Piece (3) ~
DESPITE ALL IMPOSSIBILITY...
Across the African Diaspora, a rich tradition of call-and-response has been used as a powerful tool for relating to and contextualizing complex social structures and histories. From hip hop to the church to voguing, call-and-response has been widely used in the Africanist tradition to delineate the boundaries of community and denote those who belong through how one responds to the call. At Toucouleur weddings and birth celebrations, charismatic and brassy-voiced griots will beckon attendees to the dance floor by calling out, “ōn dila ta!? (won’t you shake!?)” And we, the spectators enter the floor with bombastic force, keep the beat with makeshift and improvised percussions, or yell back, “dilé! (shake!)” Through this, social and practical roles are taken on by members of the community within the span of seconds and attendees intuitively know how to arrange themselves: people become musicians, hype-persons, dancers, singers, protectors of the space, water bearers, any role that is needed.
Suddenly, the group has woven a system of social relations that depend on and build upon one another: by the griot to the spectators and the dancers; the individual dancer to the griot, the spectators, the other dancers; the spectator to the griot, the other spectators, the dancers; and so on and so forth. Lois Alexander’s Yeye felt like a call to me; indeed, the performance starts with one (“despite all impossibility, you are here”). Here, Lois could be using second-person narration to have her audience experience what is otherwise a personal perspective or she could be talking directly to the audience, prompting a response from us. I wish to be very specific in privileging this second reading, even though both readings are valid, because the Europeanist contemporary dance context we live in privileges the reading of this beginning as a declarative sentence—a thesis statement if you will—that relays an individual experience for private contemplation and consumption by its audience. This context still carries many of the behavioral codes projected onto the proscenium stage: silent, passive, and polite observation. But then again, it does not have to be either/or; the nature of art and cultural exchange necessitates the ambiguity that lives within the crevices of creative amalgamation and it would be dishonest of me to pretend as if Lois’ piece isn’t a deft blending of both European and African socio-aesthetic criterions—it is usually through this finely attuned code-switching that those on the peripheries of society gain entry to dominant (white) institutions.
Yeye is a response to an old call. This call reverberates throughout the watery annals of time as a mourning wail—traveling down the Ogun, Niger, and Senegal river valleys to echo into the deepest reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. There, it seeps past the Caribbean Islands as far down south as Brazil and as far up north as the Mississippi River Delta where this sickness creeps deep into the heartland of North America to fester. Lois’s invocation of Yemaya, Orisha of rivers as well as the mother of all humanity is striking here: on the one hand, the image it paints is of the mother continent being drained of her children, vitality, wealth, resources—her lifeblood—through the veins and arteries of her river systems and into the unknowable ocean where it is transmuted and then deposited into foreign waterways as despair and misery, colonialism and slavery. On the other hand, Yemaya herself is transformed into an expansive force as she reaches the ocean—her domain expanded past the rivers of West Africa and onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean where her cleansing influence can reach her stolen children.
Toni Morrison’s seminal novel, Beloved, is a harrowing reimagining of the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped formerly enslaved woman who rather than return herself and her children to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, killed her infant daughter, then attempted to kill her other children and finally herself before she was stopped by the U.S. Marshals. Since she had sufficiently maimed her other children before they were caught by the authorities, they were deemed damaged goods and not fit for work.
In Morrison’s story, Sethe, the literary stand-in for Margaret Garner, returns home to find that the infant daughter she killed, Beloved, has returned to the house at 124 Bluestone Road as a fully grown woman. There are two depictions of Beloved’s introduction that I will touch on here: the novel’s and Jonathan Demme’s movie adaption. In the novel, Beloved emerges, fully dressed, with an uncanny smile from the river, her skin is as soft and smooth as a newborn baby’s. In the movie adaption, Beloved emerges from the river covered in flies, her range of movement compromised by postmortem rigidity. In both instances, when Sethe sees Beloved, her water breaks drawing parallels to the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ by the Virgin Mary. The movie adaption foreshadows the trauma that the characters must face in order to heal and grow past their days in slavery: it associates the immaculate conception of Beloved with stillbirth and its implied effects on the mother figure—the bondage, degradation, dehumanization, and subjugation of a people made manifest as the living corpse of an adult-child winding down the river bed.
Beloved then serves as an allegory of the dark grip slavery has over the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road and by extension the free black community of Cincinnati, Ohio; in other words, she is the (divine) gift and curse of disclosure and integrating ones’ traumatic past. When speaking of both birthings, through the supernatural manifestation of Beloved as an adult-child, a divine mother is implied—pointing to an ambiguous and mythic black woman grieving and working towards our salvation somewhere in the unknowable. Only by confronting and discharging the past can its grip be loosened and healing begin.
In Yeye, Lois brings our attention to the foundational Yoruba myth of humanity’s birth: When Yemaya’s water broke, the resulting flood created all of the rivers and streams of the world and the first people emerged from her banks. Lois parallels this myth to the immaculate conception of Beloved by Sethe—highlighting Morrison’s subversion of Christian symbology and positioning African-American spirituality as a continuation of African cosmology. In fact, in many Afro-Diasporic communities, Yemaya is reworked into an aspect of the Virgin Mary. By positioning Yemaya as a spiritual mother to Beloved, Lois further contextualizes the work by linking it to a diasporic African canon—informing and being informed by events in places as far-flung as the Caribbeans, South and Central America, Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic Ocean; the echoes of these events reverberate throughout space-time.
I would like to put Yeye and Beloved in conversation with other works from the African Diaspora. Lois and Morrison specifically reference the physical and psychic horrors of chattel slavery in the New World, however, I feel it is important to put the stories of black women in the Americas in continuity with the stories of black African women as a way of contextualizing the interconnected struggles and choices they had to navigate.
The first work I would like to touch on is Segu by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé (author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem). The novel takes place at the turn of the 19th century, just before the European colonization of Africa, and its events follow three generations of the Traoré family, an aristocratic house of Segu—a rich and powerful Bambara kingdom on the Niger/Joliba River in present day Mali. I chose this novel because Condé fleshes out in spectacular detail the contours and topography of “the Dark Continent,” relaying to us the political intrigue, society, culture, religion, and decadence of precolonial West Africa. Indeed, the novel—like all good novels—is a story about the vicissitudes of humanity and the choices that paint the setting its subjects happen to be living in: she uses these tools to illustrate a harrowing picture of wealthy African city-states and kingdoms participating in petty rivalries, warmongering, wealth hoarding, power consolidation, decadent displays of vanity, and enslavement of local peoples in a cutthroat game of empire building. None suffer more than the women who in their own way have their power undermined by their husbands and male relatives and have to helplessly witness their children scatter to faraway lands and fight senseless wars.
Three figures in the novel speak to Sethe’s pain: Nya, the matriarch of the Traoré family; Nadie, the lower caste Fulani wife of Nya’s firstborn son, Tiekoro; and Ayodele, the Yoruba wife of Nya’s youngest son, Naba. The forces of the world conspire to rob these women of their agency and respectively represent a different aspect of the inner turmoil Sethe must resolve in order to start healing: thick motherly love in a world that punishes women for loving too hard, deep depression and despondency, and the disruption and splintering of one’s identity through the willful suppression of the traumatic past.
When Beloved is contextualized by Segu, it illustrates the insidious nature of intergenerational trauma as it follows its victims across space-time. A point illustrated in French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics, where a group of teenage girls in present-day Dakar are possessed by the spirits of their sea-drowned lovers who left to find a better life in Europe. In postcolonial West Africa, the victims of the forces that conspired to destroy the Traorés and followed Sethe’s mother across Yemaya’s waters still scream for either retribution or restoration—closure in other words.
At the end of Segu, the grandchildren of Nya prepare to fight for their lives in a Jihad instigated by the Toucouleur. After reflecting on the bloody conquest at the foundation of their society, the boys gather their courage and extol the virtues of war as their enemies descend upon them. The novel abruptly ends there—the rest of their stories wiped clean from the world; if one is a student of history then they would know that this war destroyed and impoverished the West African kingdoms of Segu, Djenné, Hamdallay, and Timbuktu. Their populations put to the sword or sold into slavery. As I think about how this tragic event was exploited by colonists to continue their wholesale colonization of West Africa, I think back to Toni Morrison. She responds to the call of Margaret Garner and Maryse Condé in the form of a paean from Baby Suggs:
“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.”
Lois gives this sermon of self-love a central place within her work, literally (as in a video clip of Baby Suggs giving this same speech at one of her woodland revivals) and metaphorically. Thinking about this, I revisit Lois’ opening statement: “despite all impossibility, you are here.” I hear her repeating it, over, and over again. To herself and to us and finally to myself and especially in the midst of community—after all, it was the community of the black women of Cincinnati who held Sethe down before she made another grave mistake and in the process of saving her, they saved themselves.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see Lois’ performance on the BIPOC night that she planned so I couldn’t see her perform for her community but when I sat down to catch the final act, I saw all of the signs of community and belonging. I saw the patchwork sky reflecting all of the rosy colors of dawn—the first light after a dark night of the soul; I saw the braided rope laid down on the floor—an umbilical cord binding us together and the voice of Beyoncé speaking the words of Warsan Shire echoes in my head, “One thousand girls raise their hands…do you remember being born?” I saw cowrie shells, blood-soaked hands, braids, an exorcism.
When I saw Lois dance, the first thing I thought was that she moved like an Ailey dancer! All the hallmarks of Horton technique were there—the expansive and luxurious reaching quality, the deep spinal arches, the articulate torso—as well as Ailey’s penchant for sublime, spiritual dancing. In addition, the set and costume design reminded me of “Wade in the Water,” an excerpt from Ailey’s masterful 1960 choreography Revelations—a series of dances inspired by Ailey’s upbringing in Great Depression-era Texas. Like Ailey, Lois alludes to the idea of blood memories. Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild defines blood memories as “cultural history…blood memories are a subtext in the script of what we see and experience as African American spirit. As Bill T. Jones said…you don’t need to be enslaved to remember the auction block”—a point that visual artist Glenn Ligon makes explicit in his collection RUNAWAYS (1993).
It is at this point that I would like to make an important intervention to push back on the misinformed stereotype widely circulated in European dance contexts: that black dance (this itself needs to be unpacked but not in this response) or dance originating from the African diaspora is narrative dance. As Dixon describes in the Black Dancing Body, “Africanist dance is symbolic movement. It may tell stories, but these stories are about the movement itself and about concepts—the body dancing its symbols.”What Lois has done in Yeye is abstract a story into a series of symbols, giving them forms to be performed through. The framing of the performance as a ritual to Yemaya and as an exorcism of intergenerational trauma should clue us into the abstract nature of the movement as these practices are themselves abstracted symbols—in them, items are placeholders for concepts and virtues such as sanctity, spirit, violence, sex, peace, love and clarity. By abstracting the concepts of motherhood, infanticide, slavery, colonialism, and blackness into symbolic movement Lois fills her symbols with purpose.
I have to point this out because, unfortunately, too many white European institutions—blinded by old stereotypes—lack the critical eye to notice this and therefore do not readily extend the identity category of experimental artists to artists of color—when in fact many artists of color deftly blend the new and the old to create stunningly original works. I see this in how even though Lois is wearing the white that is such an integral part of Africanist ritual practices, she brings it into the contemporary imagination through her decision to wear pants and have the sleeves of her shirt cut off—a huge departure from the overtly gendered presentation of Ailey’s “Wade in the Water.” This attention to detail is seen in the movement quality itself; as Lois moves across the stage, the concept embodied is effortless strength with her virtuosity emphasizing the refined musculature she needed to achieve in order to execute her impressive technique (isolations, syncopations, slow and controlled movement).
To close, the forces Lois animates through her dance are the same forces that have led me here to this foreign land. However she got here, we are not so different and our differences lead us to a richer and deeper understanding of this intangible and irresistible power that calls us to move, to shake, to speak, to call, to respond. Here, I am implicated and must add to the story: one of the questions I grapple with as I live and create is what compels us to go? Is it self-discovery? Is it the slithering of trauma nipping at our heels? Is it to break these chains that bind us to humanity’s darkest impulses? As I reach deeper into myself and heal the fragmented multiplicities of my identity back into singular accordance, the answers to these questions become, paradoxically, more complex and yet more simple: its love. I can talk about the love that sits still and listens, I can hear the raspy din of angels whispering of divine love, I can go into the darkness and light a fierce fire to warm my love-starved demons, I can speak of love rendered; love rejected; love received; love rescinded. So as Lois sends out a call for love, I recognize it as an unbroken and unbowed lineage. A reminder that this—whatever this may be—shall pass and the only way out is through and with love. Self-love, love for community, love for humanity, love for life, love for the earth. With that being said, I would like to offer some of the biting humor and irony that the African diaspora is so well known for by including the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phyllis Wheatley, the poem inspired my first solo and started me down this path of dance making ten years ago:
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.