playwright is living in a very hostile environment. The American theatre is still, for the most part, a white patriarchal institution. Its hostility toward African-American women writers and “others” has been expressed, not through malevolence, but more dangerously through avoidance and neglect. On the commercial theatre scene, the black woman playwright is rendered invisible. Before the all-too-brief 1994 run of Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight, when was the last time you saw a play on Broadway written by an African-American woman? For me it was ten years ago, when Whoopi Goldberg appeared in her one-woman show. An even more galling fact is that at the time of this writing there is not a single black play on Broadway. Obviously, Broadway is not the only measure of success, but it does reflect the largest capital investment in American theatre, conferring star status upon its writers. In the nonprofit professional theatre, African-American women writers are present, but a survey of plays produced delivers an alarming comment on the nature of that presence. The 1991–92 season preview of American Theatre magazine included listings for more than 190 theatre companies nationwide, a handful of which were African-American companies. Of the more than 1100 plays scheduled, nearly sixty were written by African Americans, representing approximately five percent of the total productions. About fifteen of those plays were written by African-American women—one-third of the black plays, and roughly one-and-one-half percent of the overall total. Taken at face value, these figures suggest that the contributions of African-American women playwrights are insignificant. In contrast with this bleak quantitative

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summary, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, a volume of contemporary, cutting-edge plays, invites a qualitative assessment in hopes of yielding a deeper understanding of the true value of black women playwrights. Over the past nine years, in my work as a dramaturg at Crossroads Theatre Company and as a panelist for many playwriting awards, I have read hundreds of plays in search of “the extraordinary voice” in today’s theatre. The playwrights in this volume represent some of the voices I find most compelling, thought-provoking and stylistically fresh. Defiantly poised on the vanguard, they sustain my hope for a dynamically evolving theatre as we move toward the year 2000 and beyond. If these plays exemplify excellence and innovation in dramatic writing, then how do we account for their near absence in mainstream theatre? One could argue that their very extraordinary qualities justify their “outsider” status; to include them would somehow compromise or corrupt their integrity, thus diminishing their power to challenge the status quo. If this were the case, the pages of modern theatre history— from Bertolt Brecht to George C. Wolfe—would never have been written. So the question remains: Why are the plays of black women writers so rarely produced? The answer is a complex one involving the tangled web of economics, race and gender politics, and social conservatism—all of which have a direct impact upon the theatre as an industry and an artform. The first point sounds like a cliché: America is a profit-driven, racist, sexist and homophobic society. Black women playwrights are not included in mainstream American theatre because their work in some way challenges or simply does not reflect the images and interests of the financially dominant culture, the white patriarchy. The black female playwright presents an alternative viewpoint and therefore is more likely to be embraced in those venues that serve alternative, progressive artistic agendas. In most cultures, the traditional theatrical vocabulary includes character types— archetypes, stereotypes and prototypes. We have heroes and villains, foils and raisonneurs. Historically, male playwrights, both white and black, have molded the image of the black woman into the stereotypes of mammies, “ho’s,” bitches and loons. In this way, the American theatre has devalued and denied the human dignity of African-American women. The very act of a black woman telling her story, speaking her truth, can be perceived as an act of resistance to oppression; the real power in her exercise of artistic freedom is the casting of her own image by her own hand. This process of self-definition inspires African-American women playwrights to render new characters that spring full-blown from the wordwomb, with new attitudes and new world views. These playwrights thrive on artistic risk and aesthetic adventure. To the commercial and nonprofit producer alike, artistic risk represents an inflation of financial risk. In this period of extreme economic and political conservatism, such risk poses a threat to institutional survival, which often results in artistic anemia, a lack of dare, a “playit-safe-till-the-storm-passes” mentality. In some cases, spectacular set-and-light shows feed the production machine, masking the lack of substance with form, and the laboratory is reduced to an assembly line. Those who keep doing what they’ve done before drain their resources in repetition and cut themselves off from the lifeblood of

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the theatre—the words of the playwrights whose daring visions open on new pathways of perception. In the 1980s, many resident theatres pursued growth by taking a firm hold of the nonprofit corporate model for institutional organization. The critical process of making art for the advancement of culture was co-opted by the bottom line. The marketdriven, product-over-process approach began to lock theatres into rigid, formulaic methods of programming, and the aesthetic adventurer could not fit into a marketing equation for mass appeal. When I came into the theatre fifteen years ago, it seemed that artists were packing agendas for social change the way people pack pistols today. Many artists who carried the spirit of revolution in the 1970s now find themselves in mid-life crisis, sitting in power at theatre institutions (within a nation and a world) suffering a similar identity crisis. For them, the battleground is in the meeting room where they struggle with the board of trustees to hold onto the artistic ground they gained ten years ago. They are now officially a part of the establishment, with all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of membership—credit cards, corporate accounts, faxes, modems, conferences, state-of-the-art technology, annual deficits and competition for a declining market. The social agenda for institutions has also been influenced by funding shifts: cuts in the arts and increases in education and outreach programs. The revolutionary agendas of the seventies are now in the hands of the evolutionaries—the avant-garde artists, many of whom are women and artists of color.

Multiculturalism The cultural diversity movement of the nineties has altered the economic climate in the arts by its significant increase in opportunities for women and artists of color. With increased opportunity comes increased competition. Theatre companies compete for funding and artists compete against each “other” for the multicultural “slot” in production schedules. Women and artists of color have greater access to the mainstream, but true entitlement is limited. Artists are not involved in setting national policies and strategies. The scent of paternalism and tokenism lingers in the air. In other words, women and artists of color are welcome to visit the mainstream, but it is not their “home.” The current cultural diversity plan marks only the beginning of a much more complex process that will eventually have to address the residual racist and sexist conditioning that undermines the integrity of the diversity movement. As currently administered by government, foundation and corporate funders, multiculturalism addresses the problem of demographic disparity; it also creates opportunities for artists and producers to address the equally pervasive problem of aesthetic inertia. In the 1991–92 season, there were seven planned productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in white-run theatres across the country. Clearly, jobs were created and the ethnic audience (the untapped market) was served. But what’s wrong with this picture?

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Ain’t Misbehavin’, a black musical with a small cast and a single set, is an economical, marketable choice. It also showcases the performance virtuosity of black talent, honoring our rich musical and dance heritage. People leave the theatre feeling good, and that is no small accomplishment. But the incidence of so many productions in one season reflects an absence of new ideas, a clinging to a portrait of black people created by others that romanticizes the past rather than engages living black artists who present new views of black life. The many artists who create provocative new work are rarely given an opportunity for full production. Often these works are recognized for their potential but ultimately deemed “not ready” for the big leagues. Beyond the confines of the mainstage slot-system, the “other” artist languishes in the Sisyphus-syndrome of the developmental track; i.e., workshops and readings presented on “the second stage.” Because so few writers of color move beyond that purgatory phase, in effect it forms a ghetto of multiculturalism within the theatre. In order to move beyond the sharecropocracy model, the new faces, themes and styles call for an innovative redesign of the process for developing and producing new plays. The model of development for August Wilson’s plays—taking each play on a regional tour en route to Broadway—is an alternative process that produces excellence and completion. It calls for the kind of partnership that is rarely seen in nonprofit theatre, yet it holds great possibility for the cooperative enhancement of our artistic process. Uniquely, Wilson’s circuit is formed by an elite group of the nation’s white theatres; this model advances both the aesthetic and the cultural diversity agendas. An encouraging “multicultural” factor in the increasing visibility of black women playwrights is the appointment of several African-American men to artistic directorships at prominent white companies. The key players are: Kenneth Leon at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre; Tazewell Thompson, former artistic associate at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., now artistic director at Syracuse Stage; Benny Sato Ambush, former artistic director of the Oakland Ensemble Theatre, currently associate artistic director at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre; and Tim Bond, artistic director of Seattle’s Group Theatre, founded by Ruben Sierra, a company wholly devoted to multicultural programming. Their sole predecessors are Lloyd Richards, former artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama, who retains his post as artistic director at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, and Harold Scott, former artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse, who is currently the head of the directing program at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Their most prominent colleague, George C. Wolfe, is the newly appointed producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Joseph Papp Public Theater; unparalleled in his mainstream achievement as an experimental playwright and director, he has the distinguished charge of continuing the Public Theater’s legacy of producing cutting-edge plays as well as sustaining the classics. These men, forming a new constellation of leadership in American theatre, consistently include African-American women in their artistic plans. Pearl Cleage and Cheryl West are two writers who have been recognized by resident theatres as a result of their affiliation with these highly visible directors.

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Whatever the course of the economic and political trends in American society, the resuscitation of imagination in American theatre will depend upon our collective ability to negotiate a balance of power, and a recognition of the interdependence of polarities—male/female, black/white, rich/poor. True diversity will empower and enfranchise each interest group as cultural allies.

The African-American Theatre The African-American theatre as an institution is struggling for survival—as evidenced by the recent fiscal traumas of our flagship theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company. In the same way that government set-asides for small black businesses were withdrawn under Reaganomics, multicultural criteria replace the “social cause” funding once reserved for black institutions. In theory, the playing field is now leveled. In reality, black theatre institutions are competing with the old boys’ network. A blackowned computer business can adapt to such changes because it does not rely solely upon the black market; it can pursue the white market to meet its profit goal. A black theatre cannot pursue a similar strategy without compromising its cultural purpose. Facing the limiting reality of its overdependence upon corporate, foundation and government funding, black theatres are now challenged with diversifying their funding strategies. Unlike many white companies, they lack a strong individual donor group within the community, and most of them have no endowments or other assets. Consequently, their growth has hit a plateau. Only a handful of professional black theatres has survived for more than ten years and maintained full, uninterrupted production schedules: Ricardo Khan’s Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the largest African-American company with its almost three-million-dollar budget; Lou Bellamy’s Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota; Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, headed by co-artistic directors Marsha Jackson and Thomas W. Jones, II; and Ronald J. Himes’s St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre. Woodie King, Jr., head of New York’s New Federal Theatre, is the only institutional black producer who works in both nonprofit and commercial theatre. Other companies that keep the spirit of black theatre alive include the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco, the Oakland Ensemble Theatre, the Billie Holliday Theatre in Brooklyn, the Carpetbag Players in Tennessee, the North Carolina Black Repertory, Cleveland’s Karamu House, and Bushfire and New Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia. These theatres sustain the visibility of black playwrights and continue to introduce new writers to the field. Crossroads and the New Federal Theatre have led the field in premiering new plays by black women. Importantly, these two companies were the original producers of the last two milestone productions in black theatre history: Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, produced by New Federal Theatre; and George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, premiered at Crossroads Theatre Company. These breakthroughs underscore the importance of the ethnically specific theatre in any diversity plan.

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The national economic and political conservatism also affects the aesthetics of black theatre. First, very few black theatres have aggressive new play development programs. Most producers have cautiously withdrawn from earlier, bolder programming choices in favor of traditional forms with black themes. Secondly, as is typical of the larger black community, a deadly silent homophobia prevails, isolating gay and lesbian playwrights who are also breaking new aesthetic ground. Although gay artists populate every area of the theatre, plays with homosexual themes rarely grace the stage, and invariably they come to tragic conclusions. A final reflection of conservatism is the proliferation of historical dramas and one-person biographies, which serve to recover many chapters of lost history and fill gaps in community education, but they have slight impact on the evolution of the art form. In order to move from survival mode toward growth, we must examine our relationship to our own community, in all its diversity. As more black people move into the middle and upper classes, the theatre will have to rely on them to assert consumer power on behalf of our cultural institutions. Black-owned corporations and elite entertainers and athletes who tend to contribute to organizations that address more pressing social problems—poverty, hunger, housing and drug rehabilitation—must be courted the way we court all other corporations. Our representatives in Washington, D.C. need to be called upon to advocate for the arts. We must challenge the unspoken perception in the black community that theatre—and perhaps art in general—is a frill. As black theatre has adapted to the marketplace, it has moved off-center from its African-rooted purpose. In its original context, the theatre was closer to the church than the circus. Unifying the community through rituals that honored or sought the favor of the ancestors who influenced daily life, its function was akin to that of the griot—the keeper of history, tradition, cultural values and imagination. We need to examine our assimilation and adaptation to a value system in which we disconnect our theatre from our community. Many of the playwrights represented here innovate by returning to and reinventing African-engendered elements: signifyin’, ancestral invocation, the incorporation of music and movement, use of the circle of time, the word as magic and storytelling as healing. They use these cultural charms to voice universal concerns as they advance the recovery of purpose in black theatre. Black women playwrights—like their sisters in every other sector of society—are turning the tide. And as they do, the masses of the African-American community will acknowledge the theatre, and the arts, as a spiritual necessity.

African-American Women Producers Of the few African-American women producers, two have harnessed the entrepreneurial spirit and applied their artistic vision to the creation of new organizational models, expanding their theatre companies into multi-million-dollar cultural centers: Barbara Ann Teer, founder and chief executive of the National Black Theatre in Har-

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lem; and Dr. Abena Joan Brown, president/producer of the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago. Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C. is one of the few avant-garde theatres in the world that has managed to survive on the “fringe,” sustaining Stewart’s prescient vision of global theatre. Marsha Jackson, co-artistic director of Jomandi Productions, is the only female producer with an ongoing artistic career as performer, director and writer. Other black women in artistic leadership positions include: Margaret Taylor Ford at Karamu House in Cleveland; Rosetta LeNoire, head of AMAS Repertory Theatre in New York; Sharon Walton of the Oakland Ensemble Theatre and Bhetty Waldron’s Quest Theatre and Institute in Palm Beach. Oddly, none of the African-American women artistic directors has a publicly expressed agenda for black women playwrights. Nevertheless, their leadership brings a wholistic approach to community enrichment. Their attainment of institutional security not only celebrates the living legacy of African-American culture, but provides artistic homesteads for generations to come. Despite the valiant efforts of black women to form their own companies—Chameleon in Chicago, Black Women in Theatre in New York and Sangoma, The Women’s Company at Crossroads, we have yet to create a viable, lasting workspace that is singularly devoted to the work of black women theatre artists. What would it take for African-American women to assume greater responsibility for the protection of our own interests? Clearly, the relative lack of black women in power is reflected in the minimal presence of black women playwrights in the field.

African-American Women Playwrights Alice Childress was the first black woman to win the Obie award for best play with Trouble in Mind in 1956. Three years later, Lorraine Hansberry became the first black woman to receive a Broadway production and her play, A Raisin in the Sun, won the Drama Critics Circle award for best play of the year. Although these works were structurally influenced by European models, they changed the course of theatrical history by introducing the black experience as subject matter worthy of dramatic treatment and mainstream attention. These plays now stand as classics within the African-American canon; but at the time of their premieres, these writers were pioneers who took up a pen and, as Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “threw up a highway through the wilderness” for the passage of the many writers who would follow. Hansberry’s untimely death from cancer at the age of thirty-four left us with several unfinished plays that still beg the question: Where would she have taken the American theatre had she lived another twenty years? From her ancestral seat, she whispers to the ones who will hear, and walks with the ones who accept her call to continue the work. The arc of stylistic innovation in African-American women’s writing begins thirty years ago with Adrienne Kennedy, who won an Obie award in 1964 for her play Funnyhouse of a Negro. The preeminent matriarch of surrealism once said, “My plays are

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meant to be states of mind.” A heady swirl of stark images drawn from dreams and nightmares, African and European iconography, history and imagination, fills her plays. Linear time gives way to psychological time in which memory collides with the present or an imagined time is delivered up in the urgency of now. A multi-layered, often fractured time/space reality hosts the recurrent themes of a black woman struggling through the crisis of identity. The blatant embrace of ambiguity, shifting levels of reality, specters and tentative grasps on sanity in her plays continue to challenge theatre artists. As compared to her previous works, The Dramatic Circle may seem stylistically sedate in its use of linear time and unity of place. Nevertheless, the psychological trauma of a woman’s experience of terrorism—a revolution rumbling through the subtext—still serves to bring new characters to the stage. The themes of internal and external terrorism have a profound resonance. A woman who can’t catch her very life’s breath fights the inner demons of intuition, dread and immobilizing fear. The landscape of the play is a metaphorical minefield. Despite her obvious preoccupation with race and gender, Kennedy’s plays have never been fully embraced by African-American theatres. Ironically, she is one of the most studied playwrights in the universities, where her work is most often produced, but she—like all the other writers in this anthology—stands among the many artistically homeless playwrights in America. Ntozake Shange startled the theatre world in 1979 when her choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, moved to Broadway. She did not call it a play and did not identify herself as a playwright. She claimed her space as a poet in the theatre. Categorizations aside, the power of her poetry voiced the silent rage and pain of black women with unparalleled complexity, poignancy, dignity and beauty. It gave us new words to invoke for strength; it freed us to speak out, to “not bite our tongues” and through it all to love ourselves. for colored girls set off a heated national debate, polarizing black men and women. Shange introduced black feminist thought-in-action to theatre and brought a new level of intensity and engagement to the national discourse on race and gender. This theatrical event reclaimed black theatre’s role as a catalyst for social change. Mainstream theatregoers ate it up and it continues to be produced all over the world— from European women in Paris performing the French translation to the recent Zulu translation performed in South Africa. The Resurrection of the Daughter: Liliane marks a stylistic departure for Shange, but in reading the text, one must bear in mind that the excerpted scenes have been taken out of their root context, the novel. Although the novel is being adapted for the stage, it is unlikely that it will appear in this stripped-down form. The totality of Liliane—a series of poems, multiple narratives and dramatic scenes—is more accurately described as an evolution of the choreopoem. Liliane is a young visual artist who transcends the prison of the English language through her artistry. Her struggle to sort out her own personal history within the context of the history of racism and sexism takes us into the depths of the wounded psyche. Liliane is one daughter who will not

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be sacrificed to the demons of racism and patriarchy. Through psychoanalysis, she confronts the shadow realm of the self—the realm of dreams, intuition, eroticism, terror, rage, desire and death. She dares to journey through the labyrinth of her unconscious life and gains access to the hidden power of her own truth. The pursuit of selfknowledge is a death-defying dance of the spirit that initiates the healing and the resurrection of Liliane. In The Mojo and the Sayso, Aishah Rahman uses the domestic drama as a launching pad for a highly imaginative flight into new dimensions of style. Her self-defined jazz aesthetic creates a dynamic synthesis of several genres, including allegory, farce, satire and myth, all of which culminate in this reinvention of the miracle play. The playwright’s meditation on the blood mysteries resonates throughout the subtext while the text is riddled with the sometimes harmonic, sometimes dissonant poetics of Christian doctrine in collision with African-derived vodoun, the wisdom of jazz and the passion of political militancy. The play opens on Acts Benjamin building a car in his living room; his wife, Awilda, lights candles to find her white gloves as she prepares to go to church. Rahman’s realism becomes hyperrealism through the use of symbolism, poetically charged language and the daring use of ritual—both sacred and secular. Each character has a mojo, a mechanism for magic, that gives them the sayso, the power to move through moments of terror. The Benjamin family’s attempt to cope with incomprehensible heartbreak becomes a lens through which we see the deadening effects of police brutality upon the victim’s survivors; as they struggle against despair and absurdity, we recognize the sheer heroism of survival. In this play, the powerful and corrupt authority figures that prey upon the innocent meet with justice. Ritual purification enables confession, forgiveness, healing and transformation. Revelations signal the end and the beginning. As they reshape their responses to grief, the characters recover their ability to conjure, to dream and ultimately to live again. Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange and Aishah Rahman have been partially accepted into the mainstream. They have garnered major awards; the subjects of countless critical essays, they are widely taught in black and white college theatre courses. Black theatre history of the 1960s and 1970s was written upon them and through them. As the first generation of stylistic rebels to reach maturity as playwrights, they have held the ground for black women playwrights, steady singin’ “I Shall Not Be Moved,” all the while movin’ mountains. Their presence in the academy should not be underestimated. It directly influenced the birth of a new generation of playwrights who undoubtedly gained inspiration and validation from the existence of African-American female models. The new generation is represented here by Kia Corthron and Suzan-Lori Parks, who emerged from the dramatic writing programs at two of the most prestigious universities in the country—Columbia and the Yale School of Drama, respectively. They are among the growing number of black playwrights who choose the rigorous path of academic professional training. One of the benefits of an Ivy League degree is that it almost guarantees access to the professional network already populated by fellow graduates. Both writers bring a technical maturity that belies their youth.

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In Cage Rhythm, Kia Corthron draws our attention to the harsh realities of AfricanAmerican women in prison serving life sentences. Although inspired by the need to sound the alarm on the injustices that make incarceration the fate of a disproportionate number of our women, she breaks down the politics and sociology into very poignant, fast-paced, emotionally taut scenes that turn on a dime. Two levels of reality—one physical and one spiritual—are rendered as absolute truth. The baldly naturalistic setting takes on the provocative power of metaphor. Humanity and hope radiate through the author’s manipulation of the almost microscopic details of life that we “on the outside” take for granted: a phone; a photograph; a hairbrush; a piece of paper. Women help each other to survive. Lesbian love is dignified as one of the few remaining signs of human tenderness. Within this barren, hard-edged reality, one character’s ability to live through astral projections offers the landscape of the mind as the only outpost of freedom. And the final questions that the playwright plants, subliminally, linger for days: How are you spending your life sentence? What are you living for? In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Suzan-Lori Parks uses word wizardry to unravel the essential tension of the human experience. Her search for the key to identity takes us on a vicarious journey through an acrobatic use of language. The rhythm of syntax is used to upset the systems of thought that mangle and murder the human spirit. Rummaging among the ruins of words and history, she sparks race memory and prods the imagination to transcend the boundaries of language that define us solely in terms of race history. Her work is distinguished not only by the alchemical effect of language, but also by the confident fusion of different genres—part comedy, part farce, part absurd/surreal, part classical Greek, part minstrel, part satire, part political, part mystery, part play of ideas, part this-don’t-make-no-damn-sense. The astonishing part is the paradoxical way in which meaning pierces the perplexity. The ancestors speak through this writer. Thulani Davis, author of the libretto X, is one of the few African-American women writers to venture into the musical theatre genre and the first to be embraced by the mainstream opera houses in America. I came to know her poetry in the late 1970s. Poets were collaborating with jazz musicians, putting words to music in ways that sharpened the fluency of both arts. It was an avant-garde, neo-Afro-bohemian atmosphere in which the poetry reading became a heightened theatrical event. Opera and jazz, on the surface, appear to be at opposite ends of the musical spectrum. X reflects one woman writer’s use of lyrical language to leap across an aesthetic and cultural divide in the creation of a new, unified whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Epic in scope and form, this libretto expands the existing canon of AfricanAmerican musical biographies with its entirely sung text that honors one of our greatest heroes and cultural icons, Malcolm X. The performance art posse in Moon Marked and Touched by Sun is composed of Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos, Judith Jackson, Danitra Vance and Anna Deavere Smith. Performance art, the catch-all phrase for unorthodoxy in solo performance, often incorporates media, installation art, dance and music to deconstruct logical, linear

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narratives. It often makes use of the performer’s biography or employs the tools of agit-prop, and is therefore often dismissed as an egocentric, elitist excursion into obscurity. As a genre, it is the aesthetic frontier in theatre; the only rule is that there are no rules. Embraced by the New York City downtown art theatre, these artists achieved some measure of acclaim in the 1980s. They hail from the ranks of actors, and their work relies upon a multi-disciplinary font of creativity; they write, direct and perform their own material. These professionally trained, card-carrying members of Actors’ Equity paid their dues on the audition circuit, built a solid reputation as actors—some even won major awards—but reached a plateau and ultimately had to confront their disillusionment with the limited, often stereotypical roles available to them in the mostly male-authored plays that were being produced. These women are products of both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s. Even if they worked on the alternative, experimental theatre circuit, the white male power structure could not accommodate the liberation pedagogy that had transformed their conceptions of self. Though free to express themselves through the roles created by other writers, there was still a fundamental hierarchy—director and playwright over actor—that relegated them to the role of interpreter of someone else’s vision. They lacked authority. Their stories and points of view were absent. Rather than die on the vine as actors, they took up the pen for artistic survival. In Sally’s Rape, as Robbie McCauley breaks through her own silence, the voices of her foremothers emerge to reveal the historical precedence for the use of rape as a tool of oppression. McCauley presents a fractured perspective that decodes cultural difference and deciphers the subtle and outrageous dynamics of race as entitlement to privilege and power. She breaks the fourth wall and engages the audience in dialogue—sometimes directed, sometimes leaving space open for impulse. In this dramatic reckoning with the personal, familial and collective past, she reclaims her power to speak, and generates a dialogue that asserts the possibility of a more conscious, liberating level of communication. Laurie Carlos creates her own performance vocabulary with the language of stylized gesture and text-based improvisation. In White Chocolate for My Father, she is joined by an ensemble of performers in the exploration of the multi-generational devastation of rape; rooted in the uncomplicated language of a twelve-year-old girl, the multiple narratives function like jazz solos or duets. One family of women breaks the cycle of abuse through the simple but courageous decision to love each other. White Chocolate is a world in which the ancestral spirit continues to guide, protect and instruct the living. The play begs us to listen, to look for her signs and symbols. Danitra Vance and Judith Jackson have made profound contributions to the genres of comedy and satire. Both Vance and Jackson elicit the roar of laughter that is synonymous with the roar of recognition, the roar of emotional release. If theatre can be a healing agent, Vance and Jackson bring the laughter cure. In 1985, Vance was the first black woman to join the cast of television’s Saturday Night Live, blazing the trail for other black comedians and performance artists to

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move from the comedy clubs and theatres into television and film. I think of her as the “comic strip-search” artist. Her comedic persona charms and disarms the audience without trivializing her subjects. She takes an iconoclastic approach to the creation of widely varied, specifically drawn characters, and takes the black folk style of “clownin’” to new heights. In strict observance of one rule of comedy, her humor is born of human tragedy turned on its head. The line between comedy and tragedy becomes a dangerous tightrope she walks, elevating the unheralded heroes among the anonymous, ordinary people whose real lives are often summed up in statistics. In Live and In Color!, the menagerie of zany characters forms a lens through which we can scrutinize societal illness and recognize the ridiculous and ennobling ways in which we attempt to heal ourselves. Judith Jackson is a satirist who chronicles, deconstructs and reconstructs current events. She plays a host of characters—archetypes, stereotypes, spirits, celebrities and everyday people. Issues that affect the national consciousness and conscience figure prominently in her work. Though precision in characterization takes precedence over polemics, Jackson is not afraid to put forth her political point of view. Spinning off of news headlines and trends in pop culture, she uses mime, movement, music, mask and video to support her text. An Afro-centric feminist brand of spirituality and a razor-sharp wit mark out her unique territory. At this moment in history, Anna Deavere Smith is one of the most celebrated theatre artists in America. In 1991, she arrived Off Broadway with her solo performance piece, Fires in the Mirror, and began a meteoric climb to celebrity status. Not since the debuts of George C. Wolfe and Ntozake Shange has an “experimental” play authored by an African American so astonished the theatre community and commanded national attention. Fires in the Mirror is part of a series of theatre pieces developed by Smith entitled On the Road: A Search for American Character. Each piece is focused on a timely event that has sparked controversy within the community. She conducts interviews with a diverse group of women, men and young people who represent varied points of view on the subject. She then performs each character using their verbatim testimony from the interview process. Her goal, far beyond impersonation, is the embodiment of the spoken word which reveals the essence of human character. Her performance assembles a diverse group of characters in a way that is only possible within the contextual reality of her work in the theatre. Anna Deavere Smith uses the power of the oral tradition and mask as mirror. Each character’s “difference,” finely etched in the particular rhythm and cadence of language and gesture, is the point of departure; but paradoxically, each monologue effectively removes the mask of difference in a miraculous revelation of sameness. Smith’s interview process gains access to those places that exist beyond the superficial soundbites of news media coverage. Her dramatic adventure is a journey through the interior landscape of the heart and mind—that recognizable space in which vulnerability wrestles with pride. These confessional testimonies place not people but American society on trial. There are indictments, statements of defense and unanimous pleas of not guilty. The audience sits in judgment, hearing all sides of

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the argument, only to discover their own culpability and innocence. Anna Deavere Smith’s unique, riveting dramatic form reclaims the power of the voice of a solo artist to become the voice of the people.

The Dramaturgical Orb Although I find the distinctiveness of each play in this collection to be more compelling than the similarities among them, I am fascinated by their variations on two themes: the presence of a spiritual or psychic dimension and the presence of the political voice. My dramaturgical point of view is rooted in an Afro-matricentric perspective derived from personal experience: my mother is the center of my world. Her dark beauty rivals the midnight sky; a deep well of love, she is a spirit-fixer. Through her womb, I am rooted in the continuum of life. The womb signifies possibility, conception, concept—the thought that precedes the deed. In this context, the MotherSpirit rises not in opposition to but in cooperation with divine male energy as a re-creative, balancing, healing force moving to ease human suffering. Clothed in compassion, the mother warrior speaks the truth to bring about change, a sudden change, a needed change. In Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, the dramatic embrace and exploration of the spiritual dimension is a “sign of the times,” an unorchestrated, spontaneous choric response to a world in crisis. The inner struggle against racism, sexism and homophobia has become a crisis of the soul. In a world spinning out of control, this turning inward—this use of subconscious, metaphysical tools—is a matter of life and death, a matter of survival and revival. Herstory and history, invoked for the restoration of memory, become a source of power, catalysts in this revival of spiritual power. Contemporary warriors now arm themselves with this power. Note the embrace of the African concept of the Ancestoras-Guide by African Americans and the parallel ascension of the Goddess among feminists the world over. In this final decade of the twentieth century, the invocation of spiritual power is not only an act of survival; ultimately, it is a call for collective transformation that begins with the process of self-definition. In design and purpose, this spiritual realism is a form of social activism, a politicizing force. Spiritual realism uses the theatre to reveal the unseen through that which is seen. Metaphysical realities illuminate, transform or enable escape from physical realities. Spiritual forces direct the action of the protagonist towards an elevated, integrated consciousness. The text-performance transfers spiritual energy to the audience, galvanizing an irreversible and contagious change of mind or heart. The presence of the political perspective varies in each play. In Judith Jackson’s WOMBmanWARs, Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror and Thulani Davis’s X, the politics are placed in the foreground by virtue of the explicit text regarding a political event or figure. In Cage Rhythm by Kia Corthron, Aishah Rahman’s The Mojo

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and the Sayso, Laurie Carlos’s White Chocolate, Sally’s Rape by Robbie McCauley and in Danitra Vance’s Live and In Color!, the politics are situated in the middle ground; the focus of each play is on the characters’ internal struggle to cope with a specific social circumstance shaped by the politics of race, gender and/or class. In The Dramatic Circle by Adrienne Kennedy, The Death of the Last Black Man by Suzan-Lori Parks and Liliane by Ntozake Shange, the political landscape is in the background as offstage event that functions as the antagonist. Because these forces are unseen, the focus of the dramatic inquiry or meditation remains centered on the protagonist’s interior psychological struggle to make meaning out of chaos. Regardless of the placement of the political narrative, there is an implicit subtextual awareness of a larger communal context that is directly affected by even the most idiosyncratic protagonist’s intimate search for meaning. Personal politics diversify the discourse and add new perspective to the global preoccupation with identity and survival of the species. The spiritual and political narratives converge, overtly or covertly, to reflect women’s concerns as well as their resolve to sustain a sense of hope, often evidenced through a sense of humor, as we face the turning of the century. There are many echoes of concern for the fate of children, the family and extended family within the larger community. The escalation of violence sounds an alarm. Rape, racially motivated and gender-biased crimes, terrorism, poverty and political corruption all factor into this volume’s composite sketch of contemporary society as viewed from the perspectives of African-American women dramatists. The need to liberate the self from narrow, caging definitions placed on us by other people reflects the universal hunger for freedom. In many of these plays, language is the liberator. Speech—the speaking of truth—becomes a ritual of healing to make whole or unify the splintered psyche. This liberated, ritual use of language lifts the borders that separate the speaker from the hearer of the word. Articulation signifies the awakening of a new or remembered power. In the moment of epiphany, the deceit is decoded and change occurs. At the heart of this dramaturgical paradigm is the circle, the spiral, the helix, which in many cases give clues to the structure and use of time. Whether time is compressed or extended, we move from beat to beat and scene to scene not by the clock on the wall but by the rhythm of revelation. In the same way that jazz musicians ritualized improvisation, these writers take the liberty to extend the solo or “take as many eights” as they need to reach the peak of understanding. I compare it to Ella Fitzgerald in scat-mode; full knowledge of the chord changes gives her the freedom to flirt with her favorite phrase or break out into a whole new song in the middle of the song (and it ain’t about a medley). Or consider the rap artist’s freedom found through sampling. Similarly, the circular use of time allows for rapid transit from one reality to another, for the past to become present, for exaggerated stillness or for several timeframes to come alive in a single moment. Dramatic action is rarely encoded through physical behavior but more profoundly through the experience of mystery and revelation. There is a “rule” of western dram-

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aturgy that says one comes to know a character by what they do, not by what they say. The sistren serving up the word in these texts revise that rule. The act of speaking and the precise words spoken become the keys that unlock the doors to the inner chamber(s) of character. In these plays, character objectives are intangible. They want things as complicated as meaning, as simple as even breathing; they want to know, to remember, to love, to be free, to live.

Note 1. These figures and those that follow are drawn from the following sources: for population and single mothers below the poverty line, “The Facts of the Matter,” Essence, May 1990; for rape, abuse and hospitalization, “The Other Facts of Life,” Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, Pearl Cleage (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), “AIDS: In Living Color,” Beth Richie, and “Teenage Pregnancy: A Case for National Action,” Faye Wattleton, in Black Women’s Health Book, edited by Evelyn C. White (Seattle: Seal Press, 1990); for poverty among African Americans, “Facts & Figures—The Widening Wealth Gap,” Black Enterprise, January 1992; for women in prison, “Bar None: The Health of Incarcerated Black Women,” Sean Reynolds, in Black Women’s Health Book, op. cit.; and for race/gender, median income, and family composition, “The State of Black America 1992,” Playthell Benjamin, Emerge, March 1992.

Paul K. Bryant-Jackson

Kennedy’s Travelers in the American and African Continuum I have been in dialogue with the plays of Adrienne Kennedy for many years; although words are not to be entirely discounted, images represent the essence of the dialogue. Images form the core of Adrienne Kennedy’s theatre. Kennedy achieves her greatest impact in the arresting, though critically resisting, images that surround her major protagonists as they endlessly and restlessly move along a continuum of time, matter, and space. In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Sarah’s hair continues to fall out as she moves along an African/European/American cultural and historical continuum. In The Owl Answers, Clara’s metamorphosis into an owl replicates Sarah’s movement along a similar continuum. In She Talks to Beethoven, Suzanne, who is situated in Ghana soon after Independence (1961), converses with Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) about the opening of Fidelio (1803). I have been in continual discourse with Kennedy’s images and with the images that others around me have used to describe, discern, and distinguish this pivotal figure of American theatre. Kennedy’s images resist explicit identification.

Image I: The Transcendentalists Silent and amazed even when a little boy. I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements, As contending against some being or influence. —Whitman, “A Child’s Amaze” Our Minister Rev_______________: He was always angry when he finished preaching, and the congregation seemed angry. I was afraid of him. He had dark eyes and dressed in black robes. He seemed evil. —Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays From Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Copyright 1992 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

274 paul k. bryant-jackson I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. —Whitman, Leaves of Grass The owls and myself: The owls in the trees outside the Achimota Guest House were close, and at night, because we slept under gigantic mosquito nets, I felt enclosed in their sound. In the mornings, I would try to find the owls in the trees but could never see them. Yet at night in the shuttered room, under the huge white canopied nets, the owls sounded as if they were in the very center of the room. I was pregnant again and there were difficulties. I had to stay in bed for a week as I bled. I listened to the owl sounds, afraid. In a few months I would create a character who would turn into an owl.1

It would never have occurred to me to look at the European-American transcendentalists as an origin for Kennedy’s images, except that Esther Jackson would often say, in describing the protagonist in modern American drama, “I tell you, Whitman’s boy goes into the wilderness, and in O’Neill, Williams, and Albee, let me tell you, he gets clobbered.” Kennedy’s characters, Sarah, Clara, and Suzanne, appear to exhibit some kinship with the transcendentalists. They share a restlessness that is reminiscent of Whitman’s “boy”; they, too, seek refuge from an empirical universe and solace in a metaphysical one. This kinship is evident in Thoreau’s passages on the traveler and the sanctity of nature. The traveler’s whole employment is to calculate what cloud will obscure the moon and what she will triumph over. In the after-midnight hours the traveler’s sole companion is the moon. All his thoughts are centered in her. She is waging continual war with the clouds on his behalf. What cloud will enter the lists with her next? This employs his thoughts; and when she has fought her way through all the squadrons of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his ways and rejoices in his heart.2 Though man’s life is trivial . . . Nature is holy and heroic. With what infinite faith and promise and moderation begins each new day! It is only 2 o’clock and already there is evidence of morning in the sky.3

For Thoreau, travel and nature provide the means to commune with a profound presence and find a metaphysical peace. Likewise, Kennedy’s characters appear to “travel” along a transcendental continuum and often speak of the sanctity of nature. This desire for a transcendental peace is heard in Sarah’s plaintive cry as she agonizes over the Christ/father in Funnyhouse: He pleaded with me to help him find Genesis, search for Genesis in the midst of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees and white stallions roaming under a blue sky, help him search for the white doves. (Funnyhouse, 14)4

In The Owl Answers, Clara substitutes the landscape of London for the “golden savannas.”

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We had a lovely morning, we rose in darkness, took a taxi past Hyde Park through the Marble Arch to Buckingham Palace, we had our morning tea at Lyons, then came out to the Tower. We were wandering about the gardens, my father leaning on my arm, speaking of you, William the Conqueror. My father loved you, William. . . . (Owl, 27–28)

Kennedy uses Beethoven’s Fidelio (the transitional work to “Romanticism”) as the continuo of She Talks to Beethoven to underscore Suzanne’s transcendental desire.5 Although Kennedy’s characters are cognizant of the potential of transcendence (Suzanne employs music to transcend time, Clara uses London to transcend the American space, and Sarah looks to nature to transcend the materiality of the past), they do not achieve it. While Kennedy’s “travelers” articulate the American transcendental ideals, they appear unable to “experience” communion with the metaphysical. Sarah does not rejoice in the sanctity of nature. Clara is denied admission into the Tower of London, and despite the comfort that Beethoven offers, Suzanne is sick with an “undisclosed illness.” So it would seem that Esther Jackson’s caveat about the Whitman “boy” in modern American drama is fulfilled in Kennedy’s plays, as it is in O’Neill, Williams, and Albee. In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Hank, the muscular “individual” who thrives in the uniquely O’Neillian steamroom of a ship, is destroyed in urbanized America. The homosexual poet, Sebastian, in Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, is eaten alive by carnivorous birds when he ventures out-of-doors. In Albee’s Zoo Story, Jerry, realizing that his entire life is a “zoo,” attempts to deliver Peter from his “zoo” through a symbolic crucifixion. Clearly Kennedy’s Aframerican characters have an affinity with Whitman’s “boy” and Thoreau’s “traveller,” but their sociopolitical realities, namely race, class, gender, and culture, configure a different matrix. Thus, although Kennedy’s images are linked to the transcendentalist continuum, the “through-action” and final tableaus in both The Owl Answers and Beethoven pose realities that resist identification with this tradition. Clara’s transformation into an owl is hardly traditionally or canonically Western, and Suzanne’s encounter with Beethoven does not in the least resemble the Emperor Jones’s encounter with his phantoms. In order to discern the significance of the closing images of Kennedy’s plays, other critical approaches need to be employed. One approach that can be used to explicate Aframerican experience is autobiographical writing, alongside other conventional critical approaches. Nellie Y. McKay sees autobiography as a central and complex component in the writings of Aframericans: [We are forced] to continue to reevaluate the personal and cultural meanings of autobiography. . . . [Although] theories of Western autobiography proliferate and take a prominent place in our understanding of history and literature, it is necessary for readers to maintain flexibility in their reception of texts, especially those by minorities, when they do not fit the models we have come to expect from the genre. For black women, in particular, the ability to name the self autonomously is an important part of their historical identity, a means of reclaiming and affirming selves.6

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With McKay’s injunction in mind, it is evident that Adrienne Kennedy’s autobiographical writing, particularly People Who Led to My Plays, is essentially a theatrical act of self-ascription. When it is used as an access to Kennedy’s “resisting images,” many possible interpretations of Kennedy’s dramaturgy are opened. For example, Kennedy speaks of her trip to Ghana in terms of a personal renaissance: In front of the House of Parliament in Accra was a statue of Nkrumah. . . . To see a man and to see a statue of him in the same space of time broke through boundaries in my mind. (People, 122) I remember . . . I had seen Jesus as sweet, docile, I had believed “what a friend we have in Jesus.” But that spring, sitting in the Pensione Sabrina, I went on creating a cruel Jesus Christ. (People, 123)

Embedded in Kennedy’s African renaissance is a discovery of self on an organic, though at times fragmented, cultural continuum. In both The Owl Answers and She Talks to Beethoven, this continuum allows her to transverse matter, space, and time. Kennedy’s travelers shift positions freely. When Kennedy’s characters move on the African continuum, everything that composes them travels as well. For example, Sarah brings the Duchess of Hapsburg (who is also Bette Davis in Juarez) into the jungle. As a result, the images of the self (or selves) accompanying the central characters are travelers on the continua as well. Thus the images exhibit African-American, Aframerican, African, European, and European-American features and contribute to the conflict! To unravel these resisting images is to trace the genealogy of Kennedy’s plays to its African sources. Martin Owusu’s Drama of the Gods offers a framework for this genealogy. Owusu divides West African drama, specifically Nigerian, into sacred and secular. Developing from the sacred drama are myth plays and from the secular, masquerades. Both The Owl Answers and She Talks to Beethoven have affinities with these traditional dramas. The Owl Answers is similar to the Anansegoro, which utilizes the transformation of character from person to animal to achieve its purpose; Beethoven is like the Egungun, a ritual that involves worshiping of the dead.7 Kennedy’s autobiographic/personal experiences inform and suggest this similarity. Adrienne Kennedy, recalling her experience in Ghana, feels “close” with the owls. Dramatized in The Owl Answers, this closeness becomes union: “She who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the Bastard who is the Owl.” Kennedy’s personal experience with the owls and the later dramatizing of the experience represents a quintessential African theatrical event: a communal sacred ritual, in which the central narrator, as well as other characters, can assume or change identities for religious purposes. Within this African framework, the differences between an African and an American “transcendent event” cannot be minimized: Whitman only desires to be with animals; Kennedy’s characters become animals. Ola Rotimi’s “Traditional Nigerian Drama” also discusses a wide range of theatrical practices in Nigeria and provides an intriguing lens through which Beethoven can be understood. The action of Beethoven takes place in Ghana during the course of one

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evening and centers on one event, the return of Suzanne Alexander’s husband, David. However, the continuum of time and space extends from 1803 to 1961 and from Ghana to Vienna. The characters of the play are Suzanne (a writer), Beethoven, a radio announcer (who is only heard), and Suzanne’s husband, David, who makes a brief vocal appearance at the end of the play. If read as an Egungun ritual that involves the worshiping of the dead, Beethoven contains at least three possible connections. Kennedy requests that music from the opera Fidelio play throughout the drama. It can be argued that Beethoven’s music is used to specify the deity (African? European?) that is to be called forth and accompanies the drums that are used during an Egungun. The second parallel is related to the announcer’s statement about Suzanne: It is known that Alexander jests with his wife about her continued deep love for European artists such as Sibelius, Chopin and Beethoven and if anyone in Accra wanted to hear these composers one had only to pass the windows. (Beethoven, 249–50)

The music image defines the continuum, Africa to Europe; hints at the possibility of mixed ancestry; and provides solace while Suzanne is alone and her husband is away. Finally the Egungun, as a ceremony of ancestral worship that employs a masquerader, explains the striking similarity between David and Beethoven: Kennedy’s stage direction indicates, “David’s Voice (Not unlike Beethoven’s).” (Beethoven, 258). Read as an Egungun, Beethoven might unravel as follows: waiting, and worried about the disappearance of her husband, who has received death threats, Suzanne plays Fidelio and invokes the spirit of the “ancestor,” Ludwig van Beethoven. The composer comforts and teaches her, “You mustn’t worry. I’ve foreseen my death many times. It will be in winter. In Vienna. My friends will come from Graz. [He embraces her.]” (Beethoven, 255). It is Suzanne’s and David’s joint belief that brings about David’s safe return: Suzanne. David you sent Beethoven, until you returned. Didn’t you? David’s Voice. (Not unlike Beethoven’s) I knew he would console you while I was absent. (Beethoven, 258)

Rotimi also describes a variation on the format of ancestral worship that the Kalabari and Yoruba employ: It is night-time, and early warnings have imposed a curfew on the community. A member of the secret cult concerned is fully masked. He is supposed to represent the deceased whose memory is being honoured. Accompanied with drumming and chanting by fellow members of the cult, he emerges from the cult house or sacred grove and approaches the home of the deceased. Reaching there, chanting and drumming abate or stop quickly while the cult elder or cult priest calls the name of the deceased loudly, invoking him to return to life and visit with the children he left behind. He intones repeatedly, supported by drum or choral accent. Finally, the masker speaks. His voice is sufficiently disguised to sound like that of the deceased himself or dehumanized to reflect the ethereal eeriness of Spirits’ voices. He then addresses his children within, giving words of advice, of reassur-

278 paul k. bryant-jackson ance, of blessing, or of harsh reprimand. The children within may respond where need be. Some other ritual may follow, like formally accepting or rejecting the gifts that have been placed on the threshold by the children. This done, he withdraws with his followers to the land of the dead.8

In this analogy, by evoking the spirit of Beethoven to comfort the entire community, which is also worried about the missing David, Suzanne emerges as cult priest. African readings illumine the complexity of Kennedy’s resisting images in a way that Eastern readings illumine Strindberg. When we cross-fertilize play and autobiography, Kennedy’s resisting images begin to reveal and illumine certain aspects of their complexity and origins.

Image II: The Absurdists George. All right, love . . . whatever love wants (Stops). Just don’t start on the bit, that’s all. Martha. The bit? The bit? What kind of language is that? What are you talking about? George. The bit. Just don’t start on the bit. Martha. You imitating one of your students for God’s sake? What are you trying to do? What bit? George. Just don’t start in on the bit about the kid, that’s all. —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Man. It begins with the disaster of my hair. I awaken. My hair has fallen out, not all of it, but a mass from the crown of my head that lies on the center of my white pillow. —Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro Rosemary. I will never atone you. Perhaps you can put a bullet in your head with your father’s shotgun, then your holy battle will be done. —Adrienne Kennedy, A Rat’s Mass

Early critical response argued that Kennedy’s plays reflected certain components of the theatre of the absurd.9 One sees this comparison in Kennedy’s use of burlesque and the grotesque, and in Eugene Ionesco’s ideas about how these elements establish an effective theatre. So if the essence of the theatre lay in magnifying its effects, they had to be magnified still further underlined and stressed to the maximum. To push drama out of that intermediate zone where it is neither theatre nor literature is to restore it to its domain, to its natural frontiers. It was not for me to conceal the devices of the theatre, but rather make them still more evident deliberately obvious go all out for caricature and the grotesque, way beyond the pale irony of witty exaggeration of parody. Humor, yes, but using the methods of burlesques. Comic effects that are firm, broad and outrageous. No dramatic comedies

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either. But back to the endurable. Everything to raised paroxysm, where the source of tragedy lies. A theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic.10

It is in this “violent theatre” that one finds the plays of Adrienne Kennedy. (I vividly remember the Great Lakes Workshop production of The Ohio State Murders, and the image of Suzanne walking slowly on the stage and stating that she would explain why her plays were so violent.) Violence is to be found in both image and text and has been in Kennedy’s dramaturgy from the beginning. Kennedy’s autobiographical essay “Becoming a Playwright” documents her personal struggle with the effectiveness and violence in the word “nigger” in Funnyhouse. Originally Kennedy had used the word throughout to illustrate and “define” Sarah’s self-hatred, but then she took all instances of the word “nigger” out of the script. Edward Albee chided her for this action: “Well, do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts out on the stage and that’s what you’ve done in this play.”11 In the area of language, Kennedy follows in an absurdist tradition that includes Albee, Kopit, and Baraka. Another component to this aspect of violence in the theatre of the absurd is the fear of the “absent presence.” John Killinger in Worlds in Collapse describes the following characteristics of the absurd movement. But most Theatre of the Absurd derives its basic absurdity, its awryness, from this discovery of metaphysical emptiness, of the vacuum where for centuries it had been believed there was a presence. God is the linchpin suddenly discovered missing from the machinery of living; and the moment the absence is noticed, everything flies apart, nothing coheres, the world collapses into anarchy and madness.12

In A Rat’s Mass, a Kennedyesque description of this worldview, a world without a presence, is spoken in the words of Rosemary through Brother Rat: Where are you going Rosemary? we say. And she says, “I have to go to Catechism.” Why do you always go to Catechism? “Because I am Catholic”; then thinking, she says, “Colored people are not Catholics, are they?” (Rats, 58)

In an absurd context, “colored” Brother and Sister Rat are without benefit of a religion and therefore, a presence, and this absence gnaws at the base of their existence. We see the same desire for presence in The Owl Answers when Clara says, “I want what everyone wants. . . . Love or something” (Owl, 36), and in Movie Star, when Clara says, “I belong to God and the owls” (Movie Star, 101). In addition to “violence” and a longing for “presence,” the absurd playwrights often placed their plays in a stylized, symbolic, subjective universe. Kennedy’s relationship to the absurd derives in part from her emphasis on a nonempirical reality, primarily represented as myth, history, and the significance of a “voyage.” Kennedy documents how she shifted styles: After I read and saw Blood Wedding, I changed my ideas about what a play was. Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill and even Williams fell away. Never again would I try to set a play in a

280 paul k. bryant-jackson living room, never again would I be afraid to have my characters talk in a non-realistic way, and I would abandon the realistic set for a greater dream setting. It was a turning point. (People, 108)

Although not a member of the absurd movement, Lorca, the poetic, polemic, imagistic, revolutionary playwright, would form a central structure within Kennedy’s dramaturgic architecture. Both Lorca and Kennedy frame political questions within a subjective, poetic, “inner” universe, and they both share the absurdist’s obsession with the theme of individual struggle within pre- and overdetermined realities. The “dream setting” within the Kennedy theatre often represents the unraveling of one or several intertwined myths at the crisis of racial, sexual, and cultural intersection. Kennedy’s preoccupation with myth forces her to abandon mimetic representation on the physical stage and substitute an altar upon which she stages an ontological argument in which nothing is certain except the mutable resisting image before us. Kennedy employs this technique to illustrate her concern with the absent presence. Kennedy’s characters could be said to represent a crisis of spirit(s). At some point, the process of individuation has become either fragmented or stripped away, leaving the character in desperation and longing for a presence (or presences). Kennedy’s universe for A Rat’s Mass is the absurd picturization of a philosophical/ psychological/personal/cultural angst and includes past, present, and future history, often occurring simultaneously: Kay within our room I see our dying baby, Nazis, screaming girls and cursing boys, empty swings, a dark sun. There are worms in the attic beams. (Stands.) They scream and say we are damned. I see dying and grey cats walking. Rosemary is atop the slide. Exalted! (Kneels again.) Kay within our room I see a dying baby, Nazis, again they scream. (Stands again.) and say we are damned. Within our once Capitol I see us dying. Rosemary is atop the slide exalted. [Give that one to your set designer!] (Rats, 56)

Within a violent universe, Sarah (Funnyhouse) is haunted by several figures, her “selves,” all of whom represent archetypes within her collective unconscious: Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus Christ. Sarah needs to order these figures, represented as myths, or perhaps image, in order to define self. Sarah states: When I am the Duchess of Hapsburg I sit opposite Victoria in my headpiece and we talk. The other time I wear the dress of a student, dark clothes and dark stockings. Victoria always wants me to tell her of whiteness. She wants me to tell her of a royal world where everything and everyone is white and there are no unfortunate black ones. For as we of royal blood know, black is evil and has been from the beginning. Even before my mother’s hair started to fall out. Before she was raped by a wild black beast. Black was evil. As for myself I long to become even a more pallid Negro than I am now; pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines; soulless, educated and irreligious. I want to possess no moral value, particularly value as to my being. I want not to be. I ask nothing except anonymity. (Funnyhouse, 5–6; italics added)

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It is when Sarah views her “selves” in relation to one of the historic figures that she is most comfortable. For Sarah, however, the action of the play occurs when the myths are “resisting” each other. It is at this existential nucleus of “selves,” with its multiple vertices of race, gender, class, and culture continuously represented as resisting, maddening, metamorphosizing images, that Sarah has glimpses of all and none of her realities, and with that, knowledge of an absent presence. Many African peoples believe that every person has a male and female side; one of Sarah’s “selves” is Patrice Lumumba (the assassinated, quintessential African hero). When Lumumba speaks, we witness the disintegration of Sarah’s personal histories and consequently of her universe as well: Too then, there is no theme. No statements. I might borrow a statement, struggle to fabricate a theme, borrow one from my contemporaries, renew one from the master, hawkishly scan other stories searching for statements, consider the theme then deceive myself that I held such a statement within me, refusing to accept the fact that a statement has to come from an ordered force. I might try to join horizontal elements such as dots on a horizontal line, or create a centrifugal force, or create causes and effects so that they would equal a quantity but it would be a lie. For the statement is the characters and the characters are myself.13

Sarah’s inability to exist at the intersection of resisting realities and images, to unravel their meaning within an Aframerican context, marks her as a person without reality (or within madness). External forces that shape character have the potential to destroy the inner spirit. As a result of conflicting external forces, a battle is waged in Sarah between projected image(s) of self/selves and a real self. Kennedy treats and elaborates this theme repeatedly in her next work, The Owl Answers, and later in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. It is tempting to situate Kennedy as a modern American absurdist, one whose origins could be traced to the fall of the American transcendentalists’ idealism. However, this approach succeeds only partially; such a discussion illumines aspects of Kennedy’s theatre but leaves us groping for more. For me, this discussion of the absurd minimizes the struggles of Kennedy’s characters and limits them within traditional gazes. Kennedy’s characters ultimately rise above their individual struggles, and this is due in part to their Aframerican composition and Kennedy’s “materialist gaze.”

Image III: The Diaspora Chinosole’s essay, “Audre Lorde and Matrilineal Diaspora” is one of the most stimulating articles I have read on Aframerican writing because it develops an Afracentric framework that acknowledges the impact of a diasporic aesthetic. Chinosole centers her discussion on the assumption that the forced displacement of African-Americans (as a result of the slave trade), economic underdevelopment, and colonization aes-

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thetically impacted Aframerican culture. However, miraculously and over time, the positive concept of matrilineal diaspora developed: [It is] the capacity to survive and aspire, to be contrary and self-affirming across continents and generations. It names the strength and beauty we pass on as friends and lovers from foremothers to mothers and daughters allowing us to survive radical cultural changes and be empowered through differences. Matrilineal diaspora defines the links among Black women worldwide enabling us to experience distinct but related cultures while retaining a special sense of home as the locus of self-definition and power.14

Chinosole derives her concept of matrilineal diaspora from the autobiographical writings of Audre Lorde and later links this concept to Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others. I would like to extend the concept to Kennedy. As we have seen, Kennedy’s trip to Africa is pivotal for many reasons: her connection with African theatrical practices, her personal renaissance, and her reevaluation of “presence.” A final product of that “voyage” is related to the concept of matrilineal diaspora in its broadest sense. While in Africa, upon notification of her first formal publication, Kennedy rejoices in her connection with Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutola, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland, Lawrence Durrell (poems, especially one called “Christ in Brazil”). I bought these books at the bookstore at the University of Legon. Now that I was going to be published in Black Orpheus, I was joined to these writers and I wanted to read their work. (People, 121)

In Ghana, Kennedy feels joined to other black writers of the diaspora. Within a diasporic cultural context of displacement, the difficulty I have encountered in placing Kennedy’s images and character might be explained. Chinosole argues that the forced displacement of Blacks resulted in a sense of self that was often culturally contradictory and fragmented in a hostile, dominant society. The Black diaspora experience required an acceptance of fragmentation and adaptation as critical to survival.15

When viewed under Chinosole’s lens, Kennedy’s characters can be said to possess an inner/inter cultural, an inner/inter textual, and an inner dramaturgically fragmented and culturally contradictory restlessness. Echoes of restlessness are heard in the chorale finale of Funnyhouse in which all the “selves” speak: He never tires of the journey, he who is . . . the darkest one of them all. My mother looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any white woman’s. I am yellow but he is black, the darkest one of us all. How I hoped he was dead, yet he never tires of the journey. It was because of him that my mother died because she let a black man put his hands on her. Why does he keep returning? He keeps returning forever, keeps returning and returning. . . . But he is dead And he keeps returning. Then he is not dead. Then he is not dead. Yet, he is dead, but dead he comes knocking at my door. (Funnyhouse, 20–21)

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Fragmentation and restlessness might account for the extensive use of metamorphosis in Kennedy’s dramaturgy. Kennedy’s characters assume image as part of their fragmentation and alienation, and they are in the restless process of survival: Clara, from woman to animal; Sarah, in reincarnation of “selves”; and Suzanne, in time omnipresent. In conclusion, I am tempted to develop the poetic-historical context of the diaspora and an African and American continuum to say that Kennedy’s travelers are existentially suspended in the historic middle passage and are headed homeward. As Efua Sutherland has said: You don’t always have to have a message when you communicate. You are thinking through a problem or something. If this is a problem which forms the theme of your play you ought to be able to communicate it.16

Whatever the final words, I do feel comfortable in saying that Kennedy’s characters, a true product of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism, are created to resist and that the characters, the images, and Kennedy are continually joined matrilineally.

Notes Acknowledgment: I would personally like to thank the following people for their assistance in the development of this essay: Lois More Overbeck, Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, Chinosole, and Rosemary Curb. 1. Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays (New York: Knopf, 1987), 122; hereafter cited in the text. 2. Henry David Thoreau, “Hymn to the August Moon,” from Journal, in The American Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 80. 3. Thoreau, in The American Transcendentalists, 70. 4. All text citations to Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, A Rat’s Mass, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White are from Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and are cited in the text. 5. Adrienne Kennedy, She Talks to Beethoven, in Antaeus, ed. Daniel Halpern (New York: Ecco Press, 1991), 248–58. 6. Nellie Y. McKay, “The Autobiographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Gwendolyn Brooks: Alternate Versions of the Black Female Self,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne Braxton and Andree NicolaMcLaughlin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 280. 7. Three sources were consulted to develop the section on Kennedy’s connection to African drama. Often conflicting information was given. For example, following Rotimi, Owusu places the Egungun within a secular tradition. Soyinka, however, talks about religious aspects of the Egungun. I would assume that different peoples might attach different importance to the ritual. (Martin Owusu, Drama of the Gods: A Study of Seven African Plays [Roxbury, Mass.: Omenana, 1983], 1–12; Ola Rotimi, “Traditional Nigerian Drama,” in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, ed. Bruce King [London: Africana, 1971], 36–49; Efua Sutherland with Maxine Lautre,

284 paul k. bryant-jackson interview in African Writers Talking, ed. Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden [New York: African Publishing, 1972], 184–95.) 8. Rotimi, “Traditional Nigerian Drama,” 38. 9. Doris Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 281. 10. Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 72. 11. Adrienne Kennedy, “Becoming a Playwright,” American Theatre 4 (Feb. 1988): 27. 12. John Killinger, World In Collapse: The Vision of Absurd Drama (New York: Delta, 1971), 25. 13. Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, in Black Drama: An Anthology, ed. William Brasmer and Dominick Consolo (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1970), 238. This passage is not included in Funnyhouse of a Negro as published in Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. 14. Chinosole, “Audre Lorde and Matrilineal Diaspora,” in Wild Women, ed. Braxton and Nicola-McLaughlin, 379. 15. Ibid., 392. 16. Sutherland, African Writers, 187.

Andrea J. Nouryeh

Mojo and the Sayso: A Drama of Nommo That Asks, “Is Your Mojo Working?”

Aishah Rahman’s play, Mojo and the Sayso, was inspired by a real-life incident that enraged New York City’s black community in the early 1970s. Clifford Glover, a tenyear-old African American boy, was shot by a plainclothes police officer while he was walking with his father near his home in Queens. The police department claimed that the officer mistook the boy for a robber when he ran after being ordered to stop. To the family’s and community’s dismay, the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing. After a three-year investigation, the New York City police department paid his mother reparations for wrongful death, but that was not the end of her suffering and victimization. Within days the Amsterdam News carried a story that Mrs. Glover had been swindled by her church minister, who had convinced her to hand over the reparations check. Rahman wrote her play as an answer to the question: How does a family survive this? (Mahone: 283). Although this question is what drives the play, Rahman does more than explore the psychological effects of these events on the surviving members of the family. Rather than retell the story as it happened in a straightforward way, she combines surrealism and a jazz aesthetic to fictionalize Glover’s story, adding an alternative ending of her own. Through these techniques she “testifies” and, at the same time, “conjures” up a version of the story in which the family triumphs. I contend that this version of the story is best seen through the lens of Paul Carter Harrison’s theories in A Drama of Nommo. By the force of its dramatic power, the play activates the spiritual in those who witness it and allows them not only to make sense of this terrible and irMojo and the Sayso originally appeared in slightly different form in Blackstream (1997), a publication of the Black Theatre Association, a focus group of Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and is reprinted by permission.

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rational tragedy but also to transcend the negative forces of oppression at work in the story (Harrison: xvii). Why are Harrison’s theories so vital for understanding Rahman’s play? The answer is embedded in the meaning of the two crucial words in the play’s title: mojo and sayso. Both words depend on our understanding of the spiritual heritage of the black community, a heritage in which the secular and sacred realms are not separate. This “ancestral juju” has been a “built-in survival kit” that has given African Americans a sense of potency and provided them with guidance through the vicissitudes of life— from the darkest despair to the highest of hopes—with “clarity of vision” (Harrison: xiii). The possession of two key elements—the power to create order in life through sacred and secular rituals, and to invoke the power of the spiritual realm through language or Nommo Force—is the meaning of mojo and sayso. With the knowledge of how to maintain the relationship between one’s sense of oneself in the present and one’s spiritual ancestors through action and words, anyone can survive in life without becoming overwhelmed. In trying to define mojo, it is helpful to think of the daily rituals in which people engage in order to feel as if they have some sort of control in life. No matter how discordant or incomprehensible life may seem, rituals like the lighting of candles or the turning of houseplants to catch the sun’s rays, or the use of talismans such as lucky shirts or charms, give people a sense that they can manipulate the forces around them. A mojo remains relatively impotent, however, without being invested with the spirit that must be called upon through Nommo force. According to Janheinz Jahn, Nommo is the word, in utterance and in gesture, which only Muntu (living human beings and spirits of the dead) can control. Nommo is the life force that is at the root of all creativity: “the driving power . . . that gives life and efficacy to all things . . . the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all ‘sleeping’ forces and gives physical and spiritual life” (Jahn: 101, 105). Without the word—whether enunciation, incantation, or poetry—there would be no procreation, no possibility of change, no activity (Jahn: 133). Thus empowered by Nommo force, human beings can influence the world they live in through their songs, their prayers, their wit. They can alter each other’s moods; they can create a sense of shared experience and community; they can motivate each other to take action. We see this in the mystical power of the preacher’s Sunday morning sermons in the black Baptist church to move the spirit; in the spirituals and work songs sung on the plantation to revitalize the spirit; in the lyrics of blues and the acrobatics and improvisations of jazz to help the human soul find harmony in a troubled world; and in the efforts of community leaders to instill a sense of pride and potency in young black men, even though the world outside the ghetto may not recognize their worth. Language and sound—rhythmic, rhyming, repetitions that are reminiscent of the drums that called the spirits—are at the heart of Nommo force. Having this power of the word to evoke the spirits to help one influence life on earth is what Rahman calls having the sayso. When human beings invest this power in their secular rituals—what Rahman calls mojo—they find the

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means to manipulate their world “without succumbing to its odious forces” (Harrison: xx). Rahman’s play deals with the Benjamins—Awilda the mother, Acts the father, and their surviving son, Walter, alias Blood—who have been struggling to understand the death of Linus, killed by a policeman three years earlier, when he was ten. Although the police investigations have concluded and the family has received a reparations check for wrongful death, none of them has been able to make sense of their loss, let alone transcend it. Like the Glover story on which it is based, this play illustrates the attempt of the mother’s minister to get his hands on the reparations check, ostensibly for the church but ultimately to line his own pockets. Yet this is not the real essence of the drama. Rahman illustrates what happens when family members lose their capacity to support each other because they have lost the sayso, or the ability even to invoke Linus’s spirit in a communal family setting. She shows how each of them has come to depend on a mojo that is disconnected from the spirit realm and is therefore hollow. In fact, these very talismans and rituals act as barriers to communication among them. Furthermore, the family members have lost the ability to testify and articulate their grief and can no longer listen and share as witnesses in each other’s pain. It is only when the men—father and son—join forces in reclaiming Nommo force and wresting the sayso from the conniving preacher, as well as release themselves from the oppressive and unjust power that the check represents, that the family can reestablish their equilibrium and get on with the business of living. So long as they remain alone and disconnected, each family member is incapable of finding solace in his or her chosen mojo. Acts has a car that he is continually in the process of building from junkyard scraps. Rather than talk, he buries himself for hours each day underneath the car’s chassis, which inappropriately sits in the middle of the living room floor. The noise and clutter are enough to drive his wife out of the house. Awilda uses the rituals of her church functions and Sunday services, her “saint’s” costume of pure white—a signifier of the denial of her physical relationship with Acts—and her ritual of lighting colored candles on the mantelpiece, to help her concentrate and find piece of mind. Yet she cannot prevent her gloves from getting dirty or from being confiscated by Acts, who hides them; neither can she prevent the wind—or her son—from blowing out the candles’ flames. Walter has rejected the name given him by his stepfather and made up a name for himself—Blood. This new name is supposed to bring him a new identity, one that will enable him to deal with having lost the brother who looked up to him and whom he thought he could protect. It makes him “righteous and tough. Beyond fear . . . the kind of man that pours down hot revenge on his enemies because [he] had a brother once” (25). Emotionally abandoned by his parents in the wake of Linus’s death, he has been forced to rely on guns and knives and threats in order to be heard. Not even travel in Mexico has helped him shake the survivor’s guilt that haunts him. He has endured the loss of his brother, but no one has helped him deal with his pain or comprehend the injustice that has been done. Unfortunately the knives and guns and graffiti are mojos that

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work against him: they drive his parents even further away from him because they see that he “floats around with a bomb in his heart” (5). All of these talismans and rituals are as powerless as Awilda’s gloves, which have become “old, like faded bits of sunlight,” after only one washing (28). These mojos are empty of magic because they lack the shared words that would help the family make sense of their tragedy. The reason for this is that Acts has never been able to tell what happened on the morning Linus died. He feels that everyone blames him for running from the police and not protecting the boy. Uncertain why he ran, plagued with guilt for failing to stop the bullets that killed his son, Acts tries to forget the past. He even forbids anyone to say Linus’s name in his presence. His avoidance drives a wedge between him and Awilda, the mother who must seek to keep Linus alive through her memories and through her ability to testify about her grief in church. It is the only place where she can invoke Linus’s spirit safely. That she blames Acts for Linus’s death becomes obvious when she blurts out, “If Linus could run as fast as you did, he could be here too” (4). She cannot help using words that hurt Acts; she has no way of understanding how Linus could have been killed with his father right there. When she tries to raise the subject, Acts shuts her up with the cruel words, “I see no need to draw attention to the unfortunate by-products of your womb!” (4). He cannot even acknowledge that Linus was their son, the result of the intensity of love they had felt for each other. Despite the anger in their words, he needs her love and sexual union to bring him back to life, to feel strong, and to forgive himself, and she needs him to talk to her, to tell her about the morning that Linus was shot so that she can believe him. Yet they are at a stalemate. Since Acts will not talk because he is afraid of Awilda’s judgment, and since Awilda has no way to help her understand what actually happened, they are locked in a cycle of misunderstanding and blame. Alone in her grief, Awilda is tortured by her own imagined scenarios of Linus’s death. Each night she dreams the same dream of him. In the dream it is as if her spirit has joined Linus’s—their spirits transcending their earthly bodies in the sounds of Aretha’s voice and the chords of Monk’s piano—and Acts has stolen their bodies and run away. Rather than help her see that she is wrong, he shouts ugly, hurtful words: “You are such a liar! Look at you with your face twisted like a peach pit. You are such a liar! If lies were brains you’d be smart. If lies were mountaintops, you’d be way up” (6). He is hellbent on defending his version of her dream—he doesn’t run away but rushes to her side and puts their bodies in his own, causing Awilda to feel guilty for doubting him. Her guilt forces them even further apart. Believing that she has died with her son, Awilda has lost all hope. Only her church gives her solace. “I used to have a hard heart like you till Pastor saved me. One day I was listening to him preach, my breath grew short, my throat closed up and I couldn’t breathe. It was Pastor Delroy I was looking at but Jesus that I was seeing” (10). Since she can no longer trust Acts to protect her, she has put herself into the hands of God and the church. On some level, Acts has pushed Awilda away from him and into the clutches of the minister who will attempt to prey upon her vulnerability. With her only access to the sayso

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through the sermons and songs at church, she has cut off her sexual connection with her husband, like a nun, replacing his affection with the comfort of the pastor’s words. Only once do Acts and Awilda seem to break through this barrier. They have quarreled bitterly and she has called on her God to wreak vengeance on Acts because he cannot stop time, cannot turn back the clock and give back her son and her family. He, enraged that she has chosen God over him as her savior and protector, breaks all of the windows. In the aftermath, they calm down and focus on the check that has come in the mail rather than on their guilt and anger. Awilda says she hates to touch it because it feels funny and has an awful smell. Acts names it “Evil. Blood Money. Payoff. Hush money” (16). In this moment they share their hatred of a system that is supposed to protect them but in fact killed their son and destroyed their lives. Released by his willingness to speak about the check, Awilda asks how the police “add up what a ten-year-old boy’s life is worth to his parents” (15). She recalls the joy she shared with Acts at Linus’s birth and their hopes for his future. Thrusting the blame away from himself and onto his son’s murderers, Acts finally tolerates this reminiscence of Linus as a baby and how his presence connected them as a family. He even tries to tell her what happened that morning. But Awilda is too caught up in her anguish about Walter, her surviving son, whose once happy and loving spirit has turned to violence. She does not hear her husband’s attempt to give her the explanation she has been craving for so long. Since Acts’s silence is central to the family’s disintegration, it is important to look at the meaning of his name. One possible association is with the New Testament book, which recorded the disciples’ travels in fulfilling the mission to teach the gospel and spread the word. These Acts were to name, to give voice to Christ’s message, to proselytize and be heard. Through the intervention of the Holy Spirit, the disciples were endowed with the gift of persuasive speech and the ability to speak in tongues so that they would be able to communicate with all sorts of foreigners. In fact, they were imbued with a revolutionary spirit that enabled them to stand up to evil and oppressive forces. There are clear parallels between this concept and that of Nommo force. Perhaps Acts Benjamin had once been like the apostles, capable of using the power of the word to move others. Throughout the play we see evidence of this. There is his seductive description of a drive through Queens in his dream car, smelling the barbecues, passing the ladies in their colorful dresses and the folks hanging out on their front stoops on their way to the beach, where they will lie naked in the sun and drink beer. There is his eloquent explanation of how Walter has hurt him by changing his name and rejecting the bond they once had: “You and I was real tight. Closer than father and son. We was Ace Boon Coons” (24). There is even his philosophical advice to his son: “In this world, in order to survive, you gotta have a little gris-gris to depend on. It could be anything. A prayer, a saying, a rabbit foot, a horseshoe, a song. A way of looking at life, a way of doing things, a way of understanding the world you find yourself in. Something that will never fail to pull you through the hard times” (33). Like the apostles described in Acts, he tried to spread

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the message of Linus’s death and was disbelieved and ridiculed, not only by those in the community but by his wife and son. Unlike the apostles, however, he lost faith and the holy spirit that had enabled him to persuade others. “I once was into that holiness bag and I know that trick. . . . Forget about the Devil. Forget about the sign of the Cross. It is the sign of power (holds up a dollar bill) and the sign of the trick (holds up a pair of soiled white gloves in the other hand) that counts” (10). In the wake of Linus’s death, Acts has lost belief in God and things of the spirit and therefore also the power he once had. Nor is Acts able any longer to serve as a witness. Because he refuses to listen to Awilda and Blood, he has alienated them. At the same time he has deprived himself of the healing power that sharing the loss of Linus would give him. It would have allowed him to invoke Linus’s spirit so that he could tell his version of what happened and be believed. He is a good man who needs others to survive, but he has invested all of his energy in a false mojo—his car. It may help him to survive by making him feel clean, strong, and free, but it has removed him from those who need him most. It is no coincidence that on this particular Sunday morning, the third anniversary of Linus’s death, he has found a rare Lycoming engine—“an engine so bad they used to put her in aeroplanes” (1)—in the junkyard that was the site of Linus’s murder. He has been searching for this source of power since the funeral. “Must be some kind of special sign . . . finding this engine this morning” (3). With the engine he can finish the car and have it brought to life, “be born.” Although he cannot draw the connection himself, the car has become the replacement for his son. Perhaps it is even Linus’s spirit that has helped him find the engine—“the car’s heart” (33). But the car will remain inert until Acts allows the family to heal its wounds by showing them that he did not abandon Linus to “wild dogs” (37). Rahman introduces the family’s dilemma in the first act of the play with a musical structure. As in a jazz piece, the premise is set forth as each character gives voice to his or her pain and method of dealing with it. The characters’ themes are introduced through monologues that function like jazz solos. Each monologue “is conceived as a riff on a specific instrument,” with gestures and language “rooted in classical jazz rhythms” (Rahman, playwright’s note). As the verbal interactions take the shape of duets and trios, the characters’ individual “melody lines” either converge or conflict. In this manner Rahman sets up an aural experience for members of her audience through which they can comprehend each individual struggle and feel the tension between the family members. As we are introduced to Awilda and Acts, we know instantly that their marriage has disintegrated because they fail to listen to each other. They speak in staccato sentences, like two jazz instruments jamming in counterpoint, neither responding to each other nor harmonizing. Tension mounts with the mention of Linus’s name, and although they have begun to respond to each other, their solos continue to clash until they are screaming. This crescendo culminates in the sound of glass breaking, as Acts smashes the windows. After a brief and abrupt silence, they begin to “sing” again, but this time they are engaged in a dialogue about the check. There is a lull, a quiet before another storm, as Acts gives room for Awilda to sound

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a solo about Linus and the lack of justice the money represents. His reply to her plaintive, “Tell someone what really happened. Somebody. Anybody. Especially me,” comes in late and is a barely audible pianissimo. She has already begun a new solo about her surviving son, Walter, that whips into an emotional frenzy, and his tentative vocal line, “I tried to protect him,” (16) is nearly lost. It is Walter’s return in the midst of his parents’ argument that becomes the catalyst for change. We need the entire set of voices in order for the family’s story to be told. As he climbs through the broken windows brandishing a gun, he stalks and threatens imaginary enemies whom he assumes have attacked his mother and stepfather. Filled with bravado, he refuses to acknowledge that he is endangering rather than protecting them. His voice is a loud squealing monologue that saps his mother’s energy but motivates his stepfather to match him note for note. Awilda is reduced to an incantatory refrain, “Don’t run don’t shoot don’t run don’t shoot,” (19) that continues underneath their repartee. Having regained his sense of potency, Acts is able to sneak behind his son, knock him down, and disarm him. This is the first time in three years that he has been able to show Awilda that he can protect her from harm. She even lets him touch her as he forces his son to explain his outrageous behavior. His voice has been reestablished in this trio. Reassured that there is no longer any danger, Awilda regains her composure and adopts a castigating tone that quiets Walter and makes him apologetic, though not before he has recapitulated the central theme: “I knew you would be working on the car and when I told you I was leaving again you would grunt but not look at me. Mom would light a candle for me and look at me, accusing me, but not saying anything” (21). He knows that there is something missing, that the communication and forgiveness that needs to be shared in the family is thwarted by anger and guilt. He reaches out to both his parents. Apologizing to his mother for frightening her, he starts to clean up the broken glass in a gesture of good will. As she exits to go to church, we hear a duet between the two men in the family that becomes the basis for their healing process. Walter asks, “Can’t you get her away from that holy hustler?” and Acts replies, “I tried, Walter” (24). The harmony of shared feelings and memories is manifested when Walter hands Acts the tools that he needs, like an assistant in a surgical team. The act ends with the bewildered Awilda in anguish over her white gloves, which no longer seem powerful to her. Although she has overheard the men beginning to speak of Linus, she has yet to join in and complete the trio that now remains of her family. Rahman’s aesthetic choice of jazz structure and rhythms is at the heart of what makes Mojo and the Sayso a drama of Nommo, one that rejects the aesthetics of Eurocentric social realism for a new form. Harrison explains why this is necessary: “Social realism mirrors the world as one observes it at the window, without allowing for the ascension of the spirit that brings catharsis and enlightenment. It explains existence rather than permitting it to reveal itself through a matrix of forces” (Harrison: 24). If Rahman had told the story of the Glover family in the realist tradition, she would have denied her own word magic or Nommo force. Instead she filled her play with

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the magic of symbols and “incantation,” allowing her, as well as the actors in performance, to serve as shamans and create a community ritual. Rahman, like Harrison, believes that this is the responsibility of the theatre artist. “As writers, we must think of ourselves—I think of us—as priests and priestesses of the word with a holy mission to be responsible to people” (Mahone: 284). For the preacher, this means telling a story through rhetorical speech patterns—repetitions, alliterations, metaphors— that establish a kind of musical rhythm and “a manipulation of words into concrete images which induce a spirituality into the congregation/community that no other story-teller can match” (Harrison: 44). Although what the preacher says may not be wholly true, the story is told to instill wisdom and shared understanding among those who have come together “to bear witness to what is heard and seen.” It is this kind of ritual that Rahman is creating in her play. By the style of the performance, the dialogue’s syntax, repetitions, and rhythms, the language works on the audience as if they were in church. But because this ritual is also a spectacle, it goes beyond words. The ideas can be symbolized; the characters’ real natures can be revealed through costumes; the magic of Nommo force can infuse a mojo, and the spirit realm can be made material. We see this most clearly in the second act. In the first scene, both men, in Awilda’s absence, take part in a healing ritual that allows them to release their pent up emotions and join forces. While repairing the damage to the house, they begin to repair their relationship. Walter initiates this process with a song he hopes will convey his understanding of his stepfather’s need for escape: “I don’t want to be dead,/ Me, I ain’t never gonna die/ gonna buy a car, gonna drive it fast, Gonna drive away from me, myself and I” (29). Unfortunately, Acts has retreated underneath his car as usual and does not hear Walter’s lyrics. Walter then attempts to get Acts’s attention by scrawling graffiti on the windowpanes, but still he is ignored. He tries one more time with a kind of blues poem about unrequited love, but again his effort falls on deaf ears. In fact, Acts thinks Walter is trying to deter him from finishing his dream car. He has wisdom to impart to his stepson, but his obsession with his own pain and guilt blind him to the needs of his family. That Walter peels oranges with a knife so sharp he cuts himself—quite possibly a deliberate act of self-destruction and a cry for help —is lost on Acts. He fails to see how he has forgotten the very “secret of life” that he has just tried to pass on to his son. Only when Walter hurts his father while giving him a massage, and then threatens to dismantle his car, do we see the frustration he feels with Acts’s passive aggression. But once his fury is spent, he enacts a ritual of forgiveness: he joins the fruit and peelings (a symbol of his self-inflicted pain) to his mother’s candles (the symbol of her need for order), as he mumbles an incantation. The ritual releases even more of the men’s rage: Acts explodes in anger because Awilda is under the pastor’s spell, while Walter erupts at his father for forcing her to fulfill her emotional needs in another man’s “so-called church!” Blowing out his mother’s candles, Walter breaks through his father’s complacency and pleads with him: “Pops, let’s leave here. Let’s not stay here. We should just take that money and run. You and me and Mom should get outta

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this place. Make a new start” (38). What we in the audience have witnessed is an emotional breakthrough. Although they have not reached a total agreement, Acts and Blood have come to a mutual understanding. It will allow them to take on the enemy, Pastor Delroy, and release Awilda from his power. The final scene of the play is a battle for Awilda’s soul waged with the help of mojos imbued with Nommo force. As Acts threatens to disable Delroy, Walter tries to make his mother acknowledge that she has punished him for living on after Linus’s death. But they are no match for the Baptist preacher, a patriarch of the community, who “owns a kind of mystical surety” because he serves them “in a cosmic sense, for better or worse, good or evil” (Harrison: 228). His ability to summon forth the spiritual realm through the power of the word comes from the congregation’s faith in his power to act on their behalf. Unfortunately for Awilda, Delroy’s Nommo force is used for his own individual gain, but she cannot see beyond his mojo—his white clerical collar, robe, and white gloves. All she knows is that the church service, with Delroy’s seductive voice and the altar flowers that make the church feel like a garden, make her feel innocent and clean. The struggle reaches its climax in a showdown between Acts and Delroy in the family’s home. Finally aware of Walter’s survivor’s guilt, Acts attempts to protect him from Awilda’s obsession with Linus, and politely asks Delroy to give them some privacy. But Awilda refuses to let go of her spiritual shepherd. Acts is forced into high gear, engaging in a verbal duel to win Awilda back. He uses the seductive image of his car as a means of escape, a way for the family to “slip out easy like a soft wind” to a new life (45). These honeyed words remind Awilda of the old days, of the pleasure of driving, listening to music, the wind on her cheeks. Delroy counters by upping the ante: if Awilda stays with Acts she will forsake her lost son Linus for “the vain pleasures of this world” (45). Under such pressure, Awilda caves in and announces that she will donate the reparations check to the church. Acts lunges at the pastor in anger, an act that Delroy calmly turns to his advantage. He accuses Acts of hypocrisy and greed and claims that Acts has secret plans to spend the money for his own purposes (in fact, of course, this is Delroy’s own intention). “My only concern is Linus and his immortality,” lies Delroy. “Do not let the world forget him. He who was crushed by the forces of wickedness! He who was the fairest among boys. He who was snatched from us before the soft down of manhood kissed his cheeks. His loins yet girded with innocence. A bright-eyed, graceful manchild. O! Countless are the splendors of this world but none more splendiferous than was that fine, tender young boy” (48). In anger at this display of blatant, self-serving hypocrisy, and determined to open his mother’s eyes, Walter threatens the pastor’s life, investing his mojo, the sharp knife, with Nommo force. He describes the tortures that he will inflict on Delroy if he refuses to end the charade of piety. Using the knife to back up his verbal threats, he peels away Delroy’s disguises as deftly as he has peeled an orange. Unmasked, stripped of his religious costume, Delroy is revealed as a dandy in a silk suit and gold jewelry, with talons of a bird rather than hands, the very personification of greed. Awilda finally begins to see Delroy for what he is, a man who would take money from

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vulnerable women. Needing to plunge the knife point all the way home, Walter peels another layer off Delroy, exposing him as a male stripper with jeweled G-string and S&M boots, a man who has used his sayso to seduce and disgrace both young men and women in his parish. Horrified by this revelation, Awilda forces Delroy to strip all the way down to his true nature. Finally he stands revealed as a vulture with hooked beak, “sharp eyes and a keen sense of smell,” (49) who encircles her as a vulture circles its prey. Awilda is able at last to exorcise him from her heart and drive him out of her home. Walter’s intervention has freed Awilda from the pastor’s influence. She regains her vitality and denounces Delroy as an “unclean scavenger with living flesh . . . [who] thrives on decay . . . and feeds on the dead” (50). A modern version of the sorcerer or boogeyman of traditional African societies, Delroy’s true identity had to be discovered so that he could be destroyed and driven from the family’s midst. Through the collective efforts of Acts and Walter, who combined Nommo force with spiritual force, the family was able to render Delroy incapable of exercising power over them, either in this world or in the world of the spirits (Harrison: xxi). The audience has participated in this exorcism. We may have seen through Delroy’s words, but we had no idea just how corrupt he was. Rather than use the sayso to help his parishioners make sense of what had happened, he preyed on their sense of victimhood. He repeated the awful injustices that had been done to them, allowing them to wallow in self-pity and despair. Rahman uses the character of Delroy to reveal the nature of oppression that comes from within the community, from those in power to whom we give our trust. Like all Afrocentric art, the play uplifts the audience by disseminating “information that helps Black people control their own lives, for their own betterment, on their own terms” (Molette: 38). Like the bluesy quality of a Sunday morning sermon, or a beast parable, the play’s narrative structure and its symbolism “summon the strength to understand what has happened” both intellectually and emotionally (Crouch: 46). Encouraged by his stepson’s allegiance and his wife’s renewed faith in him, Acts can face his own self-doubt and finally reveal what happened on the morning that Linus was killed. Instead of being destroyed, the family members forgive each other and rediscover their solidarity. When they tear up the check, they are released from the oppressive sense of loss that Linus’s death represented, and Linus’s spirit can be invoked in positive ways. In fact, the moment the check is torn up, Acts’s car—his mojo—comes to life, with “headlights blinking, motor running, horn honking and radio playing” (52). It had been standing poised for birth, its engine—the heart—waiting to receive the spirit of the boy whose life it has come to replace. Infused with this spiritual power, which Acts’s confession has invoked, the car is ready to help them escape back into the world of “living through and [loving] hearts” (50). By rejecting the money as an inappropriate compensation for their emotional loss, they regain what is far more valuable, their “joy in life” (Jahn: 117). The final moments of the play are like the quiet after a storm, a jazz piece that has culminated in a battle of instruments and been resolved by moving into a new melodic realm.

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Watching the Benjamin family climb into “Mojo 9” and drive away united and made whole, we in the audience experience a release, a catharsis. We have shared in the pain of loss as well as the triumph of survival by bearing witness to the story. Through the enactment of Nommo force, we have seen and felt how combining mojo with sayso can enable us to survive any of life’s traumas. We have come to comprehend Acts’s final words: “A pretty machine nine hundred times as powerful a human man. It ain’t even a machine. It is a force of nature. . . . Built by a man who walked through iron times and is still kicking. . . . Mojo can take us any place. Mojo will get you through” (52–53). Rahman’s play takes on the larger purpose behind African and African American literature: “to create new reality” (Jahn: 146). Through Nommo force, the power of creativity inherent in shared language, she alters the events of history and lifts us out of the story of victimization printed in the Amsterdam News. Emphasizing a family’s trust and love rather than their oppression, her play becomes an antidote to the worst crime against the African American community, the erosion of one’s sense of power in the universe and the breaking of the human spirit (Harrison: xxi). Her creation of a drama of Nommo allows us to participate in the Benjamin family’s grief, witness the return of their well-being, and heal our own wounds.

References Crouch, Stanley. “The Big Feeling.” Negro Digest (July 1969): 45–48. Harrison, Paul Carter. The Drama of Nommo. New York: Grove Press, 1972. Jahn, Janheinz. MUNTU: An Outline of the New African Culture. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Mahone, Sydné, ed. Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African American Women. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. Molette, Carlton W., and Barbara J. Molette. Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation. Bristol, Ind.: Wyndam Hall Press, 1986. Rahman, Aishah. Mojo and the Sayso. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 1989.

Jean Young

Ritual Poetics and Rites of Passage in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf

We carry these memories inside a we. Do you believe that those hundreds and hundreds of Africans brought here on this side would forget everything they once knew? We don’t know where the recollections come from. Sometimes we dream them. But we carry these memories inside a we. —Nana Peazant, Daughters of the Dust And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! —Toni Morrison, Beloved

In the choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, playwright Ntozake Shange combines storytelling, conjuration, healing ritual, testament, and incantation, all drawn from an African spiritual and cultural ethos, to stage the healing and rebirth of seven women of color who are represented by the various hues of the rainbow. At this site, the spiritual and cultural practices of black people of the New World are staged and made manifest as syncretic influences of New World culture and folklore and traditional African spiritual systems and worldview. As Chester Higgins Jr., author of the book Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, notes, “We are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us” (Higgins: 233). Ralph Ellison calls these African retentions “an identity of passions” among the peoples of the Diaspora. Folklorist Beverly Robinson

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adds that “African-American beliefs are metaphysical beliefs belonging to an African worldview adapted to an American milieu” (Holloway: 218). Shange’s choreopoem1 exemplifies the connection between African American folk belief and traditional practices. However, the transformation of black women’s identity through the African-based traditions, rituals, and beliefs is an element of the play that is often overlooked by many critics. The majority of critiques of for colored girls focus on two main issues: the relationships between black women and black men, and alleged “male bashing.”2 While Shange’s exploration of male/female relationships is certainly an important part of for colored girls, it is not the central theme. A superficial examination supports the conclusion that Shange portrays most of the men in the play as violent and abusive and that the play is therefore a black feminist attack on black men.3 But in an interview with Claudia Tate, Shange explains that the Beau Willie Brown piece has less to do with “violent black males” than with the need to raise black awareness of child abuse, the abuse of women, and the erosion of humanity and repression of feelings that permeate black communities: Because I have to live around people like him [Beau Willie Brown]. I can’t live around a whole bunch of lies. . . . My critics can say that he doesn’t exist. Then they can try to explain to me why there are two million American children who are abused by their parents every single year. . . . That’s why I write about it. I refuse to be part of this conspiracy of silence. So that’s why I wrote about Beau Willie Brown. I’m tired of living lies. . . . When you are living lies, you don’t know what’s real. (Tate: 158–59)

To see the play as yet another commentary on the battle between the sexes in the black community or to condemn it as “male bashing” is to neglect its importance as an innovative art form, the choreopoem. Such a view sees Shange’s play as a sociological study of black male and female relationships rather than a work of dramatic art. A comprehensive analysis of Shange’s for colored girls would examine its synthesis of African worldviews and its presentation of the range of black women’s experiences not always found in traditional theatre. Each of the seven women depicted in the play—the “Lady in Red,” the “Lady in Brown,” the “Lady in Purple,” and so on— represents a stage of black women’s lives, from girlhood through womanhood and, finally, rebirth. These characterizations stand in stark contrast to the depictions of black women as either hypersexualized Jezebels or desexualized mammies that dominate popular culture. Shange further explains the purpose of this work in the preface to the play, that it was inspired by Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman and is an investigation of “seven different expressions of black womanhood” (Shange: xii). Additionally, according to Shange, the choreopoem’s theatrical elements, combining poetry, prose, song, and dance, are framed by a distinct black American cultural heritage (Lester: 3). Deborah R. Geis argues further that Shange, “perhaps more than any other practicing playwright . . . has created a poetic voice that is uniquely her own—a voice which is deeply rooted in her experience of being female and Black . . .

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and relies heavily upon the immense power that African and African-American tradition have assigned to the spoken word” (Brater: 210). Literary theorist Cheryl Wall calls the African-derived folklore and rituals the “Africa Reconnection,” or the shared foundation of African heritage among the scattered peoples of the Diaspora, which binds black women through a similar folklore and cultural history. In other words, women reclaim their stories by connecting them to their past. This theme of reconnection is often used in the writings of contemporary African American women. In Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Paule Marshall explores the cultural continuity of peoples of the African Diaspora through the ritual of song, dance, drama, and dreams. Marshall’s novel addresses the connection between the myths and folklore of both African American and Afro-Cuban culture. In the biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), author Audre Lorde studies a new dimension of black female identity by the creation of a black lesbian deity, Afrekete, who represents the healing force of eroticism. Lorde incorporates myth, poetry, and history in her quest to reconstruct an experience of black women loving each other. In Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (1991), Nana Peazant called on memories, myth, and the legends of African American folklore to connect with her African past. Writer Alice Walker incorporates a collage of forms—potions, letters, recipes, and poetry—in her search for female identity. In literature, the use of mythology is primarily associated with the writings of women authors, as is the use of diary entries, recipes, and potions. These literary and cultural forms create a bond among women everywhere. The visual imagery evoked by the spoken word—called “Nommo” by dramatic theorist and playwright Paul Carter Harrison—serves to connect the peoples of Africa and the Diaspora, the oral tradition holding a prominent place in traditional and contemporary black culture everywhere. Geneviève Fabre also argues for the historical importance of the spoken word for black Americans: For slaves (who were often forbidden to learn to read or to write) it was the safest means of communication. It provided basic contact with Africa as a homeland and a source of folklore . . . between the speaker and his audience . . . the oral tradition has long remained a living practice in Afro-American culture, the dramatic artist has been tempted to emulate not only the art and techniques of the storyteller . . . [but] that of recording and reformulating experience, of shaping and transmitting values, opinions and attitudes, and of expressing a certain collective wisdom. (Hoch-Smith: 213)

Through the use of an oral tradition that combines improvised storytelling (where the storyteller’s own vision informs the story), song, and dance, Shange’s women project the audience into the sphere of the feelings and emotions of the characters. “Her words,” according to choreographer and collaborator Dianne McIntyre, “have the music and the dance in [them] and the works also have space that is open for the dance . . . words and movement happening simultaneously. . . . Zaki made a name for it [the choreopoem]” (Lester: 4). As the women come forth to re-create the reality of their lives, they draw upon the power and magic of word, song, dance, and story to conjure up the imagery that cre-

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ates a shared emotional reality between the audience and performer. Shange’s innovative use of only gelled lighting, without the use of elaborate sets, props, and other theatrical effects that would ordinarily particularize the message, also helps to create the dynamic imagery that enables the audience to experience the women’s inner emotions. The absence of costumes as a signifier of character in for colored girls, where the women are identified only by the names of colors, helps to create Shange’s expressionistic narrative space. In the same way, traditional ritual and New World spiritual practices such as spirit possession and conjuration also enable the participants to experience a subjective inner reality that transcends physical presence. Improvisation, or the personalization of the performance practice, is part of traditional ritual. This technique enables the performers to have a uniquely personal and internal connection to the work and allows for a collage of different genres and forms. This performance technique informs many New World black art forms and spiritual practices, including both jazz and the traditional church ceremony in which the musician or preacher works out of “feelin’ the spirit.” Actor-author Robbie McCauley, who joined the Broadway company of for colored girls in 1977, explains: The form demands that the performer have an organic, physical relationship to the words and images of the poems/narratives . . . the actor has to personalize her relationship to it . . . I’d say that the form is musical—that a broad range of Black classical music (Jazz, Blues, Rhythm and Blues) informs the work. . . . [Actors] come to it with some knowledge or strong instinct about how to give it voice. . . . And, of course, there is physical life in the text. The actor deals with inner rhythms in voice to text. (Lester: 3)

An example of the imagery that combines dance and story is the poem recited by the Lady in Purple, part of the vivid tale of Sechita, the dancer in a carnival sideshow who fantasizes that she is an Egyptian goddess. The Lady in Green is Sechita dancing furiously “thru the cracker nite” with “gold pieces hittin the makeshift stage” (25). The story is animated by dance: The lady in green enters from the right volm; she is Sechita and for the rest of the poem dances out Sechita’s life lady in purple sechita had heard these things / she moved as if she’d know them / the silver n high-toned laughin / the violins n marble floors / sechita pushed the clingin delta dust wit painted toes / patch-work tent waz poka-dotted / stale lights snatched at the shadows / creole carnival waz playin natches in ten minutes / her splendid red garters / gin-stained n itchy on her thigh. (23–24)

Spiritual traditions of the New World such as Santería and Voudoun derive from Yoruba-based spiritual practices that incorporate the dynamic interplay of music and

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movement. These two elements are particularly powerful forces because of their ability to amplify, contradict, or emphasize the spoken word. Acting as forces or channels, music, movement, and word together assist the storyteller in providing the imagery that projects the participants into a full range of emotional experiences. These mojos, or what Paul Carter Harrison calls “Nommo-force,” are potent methods of transformation. Another important example of the transformative power of the spoken word is call-and-response. Shange makes use of it to evoke the collective power of voice, heightening the dramatic effect. We see this exemplified in the dance scene by the character Willie Colon: lady in yellow we gotta dance to keep from cryin lady in brown we gotta dance to keep from dyin lady in red so come on lady in brown come on lady in purple come on lady in orange hold yr head like it was ruby sapphire i’m a poet who writes in english come to share the worlds witchu everyone come to share our worlds witchu we come here to be dancin to be dancin to be dancin baya (15–16)

Shange’s use of call-and-response and dance works as a powerful incantation or mojo force, allowing audience members full participation by projecting them into metaphysical “suspension of disbelief.” These stylistic effects create a communal, spiritual, and physical space between audience and performer best exemplified in the dance scene. The audience is transported to the lower East Side of New York City by the incantation of the women who have “come to share our worlds witchu” and sing and “dance / like the bata dance scream” and “to be dancin . . . baya” (16), through the dynamic interplay of the Nommo force of call-and-response, testimony, music, and dance. In traditional African culture, one of the primary functions of language is to provide an orderly explanation of the universe. The spoken word is used to name events

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and objects and to give the universe shape and order. In traditional African belief, the concept of Nommo, or the spoken word, legitimizes or actualizes life. Geneva Smitherman, in her book Talkin and Testifyin, explains the importance of words and language in traditional African culture. A newborn life is not fully manifest until given a name, and no medicine or potion is considered effective without words or incantation (Smitherman: 78). The emphasis Shange places on orality and the ritualized forces of words, music, and dance serves to liberate her theatrical presentation from the confines of classical Western concepts of theatre. The Western tradition is essentially Aristotelian and involves two basic principles, dramatic mimesis (imitation) and katharsis (purgation), seeking to define tragedy as an imitation of an action that is grave and great; its aim is to achieve a “katharsis,” or expulsion of the seemingly unwanted emotions of pity and fear. In mimesis drama, the audience is rigidly separated from the action of the performers. The methexis drama of the choreopoem, by contrast, demands full audience engagement; the audience is actively involved in a collective “helping out” of the action (Hill: 62–63). An example of this “helping out” is the “laying on of hands” that occurs in the final scene of the choreopoem, which is first performed by the actors. The community of spectators becomes a collective part of the ritual as the seven women sing first to each other and then gradually to the audience. The ritual becomes participatory and boundaries between actors and audience fall away. Shange’s tragic protagonist, Crystal, the Lady in Red, engages the audience by transporting them from a literal to a metaphysical realm where they may question how this theatrical experience might enrich and support their own lives and community. The tragedy of the two children of Crystal and Beau Willie Brown, Naomi and Kwame, is not solely a tragic act; they do not die in vain, and Shange does not end the play with their deaths. The tragedy of the two children becomes a necessary ritual sacrifice, initiating what playwright and theorist Wole Soyinka has termed the “cleansing, binding, communal, recreative force” of ritualized drama (Soyinka 1976: 4). This experience serves the community of women onstage as well as the audience community, as all are bound together by the tragic experience and called to reflect on the meaning of the children’s death. Only after the testimony of Crystal, the witnessing by the community, and the subsequent sacrifice of the innocent is the tragic experience elevated from the individual to the communal, the literal to the metaphysical, and from death to rebirth. It is a re-creation of the African continuum, a regenerative cycle that operates from beginning to end and then back again. The cruel, tragic ending—what Soyinka calls the “pessimistic line” that extends from classical Greek through Elizabethan drama—is absent from Shange’s choreopoem; instead there is an extension of the power of the ritual. The process of healing, regeneration, and rebirth for both the community of women and the audience begins. Shange’s ritual poetics understands drama in its symbolic dimension yet appreciates the event as a reality. The transformation is not only implied, it actually takes place.

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for colored girls illustrates several points of Soyinka’s philosophical treatise “The Fourth Stage,” which explores the connections between Yoruba drama, religion, and myth. Soyinka locates African theatricality in the realm of African spirituality. The “fourth stage” is a continuum between the past, present, and future, that is, between the ancestors, the living, and the unborn. Ritual and sacrifice serve to appease the cosmic powers in order to reunite these realms and bridge the “transitional abyss” created in mankind’s primordial existence (Olaniyan: 48). For Soyinka, the purpose of tragic drama is to promote the well-being of the community. Dramatic work should have a regenerative and healing effect; the regenerative force is what Soyinka would substitute for Aristotle’s imitative process. Shange’s drama draws power from the combination of ritualized dance, voice, and song to further evoke the purifying regenerative and communal force. Soyinka theorizes this tragic drama as one that has a positive social function: to energize the community. In The Drama of Nommo, Paul Carter-Harrison writes, “The aims of the black theater are inspired by a social ethic which is diametrically opposed to the presumed cultural hierarchy of the Western world. . . . If the play is to give up a meaningful revelation, it must be liberated from Western thought” (Harrison 1972: 195). Harrison’s position reflects the ideology of the black arts movement of the 1960s, which demanded a serious reevaluation of black art and literature and the construction of dramatic theatre that reflected black cultural identity. The work of such artists as Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez exemplified this movement and was forceful in moving black theatre away from the dominance of Western cultural values and toward cultural responsibility to the black community—with an emphasis on an aesthetic derived from the African Diaspora. In the spirit of the black arts ideology, Shange’s choreopoem rejects the conventions of Western dramatic realism for a genre of theatre that incorporates and makes meaning out of black folk ritual, dance, song, and storytelling. But, more significantly, its distinct use of the black female voice deconstructs the popular patriarchal images of black women. As each woman tells a particular story and engages the collective community of women, each begins to reconstruct black female identity on her own terms. The story of each woman’s experience serves to initiate her self-affirmation and eventual healing through finding her own self-worth: “my love is too delicate to have thrown / back in my face” (46). The other women echo this sentiment, asserting that their love is too “beautiful,” too “sanctified,” too “magic,” too “complicated” to have thrown back in their faces. In for colored girls, Shange underscores the metaphysical transformation of black womanhood to heal the soul and renew the spirit of black women. She further challenges the conventional forms of Western drama by creating her own rules of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and syntax. By adopting a black vernacular, in which the words must fit the rhythm and not the other way around, she challenges the rigidity of standard English. Shange’s language works on an emotional level to make her personal experiences, voice, and vision available to her audience. She works the storytelling vernacular, with its particular stylistic cadences and spontaneity, in the

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manner of the black preacher, the African griot, or the Vodoun priestess. This method of storytelling requires that the psychic and physical energies of the audience be channeled together through the context of shared experiences. Shange presents the intricacies and nuances of life that are specific to black females while at the same time illuminating the complex issues of identity and existence that are universal to all women. She underscores the commitment to the self-reconstruction of black womanhood. “I’ve decided to wear my ovaries on my sleeve / raise my poems on my milk / & count my days by the flow of my menses / the men who were poets were aghast / fled the scene in fear of becoming unclean” (Shange 1978: 16). According to Soyinka, in Africa deities are intermediaries in the human effort both to resolve the existential dilemma of being and non-being and to affect the forces of nature (Soyinka 1976: 1). In Shange’s play, the metaphysical challenge of existence and identity finds expression in the nothingness and disunity that comes of the double burden of being born black and female in a society defined by white Western male values: “being alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma / i haven’t conquered yet / do you see the point my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender / my love is too delicate to have thrown // back on my face” (45). Shange explores the difficulty of being black and female in a society steeped in sexism and racism as she details the black woman’s experience, rejecting the Cartesian dualism she sees as the “separation of soul and gender.” The women in the choreopoem experience a sense of emptiness that comes from living in a man-centered world that devalues their wisdom. These women are “half-notes scattered // without rhythm / no tune” (3). The women seek to transcend the emptiness of “another song with no singers / lyrics / no voices,” of pain and self-negation: “are we animals? have we gone crazy?” (3–4); and they experience profound transformation and rebirth by evoking metaphysical forces through prayer, incantation, and the laying on of hands. Their communal act of witnessing creates a force that transcends their individual solitary existence, as each woman’s value is affirmed by the others. Traditional African spiritual forces include deities who coexist alongside human mortals and the gods. In the Yoruba spiritual practice of West Africa, they are called orisas, and they include Oshun, Yemaya, and Oya, three female orisas. African spiritualists create channels of access to the gods through their relationships with the orisas by incantation and testifying. Shange uses a similar method in for colored girls. The women emphasize the importance of naming and celebrating their experience in word and song, as the Lady in Brown exemplifies: somebody / anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin / struggle / hard times

304 jean young sing her song of life she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she’s half-notes scattered without rhythm / no tune sing the song of her possibilities. (4–5)

Humans attempt to affect the forces of nature by using orisas to initiate contact with the gods. Shange uses the traditions of African spirituality to initiate the process of the women’s healing and transformation: “let her be born / & handled warmly” (5) is one of the opening lines of the choreopoem, and it ends with a healing ritual: “a layin on of hands,” “makin me whole” and “pure” with “all the gods comin into me / layin me open to myself” (60–61). Shange’s dramaturgy operates in the symbolic arena of spiritual connection, and ritual facilitates the connection of the human and the spirit force. Jay Wright explains that a similar worldview is held by the Akan of West Africa: “[The Akan] sees experience and knowledge as cumulative, the cosmos as creatively and harmonically ordered, the social and physical world as a unitary system of infinite complexity and correspondences. . . . What is necessary is terms to control the experience. Ritual understands and accomplishes this” (Harrison 1989: xiv). Central to ritual is the concept of àse, a life force present in all elements of the universe. According to Akan belief, inanimates such as song, music, and dance possess their own kind of power, which Harrison defines as “Nommo force.” The women in Shange’s choreopoem transform Crystal’s experience—”i found god in myself / & . . . i loved her fiercely” (63)—into a chant that emotionally validates the content of her words. Hesitant at first, the chant gathers momentum through repetition and creates a subconscious state or spiritual possession conveying an emotional reality that is rational and concrete. Access to the spiritual world becomes an important part of unraveling the “metaphysical dilemma of bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored” (45). In the black church, the preacher activates the power of the spoken word through call-and-response that uses singing and chanting to create a metaphysical connection with the spirit. Testifying through call-and-response is a common feature in traditional African communities. In the traditional prayer of the Akan, usually made up of petitions and requests, call-and-response is an important expressive technique between a deity and her subject. During prayer, onlookers often express their concurrence, after each pause saying “Ampa ara” (It is just the truth) or “Yonn” (Yes indeed!) (Holloway: 219). Shange employs call-and-response in the following passage: lady in yellow . . . my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face . . . lady in brown my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face

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lady in purple my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face lady in blue my love is too magic. (46, 47)

The Lady in Brown begins as the “mistress of ceremonies.” She gives the “call,” or the signal for the women to come together in the name of all colored women. The second part of Shange’s ritual is the word and testament, and this is an integral part of the black spiritual experience in the New World. The Lady in Brown tells the story of the trials that they have all experienced: this must be the spook house another song with no singers lyrics / no voices & interrupted solos unseen performances are we ghouls? children of horror? the joke? don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul. (3–4)

The opening stage directions call for a darkened stage. Harsh music and dim blue lights fade in. One by one, each of the women runs onto the stage from each of the exits. They freeze in postures of distress. The Lady in Brown is spotlighted and offers the opening testimony on their mutual condition: they are “half notes scattered,” a metaphor for the fragmented condition of their lives. They exist in the “dark phases of womanhood” and suffer the profound sense of loss of “never havin been a girl.” The inability to name the world around them is signified by the “melody-less-ness of [their] dance” and their silence: “don’t tell a soul.” The Lady in Brown uses the Nommo force to break their silence and tells the stories that begins their eventual healing and transformation: sing a righteous gospel the making of a melody let her be born let her be born. (5)

Central to Shange’s theme in for colored girls is the profound sense of loss endured by the women—profound and troubling enough that is has led them to consider suicide. Moving “to the ends of their own rainbows” is movement toward independence, reconnection, and female self-actualization; the rainbow comes after the storm. The Lady in Brown completes these lines as she is joined by the other women of color, who affirm their collective purpose: to tell the story of “colored girls who have considered suicide / but moved to the ends of their own rainbows” (6). The stage is set for this collective healing and rebirth and ultimately leads to a laying on of hands as a healing rite that will transform the nature and spirit of the black

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women’s identity from “half notes scattered” to the love of self like the “dawn dew” and “chill at daybreak,” the “holiness of myself released” (63). The women’s transition—from a state of anonymity and dependence on male approval into womanhood and the realization that love starts with self—is symbolized by the “rainbow.” In a 1976 interview with Clive Barnes, Shange explained why she wrote the play: “The reason that for colored girls is entitled for colored girls is that that’s who it was for. I wanted them [young females] to have information that I did not have. I wanted them to know what it was truthfully like to be a grown woman. I didn’t know. All I had was a whole bunch of . . . tales and outright lies. I want them to know that they are not alone and that we adult women thought and continue to think about them” (Lester: 27). Indeed, Shange’s choreopoem explores the emotional, physically painful, and isolating experiences of young females positioned to encounter potentially damaging “rites of passage.” She portrays the loss of virginity, the resulting emotional pain and isolation of an unplanned pregnancy, and the horror and emotional turmoil of a lifethreatening illegal abortion: grime from age wiped over once legs spread anxious eyes crawling up on me eyes rollin in my thighs metal horses gnawin my womb dead mice fall from my mouth i really didnt mean to i really didnt think i cd just one day off . . . get offa me all this blood bones shattered like soft ice-cream cones. (22)

The play’s episodes are arranged in an order of increasing horror, as the women gradually expose themselves, their experiences and their pain, until the climactic revelation of the Lady in Red, who removes her mask of third-person narrator to reveal her identity—she is Crystal, whose children were dropped from the fifth-floor window by their father, Beau Willie: “at alla the people screamin at him / & he started sweatin again / say to all the neighbors / you gonna marry me / i stood by beau in the window / with naomi reachin for me / & kwame screamin mommy mommy from the fifth story / but i cd only whisper / & he dropped em” (60). Crystal’s devastating story prompts the women to look within themselves to discover what “waz missin” from their lives. Shange follows this nightmarish scene with a healing of the emotional pain suggested earlier in the play: “let her be born / let her be born / & handled warmly” (5). A spiritual cleansing, a ritual rebirth, a laying on of hands by the community of women: lady in red i waz missin somethin

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lady in purple somethin so important lady in orange somethin promised lady in blue a layin on of hands lady in green finger near my forehead . . . lady in purple makin me whole . . . a layin on of hands. (60–61)

This poem marks the beginning of the actual laying on of hands, a communal ritual that embodies the cleansing, binding, and regenerative forces of methexis drama. This marks the need to remember the destructive past in order to move on to a different awareness, one that encompasses sisterhood and agency in place of isolation and silence. The Lady in Blue names what is missing, “a layin on of hands” the sharing, giving, and receiving with each other, the energy of hands and touching and drawing out the distress and the impurities as part of a final cleansing ritual. The other women respond with words that describe the laying on of hands, “cool,” “strong,” “movin,” “pure,” “all the gods comin into me / layin me open to myself” (61), as a relationship with the spiritual world is established. Traditionally, sickness or distress can result from spiritual possession, and a person ordained by a deity can come to calm the soul and undo the possession. This is illustrated by the Luvale of Zambia in a spirit possession ritual, where the doctor invokes the ancestral “shades,” that are believed to inhabit the patient’s body and cause the sickness. The shades are made manifest through possession—as evidenced by the performance of codified dance movements associated with each different cult. The doctor gives the patient medicines and attempts to exorcise the shades through a combination of the inhalation of steam from the medicines and by dancing (Hoch-Smith: 172). In this scene the act of touching serves to physically and spiritually ground the women and leads them to affirm one other. Ritual allows them access to powers greater than themselves and enables them to channel those healing forces into each other. Through this act of grounding and affirmation they gain access to spiritual forces and emerge from a state of nothingness into a profound sense of communal belonging, as the Lady in Red testifies: i fell into a numbness till the only tree i cd see took me up in her branches held me in the breeze made me dawn dew that chill at daybreak

308 jean young the sun wrapped me up swingin rose light everywhere the sky laid over me like a million men i waz cold / i was burnin up / a child & endlessly weaving garments for the moon wit my tears. (63)

Shange locates this celebration of rebirth in the tradition of an animist spirit that forcefully positions the physical struggle of the women with the metaphysical. In this last poem, Crystal describes her transition from a “numbness” or nothingness so extreme that she contemplated suicide, into a state of harmony with herself, the universe, nature, and the women around her. Traditional West African belief conceptualizes a life force manifest in all elements of the universe; accordingly, this power can animate nature in order to affect the welfare of the people. In accordance with this belief, the Lady in Red describes the sensual feeling of transcendence and spirituality as the sun wrapping “me up swingin rose light everywhere”; the tree that “took me up in her branches / held me in breeze.” She then describes a mystical passage rite whereby a maternal presence returns her to childhood; “i waz cold / i was burnin up / a child,” and finally a rebirth: lady in brown & this is for colored girls who have considered suicide / but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows. (60–61)

As we have seen, the laying on of hands is a healing folk practice among black Americans. Chester Higgins Jr. recalls his great aunt Shugg, a respected midwife and nurse, who was asked to heal a man who had suffered a severe burn to his leg. Aunt Shugg went right to work and cleaned the wound as he lay stretched on the bed. Then she knelt down on her knees and brought her face closer for what I thought was to get a better look. But she closed her eyes and holding something in her hands above the wound began to mutter so silently I couldn’t hear the words. As she spoke to the wound, it became clear the intensity of the man’s pain lessened until it seemed he no longer felt any. I had never seen anything like it in my eight years of living. (Higgins: 266–267)

When the young Higgins asked his aunt what she had done, she replied, “I talked the pain out. I have to locate the spirit of the pain and establish a relationship with it and convince it to leave.” Aunt Shugg practiced a traditional healing ritual passed on to her from her mother and grandmother before her. In the African tradition of the power of the spoken word, Aunt Shugg talked the pain out . . . At the end of for colored girls, the seven women collectively invoke the chant: “i found god in myself / & i loved her / i loved her fiercely,” as they move toward selflove. The chant becomes a song of self-affirmation and community as the women sing first to each other and then gradually to the audience. The stage directions read, “After the song peaks, the ladies enter into a closed tight circle”; this circle is reminiscent of the ritual ring shout of black religious life, especially prevalent just after

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emancipation. It is also found today as a part of black southern culture in the United States and in West Indian, South American, and Haitian religious life. An early instance of this ritual shout of spiritual possession comes from a traveler in the early 1880s who noted it in a black church in Jacksonville, Florida, where the congregation shouted, “While Heaven’s in my view / My journey I’ll pursue / I never will turn back / While Heaven’s in my view” (Holloway: 109). As dramatic ritual, for colored girls who have considered suicide ends in the traditional manner of an African story, with metaphors and parables that illuminate the lesson or message of the story. Neither the conclusive “happily-ever-after” ending nor the sequence of events is important here. What is important is the transformative and healing force of the play through the power of testament. The ritual is what moves the women to the ends of their own rainbows, away from anxiety, despair, pain, denial, and frustration toward self-discovery, hope, and rebirth. This concluding ring shout ritual animates the rainbow vision and conveys a sense of rejuvenation that links them with other women of the Diaspora and their traditional African spiritual heritage.

Notes 1. The choreopoem is defined by Neal A. Lester in Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays as a “theatrical expression that combines poetry, prose, song, dance, and music” (Lester: 3). 2. There was a virtual avalanche of criticism of Shange’s play that focused on the “male-female crisis” of black people. In defense of Shange, Sandra Hollin Flowers’s essay, “Colored Girls: Text Book for the Eighties” in Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981): 51–54, says of Shange’s portrayal of black men that the primary focus of for colored girls is “on the quality of relationships between Black women and their men.” See also Neal A. Lester’s essay, “Shange’s Men: ‘for colored girls’ Revisited, and Movement Beyond,” African American Review 26 (summer 1992): 319–29; Lester considers Shange sympathetic toward males in their attempt to define manhood. Harsher critiques insist that Shange, as a feminist, severely maligns black men. See Harold Clurman’s review, “A Nite with Beau Willie Brown,” which describes the play as a “tragically violent story about her good lover.” T. E. Kalem’s reivew (“He Done Her Wrong,” Time, June 14, 1976, 74) claims that Shange portrays black men as “brutal con men.” See also John Simon’s vicious attack, “On Stage: Enuf Is Not Enough,” in The New Leader 59 (July 5, 1976): 21. Curtis Rogers accuses Shange of caricaturing both black women and black men (“Black Men View For Colored Girls / Good Theatre but Poor Sociological Statement,” New York Amsterdam News [October 9, 1967]). Robert Staples sees a collective appetite for black male blood (“The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” Black Scholar [March/April 1979]), while Jacqueline Tescott insists that Shange’s men are “scheming, lying, childish and brutal baby killers . . . humiliated for the message of sisterly love” (“Ntozake Shange: Searching for Respect and Identity,” Washington Post, June 29, 1976, B1). 3. The most oft-cited evidence for the view of the play as a black feminist attack on black men is the emotionally difficult and controversial monologue by the Lady in Red (Crystal), who tells the story of how Beau Willie Brown dropped her children from a fifth-floor window.

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References Brater, Enoch, ed. Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Butcher, S. H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1911. Christ, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980. Gleason, Judith. Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess. San Francisco: Harper, 1987. Harrison, Paul Carter, ed. The Drama of Nommo. New York: Grove Press, 1972. ———. Totem Voices: Plays for the Black World Repertory. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Higgins, Chester Jr., Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. Hill, Errol, ed. The Theatre of Black Americans. New York: Applause, 1987. Hoch-Smith, Judith, ed. Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. New York: Plenum Press, 1978. Holloway, Joseph E., ed. Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Ketu, Katrak H. Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1990. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. Murphy, Joseph M. Santería: African Spirits in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Richards, Sandra L. “Conflicting Impulses in the Plays of Ntozake Shange.” In Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983): 73–78. Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. New York: Macmillan, 1977. ———. nappy edges. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ———. Art, Dialogue and Outrage. Ibadan, Nigeria: New Horn Press, 1988. Splawn, P. Jane. Rites of Passage in the Writing of Ntozake Shange: The Poetry, Drama and the Novels. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1988.

Part IV Performance

Overleaf: Ntésié (or Maté-masié), the ideogram of knowledge, is linked with the oral tradition. The knowledgeable person is one who listens well to the seers and retains everything.

Gus Edwards

Introduction

It is necessary to eradicate the misconception that African and African American theatre is an exotic variation of Western European theatre and must therefore be governed by its general principles and aesthetics—a notion has prevailed both in academic circles and in the popular mind for nearly a century. “We are not white theatre in black face,” playwright Ed Bullins (along with many other black theatre artists) has been saying since the 1960s.1 Yet in the minds of the general public this impression still exists because the so-called opinion makers in the mainstream press refuse to acknowledge our differences, whether out of ignorance or a deliberate attempt to deny us our specific identity as the descendents of Africans. Therefore we must once more go to the mountain, raise our voices, and shout down into the canyon: No, this is not so! African American theatre is governed by its own set of rules and disciplines, evolved out of our experience in the New World and informed by the music, ritual, dance, mask making, and song/chant of Africa. “Our aesthetic is performative and not didactic. In practice it subverts the European definition of aesthetic. It must be understood that when I make theatre, Haiti is in my mind but Brazil is in my hips,” Ntozake Shange announced to a gathering at Dartmouth College on a crisp winter day in March 1998, to the cheers of her African American audience.2 We must train our artists to be true to themselves and their culture, I believe, because it has been so rigorously trained out of them. It must be understood that our spiritual past and future are rendered through the movement, music, and language that emerges out of our culture, then and now. Only when we express our art in this way can we truly express who we are. In a recent interview on performance and preparation for performance, Douglas Turner Ward, actor, playwright, and director and co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), offered these observations: The only vehicle for acting is yourself. No agency other than yourself. And since you will start from there you have to start from that which is most familiar to that self. What you know, what you experience, what you heard. With black actors they start in broad and various ways, crossing many lines of class and experience but essentially in our context of America we have been shaped by a particularly unique experience which happens to be

314 gus edwards common to other black people in other parts of the world because of the Diaspora. Having some earlier link to Africa that is a common historical/cultural experience that transforms itself, that crosses boundaries. I mean you could say those brought to the West Indies, those brought to Brazil, those brought to the United States, all share a history of subjugation, dispersal, etc., that has created a common background. That is what’s closest to us, whether we like it or not. Whether we try to escape it or not. Culture is very specific, creativity is very specific. Artistry is very specific. It’s not some vague, evanescent sort of liberal nonsense about color-blind casting. There’s no such thing. . . . When you don’t see color, the only color you see is then white. There’s no such thing as color blindness. It doesn’t make things superior, there’s no experience that’s superior to another. But at least in order for everybody to be equal one has to acknowledge the primacy, as a starting point, of one’s own specific cultural background.3

Some years ago, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Charles Fuller put it this way: Culture is a reflection of a country’s estimate of itself. There’s no reason to believe in the United States, where the majority of the population is white, that there is ever going to be a time when this country assesses itself in terms of black man. That’s just ludicrous. That’s just not going to happen. So the best it can do is say things like, “Well, Michael Jordan is one of the best basketball players of all time, but then black people are always good at sports.” There’s always a qualification in there. When it comes to the arts, white people’s praise for your work implies to a certain extent that you have captured the use of this language in the same manner that white people use it. It is a specious kind of praise in a strange kind of way. For me it is reasonable to assume that having spoken English all my life and having read English all my life I would learn how to use English. But racism gets in the way of that. Racism says that most black people don’t know how to do that. Racism says, “I have a place for black people in my mind and that place does not include literature. It does not include literacy, literature, or creative art in any way, shape, or form.” I will tell people I am an artist. That is a shocking statement to them.4

And so it seems that whenever we think we have finished with the battle, we discover, sometimes to our surprise, that we have only begun. The world has changed and so have we, but certain patterns persist. And once more we must assert the richness of our individuality, we must assert our unique cultural perspectives. And the most dynamic forum we have for these assertions lies in our performative expression. So it is very important that we not allow it to be codified or tamed by obeisance to the dictates of the social majority. We must defend and protect our performative expression as passionately as we can. And we have a natural ally in the black audience. Thomas Pawley noted years ago in Players magazine: “With efforts being made to build Black Theatre . . . and the increasing demand by students for Black Theatre on college campuses it might be well to observe that members of a typical black audience tend to react both verbally and nonverbally, to express their reactions and emotions by clapping their hands, stomping their feet and verbally addressing the actors on stage.”5 “We never had to read the New York Times to know if we had a hit on our hands,” Doug Ward of the NEC told me in 1995. “We knew it from the reaction of our black audiences who, thankfully, have not been trained out of spontaneous and sometimes unruly response.”6 Ward also pointed out that Shakespeare’s

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audiences at the Globe Theatre in London reacted in a similar fashion until decades later, when the yoke of “good manners” all but destroyed their spontaneity. Much of our reaction as theatre audiences results from the spontaneity of our lives and from our experiences of churchgoing, nightclubbing, and attending sporting events. The essays in this section address the changing forms of black performance and their connections to other aspects of our living experiences, from churchgoing to street dancing, social discourse, and history. Our history. In his essay “Form and Transformation,” Paul Carter Harrison observes that “The dramatization of black experience, without benefit of a forceful, spiritually expressive mode is a defused spectacle of life. . . . These staged events do not release the transformative potential of the black experience. . . . It is widely accepted that, owing to the incantatory power of the preacher to rouse emanations of the spirit, few can leave the black church ritual the same way they entered.” Ntozake Shange, in “Porque Tu No M’entrende,” points out that the Middle Passage “was not monolingual, nor were the grape and lettuce fields, the avocado and cane fields of Florida and Cuba and the Yucatan, nor the rice paddies of the Carolinas and the Philippines and Vietnam, nor the rhythm and blues songs of South Central L.A. or Houston Vietnam Town.” And Amiri Baraka’s essay “Bopera Theory” tells us that the ancient world was “organized socially by primitive communalism. The old African aesthetic still speaks directly of this. . . . Afro-American music is still fundamentally a collective and improvised communal expression. The call-and-response frenzy of the earliest song forms can be heard in Stevie Wonder or John Coltrane.” These essays and the others in this section all attest in one way or another to the fullness and vitality of our performative expression. From Caribbean street dancing to African drumbeat, from ritualizing space to hip-hop and beyond, the black artistic experience is one of vibrancy, intensity, and integrity. “I don’t know what ‘Black Drama’ is. I just know that I’m a certain way, and that way nurtures me. . . . See, I don’t separate dance from singing, from writing, from directing. There’s really only the experience,” says Barbara Ann Teer in Lundeana Thomas’s “From Holistic Training to Liberating Rituals.” We are at the dawn of a new century. And with this dawning comes the opportunity for new enlightenment and new learning. There is no better place to start. Let us begin.

Notes 1. Louis Mason, “The Electronic Nig Meets the Gold Dust Twins,” interview with Ed Bullins and Robert Macbeth, Black Theatre (May–September 1969). 2. Ntozake Shange, speech delivered at the African American Theatre Conference, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 7, 1998. 3. Interview with Douglas Turner Ward, December 18, 2000. 4. Interview with Charles Fuller, March 1988. 5. Thomas Pawley, “The Black Theatre Audience,” Players (August–September 1971): 37. 6. Interview with Douglas Turner Ward, June 1995.

Paul Carter Harrison

Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? —Psalms 137:1–4

As Africans in the New World, black performing artists are faced with the daunting challenge of how to sing the liberating song of our ancestors in a hostile, alien land. Having been dislocated from the site of our ancestry, memory of the liberating song demands an inquiry into our spiritual origins. In most of the world’s cultures, the creation of all existence is believed to originate in the hidden activity of a Supreme Being. This hidden activity is often referred to as “the Word,” spoken or gesticulated. In the West African nation of Mali, the Dogon people’s version of the Word is the Nommo, which is understood to be the creative force that gives form to all things. The benefits of the Nommo, however, are received primarily through ritual: a specific, formalized activity that a people create in order to achieve a particular psychological, physical, or spiritual result for individuals and the community. It is through

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the specific ritual reenactment of the divine creation of the cosmos that participants in the ritual understand its human purpose: a cosmic bonding with the Creator, or Nommo force, which promotes spiritual enlightenment and corporeal empowerment. The practice of ritual, as Amiri Baraka observes in his essay “Bopera Theory,” is “the oldest root of performance” that leads to “the transformation of the human consciousness. “For the ritual to be effective, however, the participants must access the soul, the source of spiritual energy where ancestral memory is stored; and they must use the appropriate invocations to petition the ancestral memory. When the soul is touched, the ancestral spirit is awakened to empower the body/mind to greater spiritual fulfillment through enlightenment. Ancestral memory, then, is the essential foundation of the aesthetic objectives of African American inventions, both sacred and secular. The soul is our fundamental reality, the repository of the ancestral spirit that fuels the imaginings of the mind. It is the inner force of such ancestral spirit/memory—referred to by Robert Farris Thompson as a flash of the spirit—that also guides the imagination. It is thus necessary briefly to discuss this thing called soul in both African and Western perspectives. Africans in the New World are intimately familiar with the spiritual objectives of the Judeo-Christian theology that views mortals as once-perfect creations of God who became imperfect through original sin and must therefore seek atonement from God. Atonement allows the soul to find rest from its eternal struggle with good and evil. This creation story does not work for African cultures. Irrespective of the psychic and spiritual disjuncture of the Middle Passage, J. B. Danquah’s exegesis of the soul, gleaned from the ancient Akan sacred paradigm, is more appropriate to the sensibilities of African diasporic cultures. It is interesting to note, however, a correspondence between the Akan paradigm and the Platonic view of the soul, which recognized a need to close the distance between the corporeal and non-corporeal worlds. Plato views the soul as a nurturer of the divine musings of God that seeks to realize spiritual divinity by reuniting with the divine. As with the earlier, traditional Akan paradigm, the soul in its fullness is understood in the Platonic schema to be a harmony, not a duality, between corporeal experience and non-corporeal spirit. Plato recognized that the loss of such spiritual harmony is the result of the soul’s turning away from the divine source, thereby forgetting itself; hence the mortal’s experience of duality. Having lost “the recollection of those things which our soul once saw when following God,” the soul loses cognizance of its divinity. Despite this loss of harmony, the soul will be aroused when it encounters divine beauty, for this encounter will give it knowledge of its true and original nature. In J. B. Danquah’s description of the Akan sacred system, God (Onyame) is identified as the Supreme Being, the Shining One, Absolute, Virtue and Righteousness. Emanating from the Shining One is the Okra (soul or spirit), which is in the first place an individuated spirit, even when encapsulated in the flesh of the corporeal human being. The mission of the Okra is to fulfill itself in virtue; and its commission, in its corporeal form, is to accumulate and develop its virtue in a social context. Social harmony is thus achieved when the individual’s Okra is fulfilled, through the acquisi-

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tion of virtue within society. Since each individual spirit has access to the Shining One, it is not distanced from God by its existence in the temporal world. The Okra is the bearer and instrument of man’s destiny (Nkrabea) and the guiding intelligence for each individual’s effort to accumulate, within the social context, the requisite virtue to fulfill the spiritual destiny of reuniting with God. Danquah eloquently reminds us that an Okra is the intelligence or nous that comes out of the Nkrabea (destiny) of the Sunsum (personality of the soul) and the Hyebea (life ordained by nature) of God. It is a part of true being, or is in the path to share true being, is in its nature divine, and no contamination with sin or evil is possible for it. The evil soul or Okara is a chimera of our own imagination (Danquah: 86–87). Implicit in the Akan view is a major difference from the Platonic: while both acknowledge a profound struggle for the soul in its quest to acquire knowledge of its true virtue, Plato sees the soul as having been created perfect but as falling into imperfection through disobedience to God, which is original sin. In the Akan view, there is no original sin. The soul or Okra is always divine because it is not separated from the divine source; the soul has a dynamic relationship with the Shining One. Thus, whatever the soul encounters in the corporeal form cannot compromise its divinity, but merely retard its fulfillment and prolong its mission for fulfillment. While the Okra may become spiritually ignorant when encountering evil in the temporal world, it does not become socially dysfunctional. With the death of the body, the Okra reencounters the divine source, but it must be returned to the temporal world, reincarnated as flesh, in order to accrue the essential wisdom needed to achieve fulfillment of its divine virtue. Its return to earth is not a punishment for corporeal, spiritual, or moral transgressions; to the contrary, it is a continual opportunity for incremental learning of the spiritual knowledge that leads to the fulfillment of virtue through acts of goodness that promote social harmony: It is like a man who dips a bucket into a deep well. The weight of the bucket when lifted up from the well tells whether it is full of water or not. If it is felt to be light, down it goes for a second, and maybe a third and forth, dip, until the weight assures the man the bucket is full. So is the soul’s coming forth and going back into the source. He is not lifted up and taken into service with the source until his bucket of Nkrabea (destiny) is completely filled with good—until the destiny of the soul is fully realized. (Danquah: 82)

Reincarnated in the flesh, the soul relocates itself in a collective context—blood kinship—in order to carry out its commission. Within the intimacy of this social context, with its hierarchical arrangement of blood kinship (including immediate mother and father and the extended linkages to ancestors and the Shining One), the soul is able to draw upon the accumulated spiritual knowledge needed to resume the quest for divine virtue. Herein lies the foundation of African ancestor worship, which permits individuals access, through rigorous ritual performances, to the accumulated knowledge of ancestors. This knowledge reveals “all the modes of traditional inheritance which make for a greater and a more constant achievement and a greater and more real correlation of total effort of virtuous men with the complete good” (Danquah: 91).

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This brief summary of an African exegesis of the soul offers insight into how the songs of our ancestors are sung: “This lil’ light of mine / I’m gonna let it shine / let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” When the ancestral memory is awakened in the soul, the expressive response is toward self-illumination and thus spiritual enlightenment, as we see in the performative ritual of the New Orleans Second Line that celebrates the spirit of the soul that has gone home after leaving the body behind in the corporeal world. The communal performance becomes a testimonial reminder that mortals are always in a state of becoming united with the divine source, since to be does not mean to exist in the flesh but to be in spirit, and this truth is apparent in all African diasporic cultures, which tend to be guided by an unabashed sense of spirituality. It is perhaps this spiritual sense, irrespective of the disruptive and corrosive impact of having been dislocated from our natural site of being and accumulated traditional knowledge, that has allowed the African spirit to persevere with such strength and resiliency. While the Pilgrims had envisioned America as a promised land, a new Jerusalem, Africans arriving through the Middle Passage had a vision of the Americas as a hostile, alien land, a howling wilderness. In the process of forced relocation, Africans in the New World had desperately to examine, evaluate, and judge their new world through an African lens in order to reassemble their dislocated souls. In the process of relocating self through an African lens, diasporic Africans in the Americas have tended to reclaim Africa as the locus of reconstruction and invention of self-image. This has been more than some arbitrary effort to establish a sense of pedigree. It has been, and is, a necessary strategy for surviving slavery, colonization, and their aftermath, by identifying the primal traditions needed to reinvigorate their sense of spiritual continuity and empowerment. By this strategy New World Africans have been able to reconstruct and reinvent self-image, just as Africans living on the continent have been forced to reconstruct the authority of authentic traditions corrupted by colonialism. Africans enslaved in the Americas revealed a diversity of cultural origins and customs, yet shared a common worldview that fused man and spirit in a single universe. The agonies of the physical world required them to adapt in order to bring a modicum of order out of the chaos of enslavement (Pitts: 35). Buttressed by an incorruptible sacred sensibility, the secular inventions of New World Africans were accorded iconic continuity as well. Lawrence Levine has observed the sacred sensibility of traditional African societies as being “a means of extending the world spatially upward so that communication with the other world becomes ritually possible, and extending it temporally backward so that the paradigmatic acts of god and mythical ancestors can be continually reenacted and indefinitely recoverable” (Levine: 30–55). Though forced into an intimacy with a New World culture that privileged the material world, slaves gathered covertly at night in the Hush Harbors, those secret “woods, gullies, ravines, and thickets” around the plantation where they adapted their spiritual rituals for the purposes of protesting slavery, curing illness, marking events such as marriage and death, expressing communal suffering, and, perhaps most importantly, instilling in the young “the esoteric sacred wisdom that also crossed the Atlantic”

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(Raboteau: 128; Fisher: 183, 10). The recognition of a reciprocal relationship between the corporeal and spiritual worlds found application in all aspects of practical life and fostered communal welfare. As Beverly Robinson has observed, these secret, sacred places had become “major areas of creativity and cultural demonstration where enslaved Africans could sustain their culture and express themselves with certain freedom” (Robinson: 2). Even games, spontaneously conceived with an inventive use of language, song, and dance, were testaments of self-reconstruction made intelligible through cyclical narrative gestures that incorporated the past and the present, the dead and the unborn. All of these rituals cemented social values and common beliefs and solidified both secular and sacred mythologies of group affiliation. Ring rituals became the most enduring type of sacred performance, however, including the popular Juba Dance and Ring Shouts, in which the Christian deity Jesus Christ was appropriated as the spiritual source for bonding with the supreme being. In the process, the song leader employed African-derived repetitive verse, which invokes a patterned response from the participants, who would shuffle their feet in a counter-clockwise circle, this call-and-response ritual “fueling an increase in tempo and loudness until some members in the Ring Shout begin to become possessed with the spirit” (Pitts: 93). The Ring Shout is a root paradigm for the sacred rituals practiced in African American fundamentalist churches. Through this ritual African Americans use biblical scripture and Christian deities—a pantheon of angels, saints, and disciples—without a sense that they are violating either their African heritage or the restrictive covenant of Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, these sacred rituals conflate lesser Christian gods with African orishas without becoming polytheistic in practice. Orishas are forces, distinguishable activities of the Nommo force that is God. They correspond to the mythical figures, the patron saints and angels who are summoned for specific needs and to the biblical figures such as Moses (the liberator), Ruth (the nurturer), or King David (the leader). Jesus, in the African sensibility, is not necessarily the source of salvation, or a Son in isolation from the Father; he is rather the Orisha/Son who allows passage to the Father, the Supreme Being. While Africans in the Caribbean and South America easily transmuted the Catholic pantheon of guardian angels and patron saints into orishas, African Americans used the Ring Shout to appeal to the supreme god. Participants in the Ring Shout invoked Christ, not orishas, to ride them toward spiritual connections with ancestral memory by performing mnemonic gestures that included “apart-playing, polyrhythms, cross-rhythms, time line, elisions, hockets, ululations, tremolos, vocables, grunts, hums, shouts, and melismatic phrasings of the homeland,” repositioning their values in a manner that assured communal unity and affirmed “identity in a new land” (Floyd: 39). Resolutely bound to ancestral memory, the sacred Ring Shout is also a significant paradigm for the expressive modes of secular performance, relying as it does on song, dance, and drum to revivify the ancient oral tradition in the New World. What is important in these rituals is how the story is told at a given time and place (for example, during the Great Migration or the Great Depression). The how in the perform-

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ance of oral tradition is what identifies African sensibility in the continuum. We discover in the vocalizations of the blues or rap conjurer an invocation to orishas that reaches beyond descriptive commentary to reveal encoded nuances of experience. The blues or rap conjurer manipulates sounds that alert us to shifts in the conditions of a particular musical mode, tapping into the invisible world for a symbolic language that illuminates the mythic layers of experience for the audience/participants. At the creative core of these invocations—how the story is told—is “rhythm,” which the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor reminds us is the architecture of being, the inner dynamic that gives form, the pure expression of the life force. Rhythm is the vibratory shock, the force which, through our sense, grips us at the root of our being. It is expressed through corporeal and sensual means; through lines, surfaces, colours, and volumes in architecture, sculpture or painting; through accents in poetry and music, through movements in dance. But, doing this, rhythm turns all these concrete things toward the light of the spirit. In the degree to which rhythm is sensuously embodied, it illuminates the spirit. (Senghor: 60)

Senghor’s assessment of the African creative process points to the significance of spiritual invocation as the procreative mediating force required to transform the corporeal experience. Since the commonplace in reality is the known, replication is not necessary in the creative process. The African creative process usually requires poetic language and gesture, a heightening of reality as opposed to a replication, even in its most mundane representational form. Thus, within the African American creative modes of expression—the slave songs, blues, field hollers, spirituals, and jazz of the music performance tradition; the oratory, wisdom tales, toasts, poetry, and sermons of the oral tradition; and even the expressive narratives of the visual arts tradition— we experience rhythm and repetition as the principal organizing devices for a panoply of performance strategies, including irony, parody, and tragicomedy. Rhythm and repetition are enhanced by the aesthetic confluence of call-and-response, vocal and gestural angularity, timbral distortion, off-beat phrasing, counter-riffs, vamps, and breaks that improvisationally weave images, tones, and ideas in and out of time and space to create a density of meaning. The result is a transmutation of the familiar in material life that unifies us collectively around the power of the ancestral spirit. Amiri Baraka writes that music “goes more deeply into the spirit than words” because it has “a readily apparent spirituality that transcends the visible world of its creators. . . . The sounds carry whatever information rests in the frequencies and rhythms and harmonies of the world, some known to us, some unknown” (“Bopera Theory,” p. 378 of this collection). In black music, all the devices of song—metronomic cadence, melody, harmony, and rhythm—are devoted to the amplification of those “frequencies” that reveal the “unknown” yet recoverable qualities of the soul. It is not the exotic surfaces of cultural expression that reveal the aesthetics of performance, but the spiritual enlightenment of the gesture. Thus a variety of performance strategies are employed to arouse ancestral memory, including the layered riffs of polyrhythm, repetition, improvisation, and the intonations of the pentatonic scale.

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Just as polyrhythm betrays the fixed expectations of time and space, Africans throughout the Diaspora resist the regularity and closure of the major scale and welcome the phonic tension of the pentatonic scale, which owns the angularity in sounds—blues notes—so prominent in black languages, offering opportunities to exploit its potential for improvisation in both verbal discourse and musical performance. A blues song or sacred sermon is unilluminating without spirituality. Spirituality is what we recognize in the soul-stirring syncopations of James Brown or the Florida A & M Marching Band (FAMU), in the sonority of a spiritual sung by Paul Robeson, or a rhythm & blues ballad performed by Aretha Franklin, or even an aria by Leontyne Price. Each of these performers generates the appropriate Nommo force required to invoke the procreative power of the invisible world that allows the audience to bear witness to the immanence of ancestral memory. The soulfulness of the performance corresponds to Komla Amoaku’s observations on the traditional music of Africa as being “the phonic expression of psychic experience generated within the spiritual framework of traditional institutions. . . . African music is symbolic, an expression and validation of psychic energy. African music is a living thing ensouled by the spiritual energy that travels through it” (Amoaku: 37). In African diasporic cultures, liberating illumination may be pursued in both sacred and profane experiences. Resisting a dualistic response to the soul, we discover in both the manipulation of sacred church texts and the profane storytelling on the street corner the highest—the most soulful—models of the oral tradition. The late, great blues songster Alberta Hunter once declared that when she sings I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry Yes, I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry What I’m doing is letting my soul out (Barlow: 152)

As Miss Hunter put it in an interview, “To me the blues are . . . well, almost religious. They’re like a chant. The blues are like spirituals, almost sacred. When we sing the blues, we’re singing out our hearts, we’re singing out our feelings. Maybe we’re hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues. Yes, to us the blues are sacred” (Barlow: 152). It is both unnecessary and inappropriate, then, to classify separately the ribald incantations of the blues and the lamentations of spirituals (sometimes referred to as sorrow songs), as they both serve the homeopathic objective of purging negative experiences by identifying the source of despair, hoping to change the condition with spiritual renewal that restores psychic and spiritual harmony. Indeed, James Cone has referred to the blues as “secular spiritual” (Cone: 108–42). And Lerone Bennett has observed that the African American cultural tradition “recognizes no such dichotomy. The blues are the spirituals, good is bad, god is the devil and every day is Saturday” (Bennett: 57).

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It is noteworthy that in today’s African American vernacular badness is a signifier of potency or power: it is power that is beautiful when it illuminates social goodness. Since beauty is synonymous with power or potency, the expressive articulation of song, dance, and drum must necessarily be, in the vernacular, bad, mean, and terrible, to empower the spectacle of beauty. We see this association in the Gospel at Colonus—a musical adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus conceived in a black church mode—where a rousing hymn provokes from a black audience already rooted in the sacred values of sanctuary, deliverance, and spiritual sanctuary, the appropriate incantation—thank you, Jesus—while they collectively share the redemption of the protagonist. Similarly, we hear in the voice of the embattled blues figure and trickster in Melvin Van Peeble’s Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, who sits perilously on a tenement rooftop (where he contemplates the possibility of liberation and empowerment in a hostile universe), the primal, incantory shout, “take yo’ hands off me, mista . . . i ain’t jumpin’ . . . this is the coolest place in town.” His shout is a spectacle of personal affirmation emblazoned with the light of the spirit, converting the posture of apparent self-destruction into an ironic moment of optimism that overcomes oppression. Without the benefit of a forceful, spiritually expressive character, the dramatization of black experience becomes frozen in sociological analysis. Narratives that reduce experience to simile, observes Richard K. Priebe, constrain the metaphoric potential of myth to “resolve the primary ontological, psychological, and physical contradictions that man has recurrently faced” (Priebe: 12). While drama, notes J. C. de Graft, “derives from everyday life . . . it is not the same thing as everyday life! . . . [It] is a condensation from everyday life, whose many aspects—visible and invisible, tangible and intangible—it attempts to manifest, embody, or affirm” (de Graft: 3). Contemporary black theatre in the United States has been characterized by three types of expressive strategies: 1) agit-prop constructions designed to raise ideological consciousness for political persuasion; 2) the biographical and melodramatic narratives that replicate the sociological and historical landscape of black experience; and 3) the innovative theatrical exercises of ritual reenactment of experience. In the first case, the narrative event is constructed in a didactic, one-dimensional, pseudo-journalistic, presentational mode. In the second, the narrative, guided by “an ethical consciousness,” adheres to a fixed representation of reality, the “outer reality that is like the historical one we daily experience and [that] is thus controlled by a corresponding continuity” (Priebe: 13). In such dramas, the theme is the first thing that touches our hearts, arousing our capacity to respond with predictable empathy or mirth. These staged events do not release the transformative potential of black experience. They are, rather, like journalistic slices of life, a chronicle of mundane experience arrested in an expositional tableau, prompting George C. Wolfe to observe, in his essay on performance method in this volume, that “when everybody has pre-programmed expectations for language or suffering, nobody is available to no one. And if nobody is interested in anyone because we think we know everything, theatre has

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no point in life. So, it becomes necessary to strip it down, make that which everybody thinks is commonplace, new.” Thus, in the third strategy, a mystery unfolds through a narrative fueled by the imagination of a “mythic consciousness”; it reenacts ritually an “ahistorical inner reality” that expands the boundaries of time and space, even “though reality is necessarily revealed in objective symbols that we can recognize” and has a “cyclical rhythm that we can feel” (Priebe: 13). While it is all too common for most observers to respond only to the thematic content strip-mined from the sociological surfaces of black experience without ever discerning the higher performance mission of spiritual revelation, the symbolic actions of myth, located in both sacred and secular experiences as a ritualized event, own the capacity to reveal the symbolized thing that is “transformative more than representational” (Smith: 57). Marimba Ani reminds us of the effectiveness of ritual reenactments: “The power of ritual drama as a cultural mechanism capable of restructuring ordinary categories of time and space is profound, startling and impressive: a different kind of transcendence indeed from the artificial construct that serves as the basis for rational thought. . . . Ritual drama . . . acts to transform the psyche to redefine reality for a special moment. It becomes a phenomenal reality” (Ani: 75). Malidoma Patrice Some, the scholar/diviner from Burkina Faso, informs us that what we witness as dysfunction in the visible world is merely the last stage of reality, “the tip of the iceberg.” In order to remedy the dysfunctions of physical reality, it is necessary to “locate its hidden area, its symbolic dimension” which has “roots in the world of the spirit.” Attempting to negotiate the physical realities of the visible world is “like trimming the leaves of a weed when you mean to uproot it,” since the visible is merely a manifestation of the invisible. What is perceived on the surface as reality is only the sign, logos connected to mythos, a reflection of a deep-rooted memory. The mechanism to uproot dysfunction is ritual which “offers a realm in which the unseen part of the dysfunction is worked on in its ways that affect the seen. Purpose (goal) is the driving force that contributes to the effectiveness of ritual” (Some: 43). Word-force, spoken or gesticulated, is essential for ritualistic illumination. If, indeed, the play is the thing, the ritual reenactment of familiar or anecdotal experience is not limited to verbal expression. We can see this in the gestural articulation of black experience revealed in the Savion Glover/George E. Wolfe collaboration for Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, or in the mimetic inventiveness of Gil Moses’s late-1960s production of Amiri Baraka’s Slaveship, that visceral depiction of the agonized crossing of the Middle Passage. Rather than simply document experience, the event was ritually reconstructed as a spectral thing, a mystery absorbed by the audience to clarify and make use of ancestral memory for the transformation of a spiritual state of being. As the artist Oliver Jackson has noted, in both verbal and non-verbal modes of expression, ritual is a means of making the thing that holds the mystery: “Every exchange that we have with the world, regardless of whether we call it spiritual or not, is through the world, by the senses, absorbing things, exploiting things by things, always relationships with things. When a person understands that, then they will not try to take the mystery from the thing, even though they may understand the me-

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chanics that led to how the thing came to be. The operation of a thing is forever a mystery” (Roby). African religion scholar John Mbiti has written that “religion is the African’s celebration of life and his source of survival, whereas traditional theatre is his way of giving witness to this” (Mbiti: 73). In the mid-1960s Barbara Ann Teer developed a performative style that would replace the “European self-conscious art” of theatre with a “God-conscious art” by introducing the ritualizing practices of the Holiness Pentecostal Church—retrieved from African ceremonies—into the ritual exercises of the National Black Theatre (NBT). The performers served as community witnesses, offering testimonies that often induced a sort of spiritual possession in the process of illuminating common experiences that invited an opportunity for social reappraisal and collective spiritual liberation. The NBT designated the style of performance as “ritualistic revival,” leading Mance Williams to observe, “The ritual part is a musical experience of overpowering creative force that entertains and transforms the audience. Combined in these rituals are elements of religion, dance, music, incantation, and the communal experience. The revival side expresses and celebrates the joy of living and provides for both performers and spectators a liberating catharsis” (Williams: 51). Clearly, bearing witness and testifying are principal objectives of both the black church and black music performance experience. Both construct a ritual strategy as a culturally derived sequence of words and actions—testimonies—expressed in varying degrees of formality and orchestrated with rhythm and repetition into a mode of power invocation that transforms the familiar experience into a new or heightened revelation of reality. For example, we discover in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf choric testimonies constructed in the form of poetic blues arias that awaken our consciousness to the female agency of spiritual kinship. The chorus element, a vital aspect of rituals, allows the choral figures to be conceived as the requisite archetypes for character transformations that urge us past the constraints of realism to bear witness to the soul’s immanence, illuminating our collective need to remedy an acute sense of crisis. It seems reasonable, then, that black theatre, as a vehicle for social edification and psychic clarity, might very well invent ritual reenactments that explore the mysteries of experience by minting performance strategies from the black church. Such a process of liberation and healing provides the benefit of clearer insight into corporeal experience achieved through the ritual reenactment of reality. In the “conjuring cultures” of the African Diaspora, notes Theophus Smith, healing is a function of soliciting the pharmocosmic properties of the cosmos so that dysfunctional experiences can be remedied by a “more clearly articulated pharmacopeic, ritual and magical orientation” (Smith: 56). The curative function solicited through the mimetic performance of conjuring is tied to a pharmocosmic worldview in which “cosmos is constituted and reconstituted by healing and harming processes and practices.” The remedy solicited can be both tonic and toxic depending on the objectives of the “incantory rhetoric” summoned by the symbolic gestures. The performative

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process is activated by the beauty in the word—Nommo—but not because it is crafted prettily. The beauty required for the construction of “cosmic vision” and healing is described by Sydné Mahone in her introduction to the anthology of black women playwrights Moon Marked and Touched By Sun: “Word weavers. Wor(l)d weavers. Literary quilters placing memories alongside imaginings; threading testimony through ritual; myth-making, uncoiling truth from skeins of make-believe. These diviners nestle with their dreams and nightmares in the bosom of night, knowing it to be the womb of light. Their plays live in that embrace of dark and light, where life reveals its magical and mystical meanings” (Mahone: xiv). In both sacred and secular events, the ritual syntax or structure is framed by metaphoric paradigms (Pitts: 31–32). The activity enclosed within the “frame” reveals meaning and significance beyond the observable parameters of action. The frame or structure is shaped by the Nommo devices of song, dance, and drum to ignite and control the desired emotional mood of the participants, imposing on them the mythic demands that pave the way to new identities during the transformative course of the ritual (Fernandez: 125). Since the metaphoric frame is not a static mode, it shifts as needed, moving the participants along an affective scale between poles of “disparagement” (self-disparagement) and “adornment” (self-aggrandizement) during the ritual’s progression (Fernandez: 123). A similar process is apparent in the tragic rituals of the Yoruba in West Africa, where the protagonist experiences a sense of self-disintegration and great suffering during his confrontation with antagonistic forces but is later able to reassemble himself through an act of will (Katrak: 19). At the end of the church ritual, having been moved along the emotional continuum of the mythic demands, the participant reaches enlightenment and is transformed from a state of psychic ignorance to emotional and spiritual clarity. It is widely accepted that, owing to the incantory power of the preacher to rouse emanations of the spirit, few leave the black church ritual the way they entered. At work here is not merely representation of the gospel, a replication of historical fact; it is the mimetic figuration of myths conjured with a language that signifies the conjunction of ethos and cosmos, a ritual reenactment of earthly issues through improvisation. The traditional black preacher, in response to a desire to promote psychic liberation and moral healing by purging the social toxins of oppression with the tonic of spiritual remedies, remains at the expressive center of African American performance. As the most potent and reliable mediator of the cosmic and mundane forces, he must demonstrate in his narrative or sermon a command of the widest range of expressive strategies salvaged from the African oral tradition, so that familiar stories of the text are spiritually infused with fresh social meaning. The sermon, rather than refining an exterior life, attempts to alter the interior reality of the congregation by urging its members into a collective response to the rhythms of his text, which is reinforced by verbal and non-verbal repetitions that amplify the power of the Word. While the sermon is improvisational in character, it emerges, according to Walter F. Pitts Jr., as a formulaic exercise to reveal the mystery of the Sacred Word through three clearly delineated stages of performance: opening, build-up, and climax. Fol-

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lowing a brief, subdued prayer of devotion in the opening, the preacher moves into the build-up, where he utters a familiar text that invites a modest response, an effort to “balance the synchrony” between himself and the congregation. In the first two stages, the language of the preacher is referential or propositional, as he alternates between rhetorical and conversational speech. At this point he prepares the path toward the climax phase: in addition to rhythm and repetition, his verbal improvisations are enhanced with such embellishments as speech/song, falsetto shrieks and timbral distortions, even blues shouts and hollers, revealing the onomatopoetic tonal significations located in West African languages and the “voicing” of the tenor sax in blues performances. The musicality of his language is vitally important for sustaining the elasticity of the ritual mode: shifting from archaic and standard English to the familiar vernacular, varying the volume, speech rate, and length of his sentences to focus his ideas, until the contrasting modes begin to induce the desired emotional transformation, which is enhanced by the growing intensity of call-and-response, those expressions of agreement vocalized by the congregation. The preacher now locks in on a tonal delivery that has a melodic character, a note that someone in the congregation will pick up in the climax phase for scalar value, inspiring the congregation to urge the preacher to advance to the climax, where form prevails over content, the logical organization of his language giving way to the poetic scatologic of a scat song. At this point, he might excite his congregation by ending each line of the text with an audible gasp, a retrieval of the verbal-breath techniques known to West African poetry; or he might choose to display a range of kinetic responses, run down the aisle, jump vigorously behind the pulpit, gesture with his divinely invested handkerchief, or give the appearance of losing consciousness—an intentionally kinetic exhibition similar to the performative style of West African narrative discourse. The success of the ritual depends, as it does for the West African griot, on the preacher’s ability to orchestrate the call-and-response, the essential improvisational device located in the sacred and secular performance practices of African diasporic cultures, a process designed to encourage communal affirmation of the spirit in the process of transformation and moral conversion (Floyd: 95–96). Transformation requires a procreative process whereby the retrieval of the old is transmuted into a concrete image or idea in the new experience. Thus, in addition to rhythm, one of the important performance devices found in African diasporic cultures is repetition, a necessary element in the process of recovering origins that cement cultural continuity. Conscious of the “recursiveness and repetition” in the rhythms of life, African cultures are forced to respond to the site of their “own apprehension of repetition” (Snead: 50–77), in order to achieve the appropriate transformation of nature’s continuous flux. Awareness of the flux resists linear perceptions of time; instead, time is perceived as multidimensional and shaped by the properties of past, present, and future in a cyclical, sacred construct that is dynamic, making space for the recursive values of the past to reaffirm the objectives of the present through rituals that symbolically reinforce a cosmic relationship with mundane experience.

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Snead views the willingness of African diasporic cultures to accept the repetition in life as “a desire to rely upon the thing that is there to pick up,” a strategy that is paramount in improvisation, as an “improviser relies upon the ongoing recurrence of the beat.” The consequence for black theatre, observes Sydné Mahone, is a dramaturgical paradigm in which the “circle, the spiral, the helix . . . in many cases give clues to the structure and use of time. Whether time is compressed or extended, we move from beat to beat and scene to scene not by the clock on the wall but by the rhythm of revelation. In the same way that jazz musicians ritualized improvisations, these writers take the liberty to extend the solo or ‘take as many eights’ as they need to reach the peak of understanding (Mahone: xxxiii). We recognize in the old adage what goes around, comes around the passage of old myths and values transformed in a collision with the shouts and hollers of modernity, yet the expressive mode remains animated and energized, authenticated by the recursive riffs in the solos of Bud, Bird, and ’Trane that extend time, or the tension of undifferentiated space created by the numinous dissonance of Monk’s rhythmic metapathos. Much like the ancestors who crossed the Middle Passage to find themselves at the intersection of an experience that was debilitating and degrading yet, paradoxically, owned potential, we play the changes, making those improvisations that aspire toward a reconciliation between the visible and invisible, adorning the appropriate masks for secular and sacred performances that will invoke the ancestral spirit. This can be witnessed in the popular choral dance The Electric Slide—The Bus Stop in an earlier incarnation—where each member of the collective corpus is committed to the synchronous, repetitive pattern of the movement, yet independently assumes an otherworldly demeanor, as if being “driven” by a personal deity claimed from the invisible world. At the insidious crossroads of the Middle Passage, we discovered the blues god, Eshu, the shape-changing mythic trickster of Yoruba mythology who has reappeared throughout the African Diaspora to guide us past psychic disjuncture toward contingency. Eshu is present in the blues testimonies of the incarcerated black men in OyamO’s Let Me Live, who are ravaged by a dehumanizing chain gang in the 1930s South yet are able to affirm a personal sense of humanity that touches our spirit and inspires in us a collective sense of survival. To the uninitiated, Eshu is not visible at a rural junction; his body language—that of the shuffling Negro—is perceived as submission, when in fact it is a rhythmic dance of self-empowerment, designed to deflect the attention of the field boss from his subversive slow-down tactics. The uninitiated do not see Eshu at the urban intersection, where the aggressively rhythmic gait of the boppin’ ghetto youth looks like a sign of intimidation, when in fact it is the dance performance—Nommo force—appropriate to the threat of the brute force of industrial urbanization. Both the shuffling Negro and the boppin’ ghetto youth—as well as those legendary heroes at the crossroads of black musical invention, Monk, Miles, Mingus, and Morton—owe their pedigree to Eshu, the trickster, who is imbued with the potent, unfettered rhythms of nature and achieves self-empowerment through cunning, wit, and guile and thus is responsible for all that is paradoxical and beyond good and evil.

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Eshu has made many appearances in the work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson, whose dramaturgy reveals many of the expressive strategies of the African oral tradition, including the rhythm and repetition that drive the angularity of vernacular speech, field hollers, and work songs that inform African American blues and spirituals. Guiding the process is the ubiquitous presence of a pantheon of tricksters, Leevee (Ma Rainey), Troy (Fences), Bynum (Joe Turner), Hedley (Seven Guitars), Hambone (Two Trains), Turnbo (Jitney), and Boy Willie (Piano Lesson). The ability of Wilson’s characters to transform chaos into positive potential recalls the ingenuity of Eshu, who appears in many masks at the crossroads. Typical of the trickster figures of the African American oral tradition, including the Signifyin’ Monkey, Brer Rabbit, Shine, Anansi the Spider, High John the Conqueror, and John Henry, Wilson’s characters outrageously enter into the lives of people at a crossroads to challenge the power and authority of normal order and instigating disharmony. The trickster appears cartoonish and one-dimensional at first, until it enters into the cosmic dance at the crossroads of dysfunction without melancholy, and recreates through improvisation the potential for some form of resolution or accommodation (Floyd: 24). Like Eshu, who has one leg in the visible world of humans and the other in the invisible world of gods, Wilson’s tricksters dance to the awkward rhythm of liminality, their mental convolutions signaling a suspension between the social and the cosmic universe of nature, which they perceive as being one and the same. Implicit in their gestures are survival improvisations at the crossroads of black experience, the symbolic junction that conjoins the physical and spiritual worlds, mediating the obstacles that threaten survival and harmony. In The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie establishes the linkage between the visible and invisible world that is signified in the totemic carving of names, images, and dates of family members into the legs of the piano. This ritual gesture of pictorial historiography transforms the piano into a sacred altar for the mnemonic transmission of an oral history that makes possible a reciprocity between the visible and invisible worlds and restores the kinship between the living and the dead. The intertextual call-and-response between the verbal and nonverbal narratives suggests the “rhythmic counterpoint of improvisation and emotive language that becomes both song and dialogue” (Boan). The piano, figured as a historiographic resonator, is the Nommo force required to awaken ancestral memory, much like the (lukasa) of the Luba tradition described by Michael Morales: “The correct retention of history from generation to generation is further assured by the tonal and rhythmic patterns of the narrative itself . . . the rhythms of the music and the patterns of the boards help maintain the historical continuity upon which the social order depends” (Morales: 107) In The Piano Lesson, the sacral connections of the piano had been compromised by a lack of ritual exercise, thereby diminishing its power to revivify the protective custody of the ancestors. For Africans, ritual neglect results not only in the loss of ancestral protection from catastrophic forces but also threatens the potency and sustained existence of the ancestors in the invisible world. The threat of family disintegration demands the release of a testimony from the carvings through the rhythmic invoca-

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tion of Boy Willie’s boogie-woogie improvisation and Wining Boy’s “Rambling Gambling Man” blues gestures, which reach “across the middle passage back to Africa— to the original ancestors and their gods” (Morales: 107) for the power to restore harmony and the sanctity of kinship. Revealed in Wilson’s liberating song is a kinship between the living and the dead, a testimony to the fact that we continue to be culturally a spiritual people whose performance objectives are guided by the procreative force of mnemonic invocations and gestures that activate the soul and memory. In a reversal of the naturalistic objectives of the Western tradition, black theatre does not hold up a mirror to nature; instead, it invokes a process of conjuration to awaken the forces of nature that illuminate experience. Indeed, as testified in the title of Shay Youngblood’s ritual reenactment, we are Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, as opposed to surrendering to delusions of the Peola complex, an “Imitation of Life.”

References Amoaku, Komla W. “Toward a Definition of Traditional African Music: A Look at the Ewe of Ghana.” In More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin Music and Musicians, ed. Irene V. Jackson, 31–40. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Ani, Marimba. Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior. Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1994. Barlow, William. Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Bennett, Lerone Jr. The Negro Mood and Other Essays. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1964. Boan, Devon. “Call-an-Response: Parallel ‘Slave Narrative’ in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.” African American Review 32 (summer 1998): 263–71. Bryant-Jackson, Paul K. “Kennedy’s Travelers in the American and African Continuum.” In Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy, ed. Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, 45–58. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Included in Part III of this volume. Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. New York: Seabury Press, 1972. Danquah, J. B. The Akan Doctrine of God. London: Frank Cass, 1968. Dara, Olu. “Natchez Shopping Blues,” recording. In The World, Atlantic Records, 1998. De Graft, J. C. “Roots in African Drama and Theatre.” African Literature Today 8 (1976): 1–25. Included in Part I of this volume. Edman, Irwin, ed. The Works of Plato. New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1956. Fernandez, James. “Analysis of Ritual: Metaphoric Correspondences as the Elementary Forms.” Science 182 (1973): 1366–67. Floyd, Sam Jr. The Power of Black Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Katrak, Ketu H. Wole Soyinka And Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

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Mahone, Sydné. “Introduction.” In Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, ed. Sydné Mahone, xiii–xxxiii. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. Included in Part III of this volume. Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophies. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Anchor, 1970. Morales, Michael. “Ghosts on the Piano: August Wilson and the Representation of Black American History.” In May All Your Fences Have Gates, ed. Alan Nadel, 105–15. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Priebe, Richard K. Myth, Realism, and the West African Writer. Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1988. Pitts, Walter E. Jr. Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible” Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Robinson, Beverly. All Things in My Remembrance: Interpretations of African American Games. San Francisco: KMT Publications, 1998. Roby, Diane. “Oliver Jackson: On Making.” Excerpted from a series of conversations with Oliver Jackson in his studio in Oakland, California, August 1996. Senghor, Leopold. “L’espirit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture negro-africaine.” Presence Africaine 8 (1956): 60. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Snead, James A. “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture.” In Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., 129–80. New York: Methuen, 1984. Some, Malidoma Patrice. Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. Portland, Ore.: Swan/Raven, 1993. Thomas, Lundeana, Barbara Ann Teer, and the National Black Theatre. Tranformational Forces in Harlem. New York: Garland Press, 1997. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit. New York: Random House, 1983. Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990. Williams, Mance. Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Beverly J. Robinson

The Sense of Self in Ritualizing New Performance Spaces for Survival

Those who survived knew that a strong arm of spirit protected them as they traveled life’s way. —The author

The two ritual elements universally common to theatre are dance (movement) and storytelling (oral tradition). Ritual can be defined as a recurring pattern of action that represents the desire to begin life anew, and the need to find some way of expressing that desire. If a sense of self based on identity and heritage could endure the Atlantic crossing from Africa to the Americas and Caribbean shores, then the memories of home of every African bound for slave labor over the age of ten would be the rituals. These rituals, sacred and secular, would include knowing the names of your gods, your ancestors, and yourself, and knowing your community and clan affiliation. You would also know your native language and the social prerequisites that prevailed in your home community; and you would understand your place in a culture where oral traditions prevailed over written ones. An awareness of communal traditions— language (including gestures), tales, games, humor, music, dance, religion, riddles, food, and other forms of folklore—was part of the human knowledge carried by the men and women transported across the Atlantic. The vast majority of Africans aboard slave ships had a sense of self based not on skin pigmentation but on communal practices and worldview. Away from Africa, color, Old World traditions, and new rituals pluralized the identity of Africans. They were forced to endure and create different rituals. Dancing on the decks of slave ships, for example, became synonymous with survival. The decks of these ships became the first ritualized spaces for forced performance and set the precedent for the theatrical history of the African Diaspora. In the United States, three more ritualized spaces followed: the fields and plantations where early African Americans worked and resided; the pulpit; and finally the proscenium stage.

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Slave Ships Under slavery, the aesthetic and often sacred African ritual of scarification, used to identify one’s relationship with a specific community, was replaced with cattle branding. The Dutch, for example, used hot branding irons on the breasts of their slave “freight” to distinguish them from the English and French “cargoes.” New rituals aboard slave ships included suicide and the killing of newborns to spare them life as slaves, and madness-induced homicide. These rituals replaced familiar ones that celebrated life and marked the passing of the old: On many of these ships . . . the sense of misery and suffocation was so terrible in the ’tween-decks—where the height sometimes was only eighteen inches, so that the unfortunate slave could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs—that the slave not infrequently would go mad before dying or suffocating. In their frenzy some killed others in the hope of procuring more room to breathe. Men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each other’s brains.1

The common loading method was known as “tight packing.”2 Gullah Joe was an elder who recalled how the ship came to his home when he was a boy, luring him and others on board for the grueling voyage. The important distinctions between African communities (Ibo, Yoruba, Bambana, Twi, and so on) disappeared after arrival in the New World. Africans became homogenized by color, and it was not unusual for them to refer to each other as “nigger,” a term reflecting the common experiences of early Africans in the Americas: Dey been pack in dere wuss dan hog in a car when dey shippin’ ’em. An’ every day dem white folks would come in dere an’ ef a nigger jest twist his self or move dey’d cut de hide off him wid a rawhide whip. An’ niggers died in de bottom er dat ship wuss dan hogs wid cholera. Dem white folks ain’ hab no mercy. Look like dey ain’ known wha’ mercy mean. Dey drag dem dead niggers out an’ throw ’em overboard. An’ dat ain’ all. Dey th’owed a heap er live ones wha’ dey thought ain’ guh live into de sea.3

The art of limbo (or limber) dancing evolved during the Middle Passage to keep Africans as physically presentable as possible, albeit out of necessity rather than for entertainment.4 Silent language and the faint rhythmic patting or tapping sounds of feet and hands attempting to move were common, as was the rocking of the body to keep the spirit alive. Tom Feelings has documented the frequent suicides on shipboard. For these enslaved Africans, suicide was a self-sacrificing act of the utmost tragedy, but at the same time an act of liberation. During the three- to six-month voyage, ship captains “danced the slaves” to keep their blood circulating between agonizing periods cramped together below decks. Richard Drake described his human cargo as a “good-natured lot [that] jumped to the lash so promptly that there was not much occasion for scoring their naked flanks . . . these pleasant exercises [songs and ring dances] were keeping our stock in good condition and, of course, enhancing our prospects of making a profitable voyage.”5 But

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dancing on deck, with the “encouragement” of a cat-of-nine tails6 was a joyless exercise for the performers. A surgeon on board a slave ship in 1788 said their singing and dancing was an expression of sadness. The songs were about the fear of being beaten, the longing for their native foods, and their despair that they would never see their native lands again. “Madda! Madda! Yiera! Bemini! Madda! Aufera! That is to say they were all sick and by and by they should be no more.”7 Another white observer expressed his anger at the treatment of the slaves: We do all we can, insisted the captains, to promote the happiness of slaves on board. They were brought up on deck for eight hours everyday, while their quarters were being cleaned out, and they were encouraged to dance—in chains. Encouraged, indeed, as other witnesses testified by the application of whips! Those with swollen or diseased limbs were not exempt from partaking of this joyous pastime, though the shackles often peeled the skin off their legs. The songs they sang of sorrow and sadness—simple ditties of their own wretched estate.8

Fields and Plantations On the plantations, games were created to teach about life, death, and everything in between. A game called Buzzard Lope helped enslaved Africans deal with not being buried properly according to their customs. The Head Shoulders Baby game taught children the parts of the body—head and shoulders, knee and ankle and elbow—just like any child who had been to school. The refrain, “I ain’t been to Frisco, I ain’t been to school, I ain’t been to college, but I ain’t no fool,” reflected the belief that people didn’t need school or travel in order to be educated or to feel self-esteem.9 Plantation life became a spawning ground for a developing African American culture, and these games were an integral part of that. Along with language, song, and dance, game playing was an area of creativity in which people could sustain their culture and express themselves with a certain amount of freedom, or at least without immediate repression. Games and song were also used as safe havens of a sort, to throw off suspicion or keep the field boss at bay. Mrs. Bessie Jones, an elder who sang with the Georgia Sea Island Singers, recalled her grandfather explaining that during slavery (and later on chain gangs), the older men would teach the younger ones how to sing certain songs to keep them out of trouble, “because if you get too still the captain think you might do something wrong.” “If you want to please your captain / Sink ’em low boys, raise ’em high,” went one slave song. Sink the shovel low in the dirt to get a shovel full, and then throw it up high. A light shovel always meant a whipping or some other form of punishment. Mrs. Jones’s grandfather also explained the meaning of juba. The juba dance, often with patting accompaniment, known in Cuba as el juba and in Haiti as Martinique, was practiced throughout the Antilles and southern United States. The southern form traditionally involved a ring formation, with dancers taking turns displaying their dance expertise in the center. Most often juba is performed as a call-and–response

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ritual. Because drums were generally forbidden throughout the South for fear they could be used to organize slave insurrections, the basic juba rhythm was accomplished with the rhythmic patting and clapping of the hands and body. The term “juba” can be found in many African languages (it is also the name of a locale in southern Sudan). Linguistically recorded as “giouba,” it refers to an African step dance. Folk knowledge also attests to its early meaning of “little bits” of food, or “leftovers.” During the week all the scraps and leftovers would be collected in the southern plantation mansions or “big houses” and on Sundays they were commonly put in troughs for slaves to eat. Mrs. Jones’s grandfather said: Many, many days they had to eat that stuff. They would make up things because they didn’t like what they was doing, but they couldn’t tell them they didn’t want to do it. . . . You see, the food would be all messed up with everything so you wouldn’t know one piece from another. So they made up a game and dance of it and them white folks thought it was ’bout the prettiest thing they had ever seen from Africa. It just come from African people, but it sure didn’t come from Africa. My grandfather often told us that “Your head in the lion’s mouth, don’t jerk it out.” If your head is in the lion’s mouth you have to ease it out. If you jerk it out, you hurt up something.10

A song developed about these leftovers, which went in part, “Juba this [a little bit of this], juba that [a little bit of that], juba kill a yellow cat.” “Yellow cat” was a code term for whites. In other words, leftovers were too good for white folks. Other definitions of juba include a popular name given to males skilled at dancing (e.g., Master Juba), an Akan (Ghanaian) name for a female child born on Monday, nguba for ground nut (or gingooba for goober, a peanut). In the Yoruba language (primarily in Nigeria and Benin), juba translates as an homage to ancestors. Unaware of its multiple meanings, and as a way of showing off their “property,” plantation owners would request the juba performance for the benefit of visitors, or simply for their own entertainment. Patting and dancing the juba became so popular that whites finally named it after a major slave port in South Carolina—Charleston. Many slave games promoted self-esteem and commented on work and living conditions. The Buzzard Lope, mentioned earlier, prepared a slave community for death in a setting in which African ceremonial rituals could not be observed. The Buzzard Lope incorporated the animal pantomime used in West African buzzard dances.11 It protested the unadorned wooden boxes or naked holes in which the bodies of an enslaved people were buried. “Throw me any where, in that old field,” declared the performers of the Buzzard Lope, expressing their disregard for the treatment of the body after the soul has passed on. Enslaved Africans knew that they were equals with whites before the Lord, and after death this equality could be proclaimed. The game reached a climax when the players, flocking like buzzards around the “carrion,” joined in a circle formation and “worked it up” with what Mrs. Jones described as “pretty footwork. . . . I can’t do it. The womens worked it up. They just really shouting [while] mens just walk up on their toes and they throwed out [styled] so pretty.”12

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Many games evolved over the years in response to slavery. The games were intended to do much more than pass the time. They were used as self-protection against cruel treatment, both emotionally and physically. Plantation spaces had to be ritualized in a way that enabled people to cope with the forces of bondage. Survival in new spaces meant relying on both cultural and spiritual fortitude. African-based traditions had to meet two criteria: the surviving culture had to be functional for the practitioners; and it had to appear to be relatively non-threatening to the slavocracy.13 European observers of the American colonies often commented that Americans lacked a sense of joy or the harmony most often seen in the arts. An English traveler remarked that “they have no fetes, no fairs, no merrymaking, no music in the streets, no Punch, no puppet shows,” while the French counsel general to Napoleon perceived a materialist obsession among the colonists. There was “less elevation of soul, and less of those soft and brilliant illusions which constitute the charm or the consolation of life . . . the lofty ideals which nourish ‘agreeable arts.’”14 Some Europeans saw Americans as animal and childlike and criticized them throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for their poor manners. They were alleged to lack “awareness of the canons of proper speech, dress and posture; and had a penchant for brawling and other improprieties in decorum and demeanor. [These] defects were thought to be physical, mental, moral, and social. . . . In Europe, even the ethnic label ‘Yankee’ became a pejorative. [European critics] performed the same type of ego surgery on European Americans that European American critics performed on African Americans.”15 The saving cultural face (or grace) of early America was the elevated soul and “agreeable arts” found among enslaved blacks and indigenous tribes. The fields and plantations became the stages on which enslaved Africans honed their acting skills before receptive audiences, both among themselves and before the plantation owners and their families and guests. These rituals also enabled African Americans to become masters of masking their behavior for purposes of survival in a hostile culture in which “home” had to be a state of mind. The southern plantation became an arena in which slaves could enact ritualized symbolic reversals through satire, parody, and burlesque. Whether assigning roles to themselves or to others, the actors drew from a complex repertoire of “masking,” a “willful stylization of the natural face and hands.”16 As early as 1795 one traveler to America declared blacks the nation’s great humorists, suggesting that climate, music, and even the kind treatment of whites were the stimulants. Melvin Wade, in his brilliant essay “Through a Rabbit’s Eye” notes that “all too often, European and European-American critics interpreted masking behaviors purely as instruments of social control and propaganda rather than as institutions of folk culture.”17 Very few African Americans, excepting the great William Henry Lane (“Master Juba”), were allowed to render their own performances prior to the Civil War. Master Juba was a nineteenth-century dance prodigy who competed with the top dancers of the day in 1844. There was no question of his superior talent and more than once he

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was awarded $500 for movement that was described as “intricate and beautiful,” two very rare adjectives used in the depiction of minstrel dancing. Juba eventually moved to Europe, where he started a dance school and received rave reviews. Charles Dickens was fascinated by his skills and wrote about him. One critic observed that “the dancing of Juba exceeded anything ever witnessed in Europe.”18 The songs, dances, and speech styles of blacks were caricatured by whites who performed minstrel shows in blackface. The best white performers learned to play the banjo, which became an integral part of minstrelsy in the 1840s, using complex rhythms that according to one scholar “had no European antecedents and showed strong evidence of African polyrhythms.”19 By 1845 minstrelsy had become a successful business of whites imitating blacks parodying whites. Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman were among the enthusiasts who considered minstrelsy a part of America’s cultural uniqueness.20 The abolitionist Horace Greeley believed that minstrelsy was America’s native genius, its equivalent to Italian opera.21 In an 1845 Knickerbocker Magazine article entitled “Who Are Our National Poets?” J. Kinnard Jr. acknowledged the genius of African Americans in this respect. Who is the man of genius? He who utters clearly that which is dimly felt by all. He who most vividly represents the sentiment, intellect and taste of the public to which he addresses himself. He to whom all hearts and heads respond. . . . Is not Sambo the incarnation of the taste, intellect and heart of America, the ladies being the judges? Do not shrink from the answer . . . you imitate him; you spend days and weeks in learning his tunes; you trill his melodies with your rich voice; you are delighted with his humor, his pathos, his irresistible fun. Say, truly, incomparable damsel! Is not Sambo the realization of your poetic ideal?22

George Nichols, a blackface circus clown and a pioneer of white minstrelsy, learned his songs from enslaved Africans on the Mississippi River. Another blackface performer, Thomas Daddy Rice, is indebted to an African American vendor named “Corn Meal,” or “Signor Cornmeali,” who was known in New Orleans. G. Swain Buckley, the singing star of Buckley’s New Orleans Serenaders, was performing in Savannah, Georgia, in 1856 and saw “a Negro vendor with a small donkey cart selling melons by calling his wares in a chanted song. Buckley was so taken with this ‘grotesque outfit’ that he later amused J. W. McAndrews and other troupe members with an account of it. Realizing a good thing, McAndrews found the vendor the next day, learned his song and routine, and bought his whole outfit—clothes, cart, and donkey. Turning the negro’s’s sales pitch into a blackface act, McAndrews became “The Watermelon Man,” a part he continued to play until his career ended in 1895, almost forty years later.”23 The early blackface minstrels took their Southern material to the North and became a hit in New York. In the mid-nineteenth century several companies gave regular performances, with ten major minstrel houses and three troupes playing in the same block on Broadway by the 1850s. Minstrelsy performances were common in large theatres such as Old Park, Bowery, and Chatham, in Barnum’s Museum, in converted

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churches and synagogues, in a showboat that toured the New York vicinity, and in their own newly built theatres, often christened “Ethiopian Opera Houses.” People who believed blacks lacked intelligence and culture only revealed their own ignorance. Both intelligence and talent were needed to convey the complexities of parody and double entendre, while the apers and mimics relied on African American folk cultural material to assure “white common people’s identity by emphasizing Negroes’ ‘peculiarities’ and inferiority.”24 The coveted ability of African descendants to sustain and develop a heritage on American soil resulted in a body of expressive knowledge for survival. Plantation life did not kill early African Americans’ sense of identity and intelligence but taught an enslaved people to mask these qualities in words, movement, and song.

The Preacher’s Pulpit The experience of slavery made it all the more important for people to communicate with each other, if only to preserve their sanity. Whether they were watched or left alone, enslaved Africans exchanged thoughts about their conditions, hopes, and frustrations, and affirmed their religious piety through communal dialogue and performance, which always included prayer.25 The third ritualized arena for the cultivation of African American theatre was the pulpit. Many preachers could not read conventional English, so they developed their sermons orally and delivered them from memory. The pulpit gave rise to many eloquent men, who influenced their congregations through the power of the voice as well as through invigorating music and movement. Here, too, the audience played an important role. It was the congregation’s response to the preacher’s call that encouraged him to continue. As slavery became more widespread and entrenched in the colonies, the need arose to deter attempts at insurrection and escape. Black preachers knew that southern plantation owners dreaded these possibilities and more often than not used their positions to subvert them and encourage religious practices instead. Unlike the major role of white preachers, black preachers were not missionaries to the slave community. Their position was more akin to the elder or priest in traditional African societies who related news; an analyzer or curer of illnesses and problems, an adviser, confidante, and eloquent deliverer of words embellished with a language and imagery that his community understood. This “man of the word” was often feared by plantation owners because of his persuasive powers, while also reminding slave owners of the potential consequences if people were not allowed religious gatherings that could “bring some peace to the troubled slave souls.”26 Whether the African gods had betrayed or forgotten them, or whether the traditional open public expression of piety was suddenly hushed, a way was made out of no way for spiritual communion.

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Not being allowed to hold meetings on the plantation, the slaves assemble in the swamp, out of reach of the patrols. They have an understanding among themselves as to the time and place of getting together. This is often done by the first one arriving breaking boughs from the trees, and bending them in the direction of the selected spot. Arrangements are then made for conducting the exercises. They first ask each other how they feel, the state of minds, etc. The male members then select a certain space, in separate groups, for the division of the meeting. Preaching . . . by the brethren, then praying and singing all around . . . until feeling the spirit, he grows excited, and in a short time, there fall to the ground twenty or thirty men and women under its influence.27

The “influence” is the fulfilled connectedness of spirit with ancient expressive traditions that are recognizable among the group through the surviving mediums of music, movement, rhythms, language structures, and piety. Each of these expressions represents a discourse for communicating internal experiences.28 The aesthetic environment is “dependent on the continual transmission of messages between the units of the performing community for the successful realization of the performance. An African American congregation listens attentively and critically to a sermon and can instantaneously withhold assent and response if a preacher fails to speak acceptably.”29 The preacher, as a spiritual chief, was a major figure in African religious practice. In more than six thousand volumes of narratives by enslaved Africans and emancipated slaves,30 there are countless descriptions of religious practices “suggesting that slaves brought intuitive, aesthetic, and other values to black Christianity, distinguishing it from white Christianity,” as well as numerous accounts of how preachers could rise folks off their feet. Clearly “Africans attempted to make Christianity real in the lives of others—in effect, to give it universal appeal.”31 The early preachers not only had the phenomenal ability to memorize and recite vast amounts of biblical text (when many could not and were not allowed to learn to read). They were able, like the traditional griot, to translate text into something understandable, particularly when most of the text was too cryptic to follow: “Brothers and sisters, this morning I intend to explain the unexplainable—find out the undefinable—ponder the imponderable—and unscrew the inscrutable.”32 They relied on dramatic devices like mime to portray biblical stories. One man, Matthew Ewing, was esteemed for his ability to “read out of his hand. He never learned no real reading’ and writin’ but he sure knowed his Bible and would hold his hand out and make like he was reading’ and preach de purtiest preachin’ you ever heard. De meetin’s last from early in de mornin’ till late at night. When dark come, de men folks would hang up a wash pot, bottom upwards, in de little brush church house us had, so’s it would catch de noise and de overseer wouldn’t hear us singin’ and shoutin’.”33 The preachers ritualized the pulpit in a tradition that was common to the deep structure of their heritage. They were master storytellers who knew how to preserve the spirit and understood what Paul Carter Harrison identifies as “traditional sensibility”:

340 beverly j. robinson The story is ritualized, the power of the word urged toward the most potent imagery that can be conjured through modal rhythm of sounds, i.e., the synthesizing of seemingly unrelated sounds introduced into the story-telling context, and a generous amount of gesture. Story-telling is not a passive event; it is actively conjured. Unlike the Western fairy tale, it is not designed to transport our sensibilities beyond the realities of natural existence. Rather, the story teaches how to deal with existing forces by creating a mode which demonstrates [a person’s] potency in relationship to what might have been considered overwhelming odds.34

The Proscenium Stage From the pulpit also arose the movement toward the proscenium stage. In the United States, it had its beginnings with the folk performances of Signor Cornmeali (Old Corn Meal), who promoted his vending song “Fresh Corn Meal” and other original ditties with his horse and cart on a New Orleans stage. Old Corn Meal and another New Orleans performer about whom little is known, Picuyne Butler, were exceptions, but good enough to rank as novelty acts during the era of minstrelsy. Before them, it was the men and women who helped to establish the African Theatre Company in New York. They began their first performance in 1821 with Shakespeare’s Richard III. The company endured only a few years owing to the rude and uncultured state of the colonists, who had no interest in European classics and certainly no desire to see them, or even original works, performed by blacks. By 1823 the performances of the African Theatre Company came to an end. Its final presentation was written by Henry Brown, the company’s founder, and was entitled King Shotoway, based on the history of a powerful folk hero on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. King Shotoway led the slave revolt against the Spaniards and encouraged many destined for captivity to seek freedom as far away as Belize. Nearly thirty years after the demise of the African Theatre Company, William Wells Brown wrote a script on the theme of escaping captivity, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. Brown’s work signaled the extension of the pulpit for the spoken word to the written dramatic text. Considered the first African American to publish a play that has endured, Brown is a prime example of how the earlier arenas for African American theatre came together. Brown recorded his memories of enslavement and his eventual escape from bondage in 1834. He was twenty years old and vividly remembered the treatment of those who stayed and the results of one of his failed attempts to escape. During his first recapture, he experienced a detestable “punishment [known as the “Virginia Play”] in which the slave was tied in the smokehouse, flogged, and then ‘smoked’ by setting piles of tobacco stems afire. After the slave had coughed to the point of asphyxiation, he was untied and sent back to work.”35 The Escape is an autobiographical account of Brown’s life. It was never meant for performance but used some of the language of survival. His white characters are

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more complex than “massa” and “missus” stereotypes. The characters raise philosophical questions about the merits of heavenly or godly conversation and economic class and its relation to slavery. The double-edged humor demonstrates a keen sense of who is imitating whom: Walker (slave speculator). Get out on the floor and dance; I want to see if you are supple. Sam (slave). I don’t like to dance; I is got religion. Walker. . . . you’ve got religion, have you? That’s so much the better. I likes to deal in the gospel. Sally. I is Big Sally, sir. [after Big Sally is not able to provide her age in years] Walker. Don’t know how old you are! Do you know who made you? Sally. Hev herd who it was in de Bible dat made me, but I dun forget de gentman’s name.36

Again, this play, like many of the rituals maintained and created by African Americans, was never meant for performance. Since neither slavery nor freedom welcomed blacks to the stage, The Escape was performed from the pulpit and alternative arenas that allowed Brown’s voice to be heard. He transformed the spaces with the power of his words, enacting over twenty character parts to audiences devoted to the abolitionist movement. At a time when most Christians abhorred the theatre as an arena of ungodliness, Brown was a major catalyst in overturning this taboo for the abolitionist cause. His black characters were endowed with human qualities, including reason, and their words exposed the corruption and absurdity of slavery. Brown had a keen aesthetic sense of what the audience wanted. Melodrama was the order of the day, and dramatic action was interspersed with song, romance, tragedy, and triumph. Since minstrelsy had created the “contented slave” stereotype, Brown offered his listening audience the character of Cato. Throughout the play, Cato is portrayed as contented and “docile,” but his desire to escape his condition shows that this posture is a mask he must wear in order to survive. “I allers dose what you and the Massa tells me, an axes nobody,” says Cato to his master’s wife. Away from the master, Cato affirms his own identity and recognizes the plight of his people. When he sings about running away to Canada, the dialect turns into high English, forcing the actor to test his understanding of how the song should be sung: Come all ye bondsman far and near, Let’s put a song in Massa’s ear, It is a song for our poor race, Who’re whipped and trampled with disgrace.37

Ritualizing spaces where rhythms, dance, songs, storytelling, humor, and masking are used reflect the ambitions and intelligence of people who have created their own theatre history. These people may have been displaced from their homeland, but they

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have not lost their self-knowledge. The glory of an Egyptian, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, Nigerian or larger African continental past is, as one scholar suggests, as legitimate for the African Diaspora as the “shared glory with the Greeks for Western Caucasians.”38 Indeed, “the whole of black history from the slave trade through emancipation [was] a ‘magnificent drama’ and a ‘tragedy that beggared the Greek.’”39 Even at their most challenging moments of history, African captives and their descendants strove continually to keep their spirits alive. Whether their performances were secretly forced or freely volunteered, they relied on ritualizing spaces in an African spirit in order to survive. They owed their ability to accomplish this to ancestors who shaped their dramatic history before slavery. Babies did not cross the Atlantic without adults. Most of the imprisoned people bound for slavery were old enough to have a sense of self and history; the challenge was to find ways to maintain this sense in a hostile and oppressive environment. Games and storytelling, song and dance promoted the development of a common vernacular characterized by vocalization and performance.40 Memory was cherished and selectively shared in stories cloaked with double meanings for in-group understanding; respect for the art of the spoken word and oratory skills were prerequisites for being heard and unifying a relocated culture; music and movement were needed for total expression, as shown by the innumerable accounts of circle dances (or ring shouts), which were never performed without music or singing—whether as part of religious or social traditions or as accompaniment or encouragement to work. The ability to communicate subversive messages through ritualized code, even under the watchful eyes of whites, was indispensable to preserving integrity. As late as 1942 folklorist Lydia Parrish observed that “it is amusing to question Southerners as to the number of times they remember hearing Negroes volunteer information. Not one so far has recalled an instance in which something has been told that was not common knowledge.”41 Historian Sterling Stuckey says it best: “When one bears in mind that slave folklore was not created to be transcribed or even to be heard by whites, one must conclude that what was eventually transcribed is probably just a small portion of that which died on the night air or continues to live, undetected by scholars, in the folk memory.”42 For those of us devoted to the cultural arts and aware of the operatives and adjuvants of folk memory, intimately familiar with (if not practicing) traditions inherent in the cultures of African people throughout the world, and, above all, understanding the importance of ritual and ritualizing as an Africanizing aesthetic, we have a lot of work to do.

Notes Acknowledgment: My sincere gratitude to Kathryn L. Morgan, Jean Ishibashi, DeWayne Knox, Charles Moore, Ryan Kernan, and the students of my African American Theater History courses for their intellectual and spiritual guidance. 1. Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower, 6th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 49.

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2. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing under the Lash,” in Jookin’ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), explains “there were two philosophies for loading slave ships . . . tightpack slavers consistently exceeded the legal number of slaves on their ships, subjecting the Africans to a long journey under unbelievably over-crowded conditions. The loose packers obeyed the legal limitations or crowded only slightly. Neither strategy was humane.” Legal conditions allotted a 6′ × 1′4″ room for every man, a 5′10″ × 1′4″ room for every woman; a 5′ × 1′2″ room for each boy, and a 4′6″ × 1′ room for each girl. Overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and dehydration were the major causes of slave mortality during the Middle Passage. See HazzardGordon, 5, and Kenneth F. Kiple and Brian T. Higgins, “Mortality Caused by Dehydration during the Middle Passage,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. J. E. Inikori and S. L. Engerman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 321–32. 3. E.C.L. Adams, Nigger to Nigger (New York: Scribner’s, 1928), 227–28. 4. According to Ryuta Imafuku, “It is said that the Limbo was born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. Captive slaves from Africa were crowded into the holds of the ships, their hands and feet were bound in chains which were attached to an iron bar. To limber up their stiff, cramped limbs, the slaves devised a competitive exercise to see who could pass beneath the iron bar without touching it with their bodies. So, the limbo is a limb contorted with the colonial history, the contortion which transformed the slaves’ body into the crawling spider.” For further information see his web site, http://www.cafecreole.net/corner/Spider.html. 5. George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1927), 50. 6. Whips usually divided into nine strips of leather. 7. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 7. 8. Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing under the Lash,” 8. 9. Unless stated otherwise, the quotations concerning games were collected from Mrs. Bessie Jones during her teaching and presentations during the 1976 Bicentennial Festival in Washington, D.C. The interview tapes of more than seventy games from the Georgia Sea Islands are housed at the Smithsonian Institute’s Folklife Program and are part of the forthcoming publication “All Things in My Remembrance—Interpretations of African American Games from Enslaved and Post-Slavery Tradition,” by Beverly J. Robinson. 10. Ibid. 11. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1979, rept.), 25–26. 12. Interviews with Mrs. Bessie Jones. 13. Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing under the Lash,” 13. 14. Melvin Wade, “Through a Rabbit’s Eye,” in The Role of Afro-American Folklore in the Teaching of the Arts and Humanities, ed. Adrienne Lanier Seward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 145–47. 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 58. 17. Wade, “Through a Rabbit’s Eye,” 17. 18. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 46. 19. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 46. 20. For example, Mark Twain’s 1924 autobiography states, “If I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera.” Constance Rourke believed that the “‘Negro minstrel joined with the Yankee and the back-

344 beverly j. robinson woodsman’ to create a comic trio embodying the nation’s ‘deep-lying mood of disseverence.’” For her, “comic triumph appeared in them all.” See Mel Watkins, On the Real Side (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 99. 21. “The Black Opera,” New York Tribune (1855), quoted in Eric Lott, “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 224. 22. J. K. Kinnard Jr., “Who are Our National Poets?” Knickerbocker Magazine (October 1845). 23. Toll, Blacking Up, 45. 24. Ibid., 67. 25. See Beverly J. Robinson, “Faith Is the Key and Prayer Unlocks the Door: Prayer in African American Life,” Journal of American Folklore 110 (1997): 408–14. 26. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 89. 27. Ibid., 217. 28. For further discussion see Will Coleman, “‘Coming Through ‘Ligion’: Metaphor in NonChristian and Christian Experiences with the Spirit(s) in African American Slave Narratives,” in Cut Loose Your Stamming Tongue, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins and George Cummings (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992), 67–102. 29. Gerald L. Davis, I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 17. 30. David W. Blight, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American History Memory,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 59. Blight quotes and supports Du Bois in stating, “if the black worker was the ‘founding stone’ of the antebellum economic system that tumbled into civil war, then the slave narrative—the entire abolitionist literature—was the ‘founding stone’ of an alternative American history.” 31. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 31–33. 32. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 5. 33. Norman R. Yetman, ed. Voices of Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 335. 34. Paul Carter Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 39. 35. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds., Black Theatre U.S.A. (New York: Free Press, 1996), 37. 36. Ibid., 46. 37. Act 3, scene 2. 38. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamilton, The Roots of African American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 16. 39. Blight, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American History Memory,” 64. 40. A common characteristic is the historical use of making words fit the rhythm of a story, song, in-group conversation, etc. This tendency is the talking drum vernacular, with or without the drums. When done correctly, people respond in the call-and-response manner. 41. Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (New York: Creative Age Press, 1942), 20. 42. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 10.

Lundeana M. Thomas

Barbara Ann Teer: From Holistic Training to Liberating Rituals

In 1965 noted African American poet and playwright Langston Hughes perceived “a very great need for a serious theatre in the Harlem Community . . . a theatre in which the drama and the folk arts of the Negro people might be presented before the very audiences out of whom this drama is born.”1 Hughes was not the first to recognize this need. According to James Hatch, “In 1926, W.E.B. Du Bois was to produce plays about, by, for and near Negroes. In 1965, LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] demanded a theatre about, with, for, and only black people.”2 Ed Bullins, among others, also called for a national black theatre in Harlem. In 1968 one charismatic black female accepted Hughes’s challenge. Broadway actress Barbara Ann Teer, the founder, spiritual leader, and prime mover of the National Black Theatre of Harlem (NBT), burst upon the scene with the intention of creating “a black theory of acting and liberating.” Her proposal moved Hughes’s vision beyond just “a serious Harlem theatre” to a holistic training program from which would emerge new productions and new performers, in a permanent home that would perpetuate an African American theatre ideologically and financially separate from those of the white majority. Teer announced to her fellow African Americans We are a race of people with a dual cultural heritage. . . . We are American with an African Ancestry! . . . Our best and most realistic hope is to go back home, back to the community, and begin to build a “new theatre.” A theatre that is not Broadway-oriented, a theatre where you can “call the shots” as you see them, and not be afraid of losing your job. A theatre where you will be free to experiment and to create. A theatre where you can relax and be “colored.” (“Colored” in speech, movement, and behavior patters.) A theatre where you can stop denying and begin identifying.3

This declaration marked Teer’s departure from Broadway to Harlem during the height of her career and the formation of the National Black Theatre. In 1990 Teer saw her long-cherished goal become a reality in the form of a theatre complex bearing a new name: the National Black Theater’s Institute of Action Arts.

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History For African Americans, breaking with mainstream American tradition meant searching for relevance in theatre in African traditions. Above all it meant rejecting whitecontrolled theatres after many years of trying to fit in. In short, it meant facing the reality of society’s unfulfilled promises of assimilation and integration. Ed Bullins declared, “We don’t want to have a higher form of white art in black faces. We are working toward something entirely different and new that encompasses the soul and spirit of black people, and that represents the whole experience of our being here in this oppressive land. . . . (Anything less than this is unreal).”4 Not all blacks felt as strongly as Bullins, but most knew by the late 1960s that it was time to reclaim their own identity through the raising of black consciousness, and many worked to accomplish this task. In 1980 Teer explained, “Our [NBT’s] standard of art was designed to present black people in a way that supported and strengthened and nurtured who they were, because as a subculture in a dominant culture, we were not included. We inherited a legacy of ‘less-than-ness.’ . . . My processes were designed to give people a sense of wholeness, a sense of rightness with themselves. Once that was done, there was no longer a need for separation.”5 To cure the less-than-ness feelings in blacks, Teer offered a theatrical ideology and training. Her goal was to help correct feelings of inferiority not only for performers but also for every audience that came to see them. Although she was not a scholar of traditional Western theatre, Teer was very familiar with black history and the pain of living under the cultural hegemony of whites. It was this pain that she sought to alleviate through the formation of the National Black Theatre. In 1968, after Teer had directed Joseph Walker’s off-Broadway musical The Believers, she was approached by Zuri McKie, a black opera singer and cast member, who requested that Teer teach her acting. Teer agreed to teach but only to a group, and she began a workshop at the Martinique Theatre. The class later moved uptown to the Elks Club on a 126th Street and then to the East Wind, a loft Teer shared with the Last Poets, also in Harlem. Maurice Peterson remembers that “a doctor donated space for the classes. The Last Poets also donated some space to accommodate the increasing number of her followers. . . . There on 125th Street she and her disciples tried to evolve a new black art standard.”6 They worked together for two years. The first year of the theatre’s existence was largely experimental: there were no public performances; workshops and symposiums were scheduled each week. Teer has stated that “first we sacrificed our egos, our desire to act, and went about the task of establishing a black theatrical standard— a standard based on the black lifestyle.” The focus of the theatre was determined during the first year of experimentation. In an interview with the New York Post, Teer claimed that at her theatre she was actually “rehabilitating black people’s ability to love themselves”; furthermore, she said, “If you don’t have an experience of self-worth and are not in touch with who you are, you can’t move through the world with any certainty.”7 She wanted to see an end to plays about blacks written or directed by whites who did not understand the

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black experience. And she wanted to attend a theatre where she could see plays that validated her as a black woman and left her feeling exhilarated. Teer sought to transcend prevailing forms of theatre. Within the prescribed formulas of traditional Western theatre, there are generally directors and actors, a theatre space, and a script—but each of these has limitations. The playwright limits, through the script, what can or will be said, and the director defines the style and can restrict movement. There can be audience interaction, but only at the discretion of the director. Teer believed that in traditional theatre “you’re not free to be spontaneous and to let go because the form is more important than the feeling. . . . What the other black theatres are doing is fine, within that form, but I wanted to add to the form, transform the form, actually, open it up so that we could really express our magnitude, our omnipotence, our fire.”8 Teer’s commitment to openness of form was elaborated by her enumeration of what-ifs: What if more emotion was needed than was specified by the playwright or director? What if more gesturing was needed than the director allowed? What if the actor saw the audience being moved and wanted to reach out further to them? Teer saw any restriction as a handicap to the emotive force of the performer. She explained that while other theatres were building their philosophy of what is, she built the NBT on the philosophy of what might be, what was possible, what was missing, and what we could provide for what’s missing. She also wished to establish a theatre that would promote performers’ pride in their performance and in their accomplishments both as artists and as black persons. Blacks, she believed, needed also to begin to recognize Africa as the “mother country.” Teer felt that blacks needed to think positively of the wealth of the motherland and of its rich cultural and artistic heritage. These, then, were the convictions that spurred Teer to begin her own theatre. She knew that a theatre would encompass more than actors. She needed plays. When asked by Valerie Harris to define black drama, Teer replied, “I don’t define it. I don’t know what ‘black drama’ is. I just know that I’m a certain way, and that way nurtures me, and that’s all I know to write about. . . . See, I don’t separate dance from singing from writing from directing. There’s really only the experience.”9 Although Teer knew of no plays or scripts that expressed this nurturing feeling she missed, she wanted an artistic form that highlighted the positive aspects of blacks, containing music, songs, and dances that would combine the African roots of blacks with Christian inspiration. Teer’s search for experiences that would nurture her artistic expression led her to the Pentecostal church, whose spiritual exercises suited her needs exactly. According to Jessica Harris, Teer’s process of creating a new black actor was a spiritual experience. “Most black people in the world are united by a common tradition of worship that cuts across social classes and national differences. This is not a common religion but rather a similarity of worship that can be traced through the religions of Africa to those of the Caribbean and finally to the Pentecostal and ‘holy roller’ churches in the United States. It is from this energy that the NBT works to create a liberator.”10 Many of these same elements can be found in performances at the National Black Theatre. Teer was inexperienced in theatrical theory, black Pentecostalism, and Yoruba tradi-

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tions, and so she turned by instinct to her inner feelings and her cultural heritage. Genevieve Fabre offers one explanation for the course taken by Teer and others: The drama traditionally written by whites requires catharsis [as defined by Aristotle], whereas the ideology of revolutionary theatre established more critical reflection. By refusing catharsis, black theatre does not renounce its emotive function, but adds exercise to exorcism. In the best performances . . . reflection stems from emotions and creates the effect of shock. Emotion is not an end in itself but a means to construct meaning.11

Theory Teer seized at once on the ritualistic practices of Pentecostals and Africans as a starting point, partly because of their innate theatricality, “integrating,” as Fabre puts it, “musical forms, narrative, and choreography specific to black culture.”12 Teer stated that “you can’t put that magic in a play for plays are nothing but ego trips, anyway. You stand up there on stage reciting lines, and the audience flips out because you’ve mastered an acting technique.” The main element that excited Teer’s imagination was ritual. Bruce McConachie describes a ritual as a “repetitious, formalized, and dramatically-structured communication of significant cultural meanings, effected through the involvement and catharsis of its participants, which functions to legitimate an image of a social order. The ‘dramatically structured elements’ may vary widely from ritual to ritual, but include music, song, call-response, liturgical chanting, dance, impersonation, incarnation, story—in sum, theatrical elements.”13 These elements suited Teer, as she declared that in her theatre audience and performers would have the same electrifying experiences that she had witnessed in the Pentecostal churches of Harlem. Her first trip to Africa in 1972 acquainted her with African rituals, which she related to the practices of black Pentecostals, confirming her decision to include such elements in her theatre. Teer’s aim was not, however, to take the African and Pentecostal rituals literally in order to change the behavior of African Americans, for she did not, according to James Hatch, “impose Yoruba rituals on black Americans, but rather develops eclectic forms based on close examination of black life in America with its intuitive and acquired rhythms and rituals of the street, church, bar, school, and family. All offer form, content, and style that can be used to raise the consciousness of Afro-Americans as to who they are, and who they can be.”14 Teer wanted her rituals to raise consciousness. To this end, Mance Williams reports that the NBT coined the term ritualistic revivals to describe what they did. . . . The ritual part is a musical experience of overpowering creative force that entertains and transforms the audience. Combined in these rituals are elements of religion, dance, music, incantation, and the communal experience. The revival side expresses and celebrates the joy of living and provides for both performers and spectators a liberating catharsis.15

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And most importantly for Teer, a ritual was a liberating and “a holy experience; you deal with a congregation of people. A ritual is a family affair. In a ritual you mend and heal the mental wounds in the minds of your people. You attempt to get your people out of the box that Western civilization has placed us in, inhibiting us, keeping us from being natural. You wash away all negative Western thought patterns, because essentially a ritual concerns itself with decrudding.”16 From the Pentecostal churches and the Yoruba rituals, Teer borrowed theatrical elements with which she felt comfortable, those ingredients that separated her from white culture. In music these included rhythms familiar to black Americans in the cadences of jazz, blues, soul, spiritual, and gospel. Teer employed African drummers for every acting training session, as well as for performances. The speech of performances was likewise modeled on that used in Harlem churches, the so-called black English common among blacks throughout the country, although standard English was not wholly eschewed. Performances also included “testimony” from the audience and cast, consisting of impromptu personal anecdotes about how they had overcome some difficulty. During testimony, auditors offered support with comments such as “You can make it,” “I’m a witness,” “He brought me through,” and “I know God cares about you.” This sudden intimacy between perfect strangers—escalating after the performance into hugs, kisses, prayers, and even offers of money—was Teer’s goal. Just as sharing personal travails and accomplishments in church enables the congregation to greet one another familiarly as “sister” or “brother” before they become fully acquainted, the same activity in a theatre creates a bond of fellow feeling known as “the ensemble effect.” Teer’s adaptation of the call-and-response aspect of religious services was governed by an unwritten code of taste that, while welcoming spontaneous outbursts by all parties and the use of intimate phrases expressing solidarity, prevented demonstrations from becoming unruly. Nevertheless, from the point of view of many white spectators, these elements of Pentecostal worship and Yoruba ritual appear comic or incredible in a theatre. The reasons for this reaction are not obvious, and since Teer feels that this element of her theatre calls deeply to black people, it deserves investigation. The culture shock many whites experience at an NBT production is due in part to their self-enforced isolation from black culture, in worship as well as in daily chores. Living as a minority in a hegemonic society necessitates disguise in order to succeed or even to exist, so blacks learn white ways in their efforts to adapt; but whites almost never have occasion to observe black life, let alone understand it. Teer borrowed elements from Pentecostal services and Yoruba rituals that not only fostered a healthy familiarity between cast and audience but also set blacks apart as a coherent and sharply defined subculture. These included the elements of dance, call-and-response, testimony, music, highly emotionalized motor reactions, speaking in tongues, and spontaneous verbal and physical outbursts. Upon these theatrical elements Teer based her theory of theatre that culminated in the NBT of Harlem.

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Goals Teer and her group of thirty-five performers formulated six goals: 1) the creation and perpetuation of a black art standard, 2) eliminating the competitive aspect of most commercial theatre, 3) reeducating audiences, 4) restoring spirituality and a cultural tradition that Teer felt had been stripped from blacks in America, 5) creating an alternate system of values to the Western concept, and 6) creating a black theory of acting and liberation. Self-Affirmation According to Teer, “First and foremost was the creation and perpetuation of a black art standard. A way of working blackly—so that an artist can work naturally from his own spiritual energies, by using the language, environment, and all elements which distinguished black people from other nationalities.”17 James Anderson gives a vivid example of one of Teer’s distinguishing elements with his comment on language: “The writing/speaking styles of Mexican-American, Black-American, and Puerto Rican-American students are frequently viewed as ‘too flowery,’ too subjective, involving an excessive use of metaphors, [and] utilizing the wrong tense of verbs.” He adds that “What is a valuable and valid communication process under one cognitive style becomes a deformed example of cognitive/linguistic deficits under another.”18 Teer’s goal was to have her African American students find what Anderson calls the “valuable and the valid” by “working blackly,” that is, by studying and working within their own culture. The goal of self-affirmation through the study of one’s own culture has also been tested at NBT in unanticipated ways. Cooperation NBT’s second major goal, in Teer’s words, “was to eliminate the competitive aspect of most commercial theatre. This goal was accomplished through an essential black medium: the black family structure.” This structure, instilled in Africa, carried over into slavery; for during slavery, as James Banks points out, “the family was important to the slaves. Family members taught the child how to survive the harsh white environment, as well as how never to submit totally to the whims of the master.”19 Family was important not only to teach survival techniques but to serve as a supportive and collaborative body. In the NBT, as in many families, there was to be no “star” system; everyone was to be important, but no one was to be indulged. The group became very goal-oriented, not role-oriented; roles were not rigidly defined. The members of Teer’s company were given freedom to experiment; every member was expected to “do everything from sweeping the floors to singing.” Accordingly, “sound technicians acted. Actors built sets. Lighting designers danced. Cooperation was Teer’s goal; group effort was stressed rather than individual effort.”20 This community spirit that Teer fostered in

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her theatre company not only developed latent talents in the entire company but also provided a model of the society that she envisioned as the ideal result of the NBT’s educative efforts: a society based on cooperation rather than on competition. Education The third major goal of NBT was to reeducate audiences. In Teer’s words, “We need permanent cultural and educational institutions, committed to teaching what it means to be human. . . . Art and culture is where people are taught values, where substance is produced, where we establish traditions and practices and rituals and standards which we live our lives by. Culture and art is where the parameters for behaving are developed, how we treat each other, what we hold dear.”21 In commercial theatre financial success has become more important than teaching values to those who support and participate in it. Teer and the NBT want to give their community information germane to their surroundings and to issues that confront them daily. Harris writes that “the NBT performances . . . deal with situations that are relevant to the members of the Harlem Community. The group attempts and usually succeeds in providing the largely Harlem spectators with new information about themselves, so that they leave uplifted, reaffirmed, and enlightened.”22 Reeducating has a twofold purpose: to counteract the damaging effects of subjugation of African Americans’ minds, and to cultivate a clear understanding of facts necessary for African American survival. In the NBT production A Revival, one actor related information about how blacks spend their money to show that although blacks have money, they often spend it on seemingly unnecessary material objects: “We are 11 per cent of the population but we buy 49 per cent of this country’s scotch, spend 8 million dollars on ties and 200 million on suits and drink 25 per cent of the grape soda.” Then he asked the audience, “How does that relate to positive blackness?”23 To expose the greater Harlem area to information about social and political issues, in 1971 Teer instituted symposiums, later called blackenings, on Sunday afternoons. Teer stated that a symposium “is an open forum where black people can come and find out directly from the people involved in cultural-political-economic activities what they are about.” The audience and the Harlem community were thus reeducated about their history, their culture, and their power as consumers. Spirituality “NBT’s fourth goal,” writes Harris, “was to restore spirituality and a cultural tradition that Teer felt had been stripped away from blacks in America.” After all, she reasoned, blacks are a spiritual and emotive people: “We are an African people. And Africans are spirit people. So we must have an ideology that will help us develop a spirit culture. A culture to deal with the spirit. A spirit power, in order to deal with the concept of theatre as a religious experience . . . as a holy experience, as a cleans-

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ing experience, as a lifting experience, as a raising experience. As a force or energy to help us transcend ourselves; raise ourselves, so that we can discover the magic in us.”24 Teer advocated not a dismissal of Christianity or of God but a religion without hypocrisy. She herself had found a spiritual bond with the Yoruba. She stated that embracing African religion is “not so much a rejection of Christianity as a rejection of what Western Civilization has done to Christianity. Christianity is packaged and presented as a mental thing. . . . there’s no experience of the religion. When you go to a Protestant Church there is no emotive power because there is no action, no life force. There is no emotive power allowed to the people. All power is behind the pulpit.”25 Yet she did find spirituality in Christianity as well as in Yoruba religion. She found it in the black Pentecostal churches, where freedom of expression was encouraged to a far greater degree than in other churches, where, she felt, outward decorum smothered any spiritual sparks. Once the students at Teer’s theatre had kindled their own spirituality, they could then ignite an audience. At performances Teer wanted the participants and the audience to be infused with spirituality, while celebrating being black and being human. Values “Creating an alternative system of values to the Western concept was the fifth goal of NBT,” according to Teer. Through observation and experience Teer and her associates determined that problems of separation resulting in emotional and physical stress were being caused by a breakdown in communication with Africa. Cut off from this source of self-validation, Teer believed, black Americans had been forced to adopt the standards, values, and lifestyles of Americans with European backgrounds, and this process weakened blacks. “Our technique is all about the strengthening of the mind. We start with the premise that the Western system is a very surface system opposed to the essence of things, the center, the spirit of people. . . . A spiritual journey is the opening of new avenues of thought redirecting the concept of who we are and how we must function.”26 In Teer’s view, theatre was a spiritual art form, one that could arise from emotions and awaken them in turn. Some acting teachers and directors regard strict discipline and conventions as the means by which emotion can be harnessed and safely unleashed. Blacks, Teer felt, are different. She did not want to be confined by strict conventions of blocking, concepts, and styles. My vision of theater is one rooted in the heart, not the mind. I want to add another dimension to theatre—the dimension of human spirit, so that people will get to experience who they are when they come to the theater and not just look at the scenery and how pretty the actors are. It’s a billion dollar industry wasted on gimmicks to sell tickets when in fact the only thing to sell is you—your spirit directly communicating to somebody else.27

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The NBT actors do not perform with an invisible fourth wall; they are as aware of their audience as their audience is of them. Their goal is to involve every audience spiritually in their performance. NBT has also sought to develop a “God-conscious” art to replace European “selfconscious” art, which it believed was conditioned by materialism and based on external feelings. Teer writes that “God-conscious art is the creative expression coming from within, as opposed to self-conscious art, which has resulted from European conditioning and which says that you have to gain external material things to feel fulfilled.”28 God-conscious art, according to Teer, is guided by the creative impulses that emanate from within. She believes it is a way of performing with spirituality and emotions unleashed, as opposed to traditional Western standards, which, in an effort to sublimate emotional energy, too often simply represses it. Liberation Teer has stated that “the sixth goal of the NBT was to create a black theory of acting and liberation.” Teer believed that liberation becomes necessary for black Americans who, raised in a racist environment, consider themselves to be second-class citizens. These feelings of inferiority can hinder the actor in performance, inhibiting that freedom of expression essential to art. Teer urges NBT members to make themselves responsible for their state of mind regardless of what happens to them. This sense of responsibility, she feels, liberates them from the negative forces of society, enabling them to become autonomous creators and liberators. In Harris’s words, As the black experience in America is quite different from the white one, black actors are frequently asked to play roles that have nothing to do with the basic reality of their lives. This may seem to be a contradiction but Stanislavsky’s “as if” theory does not always work for black actors in these times. With the theories established by the NBT, the black actor can return to himself, to his culture, to his heritage, and to his people. 29

Stanislavsky’s “magic if” treats “if” as a word that “can transform our thoughts. . . . Through it we can imagine ourselves in virtually every situation.” This particular doctrine becomes destructive for many African Americans, whom “if” can make very angry. “If there had not been slavery,” “If I were white,” “If there were no racism,” “If I could get a good job” are subjunctive propositions African Americans must often use, defeating the purpose of Stanislavsky’s exercise and providing a negative force with which to reckon before the real work can begin. Instead of inviting the actor to forget himself and step into another soul, the NBT immerses him in self-study, not only of who he is but of his roots. Teer has remarked that “if you really want to know about a people look at their beliefs. Their Gods. Before history books got turned all around you could tell people by what they believed in . . . not by the history, the set of facts selected and put down according to some individual’s ordered mind.”30

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In order to help herself understand her black roots, Teer applied for and received a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1972 to visit seven African countries to research “soul” through African ancestry. She spent four months in western Nigeria acquainting herself fully with the Yoruba culture and religion. Teer “was supposed to visit seven countries in Africa and spend a couple of weeks in each, but ended up spending all the time in Oshogbo, a small village in Nigeria where she was initiated as a Yoruba priestess.”31 Teer returned to Nigeria seven times between 1972 and 1974. She and her performing company of thirty-five students continued their research into other parts of the black world: Africa, South America, the West Indies, Guyana, Haiti, and Trinidad.

Training The foundation of the National Black Theatre lies in its classes and workshops. Its productions have been supported by the study and participation required of the performers in the NBT classes. It has been important to Teer to have not only a theatre company with a new ideology but also a process by which artists could be trained to apply her theories of performance. By the mid-1970s, courses were offered in evolutionary movement and dance, meditation, spiritual release, numerology, astrology, liberation theory and practice, and ideology. Classes in liberation theory and practice were called the Master of Liberation Workshop and the Pyramid Processes One and Two. The Master of Liberation Workshop was a seven-hour course designed by Teer to demonstrate to the student that he is responsible for everything in his own life. This workshop, according to Teer, was “designed to put ‘you’ in touch with ‘your’ power so that you could transform your life and increase ‘your’ ability to attract and hold more prosperity, aliveness, happiness and joy.”32 The workshop helped participants to break out of their shells, which Teer believed to be self-imposed. In 1975 she explained how the goals of the Master of Liberation Workshop were achieved: “In order to realize total liberation, this workshop moves participants towards an inward cleansing of the mind. Through a comparative analysis of two different evolutionary systems, one African and one European, participants get to choose a point of view about life which assists them in removing the notion that black people are oppressed, and helps them get more satisfaction out of life.”33 The second and third steps of liberation theory were the Pyramid Processes One and Two, both of them eight-week courses. Teer stated that their purpose was “to enable the participants to present themselves fearlessly to the world and to enjoy that presentation of who they were.” Power, according to Teer, “was the ability to take action.” Each student would be able to “rediscover and master that magnetic entity called soul and express himself in a whole new way so that he can perform effortlessly and without fear.”34 Teer assured each student that he could become an accomplished person if he believed in himself.

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The Pyramid Process Two course, also called the Ritualization of Communication, was for more advanced students. Its purpose “was to further remove concepts of lack, limitation, and self-consciousness.” To free themselves of feelings of inadequacy, the students performed continuously either before an audience or before the class. Teer encouraged them at every opportunity, in novel and sometimes surprising ways. For example, she wrote a musical for Zuri McKie, a student interested in opera performance. Teer reported that “Zuri wanted to sing again and I supported her. What I had to do was write a piece that would present her in a fashion that she’d be comfortable with. . . . I wrote it [Softly Comes a Whirlwind] for her out of my love for her.”35 Three other exercises helped prospective performers to understand and achieve the goals of liberation theory. The first exercise engaged the participant in a “love affair” with himself. Teer’s theory was that by loving oneself, one can become self-motivated, love others, and educate others through love. The second exercise, named the “de-crudding” process, was designed to eradicate feelings of worthlessness and selfcontempt. This process identified the worth in a person and helped him appreciate and love himself. Teer explained that the “de-crudding” process was a “purification process undertaken by the prospective actors to find whatever was at their base as individuals.” This exercise encouraged students to speak out about themselves, so that they would not believe racial slurs and would have verbal weapons with which to defend their merits. Another part of the liberation class were visits to a highly emotional Pentecostal church and a lively bar, both in the center of Harlem, on the assumption that in such surroundings people show most clearly who they are. In such surroundings, Teer believed, students could gain further insight into the character of their own people. During these visits students encountered people from all classes and walks of life. The observations made at the church and at the bar had a twofold purpose: to see black people from varied professions, and to see those people reacting to a relaxed setting. In Teer’s words, We set out to establish a theatrical concept based on the black life-style and we borrowed heavily from the churches. . . . We went into the churches, not the Episcopal churches, but the Pentecostal churches, the Baptist churches . . . where blackness was most clearly expressed. For us blackness is a spiritual value. . . . We measured that value based on how free people were—black people are really free in church.36

This “free-spirit” technique was an emotional and spiritual experience involving students’ observations of body movements stimulated by feelings and thoughts. Teer wanted her students to discover the close connection between the spirit and the senses. This is partly why she included church attendance in her curriculum and continues to do so. During the church services that Teer’s students attend, members of the congregation and visitors are often encouraged to express their love, joy, happiness, sadness, vocally or physically and without embarrassment. It is not uncommon

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to see members, during any part of the worship service, scream, cry, and wave their arms. Members of the congregation eagerly clap their hands, tap their feet, shake their heads, and sway their bodies as they begin to feel the spirit. This does not distract them from the service but rather fuels the fire that has been generated by the minister’s prayer or by a song from the choir. An onlooker at these proceedings might believe that the members are crazy or fanatic—or even that they are faking emotions. But to the members themselves these experiences are very important. The worshipers are simply obeying scripture: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with singing.” Occasionally, a member will begin a holy dance, some running all about the church, and some running to the altar and remaining there until they feel blessed by God. Often this experience results in crying, sometimes in rolling on the floor in humility, and sometimes in foaming at the mouth for purification. Teer’s students often find themselves caught up in these services. The climax of the Pentecostal church service is usually the minister’s sermon, which is both emotional and dramatic. During the sermon, a Pentecostal minister might strike the pulpit or even jump on top of it. Nor does he remain in the pulpit or rostrum area, but he might take a microphone and go down into the congregation. He might also establish a rhythm, keeping the beat by tapping his foot or clapping his hands. His sermon is in many ways a theatrical enactment of his biblical text. Such rhythmic preaching descends from its roots in Africa, in rhythms used by the griot or storyteller. Teer surmised that it was essentially a black idiom and so wanted to instill it in her students. She concluded that “there are many concrete reasons why the church is our oldest and strongest institution. . . . Many of our basic techniques come directly from the black Church.” The Pentecostal church service, which was the only service the NBT classes attended for this exercise, was a necessary element of Teer’s training because she was advocating a “move from a self-conscious art to a God-conscious art,” in order to “discover a whole new way of fully expressing the actor.”37 Africa had also forged bonds between its religious ceremonies and theatrical entertainments. John Mbiti reports that the single most important difference between Western and African religious theatrical ceremonies was that for the Africans, religion and theatre were synonymous. “Religion is the African’s celebration of life and his source of survival, whereas traditional theatre is his way of giving witness to this.”38 For the African, religion and theatre are both free, communal, and a celebration of life that can instruct, entertain, please, or provoke into action. Both theatre and religion are carriers of the culture to the people. Religion exerts the greatest influence on the thinking and living of the people concerned, for “wherever Africans are, so is their religion.”39 Religion was the African’s celebration of life and his source of survival. In the traditional African community there are no irreligious people, for to be human is to belong to the whole community, and to belong to the community is to be involved, fully participating in the beliefs, customs, ceremonies, rituals, and festivals of that community.

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For Teer and her theatre, the community holds the same importance. Her theatre is concerned with the needs, problems, and interests of the community and what answers, solutions, and balms they may need. As religion played an important role in the theatres of the past, it is now injecting new life into theatre again, but this time in Harlem. Although others have used religion as a source, Teer is the first to combine the African celebrative rites and the black Pentecostal ceremonial worship elements as the basis for a theatre. Graduation from one class usually led to enrollment in other NBT classes. In 1975 Teer and her group reevaluated the classes, continuing those that were thought most necessary, modifying others, and creating new ones to meet the needs of the students. Among the courses added were the Teer Technology of Soul [TTS] One and Two, which are the principal performance classes meeting twice a week for two months. Classes in Identity, Dignity and Trust and Advanced Public Performance are subsidiaries and are scheduled for participants who want more training. The sessions meet only once, all day on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. I attended the Identity, Dignity and Trust course in January 1988. After seating themselves, students took notes as Teer lectured: Freedom. To be Free means that you are autonomous. We invite you to experience a mood of peace. Peace is a conversation without worry or doubt. Begin taking all your cues from the heart. Ask yourself the questions: What do I care about? What are my concerns? What is my commitment? . . . Shift your conversations. Move through your life from the conversation commitment. . . . If you operate from your commitment, from your heart, from your concerns and caring, you immediately become effective in the world. You should speak and listen from your commitment. You should shift your conversations. And be able to move through your life from the conversation of Commitment.40

When asked what conversations were, Teer explained that they were “interior verbal exchanges. Everybody talks to himself, whether in the mind or in the heart, and rather than trying to dismiss such colloquies, the participant should listen in. In this course, I want you to reconnect yourself back to a conversation of the heart. I encourage you to find your commitment in life.”41 Each participant was encouraged to work fifteen minutes a day at a “confidence center,” which was defined as any space where the participants could go privately for meditation. Spiritually, it was a place where they would repeat the following thoughts, supplied them by Teer: “You are the Self. You are of God. God’s power within you is greater than any challenge or circumstance of life. No habit, no lifestyle, no personality has the power over you to block your full expression of health, prosperity, wisdom, peace and joy. The Spirit, the Self, the I Am is great within you. It is a divine intelligence, a conversation.”42 Therefore, according to Teer, “as NBT liberators, they must look past the obvious, and look for all possible approaches to a problem, and find several solutions; they must move with energy, making sure their bodies are capable of the task.”43

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Classes have been the foundation of the NBT from the beginning. They provide a range of experiences for the prospective performer or playwright. In addition to training actors and playwrights, whose compositions the young actors perform, the NBT maintains a complete theatre company. Above all, Teer focuses on consciousness raising, using community resources in Harlem, and she encourages her students to investigate their own heritage as performers rather than as characters in a play. Teer asserts that the characters her students will portray can be drawn from the five cycles of evolution studied by each student. The Cycles The goals and classes were synthesized into five stages that Teer calls cycles: “From observations made in [the church, the Apollo Theatre, and the bar] the participant can begin to build his own interpretations of the Five Cycles of Evolution, which are at the base of the technique for the NBT actor.”44 Teer’s terminology for the five cycles originated from the rhetoric of the 1960s and early 1970s; i.e., black power, militancy, civil rights, and revolution. This rhetoric, though somewhat dated, need not obscure Teer’s basic categories: First, the nigger. The Nigger is the most free, most colorful and most creative character. But he has strong materialistic and individualistic values. Second, the negro. The Negro is also individualistic and materialistic. He accepts white cultural standards and is an imitation of a white American imitating Europeans, imitating Romans, imitating Greeks, who we all know were imitating Africans. Third, the militant. The Militant is an aware Nigger, still individualistic and materialistic. He’s in that I-hate-all-white-people bag but he’s not for real change, and is only angry and frustrated because the system won’t let him in. Fourth, the nationalist. The Nationalist is non-materialistic. He is intellectually for the collective. This is the first step into true blackness, where you develop a consciousness and a love for your people. And Fifth, the revolutionary. The cycle of the revolutionary is the highest, the most evolved of all the cycles, for in this cycle you deal with the spirituality of blackness. You know who you are, what you have to do and you simply go about quietly doing it.45

These cycles represented Teer’s sense of the internal changes necessary before external ones could take place. The characters of the cycles, representative of the people of Harlem, could move either up or down the vertical scale. Teer understood the cycles as representations of qualities in black life. An actor, she believed, found the salient characteristics of each cycle and used them for his work on a character. The cycles were not restrictive; they were merely guidelines and thus offered an open arena in which an actor could work. Teer admitted, “Of course you can’t put real people in such categories. . . . In real life all of us [blacks] have the same tendencies; it’s just a matter of emphasis. But as a technique it [the five cycles] is a good guideline, a basis for a black theatrical standard.”46 When analyzing the five character types in Teer’s classroom, students are encouraged to deal with each in terms of color, music, values,

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and other indications of black lifestyle. At the end of each class Teer encourages her students, as a final project, to create workbooks using magazine and newspaper clippings, song titles and lyrics, and swatches of material to illustrate each of the five cycles. These workbooks are meant to illustrate that the cycles are constantly changing. Although students in traditional acting classes often hope that some kind of bonding takes place, Teer goes further by involving the students in social functions. The students must attend church and the Apollo Theatre and must go to a bar together. If even one student is absent, the activity must be repeated. Having the students extend their instruction outside the classroom helps them to bond not only with their group but with their culture. Finally students must involve themselves in community service in order to be performers at the NBT. Teer places particular emphasis on this condition, as she feels that this helps students to understand that their community is important to them and that they are important to their community. Students will then feel bound not only to the NBT but especially to their community. The NBT’s Performance Goals After Teer had set goals for the NBT, she and her members initiated goals for their productions. They had very definite ideas of what theatre should do in order to liberate. Teer stated: Our art standard requires that all theatrical presentations, be they dramatic plays, musicals, rituals, or revivals must: 1. Raise the level of consciousness through liberating the spirits and strengthening the minds of its people. 2. Be political, that is it must deal in a positive manner with the existing conditions of oppression. 3. In some ways educate and educate to bring out that which is already within and give knowledge and truth. 4. Clarify issues, that is enlighten the participants as to why so many negative conditions and images exist in their community in order to eliminate the negative condition and strengthen the positive condition. 5. Lastly, it must entertain.47

Teer felt that the key to attaining these objectives was to discover the secret of “soul.” The seventh definition of “soul” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is “a strong, positive feeling (as of intense sensitivity and emotional fervor) conveyed esp. by American Negro performers . . . of, relating to, or characteristic of American Negroes or their culture . . . designed for or controlled by Negroes.”48 Teer’s own views on the matter are fully consistent with this definition, and her own notion of “soul” is represented in her statement that Singing, dancing, those are the things that take you down. When we sing and it gets so good we go down. The singers in the Gospel choirs dip their knees and get down, we go down and into ourselves. For the power. To touch the forces. And when they are touched,

360 lundeana m. thomas when it gets so good we release the power in a scream. You know. That’s power. That’s emotion. That is feeling, primal, unrefined feeling is force. . . . And when you go into the Holy Roller church, the Pentecostal churches and when you see African Religious festivals . . . Bimbes, or when you see Haitian ceremonies. People are moving. They’re dancing. They’re praising. They’re singing. It goes on and on. You know, they are drumming. They’re stomping . . . and they’re down . . . and they release this spirit and they get power. They kiss the Earth when they give praise. They don’t look up to the sky. They go down to the ground where it is practical.49

Teer believes that “soul” people are a practical people whose element is Earth. Teer also believes that “soul” is a feeling. She describes particular sounds that make up the feeling of soul: “When you go down 125th Street or in any black community you hear music all the time and it’s blasting . . . out to the suburbs it’s clean, clean, clean and quiet, quiet, quiet. . . . When you go into the black community people live side by side. In the south, in Harlem and not always by force of ghettoization. Rather by force of feeling.”50 For Teer, “soul” brothers and sisters are those who can identify with the discrimination that blacks have encountered in America. When racism damages a person, Teer believes, it goes to the very core of that person’s being, to his very soul: he is rejected not for a mere “offense,” he is rejected for what he is. Although whites and others can sympathize, Teer feels, they cannot fully understand the impact of such a blow unless they are kindred souls. Ultimately, “soul” “is the awesome gift, a cultural phenomenon that swells up inside where the spirit resides. It can be present when a person is in touch with the divine energy of God.”51 “Soul,” then, is the key to Teer’s acting method; and to put audiences in touch with “soul” is the purpose of her theatre, for soul is the essence of spirituality. As Harris writes, “The National Black Theatre does not consider entertainment its overriding goal. Its major goal is to re-educate, to restore spirituality and a cultural tradition that Teer believes has been stripped from blacks in America.”52 Art can serve this educative function, according to Teer, because it reflects the culture that produced it. But for this very reason it is important to choose carefully the sources from which to create an art that is to educate a people: “Black life-style must be the source of artistic expression if there is to be a black theatre for a black nation.”53 For Teer the foundations of this cultural institution lie in training artists, theatrically and spiritually, in the spirit of an African American lifestyle. The NBT answers the need established by earlier dramatists who called for a unique black theatre in Harlem. It answers that need because 1) it is a black theatre, 2) its rituals, by and large, are the most successful of all the black experimental theatres of the 1960s, 3) it has lasted longer than any other black theatre in Harlem, 4) it has become a cultural treasure in Harlem supported by an audience, and 5) it has become a model for other black community theatres in America. Much of Teer’s approach has involved changing the terminology and definitions used to describe the NBT. She invoked associations in labeling the NBT a “Temple of Liberation, designed to preserve, maintain, and perpetuate the richness of the black life-style.” Teer called the NBT’s plays “revivals” or “rituals,” and Genevieve Fabre

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writes that “for the National Black Theatre ritual is a communal event organized and studied, refined and unambiguous. It aims not to bring African ritual into a different context, but to create a ritual that renews the ties among cultural elements alienated from one another.54 Teer uses the example of Pentecostal church revivals, but rather than reaffirm the connection between believer and God, she reaffirms the relationship between performer and audience. Jessica Harris asserts that “Revival has nothing to do with downhome camp meeting. [It is] a didactic work, but then the major aim of the National Black Theatre is education and nation-building.”55 In the process of nation building, claims Harris, “the ritual releases a psychic liberating energy; thus Teer calls the actors—liberators.”56 Similarly, Teer labels the audience members “participants” and challenges the limiting concept of a stage as a self-contained performing space. In her view “there is no such thing as a stage, nor such a thing as an audience: only liberators and participants. And you try to remove that psychic distance, that nigger space that separates black people from each other. In a ritual you mold, meet, and merge into one. You feel, laugh, cry, and experience life together.”57 With distinctions between performers and spectators removed, the audience can relax and become more engaged in the dramatic experience. The performers are also able to relax, and to be more spontaneous and natural in a setting that does not put pressure on them to emote but rather refuels them with the energy of the participants. Teer never forgets her obligation to the audience, for her aim is to “put theatre in the service of the community and define the dialectical relationship between artists and the community as represented by the assembly.” Yet she does not see the relation of artist to public as a slavish subservience or as pandering. She recognizes that those who come to the theatre have much to offer the performers besides the price of a ticket. “The black artist must remember that it is the people that give him light and clarity of vision and who reinforce his sensibilities.”58 Here again Teer departs from much traditional theatre in seeking to identify and elaborate ways in which performers may be stimulated by an audience. “Every ritual has a function,” she states. “Ours is to open up, liberate, regain and reclaim our spiritual freedom. If we are successful, then people watching will feel this.”59 Teer does not claim that traditional theatre fails to arouse emotion but rather that in traditional theatre feelings come from observing performances, while in the NBT feelings ought to arise from more active kinds of involvement.

Critical Response I want now to focus on five original “ritualistic revivals” performed by the NBT—The Ritual: To Regain Our Strength and Reclaim Our Power (1970); A Revival: Change/Love Together/Organize! (1972); Soljourney into Truth: A Ritualistic Revival (1974); Softly Comes a Whirlwind Whispering in Your Ear (1978); Soul Fusion (1980)—and one play, The Legacy (1988). The five “ritualistic revivals” represent Teer’s first attempts at formulating her type of theatre, while The Legacy represents her attempt to adapt a traditional

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script to her vision. (A detailed synopsis of each play is available in the appendixes at the end of this essay.) Each “ritualistic revival” used different ways of greeting the audience as they entered the performance space. This could happen as simply as it did in The Ritual, when the company began “their performance by shaking hands and chatting with the audience,”60 or as engagingly as it did during The Revival, “when the audience, upon entering the theater, encounters the players head on, face to face: beggars after some change [money] . . . [or] a sister totally wrecked by heroin looking to turn a fast two dollar trick.”61 Hazziezah, reviewing for the Amsterdam News, wrote that such action was “a far cry from the ‘star on the door,’ ‘see my agent’ demeanor of many actors. . . . The beaming smiles of the NBT family remind us that actors and ‘stars,’ if you will, are only real people.”62 The NBT enjoys giving personal touches to its opening sequences so as to lessen aesthetic distance in the theatre. Mauby, after viewing A Soljourney into Truth in Trinidad, wrote, Each individual is greeted personally, the first contact made as his hand is warmly shaken, his eye firmly held. He is told a little about the show, and asked if he is game [consenting] to participate. If he expresses any doubts, these are smoothed away. All that is asked for is an affirmation of willingness to co-operate. The psychology behind this approach is neat. The physical barrier has now been broached without fuss, and further contact has a comforting precedent.63

Besides such greetings, each ritualistic revival also included singing and dancing and the use of instruments such as “conga drums, guitars and tambourines.” A piano or synthesizer was used as well, for, according to Harris, “Music is an integral part of the performances at Ms. Teer’s theatre, as is dance and movement.” Although these elements can be present in Eurocentric productions, Harris notes that “music and movement are thought of in the African sense and are integrated within the performance, flowing naturally out of the situation that is being presented.”64 Chanting was also used during the ritualistic revivals, and Hazziezah suggests that “while the cast was chanting . . . it occurred to me that perhaps the same message of the Sixties is needed again today at the height of the apathy of the Seventies.”65 Teer also understands the necessity to adapt, and Lionel Mitchell noted that Softly Comes a Whirlwind had less chanting. He wrote that “Experimentation has paid off and the years when pretty girls seemed to seize every opportunity to chant ‘Afrika!’ ‘Africa!’ to the point of delirium have given way to a harvest of very masterful, naturalistic (even impressionistic!) theatre.”66 The most impressive element of the revivals, however, according to critics, was the energy exuded by the group. Michael Givens asked, “You want energy? Their energy, it may be told, is African heredity along with ‘sources of the sun.’”67 Clayton Riley reported that The Revival “works best when it is exploring the defiant, stubbornly energetic life style existing on America’s torn and wasted inner city streets.”68 Albert DeLeon felt an abundance of energy from this same production and wrote, “When the first act is over, one is raised to such an intense level of excitement that it seems

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impossible for the second act to sustain that sensation. It does. Indeed, the second act raises one’s involvement with the show even higher.”69 Charles Burden testified that Softly Comes a Whirlwind’s “simple story line serves as a touchstone for cast and audience to generate a certain energy together and create a certain atmosphere.”70 Such excitement and enthusiasm were also evident to Larry Conley, who in reviewing Soljourney into Truth revealed that “as theater the NBT mixture of love, African ritualism and positive thinking makes for a genuinely exhilarating evening.”71 One other important similarity in all ritualistic revivals is the opportunity for audience interaction during each performance, sometimes planned and sometimes spontaneous. In the early ritualistic revivals there was space for “testifying” not only from the performers but also from the spectators. The Ritual ends with the audience dancing and singing together onstage, while, according to DeLeon, The Revival’s “structure is such that there is room for improvisation by the performers to an extent that they are allowed to become personal with the audience, creating a tremendously inspirational atmosphere for everyone.”72 Here the audience was entertained and uplifted not only by the performers but by the other “participants” as well. Although all performances of the ritualistic revivals contained audience interaction, the shows were not always successful in prompting such reactions. After a performance of Soljourney into Truth, Mauby reported that “the show does depend on a measure of reluctance to participate. Immediate total co-operation by the whole audience could finish ‘Soljourney’ in less time.”73 Whirlwind had a decidedly different effect on its audience. Charles Burden wrote, “The final act is the performance of this concert for which she [Iansa, the main character] has been rehearsing. The part of the audience is played by—yes, you guessed it—the audience. Thus, from beginning to end, audience and cast switch back and forth between ‘play’ and ‘reality.’”74 Lionel Mitchell praised “the opening scenes . . . which are perhaps the most emotionally rich spontaneous ensemble ever put on stage.”75 Such remarks suggest that the story line of Whirlwind was more focused and detailed than those of The Ritual or Soljourney. Special greetings, music, singing, dancing, chanting, high energy, audience interaction, and spontaneity were elements that engaged the NBT’s audience in unusual ways. Some elements were not as successful as others in their implementation, but each distinguished the NBT as a group that entertained its audience in ways not always familiar in the American professional theatre. As Wilkerson says of black theatre in general, the NBT’s rituals show “the spiritual poverty of assimilationism” and the necessity of finding inner sources of self-validation. The NBT’s first ritual found this theme in its subtitle, To Regain Our Strength and Reclaim Our Power. Teer says that the whole thing is just a shift in conceptualizing the concept of culture. . . . Black culture is probably the most lucrative phenomenon or commodity in the whole world. In Africa, black America . . . James Brown. They reign. . . . You know people want to give up their culture and to adopt ours. It’s because we’ve combined the primitive, meaning the first, with the “civilized-technologized,” which might be the last . . . and come out with something unique, black American! And it is profound!76

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Wilkerson also argues that “theatre is similar to the black church and serves the historical function of a place where black people can be in the majority, away from the scrutiny or imposition of outsiders.”77 All of Teer’s rituals have the flavor of the church. During the performance The Legacy I witnessed, when one of the gospel numbers became particularly emotional, the piano player jumped up and started shouting. Other audience members joined in clapping and saying, “Yeah,” “Praise Him,” and “Hallelujah.” No one seemed surprised or expressed any negative judgment about this interruption of the production. To the contrary, the church-like atmosphere pleased the audience. One Amsterdam News reporter wrote after viewing The Revival: The music and form of this experience [are] very often rooted in the mode of the gospel black Church. The content is secular. Sometimes an Africanic religious essence is placed in this new-world form. The re-working of our church heritage forms to hold a powerful secularized and theatricalized message which is an important part of National Black Theatre’s experimentation—expressing an intelligent respect for the Afro-American traditions as well as those of the ancestral land.78

Teer wanted all of her productions to be similar to the Pentecostal church services so that people could leave feeling fulfilled, and in a familiar way. At the same time, however, NBT performances educate their audiences, familiarizing them with their cultural heritage. This again fulfills one of the functions of black theatre as Wilkerson defines it: the inclusion of some type of African cultural expression via music, dance, mime, or storytelling. The Ritual, according to Thomas Johnson, “ended with a revival-like finale—with both liberators and audience members together in the performing space dancing, clapping hands, and singing together, ‘We are an African people, together we can change this mixed-up land.’”79 During the performance of The Revival, there is a “descent of the goddess Oshun, Yoruba goddess of Love.”80 The third revival, Soljourney into Truth, included a segment in which, “in the form of a fantastic African ritual, the so-called ship ‘takes off.’ Adeyemi, with a feathered headdress and African garb, appears as a chieftain to whom gifts are brought.”81 African themes weave themselves consistently through the NBT’s ritualistic revivals. Another element of African heritage is improvisation, a vital aspect of every NBT performance. Wilkerson explains the art of improvisation as it relates to the black theatrical production. She maintains that “sometimes traditional theatre dictates containment and control to an audience: the separation of audience from performers, the written text of the play which discourages improvisation, and other elements make many European-American productions fixed events whose form, down to the last detail, is frozen in rehearsal.”82 Ortiz M. Walton, a black literary theorist of the 1970s, writes that “the art of improvisation first found expression in Africa. This can be seen as a natural development in a culture that encouraged free expression of emotion through art. The accent culturally and aesthetically was on spontaneity. Spontaneity in turn means to express feelings as they occur.”83 Walton argues that the spontaneity and improvisational as-

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pects of theatre are of African origin and the NBT uses them in every performance. The call-and-response method is also employed in many of Teer’s productions. Abiodun Jeyifous agrees generally with Wilkerson’s description of black theatre but adds that “the avowed aim of black theatre is to raise the consciousness of black people to an awareness of who they are,” for “consciousness replaced sensibility as the basic parameter of black theatre criticism.”84 Here, too, the NBT fits the model, with its goal to “raise the level of consciousness through liberating the spirits and strengthening the mind of its people.” The notion of spiritual rebirth is confirmed in the accounts of every reviewer. Of the NBT’s first revival, Johnson wrote that the “final message of the Ritual is that if blacks are to progress, they must utilize a variety of programs, disciplines and approaches, including politics, economics, cultural expressions and aims.”85 The Revival, according to Amsterdam News critic Clarence Allsopp, offers “a message of love, change and organization of black folks for positive goals . . . a beautiful African goddess appears at intervals to remind black people ‘We are children of the gods of Africa so be proud of your heritage.’”86 DeLeon, viewing the same ritual in 1972, wrote that at The Revival “everyone was moved by the characters talking about what it is to be black, and how blacks can better utilize their resources in order to strengthen all that is black.” When Mauby reviewed Soljourney into Truth, he clearly identified the message of raising consciousness: “The real purpose of the show, is to teach self-appreciation, how to love yourself, whoever you are, how to ‘expand your ability to feel good about being who you are because you are perfect.’”87 Charles Burden, writing for News World, affirmed that Softly Comes a Whirlwind, the NBT’s fourth revival, “is about supportativeness in human relationships or about people acknowledging their own and others’ true value, [for] one actually experiences as a participant the interplay of positivity between all present in that upper room, not as ‘players and audience’ but as human beings.”88 In writing about The Legacy, Kelly-Marie Berry acknowledged that the play’s “message for African-Americans [was] to unify to meet the struggles and perils of moving forward into the 21st Century.”89 By raising the consciousness of its audience, the NBT gave its members ammunition against racism, by having them feel good about themselves and spurring them to remember where they came from. Jeyifous lists three significant aspects of the black revolutionary theatre movement: 1) to completely reject commercial theatre, its values, and its presumed aesthetic premises; 2) to allow only the community to validate the plays that directly speak to their life; and 3) to have productions interpreted only by critics who understand the ideology and aspirations of the group. Teer stated that her ritualistic revivals stood in direct contrast to the Western tradition, which she saw as materialistic, as opposed to the black tradition, which she saw as spiritual. When any aspect of performance at the NBT differed from Western theatrical traditions, the difference was often aimed at engaging the audience more fully in performance. The NBT conforms to the goals of black theatre as set down by Wilkerson and Jeyifous. But the NBT’s accomplishments transcend these goals, for it has become a cul-

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tural institution of stature and influence in the Harlem community. The NBT not only reflects the culture around it; it reflects wholesomely upon that culture, giving back an improved though never merely idealized image of black life, an image strengthened by confidence in the value of the individual. Teer submits that this problem of discrimination will continue until we start cultural movements where people get clear about the value of who they are and what they offer to the world so I have built such an institution in Harlem. It’s on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 125th Street. We have just built a brand new $10 million facility where our people can come and create freely regardless of race, creed and color. It is from this center of cultural healing that a new entrepreneurial and innovative artist and leader will emerge.90

Teer and the NBT constantly receive validation from the community in the form of numerous awards. In 1973 Teer received an AUDELCO Recognition Award for her pioneering work with the NBT, and in 1974 she received a Certificate of Achievement from the Harlem Chamber of Commerce. In 1983 she received the Monarch Merit Award for outstanding contributions to the performing and visual arts from the National Council for Culture and Art. And again in 1983, after the fire, the NBT collected more than 16,000 signatures from Harlem residents on petitions for restoration funds from New York state. Thus it is not surprising that the National Black Theatre has remained a viable resource in the Harlem community. Today it is one of the few cultural treasures remaining in Harlem, surviving the Apollo, the Savoy, the Lafayette Theatre, and the American Negro Theatre. The NBT continues to choose and devise its productions in response to the Harlem community. For all their ritualistic revivals, Teer and her students developed questionnaires which they took to the community, and the community’s answers formed the foundation for the first act of those revivals. They turned to the community to help identify problems, and they searched for answers to those problems, which they then developed into the second acts of the revivals. The recently deceased Tunde Samuel would listen to the members of the Harlem community to ascertain what they were interested in, and he provided plays and musicals that interested them. Having heard, for example, the Harlem community discuss (and not discuss) homosexuality, Samuel quickly found two plays, Face to Face and Third Rhythm, that dealt with that issue. Much of the training offered presently at the NBT promotes self-worth and individual wholeness. It helps African Americans feel good about themselves, and it can help any minority that has been made to feel inferior by cultural hegemony or racial tensions. As we enter the twenty-first century, Teer’s training becomes especially helpful to professional theatres and universities in further understanding African Americans and other minorities as well. A culturally hegemonic society means that institutions are dominated by one cultural group. The only way this can be changed is for the dominant culture to appropriate more from each subordinate culture. Once this has happened, perhaps there can be a society where all cultures are recognized and respected. That, then, will

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be the fulfillment of Teer’s vision for the NBT, when America will seem more like “home” to a greater diversity of ethnic groups. Because the NBT meets broad criteria for standing as a black theatre, it fulfills the goal of W.E.B. Du Bois for a theatre that is by, for, about, and near black people. Because it is self-contained, with playwrights, performers, training, and a permanent theatre, it fulfills the need described by Langston Hughes. Because the NBT uses each performance to raise the level of consciousness, to clarify issues, and to entertain, it fulfills the need of a black theatre as prescribed by Ed Bullins. The ritualistic revivals conducted by Teer were visions of spectacle aimed at enlightening and inspiring the audience. Each performance was a celebration of life, of identity, and artistic expression. Most critics see Teer as a caring, devoted, talented, and exceptional woman. Her vision has been of a theatre group with immense energy that inspires its audience to support its programs. This audience, in turn, sees the NBT as an important force in the Harlem community. It is the quintessential black theatre of Harlem.

Appendix A: Biography of Barbara Ann Teer Barbara Ann Teer is listed in Who’s Who as an actress, playwright, producer, educator, author, dancer, entertainer, musician, and real estate broker. Teer was born on June 18, 1937, in East St. Louis, Illinois, the daughter of parents who were very involved with improving the quality of life for black people. Her father, Fred Teer, now deceased, was a civics teacher and track coach. During his life he owned a newspaper, a printing shop, and two restaurants, and he served as assistant mayor of East St. Louis. Teer’s mother, Lila, also a teacher, is now retired. Both of Teer’s parents were well known, and Teer was nurtured in a positive environment, growing up proud and precocious, as she says of herself. The young Barbara and her sister Fredrica (1936–1979) learned dancing at their aunt’s private school. Teer was an accomplished student, her goal being to dance her way to bright lights in a big city. In college she majored in dance education. Teer, who describes herself as overeducated, attended four American universities, starting at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and continuing at the University of Illinois, Connecticut College, and then the University of Wisconsin. She finally graduated with high honors after returning to the University of Illinois, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in dance education in 1957, at the age of nineteen. When asked why she attended so many universities, Teer replied that she had been taught by her parents to study under the “masters” to be “accomplished.” If she read a book or magazine about a promising teacher who was teaching at another university, she transferred to that institution. She transferred to the University of Illinois, for example, when she learned that Mary Wigman, a modern dance specialist, was a visiting professor there.

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After graduation, Teer continued to study with Mary Wigman in Germany at the Wigman School of Dance, and with Etienne Decroux in Berlin, perfecting the modern mime. While in Europe she also studied pantomime with Dick Crew, who practiced pantomime in Paris and performed in dance festivals throughout Switzerland. Returning to the United States, Teer studied with choreographer Alwin Nikolais, who taught abstract dancing to electronic music. She joined the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and performed with the company in Brazil. She launched her theatrical career as the dance captain in Kwamina, choreographed by Agnes DeMille in 1961. However, a knee injury forced her to set aside her dancing career. Depressed by her injury, Teer consulted a spiritualist who told her that her power was in her head rather than in her feet. It was then that she turned to acting, supporting herself by teaching dance to elementary school children while studying acting with Sanford Meisner, Paul Mann, Philip Burton, and Lloyd Richards, among others. In 1965 Teer won the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award for her performance in Rosalyn Drexler’s Home Movies (1964) and was in the original casts of Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1966) and Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own (1966). She also appeared in films, including Gone Are the Days (1964), the film version of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961), and The Pawnbroker (1965). Teer was known not only in the theatre and film worlds but in television as well, from her appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Camera Three, Kaleidoscope, and other programs. She also performed with Pearl Bailey in Las Vegas and with Duke Ellington in Chicago. Teer began writing for several periodicals and newspapers, including the Black Theatre Magazine, Black Power Revolt, Black World, and the New York Times. And yet, even with all these accomplishments, she was not content. Teer was unhappy not only with the roles she obtained but with the climate of the commercial theatre. She was becoming aware of who she was—a black woman in the 1960s, politically aware, but in white theatre. Teer not only left Broadway; she left New York in 1967. Three specific incidents caused her to reevaluate her goals. First, after becoming politically aware, she had her hair done in the popular style of the era, a “natural” or “Afro.” Her white agent was furious yet sent her to an audition to read for a role. The director looked at her briefly and asked her to remove her hat. When she informed him that it was not a hat but her hair, he allowed her to read for the part, told her she gave a beautiful reading, and said that he would call her. But he did not call. When her manager insisted that she change her hairstyle, she refused. Second, she was in rehearsal for an off-Broadway production when the director asked her to roll her eyes like Butterfly McQueen in the film Gone with the Wind, a request Teer found demeaning and insulting. Offended by the director’s insensitivity in this and other areas, she eventually left the show. Third, she was in another production with an all-black cast, whose directors, producers, and technicians were all white. When she began to question the absence of black technicians, she was labeled a troublemaker and asked to leave the show. “I made a lot of people uncomfortable,” she recalled. “People would say, ‘you’re mili-

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tant,’ or ‘you’re a professional black woman.’” Most of her show business friends, black and white, began to drift away, disturbed by Teer’s new attitude. More disappointed than hurt, Teer said, “I began to realize that this whole system is corrupt, the image it creates is completely decadent. There is no such thing as art as I think of it.” Rather than embrace the “corruption” any longer, Teer fired her manager and her agent and returned home to East St. Louis. She remained there for four months. Her return to New York was induced by an invitation to direct a show at the Public School Ninety-Two Theatre in Harlem as a benefit for Amiri Baraka, who had been jailed. Her New York directing debut came with We Sing a New Song, an artistic and financial success. She resumed working, along with Robert Hooks, as acting coach for the students of the Group Theatre Workshop. Teer enjoyed this newfound creative outlet, working with blacks on black shows in a black community, and she felt artistically fulfilled. Many of the cast members from We Sing a New Song wanted to study privately with Teer, but she continued working with Robert Hooks and the students of the Group Theatre Workshop, who were also involved with the productions of Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Happy Ending. The Group Theatre Workshop evolved into the Negro Ensemble Company in the summer of 1967, but Teer decided to leave because, as she put it, “My philosophy was that we should not be called Negroes. And we should not be located in the Village. I didn’t want to prove to white people that I could do their Western art form as good as they could.” Teer and her followers left the group, moved to Harlem, and began to distinguish themselves from Ward and other contemporaries.

Appendix B: The Ritual: To Regain Our Strength and Reclaim Our Power In 1970 the NBT premiered The Ritual: To Regain Our Strength and Reclaim Our Power. In May 1971 Thomas Johnson, a critic for the New York Times, provided an outline of the revival’s tone and action: A young woman enters singing “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child” as Barbara Ann Teer appears in a floor-length, fire orange robe with gold-plated breastplate stating, “Yes, black people, we are a long way from home. We’ve been on a bad trip. Now together, let us take this spiritual journey—we’re coming home.” Thirty liberators come from different directions to the stage area where Teer is located in a “Theatre in the round” space. The liberators appear to be actors, dancers, and singers all at once. The music begins to pick up a faster beat as the liberators began to chant, “Set free, Set free.” As they continue to chant, Teer states over the chanting, “The power is in me, We’re going home now.” The liberators move through the audience keeping rhythms with drums, chanting, “We need you, we want you. Got to have you, we are you.” Then a series of dramatic and musical scenes followed which depicted the problems and frustrations of urban black Americans. Intertwined with the scenes, liberators urge—“[t]ake a good look at

370 lundeana m. thomas your mind.” A young girl begins to shout, “[w]ake up, wake up—make your own magic. Don’t wait for it to happen. You are magic.” Quickly the street scene becomes a church scene and a dancing liberator who was feeling good was urged by others to “testify brother, testify.” The testifying liberator states, “I do believe I can feel the fire, I do believe that I am that fire. I do believe I can reclaim that power.” The ritual ended with a revivallike finale—with both liberators and audience members together in the performing space dancing, clapping hands, and singing together, “We are an African people, together we can change this mixed-up land.”91

Appendix C: A Revival: Change/Love Together/Organize! In July of 1972 A Revival: Change/Love Together/Organize! was conceived by Teer, who also directed the play. Written by Charlie Russell, author of The Believers (which Teer had directed in 1968), A Revival unfolded, according to Jessica Harris, as follows: As you enter the first space, the liberators casually show you to a seat and talk to you about various things, or try to panhandle, or dance. This action takes place in the street setting. This continues until the main story begins: Porky, a junkie, owes money to Walt, a pusher, but he has lost the money and cannot pay. He resorts to stealing a woman’s wallet but is caught. So he has no way to return the money that he owes Walt. When Walt comes to town, he threatens Porky and gives him a short time to come up with the money. In his flight from Walt, Porky has been befriended by Toussaint, who is the leader of the Temple of Liberation. Toussaint invites all the liberators and spectators to attend a revival later in the evening. This action is juxtaposed with the descent of the goddess Oshun, Yoruba goddess of Love. Oshun sees what has happened to her children, sees the state of the community, and exhorts all to unify and love each other. The descent of Oshun is the occasion for a scene of possession taken from the voodoo rites of Haiti and is one of the highpoints [sic] of the first part of the performance. Another highpoint is a fire dance that marks the entrance of the Kabakas, who present the revival in the second part of the performance. . . . A wall of the space is then rolled back, and the spectators are ushered under a heavy chain and into the Temple of Liberation. The atmosphere of the temple is completely different from that of the street. It is spiritual and not worldly. Most of the spectators are surprised to see the characters from the first part of the piece in the temple. But the plot continues. The first few minutes in the temple are spent introducing the Kabakas, the Liberators, and ourselves. Information gleaned from a book tells the spectators that blacks form only 11 percent of the population of the United States but that they drink more than 49 percent of the scotch consumed in the country and 25 percent of the grape soda; they spend 200 million dollars on suits and 8 million dollars on ties. The Kabakas feed the audience this information and then tell the spectators that blacks have money and power to support black institutions—not only the Temple of Liberation but all black institutions. The audience becomes so caught up in this that when the plot continues—Walt breaks into the temple to look for Porky—it seems to be an intrusion. . . . Walt takes Porky from the temple. Sometime later, Porky is returned to the temple, but he has been brutally beaten by Walt. This is the occasion for a scene of healing in the manner of the faith-healing evangelists. Toussaint, the leader of the Kabakas, heals Porky and im-

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plores him not to go back to dope and the life of the streets but rather to become a spiritual being and to work for positive black change.92

Appendix D: Soljourney into Truth Soljourney into Truth was created and directed by Teer in 1974. According to Larry Conley, a reviewer for the Columbia University’s City Scope Journal, Soljourney began with a conversation between the liberators and members of the audience: “Hi, my name is Ayodele, I’m your flight attendant for tonight. And you’re (glancing at the name tag) . . . Larry. Larry, how do you feel about someone you don’t know coming up and talking to you?” “Well, I don’t know. It’s kind of strange.” “Uh-huh. Do you like to travel?” “Sure, who doesn’t?” “Oh, you’re so right. What is it that you like about traveling?” “Not having to work.” She laughs. “Well, do you have any idea about what to expect from this evening?” “No, not really.” “We’re going to hold hands, sing, and get a chance to feel good inside. Would you like that?” “Uhhh, I guess so.” “Good! Larry, I’m really glad to see you here tonight, and I hope you enjoy the evening.” “Oh, I expect to.” “Take care.” And then she’s off to greet another new arrival. “Hi, my name is Ayodele . . .” Next Adeyemi comes forth stating I’m one of your flight captains for tonight’s “Soljourney into Truth” . . . and asks the audience members to shout out their biggest problem and the audience responds. He then assures them all that before the evening is over they will discover a way to solve their problems, by getting away from those “oppressive belief systems” that prevail in this world, which he calls the “Land of Not.” . . . Later he asks the audience to get up and circulate, introducing themselves to one another. Suddenly, while the audience is engaged in this process, the lights go out and music begins booming from all sides. The audience is whisked into another large room, known as the Liberation Temple. Two female liberators join together in an engaging song about discovering “the real you”; a male performer enacts a gospel-like routine about exorcising fear and inhibition; another performer delivers an emotional soliloquy about the ways in which black people have been geared to “expect less, say no, and refrain from hoping.” There is also a lot of speculation about the secret ingredient needed to propel the “sunship” into the heavens—an ingredient later revealed to be love. Then, in the form of a fantastic African ritual, the so-called ship “takes off.” Adeyemi, with a feathered headdress and African garb, appears as a chieftain to whom gifts are brought. Dancers twirl and even manage some ballet-like pirouettes and leaps. Warbles and chants sound in the background. Psychedelic lights flash eerily across the scene. As the calm returns to the theater,

372 lundeana m. thomas Teer descends from her throne. “We’re really up there now. Don’t look down if you’re scared of heights.” . . . At her urging everyone chooses a partner and takes turns singing the NBT song: “You’re the only one who can make yourself happy. You’re the only one who can fill your life with joy.” Teer instructs the members of the audience to close their eyes and think about their first love, about themselves, and about the kind of person they would like to become. . . . Finally, in a move reminiscent of an old-fashioned gospel revival, Teer asks for testimonials from the audience. One young white male gets up and fumbles for words. “Wow! I’m just glad to be here.” A black teacher rises and talks about getting his “love cup filled here tonight.” A teenage girl comes forward shyly: “I’m really bashful. But I feel so good, I wish it would never end.” One young mother comes to the front and, in a sincere, quiet voice, says that the performance has reinforced her love for her husband.93

Appendix E: Softly Comes a Whirlwind Whispering in Your Ear In 1978 Teer wrote Softly Comes a Whirlwind Whispering in Your Ear, “based on the real life story of its star, Zuri McKie.”94 The play treated a young lady, her relationship with family and friends, and her talent for singing. Betty Winston Baye described the main character and her circumstances: The success of Whirlwind lies in Ms. McKie’s ability to make the audience relate to and identify with her struggles as a middle-class young black woman . . . her mother’s almost fanatical drive to make her a great singer, not unlike Leontyne Price, and the pain she feels pursuing a master’s degree in opera and piano while her father languishes in prison for a crime he did not commit. Ms. McKie makes one identify with her decision to break with her mother—she doesn’t talk to her for three years—and doesn’t want her mother to come to hear her sing in a benefit to raise money for her father’s release. “I don’t want my mother and all her bourgeoisie friends to come,” Ms. McKie says. We watch Ms. McKie struggle to get free of her own private prison—the one that has locked her up emotionally, but which is hidden under the veneer of “having it all together.” 95

Amy Carter, writing for the Bilanian News, continues with information on Iansa, her father, and her friends: The play . . . depicts Iansa Colburn, a young lady who intends to get her father out of jail with money earned by singing in a concert. She intends the concert to be just a one-shot deal but her friend, Ajire, played by Keibu Faison, wants her to go on to bigger things. Iansa . . . protests against Ajire’s ambitions for her and points out that among other things, she will not be packaged and sold like a can of beans. However, her friends Benny and Sonya Michaels tell Iansa that music and songs don’t have to be sex-oriented and an insult to the human intelligence. They advise her that music can be used to inspire, to bring peace, love and understanding between people. Then, Iansa decides to pursue a singing career.96

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Appendix F: Soul Fusion The fifth major ritual performed by the NBT was Soul Fusion, written by Nabii Faison and Teer in collaboration with Leone Thomas in 1980. Soul Fusion had a more traditional plot than Whirlwind but its message took the form of brief inspirational passages, such as “Get in touch with your dream. . . . Love ain’t love until you give it away. . . . This theater can be that place where we can feel strong again. You are the source of that power. . . . There’s a fusion, a connection when the performer and the audience come together. . . . It’s time to commit ourselves to each other.”97 Yusef Salaam hints that the revival “might be alluding to the closing of the Apollo Theatre and the economic blight of Harlem.”98 He summarizes the plot as follows: The story involves Jack Henry Bruwell (Tunde Samuel), who is the director of the Old Theatre in Harlem; the theatre lights are being cut off by Con Edison at a time when the cast is working on a major production. . . . Jack is a hopeless pessimist. He gives up all hope of saving this theatre. But his woman friend and his cast challenge him to dare to struggle. They remind him of the vim and vigor days of the Old Theatre when James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Dinah Washington graced its stage. Rebecca Branch (Shirley Faison), Jack’s woman friend, demands that he be self-reliant and seek independent ownership of the institution. She believes that these attributes will, if practiced, save the theatre from its desperate plight. But Jack remains welded in his negative, failure-prone attitude until he’s visited by masked, colorfully costumed characters; some of them positive forces, some negative. The negative ones call out for Jack to “Get a real job and leave that theatre be” while the positives demand that he see the light. Here, witness audio-visual psychic and emotional dynamite. Jack struggles to purge himself of the psychological garbage that society has dumped in him. . . . As Jack ventures into the realm of faith, self confidence, and belief in himself and his community, he sees the light, internalizes it. It’s revealed that one of the cast members has a friend who works at Con Edison, and she can use her connections to keep the theatre lights connected. Inspired, Jack, the cast and Benny Jackson (a famous star who returns to Harlem to help revitalize it) put on a show that had even the senior citizens swinging. Somebody jumped up and declared, “I want to see a 500-seat theatre in Harlem.”99

Appendix G: The Legacy The Legacy was a musical written by Gordon Nelson, a graduate of NBT’s The Power in You Writer’s Workshop. Elmo Terry-Morgan, a graduate of the Teer Technology of Soul class, directed the fourteen-member cast in this gospel musical. Joyce Ashe of the Rockaway Press wrote: “The Legacy” is a musical that traces the history of gospel music from the African shores to the slave plantations, through emancipation, the civil rights movement and the present time. It is serious theatre, although it is the story of a genre of music, and music is gener-

374 lundeana m. thomas ally associated with entertainment. One learns . . . that gospel music and the unswerving faith that it expresses sustained the black people through centuries of slavery, poverty, misery and oppression. . . . “The Legacy” is narrated by a majestic figure swarthed [sic] in flaming orange African robes, who is called “The Ancestor.” He represents the ancestral leader, the village chief, and the African concept of the “Father/God.” He assures his people that He is with them, always, through their trials, throughout the Diaspora. His spirit is indelibly and forever imprinted in their hearts and in their blood, in their genetic heritage. He speaks to His people through the music. The finale is the statement: “. . . Let nothing separate us from the love of God.” The gospel music expresses the determination of the black people to resist attack, their power to rise up, and “sing like a holy army.” The Ancestor says, “We have been riding on the River Gospel, our faith has sustained us, ’til we find ourselves home.”100

Notes 1. Langston Hughes, “The Need for an Afro-America Theatre,” in The International Library of Negro Life and History-Anthology of the America Negro in Theatre, 2d ed., ed. Lindsay Patterson (New York: Publisher’s Company, Inc., 1969), 163. 2. James V. Hatch, Black Theatre U.S.A. (New York: Free Press, 1974), 773. 3. Barbara Ann Teer, “The Great White Way Is Not Our Way—Not Yet,” Negro Digest (April 1968): 25. 4. Marvin X, “An Interview with Ed Bullins: Black Theatre,” Negro Digest 18 (April 1969): xii. 5. Gary Schoichet, “Barbara Ann Teer,” Other Stages (April 17, 1980): 2. 6. Maurice Peterson, “Spotlight on Barbara Ann Teer,” Essence (August 1975): 19. 7. Sandy Satterwhite, “Black Actress Shares Her Soul,” New York Post, February 6, 1976: 21. 8. Valerie Harris, “Power Exchange 2: Barbara Ann Teer,” in Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other, vol. 2 (New York: Heresies Collective, Inc., 1979), 42. 9. Ibid., 43. 10. Jessica B. Harris, “The National Black Theatre: The Sun People of 125th Street,” in The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1987), 286. 11. Genevieve Fabre, Drums, Masks, and Metaphor, trans. Melvin Dixon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 241. 12. Ibid., 230. 13. Bruce McConachie, “Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History,” Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 474–75. 14. James V. Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” in The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1987), 21. 15. Mance Williams, Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 51. 16. Charlie L. Russell, “Barbara Ann Teer: We Are Liberators Not Actors,” Essence (March 1971): 50. 17. The six goals listed are taken from a pamphlet entitled “NBT Is a Celebration of Life and a rebirth of power” (New York, 1973), 6. 18. James Anderson, “Cognitive Styles and Multicultural Populations,” Journal of Teacher Education (January–February 1988): 7.

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19. James A. Banks, Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991), 198. 20. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 284–85. 21. Transcript, “The Issue Is Race,” mod. Phil Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, PBS, WNET, New York, September 15, 1992: 457, 461. 22. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 285. 23. Clarence Allsopp, “The National Black Theatre Gets Set to Revive Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News, July 22, 1972: D3. 24. Russell, “Barbara Ann Teer,” 50. 25. Charles Burden, “A Trip to Africa Brings Hope to America,” Newsworld 2 (June 1980): 2B. 26. Quoted in Thomas A. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage, A Spiritual Journey,” New York Times, May 11, 1971: E44. 27. Burden, “A Trip to Africa,” 1. 28. “Barbara Ann Teer: Producer,” Ebony 32 (August 1977): 138. 29. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 285. 30. Quoted in Curtiss E. Porter, “This Here Child Is Naked and Free as a Bird: An Annotated Interview with Barbara Ann Teer,” Black Lines 2 (spring 1973): 40; hereafter cited as Porter, Teer interview. 31. Ruth Husar, “She Celebrates the Black Life-Style,” Bridgeport Post, August 9, 1974: 1. 32. “NBT Opens New Season,” New York Amsterdam News, November 12, 1977: D14. 33. “NBT Conducts Workshop Series,” New York Amsterdam News, June 19, 1976: D14. 34. New York Amsterdam News, November 12, 1977: D14. 35. Valerie Harris, “Power Exchange Two,” 42. 36. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage,” E44. 37. “Barbara Ann Teer: Producer,” Ebony: 138. 38. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), 73. 39. Ibid., 70. 40. Barbara Ann Teer, “Freedom,” hand-out sheet from class materials. 41. Private interview, January 20, 1988. 42. Teer, “Freedom” handout sheet. 43. Teer lecture, TTS, January 20, 1988. 44. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 286. 45. Russell, “Barbara Ann Teer,” 49. 46. Ibid. 47. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 283–84. 48. The Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary (New York: Pocket Books, 1974), 657. 49. Porter, Teer interview, 25. 50. Ibid., 25–26. 51. Barbara Ann Teer, “The National Black Institute of Action Arts,” part of advertising pamphlet for The Legacy Tour USA 1989, 3. 52. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 285. 53. Husar, “She Celebrates the Black Life-Style,” 1. 54. Fabre, Drums, Masks, and Metaphor, 231. 55. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 289.

376 lundeana m. thomas 56. Ibid., 286. 57. Russell, “Barbara Ann Teer,” 50. 58. Ibid., 50. 59. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage,” E44. 60. Hazziezah, “NBT’s ‘Ritual’ to Awaken ‘Sun People,’” New York Amsterdam News, November 12, 1977: D9. 61. Clayton Riley, “Face to Face with the Junkies,” New York Times, September 17, 1972: D14. 62. Hazziezah, “NBT’s ‘Ritual,’” D9. 63. Mauby, “A Powerful Journey into Truth,” Trinidad Guardian, December 18, 1975: 1. 64. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 285. 65. Hazziezah, “NBT’s ‘Ritual,’” D9. 66. Lionel H. Mitchell, “NBT Scores with Whirlwind,” New York Amsterdam News, January 6, 1979: 15. 67. Michael C. Givens II, “Soljourney Takes Off at Beacon Theatre,” New York Amsterdam News, May 19, 1979: 34. 68. Riley, “Face to Face with the Junkies,” 2. 69. Albert DeLeon, “Can There Be a Revival?” The Black American, September 11, 1972: 11. 70. Charles Burden, “‘Whirlwind’ Is Not Just a Play, It’s a Happening,” New York News World, May 2, 1980: 27. 71. Larry Conley, “NBT: Theatre of Soul,” City Scope Journal of Columbia University, 1976: 54. 72. DeLeon, “Can There Be a Revival?” 11. 73. Mauby, “A Powerful Journey into Truth,” 1. 74. Burden, “A Trip to Africa,” 27. 75. Mitchell, “NBT Scores with Whirlwind,” 15. 76. Porter, Teer interview. 77. Margaret Wilkerson, “Critics, Standards and Black Theatre,” The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1987), 320. 78. “‘A Revival,’ a Spiritual, African Play on the Stage of National Black Theatre,” New York Amsterdam News, October 7, 1972. 79. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage,” E44. 80. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 288. 81. Conley, “NBT: Theatre of the Soul,” 53. 82. Wilkerson, “Critics, Standards and Black Theatre,” 321. 83. Ortiz M. Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 154. 84. Abiodun Jeyifous, “Black Critics on Black Theatre in America,” in Hill, The Theatre of Black Americans, 328. 85. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage,” 44. 86. Allsopp, “The National Black Theatre Gets Set to Revive Harlem,” D1. 87. Mauby, “A Powerful Journey into Truth,” 1. 88. Burden, “A Trip to Africa,” 2. 89. Kelly-Marie Berry, “The Legacy: Memories of the Gospel Song,” Metro Exchange (August 1987): 11. 90. Transcript, “The Issue Is Race,” 462–63. 91. Johnson, “On Harlem Stage,” E44. 92. Harris, “The National Black Theatre,” 288–91.

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93. Conley, “NBT: Theatre of Soul,” 53. 94. Betty Winston Baye, “‘Softly Comes a Whirlwind’ Ushers in Spring at NBT,” New York Amsterdam News, May 10, 1980: 32. 95. Ibid. 96. Amy Carter, “‘Softly Comes a Whirlwind Whispering in Your Ears,’” Bilalian News, June 13, 1980: 24. 97. Roy Proctor, “‘Soul Fusion’ is New Approach to Theatre,” Richmond News Leader, November 1, 1982: 15. 98. Yusef A. Salaam, “‘Soul Fusion’ Inspires Community Control thro’ Community Theatre,” New York Amsterdam News, June 12, 1982: 36. 99. Ibid. 100. Joyce Ashe, “‘The Legacy’—An Unforgettable Night,” Rockaway Press, December 17, 1987: 24.

Amiri Baraka

Bopera Theory

Theatre in the United States is obstructed in its development by the same forces that obstruct the general positive development of human life and society. Frequently we are stalled by our very amazement at the rulers of this society, shrieking for years of their “superiority,” when one has only to look around to see what a mess they have made of everything and what a bizarre lie this “superiority” is. Even lower animals cause less trouble to the planet. But the superstructural control of intellectual development is critical to our penetration of socially dynamic aesthetic theory in this country, with its fake democracy and real imperialism. We must step outside the parameters of this society’s version of just about everything. Often I seek to use, as one alternative, practices found in the oldest root of performance: ritual, but not in a frozen or atavistic way. We take the wholeness, the freshness, the penetrating emotionalism and spiritual revelation and renewal, the direct connection with what the ancients meant. We want to educate but we want to do that through the transformation of the human consciousness. We want to open it. We want to show the known world to be as irrational as it actually is; and we want to bring the approaching epoch of human equality closer to reality through our open embrace. We want news, we want olds, we want the constant beat of life in its material existence. The use of music must be understood. Music goes more deeply into the spirit than words; music is a living creature, a human intellectual and emotional creation with a readily apparent spirituality that transcends the visible world of its creators. It goes out of the world as the colors of the world. It is not bound by our physicality. The sounds carry whatever information rests in the frequencies and rhythms and harmonies of the world, some known to us, some unknown. We have five senses, yes, but they are merely the ones the present world is prepared to use. They are not nearly complete. In the here and now on earth, in society, we live in a lower register. This is why we are essentially one-handed. Add five more senses to the five we know. Then we will be getting somewhere. Music is a profound speaking, moving, raising, perception, and teaching, the old folks said. Du Bois called

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it “the frenzy.” “Getting Happy,” my grandmother called it. The Gospel. The Good Foot. Dance, that must be in it. But not as the dance we know now. The common dance. The every-minute, moment-to-moment dance that everything actually is. I want the movement of the players to take on the rhythm of the music without “leaving” the dramatic context. The dance must be heightened movement. Emphasis. Further explanation, integrated with the whole. Every element we know must work together for the revolutionary, democratic, workers’, people’s, communist theatre we envision. Lights. Music. Dance. Sets. Speech. To me the Bopera was poetry and music and heightened movement. “Bopera” was a term developed while writing what were first called “jazz operas” (Bumpy: A Bopera; Money; and Primitive World). Sun Ra brought back the Pythagorean application of Egyptian understanding that “everything is everything,” and that music, color, number, emotions, the laws of matter in motion are revealed as inextricably tied together. Ra’s introduction of the space organ in the 1960s, which the Dangs called later “light shows,” was an example of how the really “new” could be historically co-opted and turned into commerce. And that innovation in this society is still as much at risk as the security of escaping slavery! In the Bopera, the words are poetry, heightened rhythmic speech, but not outside the currents of everyday life. Our use of the rhythm and motion and image become a social force, grasped by the people. We do not always perceive everyday life in its true depth and grandeur. We do not always perceive what is happening, the feelings, the transformations, the emotional totality. The Bopera should take our lives and render them understandable as emotional and intellectual experiences that add to our way of seeing and being. This is what the church does. The preacher gets people “happy,” makes them “possessed” so that they jump up in the aisles, spinning like James Brown. They become a part of the animating element of existence. We want that experience of entering the whole, both as emotion and as heightened rationale, so that the social “use” of the experience we are creating gets registered on several levels. I was on that path with Slave Ship and the ritual dramas of the 1960s. I still think verse is the language of drama. And the world of theatre is a deeper world (canto jondo), wherein we see this world not “through a glass darkly,” but clearly, as something funny or sad, which makes us respond and informs and changes us. The responsibility to inform is our deepest task, but information is alive and can only be deeply grasped as a living, changing entity. The theatre should wake us from the “dead,” from the blunted senses, the mediocrity, from the day-to-day evil our feelings have gotten wrapped up in. And as we heighten the audience’s feelings, those feelings become the enhanced antennae of learning. Feeling predicts intelligence, I wrote many years ago. So feelings are the emotional catalyst, the dramatic motor. The play itself is motion, game, ritual, form, and content at once. But the point is to involve the audience, to free them from the confines of the brutal, lie-filled world. Truth and beauty are the content and form of our most advanced works. But these are obstructed (per time, place, and condition) by lies and ugliness. These are the shapes

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of the outline of what we create. We are also shaped by what we are not, to be what we are. We are always struggling against what we are and are not. The theatre must present both things as the dialectic of birth, maturation, and transformation. The ancient world was organized socially by primitive communalism. The old African aesthetic still speaks directly of this, whether in the polyrhythms of music or in the bright, polychromatic colors of visual art, passed even now to us in the Western world. Afro-American music is still fundamentally a collective and improvised communal expression. The call-and-response frenzy of the earliest song forms can be heard in Stevie Wonder and John Coltrane. So the Bopera is re-Creation, inner attainment, gained by tightening our everyday language into verse and lifting it into the zoom zone of the spiritual, giving it emotional and intellectual impact through music. Lights and sets round out the effect. The neo-realist set is a product of the mediocre imagination in which commercial theatre has trapped us. The set, the props, everything in the scene must relate to what we are saying, and not to a world where what we are saying can’t even be said. To the extent that we are not Broadway, for instance, but imitate Broadway, we are not revolutionaries or even serious dramatists. We should relate to the known world, but like the Africans, or the revolutionary German and Russian theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, we must create drama out of our understanding of what we are trying to present, what we are trying to say, what emotions and ideas and acts we are trying to explain and agitate. The sets must have to do with this, by expressive creative means, not by passive reflection of a world ruled by our enemies. So the stage must speak from outside the confines of imperialism and national oppression. It must show these things so that we can destroy them, but we must go far beyond them with our presentation, so that our very presence weakens the rulers and they are blown back by the audacity and intellectual and emotional depth of our statement. Recently, at a play of mine where election machines were called for, the presenters wanted to reproduce the election machines. Why? The election machines are not real, they do not serve the purpose they are supposed to serve, they are a lie and a cheat and an affront in this world of lies in which we are oppressed. Why should we give them more reality than they have? Making them unreal is the point! The rappers show the musical versification of the word. But our concept is that words become verse by their insistence and rhythms, not redundant patter that dulls perception. The Bopera is meant to be a musical experience in the sense that the action of the play must be predicated on and take its tone and motion from the music, as its basic underpinning, and only secondarily from the descriptions of character, psychology, and so on, as in the commercial theatre. The “method” of Stanislavsky (in which actors become the characters) is acknowledged as the principal task of the actors. But the motion, the path, the dramatic “dance” of form, content, and meaning must come from the music. The speech, acting, singing, and movement must be functions of the music. This is difficult for some folks to dig. Directors think you are

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slighting ideas and meaning if you make the music paramount. But exactly the reverse is true. In the music should be found the deep essence of what is meant, as feeling, mood, tone, psychology. If the actors tune in with the music, then what they say or sing, how they move or pause, will be rendered as more of a whole, filled with more life. Life connects us with rhythms. To the extent that we tune in to the rhythm, and to the extent that the ideas we project are based in the emotional and intellectual rhythm of their whole meaning, we move the audience. Whatever is being presented is coming in at several levels, each enhancing the whole, layering our statement with the feeling, flesh, and mind of more of our whole selves. More whole in the sense that we present not only a statement but an explanation, and ultimately a registration across a broader sensibility. A response from a deeper re-creation of what is called.

Keith Antar Mason

From Hip-Hop to Hittite: Part X

i cannot write this essay about the Hittite process unless i confess that our stories are in our flesh in our genetic memories in our ancestral callings and responses on landscapes where jazz looks ahead and becomes hip-hop an angry son who wants more than what his father settled for in his lifetime i must confess that i did always know that i was interested in the flesh of my body and the bodies of other brothers because i watched the shaming the torture and the murders and like the last surviving victim in a cliché-filled horror movie i always suspected it was my turn next so i wanted to see the bodies healed and come back to life and allowed to thrive in world where white male supremacy did not exist the Hittite process started at the funerals of young black men who had been murdered in the “rockhouse wars” as a part of the declared War on Drugs in Amerika circa 1987 we started mourning late in 1987 with no words like grieving ceremonies that robert bly and his wildmen’s gatherings would give to society the same way and at the same time that george bush and the CIA would be giving us the word crack/baby and crack/mother the way old white slave masters gave our ancestors the word motherfucker this is a wildassed performance text in itself meant to be read out loud ashe our process started in grief and being afraid that on any given friday night back in the day 1987 somebody would call and say so-and-so is dead from a drive-by shooting or AIDS . . . see two viruses are killing young black men in this nation it is funny that out of death our process got born because past death is life really a life lived hard a life must be lived hard cause death is so easy and freedom to live that hard of a life could be denied forever cause the unapologetic racist / sexist / classist / homophobic have the power and the ability to still deny black men in this country a life a lifetime that men could enjoy in los angeles where gansta rap flourished and marked the landscape so deeply what other art forms could not be affected? in los angeles where everything is a

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metaphor cause the earth moves the earth dances under the feet of those who suffer in this life the energy released has to be directed we performed rituals and because of the dominant culture usage of language we got labeled “performance artists” they did not ask us what we would have chosen to name ourselves like white masters in the slavery times we could not name ourselves we are Hittites we create ritual and tell myths see some people believe that the universe is made up of atoms we come from a culture that believes the universe is made up of stories and that is how you can tell where you are in the universe (i claim this because i recently read some article that was published in minneapolis, minnesota and some white woman has been credited with this quote but “i” said this and our company has worked in minneapolis intensively from 1993 through 2001 just like the quote “it takes a whole village to raise a child” will be credited to hillary rodham clinton is we must say our truths in our own tongue) our stories come from our bones from our blood we are lovers of concrete and everybody is paying attention to the numberone dance but ain’t nobody listening to the number-one song we are lovers of concrete as the cops throw us down on concrete and you perform the drive-by when you see the lights and the young black brother face down on concrete and you keep driving by ain’t nobody listening to the number one song our process begins in the flesh and ask questions how many times can you take the strip search before you start to like it start to expect it it was in that expectation that i as a writer of these stored memories seeking for a way through the Hittite universe i found in the darkness of this jungian shadow box (l.a.) my voice i grew up suspect and got very familiar with the next generation of black men who grew up guilty and facing the death penalty i had to look into the darkness and see i had to look into the night not with the coming of the dawn i had to develop like the dogon how to navigate in the caves in absolute darkness how to navigate the stars and our black bodies glowed sweat covered bodies at pickup basketball games were the places i decided to test out the Hittite process in-between the brothas choosin up teams we would run out do a rite and see how long we could tell the story of the day we just did that we developed the rant thirty seconds forty seconds forty-five seconds no applause expected the basketball court where a brotha could get some justice was a thought a thinking black man as metaphor in my work the process now had location so people would come to see if we should show up and perform they started to expect us to do it just do it and by the time spike lee got to ask michael jordan is it the shoes folks in l.a. knew about the split-second rapid-fire urgent rant we could do as Hittites the first step to see the face of god was to call him in a Hittite rant how could we not be affected the declared war on drugs brothas and sistas dying in the “rockhouse wars” and the growing dissatisfaction of talented black actors who would do a gig in hollywood and be the gangbanger or the good cop second banana sidekick that once he got his close-up was dead in the next scene i lucked out a talent pool that wanted hollywood but somewhat concerned with the image they would be stuck playing

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vs. portraying is they actually went to acting school and we all were living in los angeles where crack cocaine had complicated things made people want more and more things just like those yuppies back in the day wanted to be masters of the universe brothas wanted to be masters of the hood we were shaman in this desert town doing our walkabouts in between shootouts in the wild wild west how could we not tell our stories our process started to cool off we were afraid of our own bodies because body-shame was a real form of american apartheid and we had boundaries we had rules of understanding of what could be done in front of people because we come from a culture that is older than the french ballet and our naked bodies had been seen in history books burned lynched and castrated and our rituals had to explore what were these codes that we perceived we were searching for that space like amiri baraka suggested we were searching for that space that was bigger than where “x marks the spot” our aesthetics like hannibal’s aesthetics were too big to fit in the mouth of rome our work developed from our understanding that there was always a covert operation in the media to destroy us the way the CIA was selling drugs—crack in the afrikan american communities we made works that spoke to our healing after the death after the murder we made works that explored our mythic selves as ghosts spoke to young brothas about the subway vigilante about the night ted koppel convicted us all (black people) as wilders rampaging through central park and as all the ghosts that did not get videotaped at the foothills of justice rodney king not michael jackson and we came back as vampires living in the nighttime of amerika remember Hittites created havoc in the ancient world with iron our process starts with no script but living hard in los angeles where brothas’ bodies have sustained gunshot injuries our work starts in los angeles a pacific rim city where we saw the power of butoh and earthquakes and the afrocentric in not exclusive we saw butoh dance and said yes yes that’s how we can get them out of dem one-hundred-twenty-five-dollar sneakers now two-hundred and get them to remember that the story is in their flesh do what i suggest get that silent one in the back of the class mad don’t want to be there in the room forced into the workshop with some performance artist get them to take off their shoes and socks and ask them to move how they moved when their friend died the stored memory of a fifteenyear old black boy ask him to move the way he feels about all his friends who have died during the “rockhouse wars” our process starts on the cool floor with bare feet on the earth and we are looking ahead as shaman cause we want the brothas to take on this this is in our process we want them to take it that we are shaman and we are here to heal the earth and our bodies that is the purpose of our process and in our healing we have to remember the dead like we have to remember the names of all the free men and women and children who were brought over here during the middle passage the maafa and there will always be the blues straight through to hip hop until we remember their names

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get it up I come to the river when the womanist shared this knowledge kicked me some mad science the personal is political our bodies on the front lines in A Declared War on Drugs / the “rockhouse wars” so from the blues / to jazz / to hip-hop so our process is personal what a brotha wants to deal with wants to say with his body and the oral tradition of the day is/was rap in a desert city where gansta was cool at the time when the east coast/west coast rivalry was jumping off just like back in the day Hittite kemet when the jazz riff was an east coast/west coast thing cause black folks all came from the same place Oppression aaaaahhhh the smell of it i started to write as a storyteller who was asked to choose between ishmael reed and alice walker and i asked why?????? That’s like asking me to choose between miles davis and john coltrane a rational afrocentric can’t do it can’t do it like you really can’t believe that elizabeth taylor looked like cleopatra our process is about making a commitment to telling our truth just like james baldwin asked us to do to tell our stories over and over and over just like margaret walker we want to do it for my people so we had to start to find ourselves at the sacred spaces instead of in cyberspace although gibson took our orisha there and won awards when we walk through fire like shango on stage at proper venue we do not want the audiences to applaud cause we know in the eurocentric that is to dismiss the spirits no we want our ancestors to come and help us to make it through so throw flowers and sing shout say ashe hotep ashe we know what our process does we think about it before we do it we come from a context a culture and our bodies are temple familiar to some god and this is a performance text in itself keep saying it out loud cause it is a prayer like david wrote a psalm for remembrance and we know in re/membering ourselves we know isis re/membered osiris and after death there is life we gave this belief to the world let our process claim it and rejoice in it this belief has shaped the world and all of human history and like the t-shirt said there would be no history if there was no black history our process is a prayer the way madonna put leon on that cross in that video our process be it a two-hour workshop or a two-month commissioning residency is about young black brothers learning how they are divine and it starts with us barefoot standing on the earth re/membering how a thirteen-year-old black boy’s body felt when he learned that his best friend had been murdered and how he thinks he won’t live to be twenty-five or if he does live he expects to be in jail in prison and for the rest of his life the gulag is real the drug czar is white the homeland security chief white and all we can do is tell our stories cause even if the judge is black it will always come up white the law is white cause we wanted to know the fact of how long is clarence thomas’s dick and after the high-tech lynching there is life fo’ even the sell-out niggas we make work ironic huh cause we want to dispel the myth that black men don’t want to work we call on john henry cause we can we are Hittites shaman ju-ju marn with our thinking caps on bady boy bocors conjurin up images that heal us and

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call us back to life back to ourselves we are sweaty muscled fat thin strong vulgar confident insecure clever wicked measured meek swift rebellious fine magic shine blacks which includes all the absent ones and this is what i struggle to write down on paper or say to the performer over and over until he can say it back to me after he has put it in his body we are willing to open our flesh to reveal or to store this is a praise song to all who have come to the support of Empire cause we have done work some of our best work because of the input and the support of black women they put words in our mouths and shared stories so that we could know of those places in the universe and latinos and latinas who have made los angeles the city of the future to the pan asians who have given us the strength to demand reparations for wars declared to gays and lesbians who taught us that silence equals death and who went down to the parker center on april 29, 1992 it was tiananmen square time and they became the goddesses and gods of democracy our process starts with death remember that calls us back to life a loving life the way john smith and tommy carlos with raised black fists made me see brightly the stars in the nighttime sky of amerika and like toni morrison and katharine dunham have suggested we are on a path a spiral ever descending ever ascending we are Hittites and our process tells us who we are and where we are in the universe director’s note: alright learn this rant put in your body and learn to say it with all the emotional strength you can muster keep cutting down on the amount of time in which you can say these following words keeping the truth real i suggest that you start out in a business suit and begin to strip letting your clothes fall off start with your shoes and socks first i suggest that you stand on top of a black cube and you speak this story let yourself go through the rites of passage being stopped pulled over by the cop going through the strip search in the background play music david bowie’s Young Americans side one have the lights start out dim blue to portend a night haunting by the time you conclude have the lights become tv white and have lights so that a whiteout happens on the audience so they can not see you naked underneath wear clean dazzling white underwear at one point risk body-paint red and blue never white when it ends bump it to black exit go home do not take a bow go home write me about what you felt write if someone calls you or has an encounter with you to discuss the work tell them first it was an initiation process tell them you have gone berserk to the dark side that you really are dogon and you like navigating the skies end the piece with this line billions and billions of stars and i wind up on earth a fucking nigga white out bumps to black

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and re/member in the beginning there was darkness re/member death calls us back to life re/member ronald reagan can’t re/member who the evil empire is re/member death calls us back to life like niggas we didn’t give up on god and god has not given up on us. Hotep Ashe Amen

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William W. Cook

Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson

To be lame means to be outside of the central group and its culture; it is a negative characterization. . . . What all lames have in common is that they lack the knowledge which is necessary to run any kind of a game in the vernacular culture. —William Labov, Language in the Inner City lame: n. adj. (1950s–1990s) to be unaware of street culture. —Clarence Major, Juba to Jive

The recent Oakland Schools case on black English (1996) and its precedent in Wayne County, Michigan (1979), have drawn public attention to a long-contested issue in African American letters. What is at stake is the nature and status of that particular version of American English spoken by some members of the African American community, and the function of that language in public discourse, particularly in those arts that purport to be part of an African American aesthetic. James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1921, commented on his view of the limitation of that special form of American speech: “Negro dialect is . . . an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos. So that even when he confines himself to purely racial themes, the Aframerican poet realizes that there are phases of Negro life in the United States which cannot be treated in the dialect either adequately or artistically” (Johnson: 880). He pointed favorably to the writers of the Irish Renaissance as models for a new poetry, one not tied to the plantation tradition, which he saw inextricably embedded in “Negro” dialect. Johnson also inveighed against the “eye dialect” (the use of aberrant spelling to indicate black speech sounds), which he charged was borrowed from the local colorists of the turn of the century and the plantation school of poets:

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What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect. . . . Negro dialect is at present a medium that is not capable of giving expression to the varied conditions of Negro life in America, and much less is it capable of giving the fullest interpretation of Negro character and psychology. (Johnson: 881)

Johnson’s criticism must be seen in the context of his own career. Dialect poems like “Sence You Went Away” (1900) are traditional products of the dialect school and, as such, stand in contrast to God’s Trombones (1927), with its abandonment of “eye dialect” for a focus on the rhythms and cadences of black speech, an emphasis on what Johnson would call “symbols from within.” Johnson sees Paul Laurence Dunbar as a gifted poet victimized by the craze for dialect poetry. Dunbar said on more than one occasion that he was forced to write dialect poetry because it was the only language the public would listen to from a “Negro” writer. Dunbar is more eloquent on the subject in the 1903 poem “The Poet” than he is in any prose statement. He sang of life, serenely sweet, With now and then, a deeper note; From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world’s absorbing beat. He sang of love when earth was young, And Love, itself, was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue. (Dunbar: 191)

I cite Johnson and Dunbar early in this discussion because August Wilson began as a poet and both Dunbar and Johnson played major roles in the development of twentieth-century black theatre, but we can trace the argument over black English in art through the New Negro Renaissance, through the black arts movement, and into our own day. The principal poets of the black arts movement, Leroi Jones (later Imamu Amiri Baraka), Sonia Sanchez, and Don Lee (later Haki Madhubuti) among them, opted for a language closer to northern urban black speech than to the rural southern dialect of the earlier plantation school. They were nevertheless clear in their insistence that the new black poetry could not be written in standard English. Geneva Smitherman, in her groundbreaking study Talkin and Testifyin (1977), argues that for the black arts artists, “an individual’s language is intricately bound up with his or her sense of identity and group consciousness.” She cites Fanon’s argument for home dialect over the dominant discourse of the metropole: “Every dialect is a way of thinking.” Smitherman sees the revolution as manifested in language for the black arts movement and a continuing issue for our own day. (Smitherman was one of the expert witnesses in the Wayne County suit, which insisted that teachers’ ignorance of the home dialect of their students impeded their efforts to teach those students the

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dominant discourse of the nation. A similar court test of the nature of black English [ebonics] took place later, in an action brought in Oakland, California.) It continues to be the painful and trying task of the black consciousness movement to destroy the ambivalence about black language and culture and replace the old pejorative associations with new positive ones. Throughout the 1960s and on into the seventies, the clarion call of black politicians, artists, leaders, and intellectuals has been ethnic, their role revolutionary, the language black. Undoubtedly this has been in recognition of the fact that language is interwoven with culture and psychic being. Thus to deny the legitimacy of Africanized English is to deny the legitimacy of black culture and the black experience. (Smitherman: 174–75)

Frantz Fanon makes a similar point. “To speak means . . . to assume a culture. . . . In school the children . . . are taught to scorn the dialect. . . . The educated Negro adopts such a position with respect to European languages . . . because he wants to emphasize the rupture that has now occurred. He is incarnating a new type of man that he imposes on his associates and family” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, cited in Smitherman: 171). As a playwright, August Wilson seeks a way through the dialect/language briar patch that is linked to but different from those of his predecessors. Wilson is not much interested in the phonological or syntactical particularities of black speech; what interests him are the affective forms of the language. Narrative sequencing—the telling of the self through stories—is a central feature of black speech and of Wilson’s characters. As Geneva Smitherman puts it, Black English speakers will render their general, abstract observations about life, love, people in the form of a concrete narrative. . . . They are not content just to sit back and rattle off the words to a story. . . . If the story is in response to an actual comment or question in a real-life situation, the story-teller comes on with a dramatic narration. . . . Subject matter includes . . . not plain and simple commentary but a dramatic narration and a communal reenactment of one’s feelings and experiences. Thus one’s humanity is reaffirmed. (Smitherman: 147–51)

Wilson’s characters are ghost haunted. They bear with them memories and experiences they have either suppressed or dare not share. Their ghosts, the central subject of the blues, are the psychological baggage we bear, baggage that accrues as a result of the disruptions and disjunctions that have been our experience of life. Frequently we choose to suppress such ghosts, to deny their reality. The Great Migration was the first and greatest disruption. We entered a new world still carrying with us the operative responses of the spaces and cultures we were forced to leave behind. In our determination to be new or “born again,” we too quickly discarded the wisdom of the home space and the ancestors who preside over it; we disdained the “safe spaces” in our new home, those cultural sites that retain a vital connection with the ancestral home. Note the way in which Wilson alerts his readers to this experience of cultural disjunction and its effects:

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For the immigrants of Europe, [immigration to America was] a dream dared and won true. . . . The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. . . . The city rejected them. . . . By 1957, the hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the industrial might of America. War had been confronted and won with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel . . . and the hot winds of change that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous, and provocative decade had not yet begun to blow full. (Fences, preface, xvii–xviii)

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone repeats the theme of the Great Migration and its losses and challenges. From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their hearts kicking in their chests with a song worth singing. They arrive . . . seeking . . . a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth. Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct. (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, preface)

Although narrative sequencing can be used to deceive (for example, we embellish our worth in the community and conceal our ghosts from ourselves and others), selfdeception does not succeed in Wilson’s world. Other characters, refusing to believe the subterfuge, pressure the prevaricator into honest confession. The need to achieve a vital connection to our past is linked to a desire to be free of that past. Freedom to move toward self-construction and cultural wholeness is predicated on making peace with our ghosts. We cannot hide behind deceptive verbal masks forever. We must reveal and be revealed. It is on just such episodes of confrontation and revelation that Wilson builds his dramas. As Robert Frost wrote, “The best way out is always through.” The confrontations in Wilson’s plays can be studied within a structural framework elaborated by Andrew K. Kennedy in his book Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter. This structure or rhetorical unit, which Kennedy calls the “confessional duologue,” frequently has the effect of reestablishing the confessor within the community. Kennedy defines the “confessional duologue” as “the dialogue of personal encounter whereby the characters compel essential self-disclosures from one another through interlinked sessions of talk” (Kennedy: 167). In order to certify our humanity and to escape the weight of the ghosts that haunt us, we go to the people; we tell how we did or did not get over. A kind of prose blues, narrative sequencing, or testifying marks the climactic moments in Wilson’s plays. Kennedy calls this a kind of logotherapy. To apply Kennedy’s structural design is not to attribute to him a direct influence on Wilson but to note that Wilson, through his immersion in black culture, has arrived at a series of those “universals” too frequently marked off as the exclusive domain of

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white artists. It is to account in some way for the contradictions found in “mainstream” commentary on his work. The same critics who praise the dramatic power of his work fault that same work for what they see as verbal excess and lack of tidy, linear structure. But their notions of structure and language are alien to the cultural roots from which Wilson draws strength—and alien, too, one might add, to the white dramatists of the “confessional duologue,” among them Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. The following scheme, adapted from Kennedy’s book, provides a structure within which to consider language encounters in Wilson’s plays, one that moves beyond “eye dialect” and its phonological and lexical vagaries and beyond the mere surface features of black speech. Wilson is more interested in the deep structure of that speech, and in its communal and ritual powers. The confessional duologue is triggered by drink, frustration, or other “loss-of-control” experiences, and its intensity is heightened by evasion, repudiation, and denial. The more violent the rejection of the confession, the more violent that confession becomes. During such encounters, characters are asked (but more frequently forced) to confront the ghosts they have refused to acknowledge. The boundaries they have erected between reality and fantasy, between mask and face, between past and present are erased. Such encounters are an expression of the need for communication and companionship; yet they often lead to accusation and counteraccusation. In the comic mode, they result in understanding and empathy; in the tragic, in increased isolation and alienation. Linguistic markers of such moments are the frequent instances of code shifting. Dialogue leading up to the confession is marked by short, partial lines, a kind of modern stichomythia, but when the confession itself occurs, the language shifts to the poetic discourse of the people and is marked by the musicality of that discourse. This is the language of dream, of aspiration, of memory; it is the language of vision (Kennedy labels it “the dialect of the tribe”). This is the language of those moments that constitute a kind of verbal reconnection and ritual healing. Note the sequence of testifying (counter-confession) that marks the syllogistic refutations of Wilson’s first Broadway success, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Act 1 ends with Levee telling the story of the rape of his mother and the lynching of his father. He is goaded into this narrative by charges that he is “spooked by the white man.” The purpose of the narrative, then, is not to reveal the experience of his parents but to define himself as a formidable adversary, one who even as an eight-year-old is not to be trifled with. His testifying is underscored by Slow Drag’s song “If I Had My Way,” as the act closes. Slow Drag’s song is not a mockery of Levee’s confession; rather, it serves as a musical equivalent, an underscoring of that confession. This narrative explosion prepares the audience for Levee’s extreme response to Cutler’s admonitory tale of the experience of Reverend Gates. Having witnessed Levee’s rage in the narrative of his parents’ fate, we are not surprised when he reads that narrative into the one Cutler is telling. Just as he will do in another deadly scene, Levee directs the ghost of his rage not against the God he believes to be the guilty party, but against the spinner of a tale. That Cutler’s story is the experience of all blacks is shown in the call-

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and-response of the group as they “bear him up” as any good congregation would. (To “bear up” a speaker is to encourage that speaker, by verbal, musical or kinetic response, to tell more and thereby to affirm the truth of what is told.) Levee refuses to believe that he shares a common fate with the others or that he is powerless in the hands of forces beyond his control. Each of the central characters in Ma Rainey has a moment of confession, a moment when he or she confronts those memories, those experiences, those ghosts that will not be ignored. The confession is rarely voluntary but is usually provoked by others. We see this pattern repeated in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Characters use narrative sequencing to convey a theme that, to the uninitiated, might seem extraneous to the main plot but that is in fact a central structuring device in Wilson’s plays, and a form of the “home language.” The first act of Joe Turner closes with Herald Loomis’s vision of the walking bones of the ancestors, his recovery of the many thousand gone. Here the call-and-response pattern is more in the foreground than was the case in Cutler’s narrative, thanks to Bynum’s attempt to move Loomis to confront the full implications of his tale, to get Loomis to move beyond the tragedy and loss of his story to the empowering force of this connection with his past. He must go through this suppressed memory if he is to live beyond its song of death and isolation to a “song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the environs that weighted and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions” (Joe Turner, 94–95). Levee’s tragedy is that he directs his knife not at his horrors and exploiters but at Cutler and God, with ultimately fatal consequences. The very language rituals that Loomis finds redemptive do not empower Levee. Unable or unwilling to exorcise his ghosts, he is doomed to yet another unconscious reenactment of their deadly scenario. If Loomis is free to soar, “all the weight in the world suddenly falls” on Levee. If Loomis in Joe Turner can move from a song of death and isolation to one of self-sufficiency, the trumpet at the end of Ma Rainey is “blowing pain and warning.” The closing image of painful and admonitory trumpeting at the end of Ma Rainey echoes Gabriel’s trumpeting and atavistic dance at the end of Fences. This ritual, which effects the apotheosis of Troy, like the other closing dramatic moments described above, provides a cap to previous moments of narrative sequencing. The question with which we should approach such a linguistic device in Wilson’s plays always implicates us in the success or failure of the confessional moment. Does it find support in the community? Is the speaker borne up? Does the confession succeed in laying to rest those ghosts of the past that have incapacitated their host? Does the confession open up greater possibilities for its having been shared? Does the speaker come to conscious appreciation of the burden of living with ghosts? Clearly such questions are a part of our attention to Troy’s confessional narrative of life with his father and his own painful coming of age. Troy is very conscious that he, like his father, is incapable of love. His resurrection of the ghost of his father—which

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occurs at the end of the scene following his rejection of love as a part of his duty to his son—clarifies for us and for him the constraints (the fences?) within which he has been forced to live his life. Rose, too, has her moment of full confrontation with her past and the shaping effect of that past on her present. Here counter-confession is a mark of her rejection of the Troy structured for her sympathy in a moment of confession. Here, as in the later Joe Turner, Wilson provides us with a confessional narrative that results in an enlarged rather than a diminished life. Rose, who at first used language as a weapon to wound Troy, recovers a very different Troy in the closing scene of the play. Just as Raynell and Cory can now sing Troy’s song, accepting and forgiving the past, so too Gabriel and Lyons are back in the yard. Gabriel is ready for the sacred ritual. The fences that closed them in, supposedly for their protection, that served as resistance to change, have come down. They prepare to go out of the yard freed of the burdens of a past that, unacknowledged, severely limited their ability to live fully. Yet one more demonstration of the power of narrative sequencing, the power of “confessional duologue” to assert personality and to inscribe a desired self in the community, can be found in two extended speeches by Memphis in Two Trains Running. In his bitter denunciation of “Black power niggers,” Memphis angrily denies the reality of justice, the power of protest to achieve any worthwhile goal, and the self-hatred of those who adopt “black-is-beautiful as a slogan.” This explosion, which occurs in act 1, scene 2, seems at first dramatically disproportionate to the words and actions that trigger it. A second narrative closes the act and places Memphis in the dangerously free category of those who have lost their loved ones and thus their source of comfort and possibly even of redemption. “Everything had changed. I felt like I had been cut loose. All them years something had a hold of me and I didn’t know it. I didn’t find out till it cut me loose” (Two Trains Running, act 1, scene 2). We discover the deeper sources of his early explosion when he responds to West’s attempt to profit from Memphis’s sale of his building. Memphis is still living the desired rather than the actual end of a past horror. This is the ghost he reveals in act 2. His is a bitter, hard-won wisdom. “I say, ‘Okay. I know the rules now. If you do that to something that ain’t never done nothing to you . . . then I know what you would do to me. So I tell you what. You go on and get your laugh now. Cause if I get out of this alive I know how to play as good as anyone.’ Once I know the rules, whatever they are, I can play by them” (Two Trains: act 2, scene 1). Memphis loses this time, but the story is not over. He lives with the ghost of the dead mule, Stovall, and the lost land, just as other ghost-haunted Wilson characters live with lynching, rape, murder, and betrayal. Memphis, like Hambone, is determined to get his ham and no substitute will do. In fact, the echoing of Hambone’s quest extends what might otherwise be an individual, eccentric memory into the experience of a people. The ghosthaunted tell and retell their stories using that art by which the powerless reveal who they are. In reenacting their moments of greatest tragedy they accomplish a twofold task: they are borne up by the community and partially sustained by its soul force; and they keep those shaping moments alive and open to narrative refashioning. They seek new endings.

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While Wilson avoids eye dialect in its most overt forms, he does re-create for his audience the linguistic world of black Americans. While narrative sequencing or the “confessional duologue” serve as major structuring devices in his works, he employs a range of verbal signs far more numerous and varied. His characters talk trash, they deliver self-aggrandizing monikas, they indulge in fine talk. They are experts at the dozens, joning, or ranking, geniuses at signifying; they are skilled tellers of tall tales about superbloods; they have an inexhaustible supply of the cautionary tales so necessary to the education of the marginalized. If Sterling sees himself as a sweet-talking player, he reflects that self in his language play. “That’s all a man need is a pocketful of money, a Cadillac, and a good woman. That’s all he need on the surface. I ain’t gonna talk about that other part of satisfaction. But I got sense enough to know it’s there. I know if you get the surface it don’t mean nothing unless you got the other” (Two Trains: act 2, scene 3). In her 1995 study The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Sandra Shannon offers an excellent review of those critics who fail to appreciate the positive uses of Wilson’s “confessional dialogue.” Where I have argued that this dialogue is a powerful structuring device for revelation, self-affirmation, and cultural recovery, critics unfamiliar with the language devices of Wilson’s dramas see lack of structure. Michael Marshall, for example, in a review of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, wonders if Wilson “has yet been able to create a form that can contain his volcanic subject matter, or whether the breaking, spillover effect is what he intended” (Shannon: 128). Another critic, David Richards, observes that “Wilson’s elemental power continues to overwhelm the basic structure of his drama. His efforts remind you of a large man trying to squeeze into a suit two sizes too small. Every now and then, you hear the fabric ripping” (Shannon: 128). But the very excess to which these critics point is the heart of Wilson’s project. Critics enamored of the spare, well-made play cannot be expected to appreciate the power and rightness of Wilson’s eruption of words. These words are a “purgation that will banish the obsessive ghosts of the past” (Pereira: 101). In short, they are possessed of the verbal skills that distinguish the members from the lames. This self-certifying language was a hedge against the not spoken, the repressed, the ghosts who have haunted these characters’ lives. In keeping with the earliest African rituals and drama, they are freed by giving voice to the ghosts they have carried with them. In this way they are able to find their song and enter the crucible of self-creation. The language of Wilson’s drama is not excessive. It is both apt and efficacious and scholars need to give it the same careful attention that Paul Carter Harrison, Sandra Adell, and Craig Werner have given to blues and jazz.

References Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1980. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

396 william w. cook Johnson, James Weldon. “Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Jones, LeRoi. Home. New York: William Morrow, 1966. Kennedy, Andrew K. Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Major, Clarence. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. New York: Penguin, 1994. Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African American Odyssey. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Shannon, Sandra. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1995. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Wilson, August. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. New York: New American Library/Plume, 1985. ———. Fences. New York: New American Library/Plume, 1986. ———. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. New York: New American Library/Plume, 1988. ———. The Piano Lesson. New York: New American Library/Plume, 1990. ———. Two Trains Running. New York: New American Library/Plume, 1992.

Ntozake Shange

Porque Tu No M’entrende? Whatcha Mean You Can’t Understand Me?

Before we can honestly address multiculturalism, we must address the chauvinism of the English language. Since medieval times English speakers have characterized other languages, like Italian and French, as dandified and lacking depth, or as incomprehensibly erudite, while in fact English is a greedy, swallowing language that appropriates words and gestures as an infant at the nipple sucks milk. Without examining our relationship to the English language, we cannot honestly “hear” the “other” speak, we cannot become intimate with what we do not respect. What we deem as “foreign” we cannot take to our hearts. As the Brazilian novelist Lydia Fagundes Telles notes in Girl in the Photograph, “I used to think about my people. I knew I wouldn’t go back but I kept on thinking about them so much. Like when you take a dress out of a trunk, a dress you’re not going to wear, just to look at it. To see what it was like. Afterwards one folds it up again and puts it away but one never considers throwing it away or giving it to anyone. I think that’s what missing things is.”1 The Middle Passage was not monolingual, nor were the grape and lettuce fields, the avocado and cane fields of Florida and Cuba and the Yucatan, nor the rice paddies of the Carolinas and the Philippines and Vietnam, nor the rhythm and blues songs of south central Los Angeles, nor Houston’s Vietnam town. We have not seen alone. We could not “hear.” We are strangers to the black Uruguayan voter polled on galavision, to the Asian Cuban in Machito’s beach, to the Navajo weaver imagining mud cloth as an alternative to what she’s known for so long. Yet as monolingual African Americans, we’ve turned inward in order to be able to hear ourselves outside the thunder of Sambo’s visage and the blare of the Mammy’s smile in our faces. We try to create and re-create ourselves like sixteenth-century Peruvians, as Irene Silverblatt suggests: Early hints of “Indian” identities appear in the Andes three decades after the Spanish invasion, when, in 1565, the Taqui Ongoy (Dancing Sickness), a movement of nativist re-

398 ntozake shange demption, inspired women and men, kurakas and peasants in Peru’s central highlands. Signaling both the despair attending European dominion and the hope of being able to abolish it, Andean gods began to take over Andeans’ souls. Those possessed by the dancing sickness blamed the deteriorating condition of their lives (impossible labor demands and high mortality) on themselves and other natives for deserting huacas (deity, sacred place) for Christian gods. To right the wrongs of this world, the Taqui Ongoys argued, would require Andean peoples to return to their sacred traditions, to restore the sacred balance between huacas and mortals, and to renounce Christianity and all things would be turned. And their promised victory would be a total one: Spanish gods, completely routed, would disappear from the Andes and from native life.2

If we would “route” the white man and deliver ourselves from any way of naming the universe outside the English language, where would we then go? Clinton Turner Davis and Marta Vega are correct in suggesting that the Caribbean is a vital, evererupting source of our myths, our spirit guides, our tragedies and triumphs. Our rhythms survived Pizarro, Trujillo, Batista, and Pinochet as well. For we must never forget that no New World territories escaped the presence of African bondage, of the slave trade of Africans who look just like us. The danger of ignoring the unfamiliar, the exiled, the forgotten, is more than a bit of wrestling with “something missing,” it is the terror of becoming the embodiment of our own folklore set in time and not defined in our own terms. Perhaps the constant moving about of our people, from the continent to the Caribbean to North, South, and Central America, then Detroit, El Paso, and Nueva York or little Haiti is one of the many elements at work to save us from an inert reality, a real objectification of the “I” and “yo!” Byo no me voy. As Edward Said writes, commenting on the work of Salman Rushdie, “What happens to landless people? However you exist in the world, what do you preserve of yourselves? What do you abandon?” I find one passage particularly valuable, as it connects with many things I have been thinking about. “Our truest reality,” [Rushdie] writes, “is expressed in the way we cross over from one place to another. We are migrants and perhaps hybrids, but not of any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives as a nation in exile constantly on the move.”3

He is writing, of course, about the Palestinian people, but could we have been sure? Could that not be us as well? Our métier is improvisation, not a natural, inborn ability but a learned response, a highly complicated intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic response to the loss of control of our lives and our languages. We are allegedly a people without histories, art, or even love for our children. We must break through these grids of colonial contrivance and discover who has been truly around and about us, who is around and about us. My editor’s grandfather printed numbers for the Mafia in the 1950s in Rhode Island. He took the Fifth Amendment eighty-seven times in front of the Kefauver Commission. Working-class and gay cultures are used for comic relief when there is certainly not always much comedy associated with being gay or working class in North America.

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What say ye to all this heathen nonsense? Hoping that we might, in fact, find the time to learn one another’s tongues and secrets, I taunt and tease and challenge you with Salman Rushdie: So, in place of Jonah’s womb, I’m recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism: in place of the whale, the protesting wail. If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.4

As beginning dancers we have no ego problems learning merely to walk again. Hopefully we will humble ourselves and learn to simply talk again.

Notes 1. Lydia Fagundes Telles, Girl in the Photograph (New York: Avon, 1982). 2. Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 186. 3. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 108–12. 4. Ibid.

George C. Wolfe

Performance Method

As a child growing up in Kentucky, in retrospect, I realize I was surrounded by all sorts of folk art that was African at its base. Even though I was groomed to be a very middle-class Negro person, this folk/African art was very much a part of my world. Much of what I’ve become emanates specifically from that world, a world in which my grandmother kept snakes in a jar of formaldehyde by the front door to keep out bad spirits. I mean, the seeming incongruity of my grandmother’s living room—a couch with hand-crocheted doilies, pictures of Jesus and Martin Luther King on the wall, and snakes in jars by the front door—reflects a certain kind of cultural madness. Theatre for me in Kentucky consisted of the plays my school would put on and also the rituals, mores, and music of the Baptist church. And then when I was twelve years old, I came to New York with my mother, and among the plays we saw was a revival of West Side Story. At the end of the first act, just prior to the rumble, there is a number called the Quintet—five different scenes happening simultaneously, featuring Anita, Maria, Tony, the Jets, and the Sharks, all in separate locations. I was amazed and thrilled that all of these events could occur on an open, uncluttered, physically undifferentiated stage. I remember leaning forward in my seat when this sequence was happening and watching it with another part of my brain that was not just that of an audience member. In retrospect I believe it was the director in me studying what was happening. I like the possibilities and power of open space. I prefer black voids to cluttered settings. An isolated body, dancing/speaking/singing in an open space and lit by a single shaft of light, produces a feeling, a sensation in the human heart, like nothing else. Realism in theatre has never interested me. I don’t think of theatre as a place in which reality should be reproduced or enacted. To me, film is about story, television is about character, and theatre is about ideas. As a writer I sometimes feel an impulse

In conversation with Paul Carter Harrison at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Public Theater, April 1999.

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to write something very realistic, and it invariably comes out as a screenplay. It’s the ideas that excite me and drive me to write a play or create a theatrical event. And the complexity of an idea is larger than can be contained by realism, with its walls and its unities of time and all of that stuff. The surrealism of the fractured realities of a minstrel show greatly appeals to me. There is an almost Ionesco-like madness to minstrelsy that I love. I mean, historically, you had black people acting like white people acting like black people, ad infinitum. Pure madness. I remember that shortly after The Colored Museum opened, a white composer invited me to hear him play the score for a play he was writing about a minstrel show. He sang and performed all the roles with such zeal, and with all the vulgarized gestures and intonations. And as he sang, all of the get-hostile-the race-is-under-attack impulses in me were ready to be unleashed, but a deeper voice inside me urged me not to judge but to simply watch what was really going on. And what I saw was that underneath every mocking, grotesque gesture was all of this envy. When you look at the entire American experience of race and performance through the lens of envy and fear, everything changes. It becomes Pirandello-esque in that what we think is going on is in fact the exact opposite of what’s really going on. And so, to me, minstrelsy is an astonishing metaphor for America’s fractured cultural identity and also the DNA for all the theatrical forms that have evolved in America since. Structurally I am also very fond of the minstrel show, in particular the olio aspect, that is, a series of acts/songs/scenes that comprise a whole instead of a linear narrative. It’s a rhythm/structure I’ve returned to a number of times. The Colored Museum, Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,1 and Jelly’s Last Jam all use this structure. Also the figure of the Interlocutor from the minstrel show, with his top hat and cane, is to my mind a variation on the Haitian Voudon trickster figure, Baron Samedi, who is in turn a variation on my character the Chimney Man (in Jelly’s Last Jam), who is a variation on the character of Da’ Voice in Noise/Funk, who is a sort of narrator who gives the audience crucial information. This archetype is part of the structural dynamics that keep appearing in my work. The Chimney Man in Jelly’s Last Jam, with his cut-away and top hat, was inspired in part by the silhouette of the chimney sweeps of New Orleans during Jelly Roll Morton’s time, and by Baron Samedi. I took a Haitian reality, transplanted it to turnof the-century New Orleans, and gave it a mythology that served the purposes of the play. Jelly’s Last Jam is ultimately a joyfully macabre New Orleans Carnival funeral parade, with the Chimney Man/Baron Samedi as the show’s grand marshal or tour guide. As an expression of collective energy inspired by the participants, carnivals fascinate me; they signal that it’s purge time. They are the ultimate orgasmic ritual. There was a sense of Carnival in my production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, which was adapted by Thulani Davis. I conceived of the piece taking place in Haiti, in part because I have always been fascinated by Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and Michele Duvalier, the whole gang, but also because I love Haiti’s folk art. Because Haiti is a very poor

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country, Haitian art is all about using scraps, turning disposables into wondrous things, which is true of most folk art. And I tried to build the whole theatre piece around the same principles. At one point there is a parade that features the ensemble of peasants, festooned as if they are le governor and his court. Le governor is a stick puppet, his wife has a three-foot arm extension that allows her to slap her servants and toss coins without touching the rabble. And leading the procession is a peasant with a Mercedes Benz emblem atop his army helmet, making him the vehicle driving the whole entourage. The moment is a cross between guerilla theatre and the joyful “let’s-pretend” energy of children at play, simultaneously embodying cruelty and comedy, which is the very essence of Carnival insanity. Mask and gestural behavior are very important to me, especially in my early work. I was and continue to be inspired by all forms of Japanese theatre—Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku puppetry. What I especially love about Bunraku is its grace and clarity of gesture. A single gesture can invoke an entire emotional landscape, freeing that moment and the characters involved from all clichés. Around the time that I start working on Spunk,2 I felt a certain kind of cultural imprisonment with regard to black characters. Anytime a black person said or did anything on stage, our sociopolitical antennae went up and we instantly saw that person as a six-o’clock news report of a Ford Foundation study. We saw that person as an idea trapped inside the idea of race and not as a person/force/idea connected to the universe. And when audiences have a preprogrammed response to a character’s language and suffering, they are not available to the moment. And if no one is available or vulnerable because we think we know everything, then theatre has no point. It then becomes necessary to strip it down, make that which seems commonplace new. It was this need that compelled me to stage Spunk, using vaguely Japanese theatre techniques. The character Blues Speak Woman appeared on a hanamichi, a Kabuki ramp that extends out toward the audience; of the three men on Joe Clark’s porch, two were actors and the third was a life-size Bunraku-inspired puppet that the two actors operated, their own gestures stylized so as to make them and the puppet function as a southern, colored Greek chorus. There was also a tremendous amount of work spent reducing realistic behavior to more potent, distilled gesture. I could easily have strung a line of wash across the stage, put a goat in the yard, created Catfish Row, and called it a day. But instead, by framing the storytelling in a stylized setting and using certain Japanese theatrical techniques, I felt I was able to make clear that the production was not a sociopolitical journey into the lives of poor black people in the South. Zora Neale Hurston was making profoundly interesting and powerful observations about male and female behavior and love. The grace of southern folk language and the grace of Japanese theatre complemented each other and, I believe, made the audience vulnerable to the tales being told. The job of the theatre is to penetrate. When you begin to explore anything as specific as race, the complexities of human behavior are much more complicated than popular culture manifestations usually allow. I learned so much from how people re-

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sponded to The Colored Museum. I think that initially, in its first production at the Public [New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre], people did not hear what the play was saying because they felt violated by the silhouettes of the characters. I then realized that in most societies we gauge people without power exclusively by their silhouettes, which allows us to dismiss them. A young man in a hooded sweatshirt: the silhouette of a thug—avoid. A fat woman in an apron with a bandana on her head: the silhouette of a mammy—she’s safe. As a result, the powerless, or those victimized by this dismissal, become hypersensitive about these images. If the silhouette connotes something derogatory or reflects powerlessness, we don’t want to go near it. Because of this, a number of people were offended by The Colored Museum. Their experience and history had trained them to respond to these images of popular culture in a very specific way. One looks at the silhouette, makes an instant assessment, then trashes it, gets rid of it, even kills it, but doesn’t listen to it. Another important point is that every single gesture connected to these silhouettes has its own integrity. What ends up happening is that after repeating these gestures over and over for many years, they begin to lose their potency and become so diluted that only the thinnest version of them remains. But if a director can reconnect with the integrity of the original gesture, that gesture will regain its potency. The silhouette of the Sammy Davis Jr., who I think was the ultimate trickster figure, with his big head and exaggerated grin, can be either horrifyingly powerful or buffoonish, depending on the level of intensity and commitment of the performer, and also the context. In the case of The Colored Museum, such gestures, combined with the language, are presented as both an exorcism and a celebration, as containing a certain level of madness that takes us back to the minstrel show, in which anarchy, subversion, and madness all coexist. It amazes me that white audiences would ever enjoy minstrel performances. Imagine a black face with big white teeth coming at you with a level of intensity that bespeaks barely suppressed rage. I’m sure these white audiences were probably so busy projecting onto those images what they needed to see that they were not receiving the true energy of the performers. Certainly in the intensity of the performer’s exaggerations there had to be a contained rage, which had to create an insane dynamic between performer and audience. Madness is necessary to shatter people’s resistance, the resistance of both audience and performer, particularly with anything that has to do with race. All black people and all white people presume they know everything. There is a fundamental cynicism in our world that does not allow us to be available to the moment. As a director, it is essential to invite joy and delight into the room, shatter people’s resistance, and then speak to various human, moment-to-moment truths. I always tell actors, “If you want the audiences to stick around for the pain, you’ve to got to invite them to the party.” Usually when you invite people into the room, they are fully conscious and wearing their armor, particularly when dealing with issues of race. They think they know it all before they’ve witnessed it. Thus they never receive the information. When you start to explore what is considered unfavorable iconography, it’s very explosive. No

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matter what you do to make the images less offensive, they still have the power to assault the senses. And when that happens is that the audience begins to short-circuit, and once their brains short-circuit—as was the case in The Colored Museum—they become available to the material. The short-circuiting allowed the human moment to connect. When we talk about anything in this country, particularly race, there is so much preprogrammed crap in the way. In Noise/Funk, the short-circuiting process happened strictly through the sheer exuberance of brilliant dancing and an assault of rhythm, so that by the end of the first number the audience surrendered to the power. Laughter can do it, or the rupture of one idea followed by another. The Colored Museum begins with slave images we’ve all seen and to which we are prepared to make our preprogrammed responses of horror and guilt. The next image is of a stewardess in a hot pink outfit on a slave ship. There’s a violation there, an intentional violation, that thwarts everyone’s expectations, yet the violation places the audiences in the moment of its horror, rather than inside their predigested thought process and emotions. It makes everyone available to the moment. In a ritual, if you are not fully available to the moment, you are not going to go through the full process—the depths that bring forth cleansing. You remain resistant to it and will not receive the full benefit of the process, or even be entertained. So it is important to seduce an audience, clobber them, and then show them the way out on the other side of ritual. Anything else is a fake experience. The rhythms of the urbanization section of Noise/Funk clearly invoke the power of an urban industrial landscape that breaks through the defenses of the audience, transforming their expectations in much the same way that a Brazilian Condoble ritual does. Intellectually I can see how the emotional aspects of these rhythms may appear to be a retrieval of African polyrhythmic systems. However, I actually feel a greater affinity for Brazilian culture than I do for any place I’ve been in Africa, because I feel it is more reflective of my psyche in its normal state as a black/Negro/colored American. It’s fractured. I am myself, my mother, and my grandmother. At the same time I am my great-grandfather; I am all the rhythms I have ever known, including those that appear in the photos of my great-great-great grandmother, who was a slave. So I acknowledge and fully embrace the idea of Africa, but I find myself more easily in a mirror that shows forth a fractured reality. The idea for the urbanization section of Noise/Funk first came to me in a dream that had one of the bucket drummers playing the bottom of Savion Glover’s feet. The next day at rehearsal I had the stage managers rig a couple of poles from which the dancers could suspend themselves while the percussionists played rhythms on the bottom of the dancers’ feet. When I saw the resulting image, I knew I’d found the sequence through which to explore how rural rhythms were replaced by industrial rhythms. A lot of the show evolved out of these purely, almost spiritually, inspired moments. On one occasion Ann Duquency, the show’s vocalist and one of the musical creators, spontaneously improvised some vocal tones. I told her she was channeling the sounds of some old black woman named Gussie. Ann then turned to me and

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told me that Gussie was her mother’s name. There were amazing forces in that room that were very much a part of the collaborative process. In a sense, The Colored Museum and Noise/Funk are the bookends of a very specific kind of journey I was on. I’m not sure where I’ll go next. My work will probably become even more personal, though all my work has a lot of personal stuff in it.

Notes 1. Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, a tap-dance musical collaboration with choreographer/dancer Savion Glover, directed on Broadway. 2. Wolfe’s stage adaption of Zora Neal Hurston’s story Spunk.

Afterword About the Contributors

Eleanor W. Traylor

Afterword: Testimony of a Witness

One works, one dreams, and if one is lucky, one actually produces. But the true fulfillment comes when our fellows say: Ah, we understand, we appreciate, we enjoy . . . —Lorraine Hansberry

Forty-three years have passed since, from the Broadway stage, the Younger family abandoned its vermin-infested flat on Chicago’s South Side, heading out for the hostile but greener, airier Clybourne Park in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Today, virtually in the spot where the old tenement stood, sits the elegant house of the ETA Creative Arts Foundation, the home of a fully endowed, board-protected, bank-guaranteed, community-loved and supported black theatre. Here playwrights, invited to take advantage of the opportunities of the place, engage in “conversations with the future.” One or all of them will undoubtedly envision, for dramatic enactment, a way out of the situation that the Younger generations now face. For the Youngers at the millennium have discovered—as have their neighbors—hostile or not, that Clybourne Park is a failed promise; that the possibilities for an engaged life (its terrors still to be reckoned) remain on the South Side; that all the world now knows this and that for some time (through state-maneuvered redress), there has been a stampede to reentry. But South Side real estate now exceeds in value and price what Clybourne Park, as real estate, ever was or could become. What is to be done? Where is the space in which “one works, one dreams . . . one produces,” and finds “fulfillment”? Where are these questions to be answered if not by an agency of individual genius forming a collective mainly bereft of official legitimizing sources but imaging for a people the distinction between a South Side tenement, Clybourne Park, and all in between—where, if not by such an agency, one that pronounces itself black theatre?

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The recuperative and penetrating essays in this anthology assure that such questions are not misplaced, for as they uncover the multiple identities that configure their subject, we learn that more than playwrights, singular successes, resplendent performers, and real estate—invaluable as these are—black theatre is, in fact, an imaginative lens through which we now see the world. The glory of the day was in her face The beauty of the night was in her eyes And over all her loveliness, the grace Of morning blushing the early skies.

I remember these lines spoken from a stage liberated to perform “bodies of literature, lore, and history” (Bambara: 92) formerly suppressed by the very architecture— not to speak of the expectations of a construct called “theatre.” I heard these lines from a stage that convinced me (who in childhood had wailed that my hair would not Shirley Temple curl) they were true—true of me, true of everyone in the house. I heard them from a stage which had ignored the protocols of space regarding performance and audience, a stage demanding the least amount of distance between actor and witness, a stage promoting innovation in performance and response to the degree of complete surprise, a stage expecting the style of variety itself, and a stage approving grace as the most essential element in the achievement of beauty. Unbounded by the limits of proscenium arch, actors—moving up and down aisles and on a ramp-extended stage executing expert movement and eliciting cries of “tha’s awright”—erased the tenses of time as they addressed the cadences and themes of a culturally specific poetry, as if to supplicants who reply, “Teach!” The pitch heightens; the movement patterns itself; the tension between stage and seat, and seat and seat, tightens until those walls come tumbling down. Such was the first rendering of Glenda Dickerson, who composed book, designed stage, and directed her piece The Unfinished Song in the Ira Aldridge Theatre at Howard University in the Spring of 1970. Her stage, radiant of “the radical cultural/political theories of the day . . . smashing the codes, transforming previous significations as they relate to Black women,” remains a stage evoking “four circles of involvement: myth, history, ritual, and ontology” (Spillers and Pryse: 153). These circles identify the primary structural and dramatic features “against which motivation takes shape” (Spillers and Pryse: 152). Most of all, her stage remains an agent-centered stage, presenting what Gwendolyn Brooks has called “a sovereignty,” as in, “we assume a sovereignty ourselves” (Brooks: 72). It is a stage where “act, scene, and purpose are deployed through an equality or economy of means. . . . The agent is not overwhelmed by force of necessity, either demonic or divine, nor is the scene of her or his activity so suppressed in our awareness that the character becomes disengaged from a concrete ground of meaning” (Spillers and Pryse: 154). That concrete ground of meaning locates centers of interpretation in black thought, black cultural particularity, and—most especially—in sites of struggle that engage the existential and aesthetic realities of black women, and not only in America.

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In describing this stage, I am describing an emancipatory event enunciating the terms of our contemporary experience and expectation of the theatre today. This contemporary moment perhaps began its unfolding when Miss Hansberry exploded a subject and a dream and its forms of creative expression, releasing the stage to its work of cultural memory. Of course, cultural memory was the focus of black theatre in the 1960s, through the images of James Baldwin and the language of Baraka and those wonderfully insurgent voices speaking, writing, producing, and building the scenarios and discourses that define the possibility of an American theatre. And like an epic roll call, their names and their progenitive works configure the essays in this volume. But they confronted an industry whose stage had successfully maligned, exploited, trivialized, and made black people invisible. They confronted as well an ethos supported by colonized academia. It was that industry and its stage—silent to a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of hearing, a way of moving, a litany of intellectual and emotional experience that The Unfinished Song broke through. I see that moment of the radical reordering of the stage and the entrance upon it of the poetry of black experience not only as the mining of the territory for the brilliant reception six years later of for colored girls—the incarnation of the voice, the subject, and the direction of our contemporary moment—but also as a marker reenvisioning a certain way of being on the stage. That way of being is, of course, informed by the Voice—the encyclical frame of reference, its timbre and its resonance—that identifies any culturally specific artistic form. It is this voice, embodying genealogy, textualities, contextual locality, and the modes of eloquence, that is the instant recognition of a choric audience. The power of that voice may be summoned by a solitary figure— old as the first griot or new as Avery Brooks—charging its community to deny the finality of death through the continuity of art. When cultural historians, as those whose keen insights inform the intelligence of this book, observe indigenous theatre in Africa and the Diaspora, they describe a synergy of ceremony, ritual, pageantry, history, myth, litany, and everything in between crafted impeccably to address the expectations of the community that the performance celebrates. This performance, however, whether an offering by renowned specialists like the Ifa, dramaturg of Ibadan or Benin, or by national companies like the Ghana Dance Ensemble, the Jamaica or Cuba National Dance Theatres, or the Candomblé Ceremony of Brazil or the Voudoun of Haiti, may have little or nothing to do with the official stage. Rather, it preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs . . . which insure the good life or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitations of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embellishes those values by which the group lives and dies. (Ellison: 171)

What is more, performance in diasporic societies clarifies “a basic but [in America often] neglected truth that the audience, and not the people on the stage, is the heart of the theatre” (Lovell: 99–106). By observing this particularity in the continuum that

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is the United States, black theatre continues to widen its interpretive community by erasing the borders of place and time. For, as much as its transgressive lens, the transgressive storytelling genius of black theatre has re-formed the dreams and imagination of its interpretive community. The stories told in the liberated space of this dramatic world have and continue to become archetypal. As a consequence these stories have changed the thought, sensibility, and possibilities of life in what, for almost fifty years, has been the approach of the millennial world. One story it has told is the freedom story. Its most recent incarnation is heard in the lyrics of a young composer singing: I believe I can fly I believe I can touch the sky . . . (R. Kelly)

This is neither Icarus nor Superman. It is the emancipatory story drawn from the calabash of African American oral and written expressive modes that now go by the name of Beloved. When a sovereign people tell a story, that story reflects their dream, and that dream enters the unconscious mind of an age, and everybody dreams it. Before I could read, I saw this story enacted in my family’s church, where I saw pageant plays that told of freedom. And one magical night I saw its theme, method, and effect evoked from a stage where dancers, with the help of expert choreographers, actually flew. Emancipation from presumptive, dominating hegemonic narratives—a very black dream—is a marker of the twentieth-century mind. What we may expect of the transgressive imagination that is black theatre is a sequel to this story: how do we share contested space in a pluralistic society but honor the grounds of cultural homes? “You are not in charge here [but you are welcome to the amenities of this place],” said the daemon in a play called The Gospel at Colonus. Another resonant story transmitted through the arena of sense and sensibility called black theatre is the black-is-beautiful story. Part of that story awakens recognition: My blackness is the beauty of this land, My blackness, Tender and strong, wounded and wise is the beauty of this land. (Lance Jeffers)

Another part, reflection: “And Sonny went all the way back . . . for while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell; it’s the only light we’ve got” (Baldwin: 115). Was it not enough that this story restored the souls of black folk everywhere, that it awakened the whole world to its beauty? It became beautiful to be Italian American, Asian American, Chicano, Latin American, ad infinitum. A few say it’s necessary to build a white country someplace where white people can feel beautiful. But others ask, “What country would this be?” The black-is-beautiful story is another marker of the twentieth-century mind. It has inspired a millennial conversation that scholars would call the discourse of ancestralism. It has inspired views of the world through the concentric prisms of “Afrocentric” and “Eurocentric.” Some of

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the chief architects of this old but new historical conversation are represented in this collection. But there is another aspect of this story that “black theatre” continues to tell. That story goes: “The Apostle of beauty is the Apostle of truth and right” (Du Bois: 327). One famous, apocalyptic story that has distinguished black theatre is the tear-thisbuilding-down story. This story is the issue of an intelligence (called alternately the black arts/black power movement) that unveiled and unraveled all the pretenses and all the constructions that have falsely been paraded as reality since the Atlantic slave trade. What scholars call deconstruction is also a very black story, and it began the very day when the traveler on the ship said: “That is not my Name” (Equiano, passim). By the time a woman said, “Stealin shit from me/dont make it yrs/makes it stolen” (Shange: 53), these insurgent stories had struck the death knell on colonial constructs of the mind. Finally, a story now in splendid progress is one that might be called, “much water has run out but the calabash remains unbroken” (Rotimi: 89). It is a story conjuring “re-memory” as the process of an epic people. One of its motifs (as in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson) suggests that you may sell the mother’s piano, but it’s much too late to stop its life-preserving music. Such music clears a space in which to work, to dream answers to cruel questions, to fulfill an urgency like storytelling. These tellings, through the trajectory of a very wide lens called black theatre, liberate life and art beyond millennia. And the essays included in this anthology cause us to say: Ah, we understand, we appreciate, we enjoy . . .

References Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues” (1958). In James Baldwin, Going to Meet The Man. London: Black Swan Books, 1984. Bambara, Toni Cade. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “God Works in a Mysterious Way.” In Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), rept. Chicago: David Company, 1987. Dickerson, Glenda. “The Unfinished Song,” Master’s thesis, Adelphi University, 1970. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria for Negro Art” (1926). In The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford Press, 1996. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, The African (1789). Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library, 1969. Lovell, John. “Theatre Audiences in Japan,” Theatre Survey 5 (November 1964): 99–106. Rotimi, Ola. Kurunmi. Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1971. Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: A Choreopoem. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Spillers, Hortense, and Marjorie Pryse. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

About the Contributors

amiri baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in the 1950s and Spirit House, a black community theatre, in the 1960s. Among his many writings in all literary genres is a long list of works for the theatre, starting with (as LeRoi Jones) A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, Dutchman, The Slave Ship, and The Death of Malcolm X. Baraka has retired from the African Studies Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and continues to give public readings of his poetry in jazz sessions. paul k. bryant-jackson, Professor of Theater at Miami University of Ohio, is a frequent director of plays and co-editor of Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. william w. cook is Israel Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres at Dartmouth College, where he also teaches African and African American studies. His published work includes a recent volume of poetry, Spiritual and Other Poems. He writes for the theatre in addition to acting and directing. j[oseph] c[oleman] de graft, Ghanian dramatist and poet, made a lifelong commitment to the theatre in his homeland and in Kenya. He contributed greatly to the national theatre movement in Ghana as a teacher, writer, and director. He is best known for his play Muntu, a wide-ranging historical pageant, and for Beneath the Jazz and Brass, a collection of his poetry. Both appeared shortly before his death in 1978. gus edwards has had nine plays produced with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York and has written numerous pieces for the theatre, including The Offering, Black Body Blues, Testimony, and Louie & Ophelia. He has published two volumes of his monologues and a collection of plays from the Negro Ensemble Company. He currently teaches film studies and directs a multiethnic theatre program at Arizona State University. femi euba, a playwright, director, and scholar, has worked in the theatre in the United States, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom. He has written numerous plays for

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the BBC and has directed at the Royal Court Theatre. In the United States his plays A Riddle of Palms and Crocodiles were produced by the Negro Ensemble Company. A professor in the Theatre and English departments at Louisiana State University, he is the author of Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama, and a forthcoming book on playwriting. paul carter harrison, an award-winning playwright and director, has had a long association with the Negro Ensemble Company. He is the author of The Drama of Nommo, a landmark discussion of the aesthetics of Black Theatre, and has edited a number of anthologies of African diasporic plays. His honors include the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for American Playwriting and a National Endowment of the Arts Playwrights Fellowship. Harrison currently serves on the board of the African Grove Institute of the Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. deborah wood holton teaches theatre, black culture, and creative writing at DePaul University. She has served as dramaturg for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Pegasus Players, and the Chicago Theatre Company. joni l. jones, a performance artist and scholar, is currently Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Texas, Austin. may joseph, currently Associate Professor of Global Studies at Pratt Institute, is the author of The Performance of Citizenship and co-editor of Performing Hybridity. babatunde lawal, Professor of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, also has taught at institutions in Africa and Brazil. Among his writings are The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture, and a forthcoming book on Sango sculpture among the Yoruba. sydné mahone, a freelance dramaturg, was director of play development at Crossroads Theatre Company from 1985 to 1997 and served there as dramaturg for some thirty plays. She has taught in the Dramatic Writing Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She is the editor of Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African American Women and With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. keith antar mason is the artistic director of the Hittite Empire, an African American multidimensional men’s collective and touring company that develops new artworks and performances. His own work includes poetry, pieces for the theatre, and novels. michael mcmillan, a writer, performance artist, and critic in the United Kingdom, has published several anthologies, including Living Proof: Views of the World Living with HIV and AIDS and If I Could Fly: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Boys and Men. His work for the theatre includes Invisible and Brother to Brother, and his credits include a film, Sure Footed, commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK.

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andrea j. nouryeh serves as the resident dramaturg for the Department of Speech and Theatre and Professor of Dramatic Literature and Theatre History at St. Lawrence University. Among her publications is a co-edited anthology, Drama and Performance. tejumola olaniyan is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he teaches African diasporan literary and cultural studies. He is the author of Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American, and Caribbean Drama. beverly j. robinson, a prolific writer on African American performance and a consultant to filmmakers as well as theatres, was Professor of Theatre and Folklore Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. Among her publications is Ant Phyllis: The Narrative of Mrs. Phyllis Carter. Dr. Robinson passed away in early 2002. ntozake shange is widely associated with her “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which received an Obie Award and was nominated for a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy. Her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children also won an Obie. She has published Three Pieces, a collection of works for the theatre, several books of poetry, and four novels: Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo, Betsy Brown, and Liliane. She is currently Professor of Drama and English at Prairie View A & M University. wole soyinka, widely recognized for his work as a poet, novelist, critic, and playwright, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Among his most significant plays are The Road, The Trials of the Lion and the Jewel, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, The Strong Breed, The Trials of Brother Jero, Jero’s Metamorphosis, and Death and the King’s Horsemen. His most recent book, The Open Sore of a Continent, concerns the social and political crisis of his homeland, Nigeria. He currently serves as Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Arts at Emory University. suandi (o.b.e.), an independent arts administrator, has been the guiding force behind the Black Arts Alliance, the largest and longest-surviving network of black artists in the United Kingdom. In addition to several anthologies, she has published collections of her own essays, including Style and, most recently, I Love the Blackness of My People. She toured internationally with her acclaimed performance piece, The Story of M. In 1999 she was designated an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. lundeana m. thomas teaches theatre and co-directs the African American Theatre Program at the University of Louisville. In addition to being a playwright, actress, and director, Thomas has published a book of essays, Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre: Transformational Forces in Harlem. eleanor w. traylor, Graduate Professor of English at Howard University, has published widely. Among her works are The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production,

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The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Traditions, and Broad Symphony: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader. marta moreno vega, founder and President of the Caribbean Cultural Center/ African Diaspora Institute in New York City, is also Assistant Professor of Black and Hispanic Studies at Baruch College. Her publications include a co-edited volume, Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity, and her spiritual memoir, Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santeria. derek walcott, internationally acclaimed poet, was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He is often associated with Trinidad, where he established the Trinidad Workshop Theatre. His dramatic work includes Pantomime, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, and the Obie Award–winning play, Dream on Monkey Mountain. Among his volumes of poetry are Green Night Poems, 1948-1960; Another Life; and Collected Poems, 1948–1984. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Poetry and Playwriting at Boston University. keith l. walker is Professor of French at Dartmouth College, where he also teaches Italian, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. His publications include La Cohesion poetique de l’ouevre cesarienne, Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot, and a co-edited book, Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. victor leo walker ii has taught at several universities and most recently at Dartmouth College. Currently he is the President of the African Grove Institute for the Arts, an organization dedicated to black theatre. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center. george c. wolfe has served as Producer of the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival since 1993. Widely praised for his own play, The Colored Museum, and for his direction of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, he has been honored as best director for Millennium Approaches (Tony Award), Perestroika (Tony nomination), Spunk (Obie Award), Twilight: Los Angeles (Outer Critics Circle Award), and Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (Tony Award), a musical he created with Savion Glover that received three other Tonys. His musical Jelly’s Last Jam won three Tony Awards as well as six Drama Desk Awards. jean young, a media artist and scholar, has numerous credits as director of photography, lighting director, and assistant camera operator on major motion pictures, commercials, and industrial films. She has taught film at Columbia College of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.