Mnemopoetics

Mnemopoetics Memory and Slavery in African American Drama P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles z Bern z Berlin z Frankfurt am Main z New York z Oxford z Wien DRAMATURGIES TEXTS, CULTURES AND PERFORMANCES Series Editor Marc Maufort, Université Libre de Bruxelles Editorial Board Christopher Balme, University of Munich Franca Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles Judith E. Barlow, State University of New York-Albany Johan Callens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Jean Chothia, Cambridge University Harry J. Elam, Stanford University Albert-Reiner Glaap, University of Düsseldorf André Helbo, Université Libre de Bruxelles Ric Knowles, University of Guelph Alain Piette, École d’interprètes internationaux-Mons John Stokes, King's College, University of London Joanne Tompkins, University of Queensland-Brisbane Editorial Assistant Caroline DE WAGTER, Université Libre de Bruxelles Valérie BADA Mnemopoetics Memory and Slavery in African American Drama Dramaturgies No.14 The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Extracts from Langston Hughes’s The Sun Do Move (manuscript, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University) used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated as agents for the Estate of Langston Hughes. Copyright © The Estate of Langston Hughes. Excerpts from Owen Dodson’s Amistad (manuscript, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University) used by permission of James Vernon Hatch, executor of the Estate of Owen Dodson. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without prior written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. © P.I.E. PETER LANG S.A., Éditions scientifiques internationales Brussels, 2008 1 avenue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium [email protected]; www.peterlang.com Printed in Germany ISSN 1376-3199 ISBN 978-90-5201-276-6 D/2008/5678/13 CIP available from the British Library, GB and the Library of Congress, USA. Bibliographic information published by “Die Deutsche Bibliothek” “Die Deutsche Bibliothek” lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. Contents Acknowledgments..................................................................................9 INTRODUCTION. Mnemopoetics ..........................................................11 TOPOMNESIA. Siting the Past..............................................................29 Ambivalent Mnemopoetics. Choral Drama, Epic and Pageantry in Owen Dodson’s Amistad (1939)......................................................33 Spiritual Mnemopoetics. Music as Articulation in Langston Hughes’s The Sun Do Move (1942) .....................................................................67 DISPLACED POETICS. Ambiguous Ancestors .....................................97 Place, Time and Action. Fundamental Disunities in Shirley Graham’s It’s Mornin’ (1940).............................................................................101 Ambivalent Tragedy. Cross-Cultural Poetics in Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth (1994-1996).......................................113 RITUAL MNEMOPOLITICS. Black Arts Aesthetics ...........................127 Phonomnesia. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967) ..............................141 Ontological Journey from Darkness to Blk-ness. Val Ferdinand/Kalamu ya Salaam’s Blk Love Song #1 (1969) ......155 7 CRYPTOMNESIA. Possessed by the Past............................................167 Apocalyptic “Eclipsed Presences”. Daniel W. Owens’s The Box (1989)..................................................173 “Ripping the Veil”. Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape (1989) ..........................................183 CONCLUSION. Mnemotheatre ...........................................................207 Works Cited .......................................................................................213 8 Acknowledgments This book would have never been completed without the financial support of several institutions and the support and encouragement of advisers, mentors, friends and family during what, at times, seemed like an endless gestation period. As a dissertation, the project was funded by the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF) and the Francqui Foundation, both generously granted a research scholarship which enabled me to under- take the initial investigation for this study at the DuBois Institute of African American Research at Harvard University. I also wish to thank the Comparative Studies Department at Harvard University for allowing me to join their research staff. I am much indebted to the Fonds National de la Recherche Scienti- fique (FNRS) for its very generous support throughout the gestation of this book. The Communauté Française de Belgique and the Patrimoine ULg greatly helped this project by generously financing my numerous trips to the USA. I also wish to thank the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appli- quée (CIPA, Liège University) and particularly its director, Professor Michel Delville. I wish to thank the Académie Royale de Belgique and its Classe de Lettres for granting me the Ochs-Lefebvre scholarship which enabled me to spend a semester at Barnard College, New York City. My deepest gratitude to Professor Caryl Phillips for his generous intellectual support and friendship. I extend my gratitude to the Fondation Universitaire for financing the publication of this book, as well as to the very patient and understanding Peter Lang editorial staff for overseeing the development of this project. Very special thanks to Professor Marc Maufort for his patience, steady support and editorial vision. My deepest thanks go to my adviser, Professor Marc Delrez, for his scrupulous readings, incisive comments, and, most of all, for listening to my unfathomable silence with such patience and generosity. With devotion, I thank Professor Hena Maes-Jelinek for her careful readings of the dissertation at various stages as well as for countless acts 9 Mnemopoetics. Memory and Slavery in African American Drama of assistance and comfort. Without her unflinching support and encouragement, this book would never have been written. This book is dedicated with ineffable love and gratitude to Benjamin, Bernadette, Claudine, Corto, Laure, Lisa Mae and Raymond. And in memory of Léonie and Willy. 10 INTRODUCTION Mnemopoetics Graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ‘em forth, By my so potent art. Shakespeare, The Tempest V, i, 48-50 She crosses to the piano. She begins to play. The song is found piece by piece. It is an old urge to song that is both a commandment and a plea. With each repetition it gains in strength. It is intended as an exorcism and a dressing for battle. A rustle of wind blowing across two continents. August Wilson, The Piano Lesson 106 Prospero’s conjuring up presences from the past through his “potent art” has the double function of making the past present as well as rele- vant, i.e. translated into meaningful actualities that have a bearing upon contemporary consciousness. Art, more specifically drama in Prospero’s own self-reflexive soliloquy, has the power to “command” the past, i.e. to summon and control it through imagination and, as the second mean- ing of the term implies, to generate a wide scope of vision of the past. Drama, like Prospero’s conjuring gesture, has the metaphorical capacity to awaken the dead, bring them centre stage, re-create their history in and through present consciousness thus endowing them with “a pro- phetic vision of the past” (Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint 9). Artistic “command” and intuitive vision are the two creative dimensions of the small corpus of contemporary African American plays whose imagina- tive re-creation of slavery I have chosen to explore. The juxtaposition of the two epigraphs suggests that Prospero’s “command” of the past turns into the artistic “commandment” of black ancestral memory, a shift from his Promethean will to create to a mystical “urge” to creatively recall slavery. Indeed, the mnemopoetics (poetics of memory) centred on the dramatic recollection of the slave past verges on a mnemomystic of reconfigured cultural genesis. Theatre thus appears as a threshold of cultural recovery through a ritual revision of the past akin to a mystic 11 Mnemopoetics. Memory and Slavery in African American Drama experience of spiritual revelation and rebirth. This particular mnemopoetics of African American drama is a poetics that “exorcises,” questions and re-creates the memory of the slave past in and through “battl[ing]” consciousness. The re-activation of the memory of slavery represents a return to the moment of dislocation and dehumanisation, but also to the beginnings, as Paul Gilroy puts it, of the “black Atlantic” culture (Gilroy, Black Atlantic). Such a conception of a mnemotheatre climaxes in the Black Arts Movement’s plays in which remembering slavery subtly shifts to a nationalistic anamnesis1 recalling the martyrdom of the slaves and calling for revolution “in remembrance” of the unwilling sacrifice of a race. Before nuancing these interpretative considerations on memory and theatre, it is necessary to ponder on the theoretical endeavour of this study. The term mnemopoetics was coined by Mererid Davies in an unpublished paper entitled “Mnemopoetics: Ingeborg Bachmann and Märchen” which she gave at the

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