Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics—A Collection of Written Interviews

Appendix

Appendix This page intentionally left blank Anthony Davis—AConversation Weeks after the premier of the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City, Henry Lewis Gates,Jr., suggested I come to his house to interview composer Anthony Davis. The interview was conducted on November 9, icj86, in Ithaca, New York. When I submitted the transcript to Mr. Davis, I asked him to rewrite anything he wanted to. It came back with only the lightest editing— and that entirely for facts. Ifelt it only fair to edit my own comments in the same spirit. This is byfar the most traditional interview in the book, then—not really a written interview at all. Samuel R. Delany: I'm talking here, Sunday morning, after a pleasant brunch at Henry and Sharon Gates' house, with Anthony Davis, composer of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered a few weeks ago at Lincoln Center in New York City. Victor Hugo's son, Francois-Victor Hugo, did the translations of Shakespeare into French which Boito used to work on his libretto for Verdi's Otello. In the introduction to his translation there's a long passage in whichHugo explains that of course Othello isn't really black, that Desdemona couldn't possibly have fallen in love with him if he was: He's obviously an Arab or of some strange and romantic race that makes him not really black. But in the margin of his own personal copy, Boito has jotted a succinct and pithy note: Pertanto sta negro! "But he is black!" And this is arguably the controlling thought behind Boito's libretto, if not Verdi's opera. From Ai'da and Otello to Porgy and Bess and Lost in theStars, we as blacks have been opera-ed, have been operated upon, have been operationalized bywhitecomposers so that there seems to be a kind ofmassive charge running from white musicians to us as black subjects. How did you and your brother, Christopher, who devised the story, and your 290 Appendix cousin, Thulani, who wrote the words, feel as blacks usurping this particular position in what's certainly perceived by most opera goers as an allwhite field (with the possible exception of ScottJoplin's Treemonisha)—a field in which blacks have traditionally been the objects of white operas? Anthony Davis: Well, we felt very good about it. We said: This is a opportunity to have our own voice—to deal with our own history, our own characters, and with our own people, in our own voice. Blacks have always been the object of operas: Today I wasjust looking at Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. Black people have always been symbolic for white people, particularly in opera; in a sense it frees whites to deal in a mythological way with other subjects through us. In XI was trying to deal with our own myths. I always thought of Malcolm 's as one of the great stories—and myths—of our day. I felt it was really ripe for operatic treatment. SRD: Did it ever occur to you guys, even jokingly, to write an opera entirely about whites? AD: Sure. My brother had this idea: he said the sequel to X should be Brigham Young. SRD: Wonderful! Now,opera is often an intellectually beleaguered art. Because of its direct connections with the theater, people have a tendency not to take it seriouslyat the time it's being done: It's very theatrical, grandiose—deals with the passions. But as soon as the opera sits awhile, it becomes the object of a great deal of intellectual energy by critics.Was itJoseph Kerman in Opera and Drama who said that examining its opera is the wayyou test the health of a culture? Were you at all weighted down by this contradiction between the frivolity of opera, on the one hand, and the terrible, terrible seriousness with which people can take it, on the other? AD: No, I don't think that affected me. I wasnever convinced of opera's frivolity to begin with. There's a tradition of light, comic opera. And there's a tradition of poorly put together melodramas. But when I looked at my models for opera, at the operas I admire, I really felt that you could create something epic; you...