Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Teresa N. Washington

Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 418 pp. $27.95.

Paul Carter Harrison, who brought us The Drama of the Nommo (1972), is a wisdom-keeper devoted to revealing the multi-dimensionality of Africana drama. Harrison describes his latest effort, co-edited with Victor Leo Walker and Gus Edwards, as "the first collection of essential texts to offer a critical analysis of the historical, theoretical and performance commonalties of Black Theatre practice throughout the African Diaspora." Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora includes thirty-two well-crafted, rigorously researched essays grouped into four interconnected sections: "African Roots," "Mythology and Metaphysics," "Dramaturgical Practice," and "Performance." These sections are largely symbolic, as the essays signify with and against one another in a text best appreciated in its entirety.

The contributors seem to agree with Harrison that, "whatever value it might have as entertainment, the inventive process of Black Theatre must illuminate the collective ethos of the black experience in a manner that binds, cleanses and heals." The essayists undertake this binding by re-membering various aspects of life and spirituality to art and performance. They cleanse Africana drama by revealing its philosophical depth and inherent critical reflectivity. By embracing forgotten and disrespected forces and figures, the essayists and dramatists undertake cosmic and critical healing. Joni L. Jones's exploration of Shay Youngblood's "radical re/membering," Keith L. Walker's elucidation of Aime Cesaire's ifogbontaayese ('using wisdom to remake/improve the world'), Andrea J. Nouryeh's analysis of Aishah Rahman's applications of "Nommo force," and May Joseph's spiritual-geographical-genealogical study of Sycorax are some examples of the diverse binding, healing, and cleansing techniques exhibited in Black Theatre. These studies complement the groundbreaking efforts of J. C. de Graft, Derek Walcott, and Wole Soyinka, whose classic expositions are reprinted in Black Theatre. Additionally, Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, forerunners of contemporary drama, offer the brief and brilliant "Bopera Theory" and "Porque Tu No M'entrende?: Whatcha Mean You Can't Understand Me?" respectively.

It is often the case that discussions of African continuity in the African Diaspora are one-sided, as if historically dislocated Africans (especially African Americans) must prove their "African-ness." In Black Theatre the discourse is cyclic and truly Pan-African. In "The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance," Babatunde Lawal argues that "visual and performing arts have been an integral part of African cultures since the dawn of human consciousness." He then traces the dawn's radiance from Yoruba ijuba (homage) to African American juba (homage), uniting Gelede to 'Lection Parades, Jelly Roll Morton to Fela, and FESTAC to AfriCobra. Over 200 pages later, Harrison whispers h la Sly Stone, "Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa," and shows himself to be an ibeji (twin) of Lawal. In "Form and Transformation," Harrison analyzes the Okra (soul) of the Second Line, Ring Shout, Shiny Man, and Spiritual-Blues, revealing the sacredness of all Africana art and the divinity and dexterity of Africana artists: "We play the changes, making those improvisations that aspire toward a reconciliation between the visible and invisible, adorning the appropriate masks for secular and sacred performances that will invoke the ancestral spirit."

The dramatists and critics featured in Black Theatre reclaim the language, concepts, and comprehensiveness of their ethos and liberate themselves from Western traps of bifurcation and a predilection to define and thereby diminish. Lundeana M. Thomas offers a stunning exposition of the remarkable life-craft of Barbara Ann Teer, who, when asked to define "black drama," replied, "I don't define it. I don't know what 'black drama' is. I just know that I'm a certain way, and that way nurtures me, and that's all I know to write about.... I don't separate dance from singing from writing from directing. There's really only the experience." For Baraka, this holistic experience is Bopera--"poetry and music and heightened movement." An ancient and holistic metaphysical force of the African continuum--"Sun Ra brought back the Pythagorean application of Egyptian understanding that 'everything is everything,' and that music, color, number, emotions, the laws of matter in motion are revealed as inextricably tied together"--Bopera gains power through its articulation and multitudinous creative products: "Bopera is re-Creation, inner attainment, gained by tightening our everyday language into verse and lifting it into the zoom zone of the spiritual, giving it emotional and intellectual impact through music."

The preacher is kin to the babalawo; Esu struts in the strides of hard legs from Brooklyn to Ngula Bayou; and jazz's paradoxical ability to regenerate and multiply itself in the nadir of the Middle Passage is the seminal force of re-creation that underpins the signifying whole. Consequently, while Africana drama can be found on stage, it easily makes a home in earth, human beings, vinyl, paper, and concrete--the stylings of soulforce know no bounds. Honing his inheritance of eclectic soulpowers, Keith Antar Mason crafts a remarkable ritual/performance composition. In "From Hip-Hop to Hittite: Part X," Mason reproduces the healing/saving/claiming "Hittite rant" he created to cohere his fragmented community and kin. Mason's "wildassed performance text in itself meant to be read out loud ashe" vibrates from the ink to the soul of the reader/initiate.