Theater and Book Reviews: Why is the Black Community Angry?

Scraps

Written by Geraldine Inoa

Directed by Niegel Smith

The Flea Theater, Manhattan

September 13, 2018

Things Fall Apart

Written by Chinua Achebe

Beloved

Written by Toni Morrison

Homegoing

Written by Yaa Guyasi

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

By Wes Moore

We live in an era of unprecedented awareness and discussion of the tragic residua of black slavery in the United States. The upcoming NY theater season seems to be dominated by plays by people of color, especially black authors. Most modern art galleries are following the same trend. It’s interesting that these welcome corrections to non-inclusion are not following massive social upheavals as see in the 1950s and 1960s (Rosa Parks, Selma, the Mississippi civil rights murders, George Wallace on the university steps), but instead follow a series of actions against blacks (e.g. Ferguson Missouri) that in the old days would hardly have registered in the press or public consciousness (black or white). While some of this may be a long-overdue retuning of our awareness, I am interested in the question of why there is such a  large number of artistic responses by black artists to white oppression in the US after so many years of tragedy. Certainly, some of this is due to a historic lack of opportunity. The number of “political” black artists who have made a large public impact (esp. with whites) is fairly small: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou are most notable. Others, especially actors, have followed Barack Obama’s pattern of being vastly talented but not angry or confrontational, a reasonable and appropriate survival response to the tragedy of US black history. This is now all changing for the better, with the arrival of a new generation of millennial authors and artists. Reading several classic and new books about the issue, and a viewing of a new play by a young black playwright gave me some new food for thought on this artistic revolution, and on some continuing problems in the black community, in particular the shortage of black male leaders and fathers in large parts of the community.

Scraps is a new play by Geraldine Inoa, a young black writer based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles (she writes for the AMC series The Walking Dead!). I saw it in a small Chelsea theater with an unusual 50:50 mix (for theater) of black and white attendees, many of college age. It’s a potent, angry, and well written play that deals with the personal affects of the police shooting of a promising young black man on his friends and family. This is a gut-punching perspective that I have not seen portrayed before. Responses of the young man’s family and friends range from denial to psychiatric disorders to hypersexuality to suicide. In explicating the consequences of this tragedy, Ms. Inoa has created a microcosm of the problems facing the black community now. She also addresses head-on the critiques of the modern black man. One character gets his education and flees the community. Another is stuck in unemployment and cannot commit to any one woman. Women are shown as the strength of the community with a sense of honesty that might not be possible for a playwright outside that community. There was little sense of political correctness or caution in this play, and it addressed social issues with a mix of anger, humor, and resignation in a way I have not seen done before. I loved one monologue by a NYU college dropout (due to the trauma of the shooting).  She says “I hate white people” in a voice both angry and factual. This made me feel attacked, and wanting to say “but…..”. She then goes on to say that, for example, white people enslaved her people to cultivate spices, then took all the spices out their food. This food reference also ties to the title Scraps, which refers to the origins of the now-trendy soul food, popularized by many non-black chefs including Paula Dean, but starting out as the food crafted from scraps thrown out by white slave owners. The mix of anger and humor in Scraps was terrific. What I really loved about this play was that it only could have been written by a person who came of age in this new era. I hope to see more of Ms. Inoa’s work.

While black men came off poorly in this play, what remained unaddressed was the why. This has been much discussed with angles from the right and left (Genetics? Poverty? Willpower? Incarceration?). I have recently read four books by African or African-American writers that all touch on this issue in different ways. Things Fall Apart (1958) by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was one of the prototypes of the new novel by an African and set in Africa, achieving international fame. Its blunt style and honest depiction of tribal ritual and belief is direct and unadorned, as is the depiction of the harshness and occasional brutality of tribal life. The English style is blunt and a bit like Hemingway in its short, direct sentences. For the first 2/3, the novel reads a bit too much like an anthropology text, with interesting character development delayed until the concluding section depicting the negative effect of Christian missionaries on traditional village life. It’s notable as a pioneering work of African fiction. A more panoramic depiction of the African diaspora is shown in the recent (2016) novel Homegoing by the young American female writer Yaa Gyasi, born in Ghana but trained in American universities. 

Her novel echoes (and updates) Alex Haley’s Roots, following an African family from tribal life through enslavement in the US, into the modern era. But the unique spin here is that she compares the fates of two branches of the same family, as two Asante sisters in west Africa (now Ghana) are separated, with one enslaved and sent to the US, the other remining in Africa. This gives the novel an ambitious, Michener-like comparison-contrast format spanning over 200 years. The novel is limited by its one chapter-per-generation format, creating a series of many short stories, each relating to a different descendant. There is very limited connection between the stories, so the novel sometimes struggles to maintain perspective and flow, relying on some devices like an amulet passed along from one African woman to another. This fragmentary nature is worsened by a general lack of poetic description and some jarring stylistic shifts between the African and American chapters, where Gyasi uses the vernacular of the different regions and eras in her dialogue. I often wanted to get to know her characters better, and the novel sometimes reads like an explication of lesser-known interesting historical topics that the author wants to explain to us, such as how the African tribes were complicit in the white slave trade, or how in the Jim Crow era unjust imprisonment then sale of black prisoners by Southern state prisons to brutal mining companies led to a nasty recapitulation of slavery. Gyasis is a promising young writer with interesting ideas, and I look forward to a more synthesized and focused novel in the future. Of course, for that you can read Morrison’s classic Beloved (1987). This outstanding novel, sometimes listed as the best American novel, holds up to this praise. It personalizes the black experience from the 1870 perspective just as Scraps does from that of 2018, dreamily documenting the tragedy of a woman who would rather kill her children than see them enslaved, and by ghosts of the past that haunt these damaged people. In reading Beloved you get the tragedy and personal wounds that slavery left in a way that is impossible in shorter forms like movies or short stories.

How do black men come across in these books? In Things Fall Apart African men are central to the narrative and to Nigerian tribal culture, dominating multi-wife families and village with warlike manner. The central character is gradually shamed and humiliated by his loss of authority and prestige, a prescient prequel to modern depictions of modern black American men weakened by drugs or imprisonment. In contrast, the dominant characters in Morrison’s Beloved are women; she also provides a possible explanation for the longstanding difficulties of black men. The slave system was designed to disrupt families, but slave women were “bred” to random men to encourage the perpetuation of the work force. Those men were then usually sold off, precluding any family culture from developing. Families were seen as risky to both economic productivity and to the domination of the many slaves by the few whites. Rebellious women were less often killed than were such men, since they had economic breeding potential. Morrison depicts a world were men were either killed, absent, or treated as commodities. The mother-child bond was allowed, at least until the child reached teenage status, as part of an effort to increase the number of slaves. So, for several hundred years, black men in America had no opportunity to function in a family unit. One strength of Homegoing is its ability to contrast African and American black experience, as sort of a controlled societal experiment. The men remain strong, often domineering in Africa, but often lose hope, focus, and the ability to father in the US. The author does not really have the time in her short chapters to tell us why this happens. Another more recent non-fiction memoir in this vein is The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (2010), in which a successful American black man compares his history with an identically named (but unrelated) man who ends up in prison for murder. The two come from the same neighborhoods and each had ample opportunity to fail. Neither had a father in the home. Moore is careful not to provide easy answers to the question of why the two men diverged, but his (perhaps too) glowing prose about the positive effects of his military school experience, army mentors/heroes, and army service provide a clue: he credits the structure and goal-directedness of the military with his success, and hints that this is a fatal missing link for many young black boys and teens in the USA. I credit Mr. Moore for at least implying a solution, where the other authors mostly frame the problem in interesting ways. 

So, there consensus answer from these authors to solving the societal problem of the absent American black man. It’s striking that in all the above books set in the US, the leading influential figures on young black men’s development are all women, whether the author is male or female. In the US a virulent form of slavery (more harsh and disruptive than slavery in Africa or Brazil) followed by high rates of both unjust and just imprisonment have absented many black men from society and their families, weakening their roles as fathers and mentors to children.  This effect amplifies the observation that men’s participation in childcare is much less than women’s in most cultures (although this is highly culturally dependent). Lacking the act of childbirth and the hormonal biological chemistry women are given to enhance nurturing, child care among men is perhaps more of a learned skill than in women (this was part of the hilarity of the excellent play Mankind I reviewed last year). Absent several hundred years of paternal role modeling and with explicit negative enforcement of parenting skills by white owners as part of slavery, it is no wonder that US black men still struggle to be “family men”. That is why The Bill Cosby Show was so reassuring to many black and white people (oh, irony). Of course, the residual white prejudice against the angry, powerful black man and the subconscious need to keep him suppressed, even in a more progressive society, also contribute. Most whites are now comfortable with blacks in their community, even as friends/colleagues. But powerful blacks as their bosses or president? Especially powerful black men? Not so much. And those that are powerful must shield their anger…see any of the hilarious “Luther, the Anger Translator” skits by Key and Peele on YouTube in which President Obama’s bland pronouncements are converted into raw angry rants (e.g. see this great one with the real president at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner). 

We obviously still have a long way to go. Mr. Moore ends The Other Wes Moore with a long list of community resources devoted to improving the black community, encouraging readers to volunteer and participate actively. It will take a great many such small actions by all of us to heal these wounds.