11. We Take Blood, Not Life

ROSEMARY CANDELARIO 11. WE TAKE BLOOD, NOT LIFE Urban Bush Women’s Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story Vampires are usually implicitly—and explicitly—coded white and male: a brooding European man with cold, pale skin who lusts for blood and takes countless lives to satisfy his desires. Even those stories featuring women, as in the lesbian vampire trope, show women seducing other women for the purpose of destroying men. Jewelle Gomez’s Lambda Literary Award- winning novel, The Gilda Stories (1991), challenges traditional vampire narratives by re-imagining lesbian vampires not as evil destroyers of men, but as powerful and ethical creatures living in a close-knit and nurturing multi-racial community.1 Moreover Gomez’s novel, which spans 200 years from a 1850 Louisiana plantation to a near future of environmental degradation, depicts vampires as strong, healed women who offer restorative dreams to those they bite in exchange for blood; enhanced life exchanged for enhanced life. Urban Bush Women’s 1995 dance theatre adaptation of the text, Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story, with choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, story by Gomez, and music by Toshi Reagon, stages vampires firmly in the woman-cantered, African diasporic creative community for which the Brooklyn-based dance company is known.2 By adapting Gomez’s work, Urban Bush Women further contributes to vampire lore by staging vampires as women of colour, primarily but not exclusively women from the African diaspora. Urban Bush Women’s dance intervenes in the vampire narrative by staging vampires as a flesh and blood alternative community centred on women of the African diaspora who use their long lives and the exchange of blood to bring healing to themselves and others who have suffered from the historical violence of slavery and ongoing racism. In this way, vampirism becomes for women of colour a strategy to quite literally collectively outlive historical and racist violence, even as it forces the audience to reconsider the taking of blood, and blood taboos, in the context of that violence. This essay focuses on Urban Bush Women’s performance, with reference to Gomez’s novel, to explicate the distinct contributions corporeal expression makes to realizing U. M. Anyiwo (Ed.), Race in the Vampire Narrative, 153–166. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R. CANDELARIO this alternative vampire community. As a dance scholar, critical consumer of vampire stories, and three-time participant in Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institutes, Bones and Ash concentrates for me the contributions dance and dance studies can make to the vampire genre. WE UNDERSTAND THE BLOOD CYCLE: REMAKING VAMPIRES IN A WOMANIST IMAGE Although vampires regularly appear in fiction, film, and television, when The Gilda Stories was published and Bones and Ash premiered in the early and mid-1990s, vampires had yet to fully emerge from their status as recurrent genre favourite to the mainstream popularity they now enjoy in the early 21st century. Yet even after two more decades of wildly popular vampire narratives such as the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon, 1997) and True Blood (Ball, 2008), the Underworld movie series (Bernacchi & Wiseman, 2003), and The Twilight Saga books and movies (Meyer, 2005; Bowen & Hardwicke, 2008), Gomez and Urban Bush Women’s contributions to the genre still stand out as unique, particularly in terms of race. African American vampires are typically an anomaly. When they do appear, it is often only as a token member of a group of predominantly white vampires. Tara in True Blood, Trick in Buffy, and countless unnamed African American vampires are spotted on the margins of bloodsucker communities. Blade, as the African American protagonist of the eponymous trilogy (Arad, Calamari, & Norrington, 1998), is one notable exception, although as the half-human, half-vampire hybrid, “Daywalker,” he fits comfortably into neither world. As the singular central figure, Blade has no community to call his own. Ananya Chatterjea, in developing a context for Bones and Ash, identifies a handful of black vampire films, including Blacula (Arkoff & Crain, 1972), Scream Blacula Scream (Arkoff & Kelljan, 1973), Ganja and Hess (Jordan, Kelly & Gunn, 1973), and Vampire in Brooklyn (Besser & Craven, 1995). Despite the dearth of African American vampire narratives, Chatterjea suggests that this handful of movies demonstrates that “the mapping of such representations on black bodies have made for narrativization and implications that are very different from their counterparts in Euro- American culture” (2004, p. 277). Unfortunately many of these aspects fall into the realm of stereotype: demonization (especially in relation to Haiti and voudou), hypersexualized racial images, and pseudo-anthropological explorations of the “dark continent.” While tokens and stereotypes prevail in television and film, there do exist expanded possibilities for black vampires in literature. For example, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Octavia 154.

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