an equation for black people on stage
Structurally I really liked and hated how the critical texts precede the play in the reading packet we are reading.
The structure inevitably positions the text in the same way as the way blackness and whiteness is portrayed that Susan Lori Park supposedly dislikes; susan writes how blackness, its superfluous fluidity is always positioned in relative position to the white presence, which is a solid grounded position, in theatre that has both white and black. likewise, the critical text with its solidity/certainty inevitably positions the creative text in fluid relative/reactive position, which is also vulnerable to the scrutiny of academicians-- the super pc, the believer of literal oppresser and oppressed binary--gaze.
This shows the operatie system of theatre of academic publishing and a marginalized writers: the overflowing meaning the nonstandard body is put under the easily comprehendable solid theory and names.
But at the same time, susan revels in this theatre: that's why the black character's name that susan lori parks is giving are attached to stereotypical food(black man w watermelon; black woman with fried drumstick). she plays with mask that obviously cannot contain the superfluous body. it is just like when tracie morris screams and sings the textbooklike text that describes slaery; the music is manifestation of superfluidity, the textbook-y language are the names, mask.
Of Mimicry and Man
When I say mask that cannot contain the superfluidity, it is the opposite of the mimicry/camouflage in homi bhabha's text in terms of its original purpose. The maks Susan plays with is purposfully limited to flaunt superfluidity behind it; camouflage is intended to hide the superfluidity to fit into standardized world. yet ironically they function similarly. they both reveals constructed, thus, not-absolute nature of the mainstream/stanadard/whiteness through their own-- exaggeratedly limiting/too defined mask&trying to blend in but unsuccessful mimicry-- constructedness/performativeness
posession
in this zero-sum(in terms of interiority and authenticity) equation "the definition of posession cancels itself out. the relationship between possessor and possessed" is even further eradicated, the economic implication in the word possess. Black and white relations are always in midst of economic transaction; slavery, welfare queen, a boy with a ratty hoodie is suspicious because of this implication, and economy is inevitably in the center of theatre of history.
element of style
This title reminds me of the grammar book written by dr. white.
This section of the Susan's writing does mimick the absolute tones of instruction yet the excess, the black speech tone seeps into the instructions of how elements should be arranged to re-member the scattered, de-constructed, no longer absolutely-binary elements and masks into a new constellation, a new universe, another Ameria
America Play
That is why this is America Play, not American Play. It is creating another America, another history. There are doubling of everything, making everything into the construction and super-fluid darkmatter, the hole. The hole of History. The hole=theatre. There is no solidity. There never was. There is no ground. There is no America with capital A.
(I will add more about the play itself later; but feel free to fill it in? :) )
In “Possession” (Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works) I felt a series of high-tension arenas in which a landscape is created— I found it fascinating that she referred to the theater as an incubator, a space so compressed it gave weight and life to new ideas and modes of compression. It all began with her asking “Who am I writing for?” which gave way to questions of the existential (what I imagine of pressure), and then branched out to the people inside the play; finally, onto the ‘stage’ whereby bones are located, dug up, and studied. “Hear the bones sing,” as she put it (4).
ReplyDeleteI also fell in love with the writing in the margins for “Possession,” “Elements of Style,” and “Equation for Black People on Stage,” which Parks initially notes as her “Time Line —creating history where it is and always was but has yet been divined” (5). They were oddly archaeological in their wayward stance, sometimes non-sequitor and other times deeply profound. I feel they are meant to be there as a part of history not otherwise told in the “greater” space of the page (meaning: what could be put down in history, but perhaps should have been), and further pressurize the text that it sits next to.
In “The America Play” I was immediately struck by the introduction of time/ space/ characters. I was intrigued by the binary of the “Place Hole” (which alludes to nothingness); how the hole is meant to be “the exact replica of the great hole of history” (which alludes to a closely guarded secret, something violently crossed out, etc; thus of somethingness), and also how the hole serves as a marker for the theater, America, the strange place in which comfort can be found: “‘He digged a hole and the hole held them’” (159). The hole holds a Digger, and, in ever-binary form, the hole is haunting in its form and comforting in what it’s doing for the Digger. There is always a hole in which bones sing. The definition of “hole” and “bones,” though, keeps changing. It’s an equation all its own in which other words can be plugged in and the same hole-comfort/hole-haunt is on the other end.
Relating back to “Equation for Black People on Stage,” Parks states she writes theater to incorporate many aesthetics and experiences to negate the “fucked-up trap to reduce [African-Americans] into one way of being” (22). She writes to vary the notions of culture and aesthetic, and in doing so turns the earthwork (no pun intended) on its head in a strange and fascinating way.
Interesting Jiyoon, I almost enjoyed the introductory chapters by Parks more than the play itself. The idea I’m most attracted to is about form, and I liked the way she seems to shatter and mirror the theoretical form with poems and diagrams in the margins. For me it’s like the dominant theoretical voice and its shadows.
ReplyDeleteThe first time I read Bhabha, I found the ideas on mimicry extremely empowering. If indeed mimicry is another thing entirely, in the hands of the oppressed, it can become a revolution. But reading Park’s discussion on form along with Bhabha, produced a much more hopeless response. I think the there is a thread of the containment, or oppression that stays. Mimicry still needs the original form to feed off, so it is dependent on the form.
Is form always going to be the bully in the room? Is form the means of domination and subjugation? You can put on all different masks, but aren’t they all still masks?
Parks plays with history and race as social constructs. Race, ethnicity, gender, class are all the constructed masks. No matter what, we have to pick them up and wear them, and we become: uh exact replica of thuh Great Hole of History! (Parks 179).
So is form an extension of the mask? In Park’s discussion of form she asks: why choose shape, and in the margin quotes: the shape is ½ the meaning. (8) If shape is the link to history and domination, isn’t the shape always going to dictate meaning? After reading these essays, and moving into the play, I was disappointed that her play didn’t push the form of a play as much. Her theoretical explanations seemed to push the standard expectations in terms of content and visuals, but the play just pushed the content. Guess I wanted more.
The Lesser Man was always the Lesser Man. (Well maybe not really, because that is just a label and he was the star in many ways.) His choices and opportunities were all in some way limited by his form. I do see that Park’s pushes us to look at ideas of greatness, history and the confining/absurd nature of labels/meaning.
In the play and in the theory, the idea that language is a physical act (18), illustrates the transformative power of language. I feel that the theme of digging, endless digging represents both the idea of transformation but also futility. The digging may be change, but the result is that we are left with a hole or the shadow of a hole.
My favorite line from the first part of the Parks selection: "Don't ask playwrights what their plays mean; rather, tell them what you think and have an exchange of ideas" (15).
ReplyDelete--
Like Megan, I was fascinated by Suzan Lori-Parks's notion of "Possession"--particularly the idea that "[t]he relationship between possessor and possessed is, like ownership is, multidirectional" (3), as well as the ways in which it relates to, and maybe differs from, Homi Bhabha's notion of colonial mimicry, which also seems to be multidirectional. (Honestly, I'm trying to work this question out for myself while I write this—further thoughts are welcome if you all feel up to it.) But first the play.
"The Foundling Father" (henceforth TFF) in THE AMERICA PLAY is possessed by / obsessed with the figure of Abraham Lincoln, his whole life consumed by mimicry of the "Great Man." TFF simply does not exist in any other way, at least not really: he is a simulacrum of a person he both resembles and--supposedly--admires. In that way, TFF also resembles the "replica" of the "great black hole of history" in which the entire play takes place. He himself is a kind of black hole, a person that has been possessed by a (historical) myth that has erased his 'real' self as well as his 'real' history. The second act, in which TFF's son and wife search for him and only turn up historical debris of past presidents as well as a tv set in which TFF makes an appearance, seems to dramatize their search for a 'real' point of origin and a 'real' history that will always be frustrated, since TFF is and will always be virtual--a myth, even though he is a flesh-and-blood person. When TFF finally appears, still mimicking Lincoln, and the gunshot finally actually kills him, he's laid to rest as Lincoln, of course, and "the nation mourns" (199).
The last line is fitting: I feel like this whole play can be read as a kind of requiem for lost histories and identities, and I can't help reading "the nation" ironically here--it's "the nation" of those whose histories and identities have been wiped out by colonialism who mourn, not the "real America." (As Jiyoon said, this play does a good job, I think, of showing the "real America" never really existed in the first place except as a fabricated place, a myth.) TFF and the replica of the black hole of history are both similar in the sense that they are false points of origin--not that they are 'nothings,' but that they both cover up 'something' that is truly real--identities and histories that have been forgotten and lost, maybe forever.
So TFF mimics Lincoln (or at least the superficial details of his life), the "black hole of history" in which the play takes place is a "replica" of the real one, and everything in Parks's play seems to be standing in for something else that is "real" except for TFF's wife and son. They are simply searching, enacting the desire for a "true" or "authentic" black identity and history. Is their search truly in vain, as the end of the play seems to suggest? Is the "real" black hole of history a hole in which true origins and histories have completely disappeared as a result of colonization? Or is the very notion of true origins or histories suspect? Is the past truly irrecoverable, as Parks seems to suggest? Is the creation of new histories empowering or destructive, or both at once? Parks says at the end of "Possession" that she envisions theater as an incubator for new histories, and though these histories are created, they are no less real by virtue of their fabrication. The implication is that all histories, just like "America" itself, are ultimately constructions, stories, myths. Like Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, could “history” itself be a kind of “ironic compromise” (318) between oppressors and the oppressed?
DeleteSorry for the barrage of questions--I found the issues this play raises really fascinating. Further thoughts on any of this?
Thade (and everyone else), you have to go out and read Parks's Topdog/Underdog. It's amazing. All you have to know is that it's about two brothers named Lincoln and Booth.
DeleteI loved these Park selections we were given - the theory stuff at the beginning and The America Play itself. My favorite moments in this play are those assassination reenactments. The fact that the Foundling Father/Lesser Man's greatest obsession with Lincoln lies not in his life but his death is really interesting. Then the way that moments get played out over and over again by two "actors" who are essentially blanks becomes incredibly important. The Foundling Father as Lincoln only does two things: laugh and slump. These various Booth players come in and they say their one grand line, and that line keeps changing. These lines reflect history but they keep getting it wrong because the accounts of what Booth (and Mary Tood) said and when they said them have so long been in dispute. The phrases themselves are empty; they are only meaningful because they were put in the context of an important moment - the assassination. The mimicry involved in just parroting a line that was already cliched the moment it was recounted is astounding. That's why there's a giant hole of history. Because it is a hole into which you can literally throw anything you want and pretend it has value simply because it went into that hole. You want to throw things into the hole so you can pretend it has weight (after all, it can be thrown into a physical space, right), but that's still pretend. It's still a big hole.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I love that Lucy and Brazil have to literally dig the Foundling Father out at play's end. He's in there in this giant hole, covered up by all this feigned importance. Same with the revelation that Lucy never had any particular gift. She lucked out once as a child and then spent the rest of her life learning to be good at faking it. If we take off the mask, we just get a void, right? And we assign the void importance. The play ends with all those gaping holes - the mouth, the wound, the hole itself. We can mourn all we want. There's still holes there.
Park might be interested in the way the Foundling Father is at the bottom of the hole, becoming unrevealed. But to me it's no victory. Or, it's the emptiest kind of victory. I don't mean that there's something futlie going on here. This is the point of the writer: to fill the hole. And then to make the audience believe that the hole was filled all this time.
Oh, and if we can get on the therapy chair of writing here (apologies in advance to Drew), then I just want to point out how much I love what Parks has to say about digging out the bones of ancestral history. When I try to justify my reasons for writing, or questions of who I write for, it always sounds so trite to say "for the dead." Maybe the truth is that when I write poetry, I'm trying to get at some kind of basic foundation for myself. It's not history of race in my case, but more of a place history or a clas history. I write poetry because of the giant gaps of knowledge/history/narrative about my family and town and considering that it would be so easy for me to become one of those gaps, by choice or by circumstance, I feel some kind of need to undig myself out of it, to crawl out of the hole. And for me, that often means I've accidentally dragged some other gap-people out with me, too. Like Parks, I think I write in order to get to some essential aspect of history that got buried somehow. And sometimes I make up blatant lies based on what I think the bones are saying. And then the lies become history. I think writing is a way of making bones sing, but it's also making other bones shut the hell up.
Deletebeth, i agree. i think that is what i like about your poems, all of them are a re-membering, stitching together of a blanket or something like that, a frankenstanian-narrative
DeleteHonestly I too, like Trish, found the “Possessions” before the play more fascinating/ stimulating than the play itself and the Bha Bha. Theater as an incubator, a sort of Frankensteinian-womb, that re-members, stitches back, weaves together the little bone’s singing. This is beautiful. If history is a sight of displacement and dismembering than a natural sight of resistance is in theater and drama I think (but poetry I want to say, i belive) lends itself nicely to the digging up of these bones, of these dismemberments. The act of remembering thus becoming a literal re-membering, a stitching back together the bodies buried in history.
ReplyDeleteWhich brings me to form and mimicracy etc etc. I am not sure but when Parks is writing about the Great Hole of History—when she is playing with race, gender and class as constructs—but more particularly too when she is writing of the ways in which Blackness is perceived, and also Whiteness she too is writing about mimicracy, I think. To be more precise, I am thinking of the questions she raises and that i will try to answer:
“Can a White person be present on stage and not be an oppressor? Can a Black person be on stage and be other than oppressed? For the Black writer, are there Dramas other then race dramas? Does Black life consist of issues other than race issues?”
these questions are some that I think about often and whose answer i struggle to articulate. for me the issue of “Whiteness” is one of ideology. While whiteness is a clear reference to skin-color and because of the history we have inherited there is an almost unbreakable link between power, whiteness and well, skin color. but again whiteness is a question of ideology, it is a way of thinking and a way of applying power. It is also something that we are trained to do. Because of our mostly, white-centered education and media, (popular culture) all of us are trained to see ourselves from within this center of power. furthermore, because of modern mass-communication, everyone today from the inner-city youth, to a sheep-herder in Turkey to a campesino in Bolivia can imagine herself wearing Nikes, eating freedom fries and cheering the triumphs of captain america. for many in the third world of course these are the commodities that he or she is falsely made to believe are accessible to “those who work hard” but which in reality are only made available to those in the first world and whose sales really only benefit those who control this center of power—the global 1%. In a way thus we are all outside the center of “Whiteness” we are all “Blackness.” In this sense everyone from Carlos Slim—the Mexican business magnate and richest person in the world—to Warren Buffet, to President Obama are part of the center of power called “Whiteness,” because this center is both defined those that hold economic power and those that apply it. Obama for example despite his skin-color continues unabated the same policies as his predecessor, he is a centrist politician despite the constant attacks against him as a socialist (okay i’ve side-tracked into a rant, back to parks…)
that is why parks so astutely warns us from portraying all whites as oppressors and all “blacks” as oppressed. it is dangerous, it is playing into the logic of the white center of power and it is also dangerous for the writer. for the audiences of these kind of writings, the writing becomes like a manifesto or a flag, like ideologies and nationalism, it produces blinders that do not allow for comradeship between racial or cultural or class or whatever kind of lines and it is also limiting for producing art. and for the writer it categorizes him or her as a certain kind of writer and does not allow him or her to explore other aspects of the human condition.
well i just wrote something up and accidentally closed my browser without hitting publish, because i'm a big idiot, so here is my attempt at rewriting it.
ReplyDeleteso, i really liked the theory stuff in the beginning, maybe moreso than the play itself. i have issues with theory sometimes, but all of my issues are unoriginal (mental masturbation, disconnected from reality, blahblahblah). i bring this up because parks's bit of theory was surprisingly grounded while remaining interesting and complex. her comments about form and repetition i found particularly interesting. i like and find practical the idea that form and content are inseparable. i think that is why her play still looks like a play, though it does things which probably can't really be enacted on the stage. it places the structure and context of a play on the content which pushes back against that structure and creates a really interesting entity.
her thoughts about jazz and repetition i really enjoyed, and i can see those thoughts running through america play. 'drama of accumulation' i think is right up my alley. (rest) works as a sort of refrain, but a silent refrain, which makes space in the play. there are moments where two rests appear back to back, which is interesting and creates a strange gap. lincoln is shot again and again, haws and haws, moment repeat and recur, though they are revise each time.
it's hard not to read this play in the context of the theory stuff that precedes it. like jiyoon said, it does sortof force us to think like that, it's really hard not to. still, i liked it, it was a nice exercise in digesting theory then applying it to a text.
i think that's all i had to say.