"Change the Joke[r] and Slip the Yoke": Boal's "Joker" System in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls ... and spell #7

"Change the Joke[r] and Slip the Yoke": Boal's "Joker" System in Ntozake Shange'sfor colored girls ... and spell #7 P. JANE SPLAWN This paper examines the reinvention of Augusto Baal's '"Joker' system," in which a central character acts as a master of ceremonies by inviting the audience to join in the action, in Ntozake Shange'sfor colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enufand spell #7. 1 In these two plays and others, Shange creates unique dramatic forms that convey her activism and creative vision - a vision which receives much of its vigor from her reclamation of African-American and other indigenous ritual traditions. She brings to these traditions a New World sense of hybridity as she situatcs herself within the world that Africans and Native peoples in the Americas made. But for Shange, the hybridity, as reflected in her work, is not simply a careful sampling of the work of other artists of color in the Americas. When Shange "change[s] the joke[r] and slip[s] the yoke," to borrow Ralph Ellison's phrase,2she speaks to her recognition of difference in the work of other artists of color, even as she posits a desire for community among them in the Americas . Shange's reinvention of Argentinian theorist Augusto Boal 's "Joker" system , moreover, underscores the intertextuality inherent in any work by people of color. The connection between Ellison's "joke" and Baal's "Joker" lies in the wearing of the mask of deception. When Ellison wrote "Change the lake and Slip the Yoke" for the Partisan Review in the late 19505, he argued that wearing a mask, or the guise of the trickster/manipulator, has bccome a part of American culture - both white and black. Just as the Ladies in for colored girls wear masks to conceal the deepest parts of their inmost vulnerabilities until Crystal (the Lady in Red) shatters those masks at the end of the play, or as Lou, the magus, conceals his lack of confidence in his ability to generate strong racial pride among black Americans with a streetwise demeanor, Shange, like Ellison, seizes the moment to critique the perception of blackness in the United States.' Modern Drama, 40 (l997) 386 Baal 's "Joker" System The wearing of masks within African-American literary history, to be sure, has deep roots. The idea first gained American literary attention in Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" (1896); the trope of the mask in this poem acknowledges the practice of dissembling to whites: We wear the mask that grins and lies. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should (he world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.4 Dunbar's image of the "mask that grins and lies" symbolizes the protection of the self through the creation of a false one. Writing half a century later, Ellison pointed out that African-Americans are not the only group in the United States to wear masks. Indeed, as he argues in "Change the Joke," "America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; we wear it when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask arc as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals."5 Wearing the mask also lies at the core of the work of Ellison's literary predecessor Richard Wright. In his discussion of African-Americans' manipUlation of language ·in 12 Million Black Voices, Wright claims, "Our secret language extended our understanding of what slavery meant and gave us the freedom to speak to our prothers in captivity; we polished our new words, caressed them, gave them new shape and color, a new order and tempo, until, though they were the words of the Lords of the Land, they became ollr words, our language.,,6 Like Ellison and Wright, Shange sees the need of oppressed peoples to manipulate language.7 Aware...