Obatala in Revolutionary (Postmodern) Diaspora

You must return to Africa . . . save the race . . . find Revelations

Oh Obatálá, Orixa of creativity, robed in white, from the land of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees, (where) white stallions roaming under a blue sky . . . (Thanks, Adrienne.) We, Yoruba, Igbo, Mandinke, Wolof and Mende and on to the millions, knew you and others like you when we were transported in the hull of the ship, at the birth of the Age of Commerce. We knew you gendered as one, both male and female. We knew you void of the material/spiritual binary that dictated us as the supply for their demand. We knew and carried you with us into the Diaspora.

Enslaved in the US, we (re)created you in texts, spoken, sung, danced, heard and unheard, praised, preached, cried, laughed, hidden, called and responded to, moaned, read, swayed, spiritualized, and, until they shut us down, acted and dramatized. We performed you in ring shouts, in meetings, down by the riverside, in the fields and the valleys in shanties, in the low country, in abolition circles, and in sacred circles in Philadelphia we performed you until they forced us into rows, but the circles stayed unbroken. Thus making our art spiritual, purposeful, functional, and impregnated with cultural retentions.

We sing of you. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it SHINE—hide it under the bushel, NO, minstrelize it NO. Sing your song, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, and William Wells Brown. Let your lifesongs become performative liberation strategies. Let your survival through attic incarceration, your resistance to beatings by the mistress, and your dramas of escape and freedom serve as shining acts of agency and subjectivity against oppression for generations to come. (Thanks, August.)

Plessy vs. Ferguson colonized us anew and our texts, now necessarily bluesed, ragtimed, and jazzed, continue to shine before us. Du Bois and Locke both had it right, as did Zora and Langston, no either/or dichotomies here. As white folk continued to act the fool, the anti-lynching motherwrights wrote of acts of terror dramatized on black bodies and acts of hegemony scripted on broken necks, of Sunday Mornings in the South and of Black, White, and Blue Blood. These dramas played in church basements, segregated high schools, and Uptown, not Downtown, while Billie sang of strange fruit. (Being Blues People, isn't it all musical theatre? Thanks, Amiri.)

At HBCUs like Spelman, Morehouse, Howard, and Dillard and under geniuses the likes of Anne Cooke-Reid, Owen Dodson, and Baldwin Burroughs, the Black play became Howard's production of The Wild Duck playing Oslo, the contrapuntal Spelman/Morehouse Players' production of an all-black Othello, and countless productions of new Black Playwrights too many to mention.

Integration.

MAMA:

[Rising.] I am afraid you don't understand. My son said we was going to move and there ain't nothing left for me to say. [Shaking her head with double meaning.] You know how these young folks is nowadays, mister. Can't do a thing with 'em. Good-bye.

(Thanks, Lorraine.)

When I was Chair at Spelman College, we invited Vinnette Carroll, "double all the letters chile," to direct our opening mainstage production for Fall 1990. Early on I asked her what she wanted to direct.

"Dark of the Moon," she replied.

Unknowingly, I queried further, "Dark of the Moon? Do you mean that old Richardson and Burney script?" (Wondering why a student of Piscator and scion of the Black Arts movement in Theatre wanted to do this play.) She smiled at me.

"Paul, it's like this. The witch boy is really an African spirit, and he wants to come to the US to be 'human.' He seeks transformation from a high priest and priestess to facilitate the change; he is then transported to a small southern town to act out the drama . . . We will need a specialist in African movement, someone trained in Horton to choreograph an [End Page 613...