Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Dicker/Sun, Glenda. African American Theatre: A Cultural Companion. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. 210pp. Pbk. ISBN 9780745634432, ₤18.99. Hbk ISBN 9780745634425, ₤60.00.
Reviewed by
Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria
How does one begin to write about a people who suffered more than four hundred years of trans-Atlantic slavery- a transoceanic phenomenon which gave rise to centripetal and centrifugal discourses that have shaped events across the Atlantic world climaxing in a complex web of oceanic interculture of intellectualism, creolization, hybridity and religious interface? Because the diasporic spread of Africans across the Atlantic in contested spaces and locales have cultural, historical, political and religious significances for the Africans in the New World and Africans on home land and indeed the west especially the United States, it is difficult to explore the life of these people (African-Americans) based solely on theatre which though the highest and best expression of their struggles for being and becoming cannot capture all the experiences alone. This is why Glenda Dicker/Sun has chosen to title this important book African American Theatre: A cultural Companion
Written in lucid prose inter-laced with significant photographs that in themselves speak volumes of the journey of the African American exemplified in the identity crises that manifest in the nomenclatural mutations; Negro, Black Americans, Afro Americans to African Americans. The interesting thing about Dicker/Sun’s book is that it is not only a collection stories from the major players and memories of those who related with them but this book is as much an eye witness account. The author is a major player in the unfolding drama of African American theatre and cultural life. Of the collection of sixty photographic illustrations in the text, her own direct artistic production and creations account for nearly a dozen.
Written in nine chapters, this 210 page book with a detailed bibliographic compilation (9pp) is indeed a companion, a friend and a guide to the cultural landscape that has historically surrounded the writers of plays (as a raw material for the plots) for both the teacher and student of African American theatre and culture.(p1)
The beauty of Dicker/Sun’s book is not that she recounts the familiar story of how the legacy of slavery has woven itself historically throughout African American drama and theatre and still plays out on the current landscape in the works of such writers as August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, but the refreshing insights behind the scene that gave impetuous to these writers in their creative endeavours.
In the first chapter for instance titled “The People Who Could Fly-Slavery, Stereotypes, Minstrelsy and Myth”, the author recounted the invention of myth perhaps to counter the myth of the so-called inferiority of the Black man and the need to accept his fate? A critical question is American identity and the place of blacks. Where does the black person fit by virtue of his colour? What are the hopes and expectations of the black man in claiming his Americaness? Paul Giroy (1999) spoke of the metaphor of that ‘middle passage’ and ‘the ship’ reading the ship as personifying the “living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” midwifing the historic circum-Atlantic dialogue and the emerging culture of modernity. The myth of the ability to fly came to symbolize the will to escape bondage and “fly home” if not physically but at least spiritually and artistically from the dehumanizing effects of slavery.
This ability to fly is likened to the Yoruba concept of “Iwa” (inner essence); the inner life and inner monologue that blacks constantly go through. There is always a battle between the inner thought and utterance of the enslaved person. Dicker/Sun explores this concept as “the unnaturally suppressed inner lives which our people have been compelled to lead” quoting Victoria Earle Mathews co-founder of the National Association of Coloured women in 1896.
Chapter two “A Leap for Freedom” explores the anti-slavery movement. Contrary to certain erroneous account of blacks being contented, thick- lipped, water melon eating people, the author brings to fore those who were never contented with their conditions of enforced servitude. Though their bodies were trapped, their spirits yearn for freedom. The chapter is a logical follow up to the people who could fly talked about in chapter one who now talked, wrote and organized to gain freedom. The underground rail road conductor and emancipated interlocutor were prominent players in this with actors like Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner. The author took us through various stages of rebellion from the angry abolitionist the bloodiest of which was slave rebellion on 21st August 1831 in Southampton, Virginia through the Amistad revolt of 1838 through the underground railroad conductor to emancipated interlocutors like Frederick Douglas. These struggles were the fountains upon which black playwrights drew inspiration to write dramas which will:
liberate the black audience from oppressive past, to present history
that provides continuity, hope and glory. Such feelings and knowledge
have positive survival value for the race. This emphasis on the black
folk hero represents a new pride in black person’s past particularly
the militant past (p47)
Just when the blacks thought they had won freedom albeit partially, a new monster reared its head in the form of official racism during the final fifty years of the C19th the so-called end of slavery and the rise of reconstruction. Historically, ultra-Calvinism the belief in the God ordained supremacy of whites over blacks no doubt contributed to the inhuman slave trade and the subsequent subjugation of the black person particularly in the United States. But when even some prominent whites featured in the abolitionist struggles, the blacks must have thought a new dawn has come. But alas this was not to be as the 1900 and above renewed the myth of white supremacy. This was accentuated by the infamous U S Supreme Court ruling in the “Plessy vs Ferguson’ case where the doctrine of “Separate but equal “segregation of races was legalized. This is the issues brilliantly explored by the author in chapter three-“A Snake Called Freedom”. An important development of this era was that it threw up the most brilliant minds in black struggles in America prominent among which was W.E.B Dubois a seminal figure in the intellectual history of the C20th who famously proclaimed that “the problem of the C20th is the problem of colour line”
Dubois did not stop at the political terrain even though he was most prominent here helping to found in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), he was active on the literary and theatre circles along with people like Angelina Grimkes, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Regina M Aderson with whom Dubois founded the Krigwa Theatre in 1924 which was conceived primarily as a centre for Negro actors before Negro audiences interpreting Negro life as depicted by Negro artists.
Dubois pageant The Star of Ethiopia (1913) perhaps encapsulated the spirit of these times. The major goals were: to help people interested in the development of Negro drama, to teach the coloured people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through theatre and to reveal the Negro to the White world as a human, feeling thing. It was an audacious attempt as the play which covers a period of 10,000 years with over 1,000 actors opened at the 12th Regiment Armory in New York on Oct. 22, 1913.
The rest of the book covers important cultural/ artistic landmarks in African American history. Chapter four for instance looks at Harlem renaissance. Harlem is perhaps home of the famous black community in the world-like a mythic place; a pad for people who want to fly or ever dreamt of flying, a beacon for the young, beautiful and talented housing the greatest American artists, politicians, entertainers, clergymen and writers of the C20th. The jewel of this chapter is the re-collection of the historic meeting in mid March 1924 between a dozen young men mostly unknown poets and writers with Dr Dubois and James Weldon Johnson at the civic club. This party was notable for two reasons; 1) It marked the passing of baton from the ‘older school” of black letters, represented by Dubois and Johnson, to the younger generation, 2) It marked the birth of an idea that led to the new Negro movement.
“War Stories” (Chapter five) puts in proper perspectives the role of blacks in fighting and dying in defense of a land which refused to accord them their rightful place in history during the World wars and Vietnam war. More significantly, as the World war ended in 1945 following the surrender of Germany, the coming together of one million blacks during the war was a significant community building event, one that would be the precursor to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.
A major strength of this book is the ability of the author to seem to bind together effortlessly, events that seem so far apart and ‘unrelated’. The fifth chapter dovetails into the sixth where we are ushered into the civil rights movement of the sixties in “Sitting Down, Sitting In and Standing Up”. The foot soldiers from the war spear headed the sit-ins, freedom rides, bus boycotts and historic marches. Thus, we can see the logical evolution of the Blackman as the ordinary people, who, as they struggled symbolized their transformation by changing their nominal identity from Coloured, to Negro, to Afro-American and finally Black. The Black power movement begun in 1966 embodies the externalization of this philosophy.
By chapter seven, “Black is Beautiful”, the Blackman was coming home to roost. In 1966-68, between the assassination of Martin Luther King and the Meredith march, a mysterious spirit of blackness moved across the black movement community. One Carmichael Stockely asserted in 1966 while capturing this spirit thus “we have to stop being ashamed of being Black. A broad nose, a thick lip and nappy hair is us and we going to call that beautiful whether they like it or not”. This was literarily a transformation of the mind, a reanimation of the “iwa” grabbed hold by the people striving anew for freedom now called liberation.
Chapter eight on “Conversations” is significant in the sense that the interviews conducted by the author with actors and playwrights of the new generation brings the point home for the student and even the teacher of African American drama that there are major players beyond and after Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Eulalie Spence etc. This is important because very often especially when the old generation image looms large, it is convenient never to look beyond them.
The last chapter (9) “A Presence of Ancestry” the author touches on some of the ways the cultural history explored in the book are playing out in the present landscape of black theatre. Fifty years after emancipation, the younger generations are still struggling with ethnic designation but the author is emphatic in her conclusion that “What is important here is not what names to use, but to understand that the changing designations have described a search for ‘iwa’ a way to express our ever evolving inner life”. That is what the African American needs to fly and perhaps Barak Obama got that wing that is why he is on board the flight to the White House. May be if he had denied his Africaness, he may never have gotten. True, he is American, but his African blood flows even if his grand father and half brothers were not in Kenya today.
This book is not only a tribute to African American Theatre and Culture but a tribute to the intellectual stride of the African American. The author has made her case and it is not just the student and teacher of African American theatre but all those who want to understand the story of the African American. After all is it not said that to understand a people, it were better we study the history of their arts and no where is this more evident than in the history of theatre and drama. The book recommends itself.