Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

Mojo and the Sayso: A Drama of Nommo That Asks, “Is Your Mojo Working?”

Andrea J. Nouryeh Mojo and the Sayso: A Drama of Nommo That Asks, “Is Your Mojo Working?” Aishah Rahman’s play, Mojo and the Sayso, was inspired by a real-life incident that enraged New York City’s black community in the early 1970s. Clifford Glover, a tenyear -old African American boy, was shot by a plainclothes police officer while he was walking with his father near his home in Queens. The police department claimed that the officer mistook the boy for a robber when he ran after being ordered to stop. To the family’s and community’s dismay, the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing. After a three-year investigation, the New York City police department paid his mother reparations for wrongful death, but that was not the end of her suffering and victimization . Within days the Amsterdam News carried a story that Mrs. Glover had been swindled by her church minister, who had convinced her to hand over the reparations check. Rahman wrote her play as an answer to the question: How does a family survive this? (Mahone: 283). Although this question is what drives the play, Rahman does more than explore the psychological effects of these events on the surviving members of the family. Rather than retell the story as it happened in a straightforward way, she combines surrealism and a jazz aesthetic to fictionalize Glover’s story, adding an alternative ending of her own. Through these techniques she “testifies” and, at the same time, “conjures” up a version of the story in which the family triumphs. I contend that this version of the story is best seen through the lens of Paul Carter Harrison’s theories in A Drama of Nommo. By the force of its dramatic power, the play activates the spiritual in those who witness it and allows them not only to make sense of this terrible and irMojo and the Sayso originally appeared in slightly different form in Blackstream (1997), a publication of the Black Theatre Association, a focus group of Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and is reprinted by permission. rational tragedy but also to transcend the negative forces of oppression at work in the story (Harrison: xvii). Why are Harrison’s theories so vital for understanding Rahman’s play? The answer is embedded in the meaning of the two crucial words in the play’s title: mojo and sayso. Both words depend on our understanding of the spiritual heritage of the black community, a heritage in which the secular and sacred realms are not separate. This “ancestral juju” has been a “built-in survival kit” that has given African Americans a sense of potency and provided them with guidance through the vicissitudes of life— from the darkest despair to the highest of hopes—with “clarity of vision” (Harrison: xiii). The possession of two key elements—the power to create order in life through sacred and secular rituals, and to invoke the power of the spiritual realm through language or Nommo Force—is the meaning of mojo and sayso. With the knowledge of how to maintain the relationship between one’s sense of oneself in the present and one’s spiritual ancestors through action and words, anyone can survive in life without becoming overwhelmed. In trying to define mojo, it is helpful to think of the daily rituals in which people engage in order to feel as if they have some sort of control in life. No matter how discordant or incomprehensible life may seem, rituals like the lighting of candles or the turning of houseplants to catch the sun’s rays, or the use of talismans such as lucky shirts or charms, give people a sense that they can manipulate the forces around them. A mojo remains relatively impotent, however, without being invested with the spirit that must be called upon through Nommo force. According to Janheinz Jahn, Nommo is the word, in utterance and in gesture, which only Muntu (living human beings and spirits of the dead) can control. Nommo is the life force that is at the root of all creativity: “the driving power . . . that gives life and efficacy to all things . . . the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all ‘sleeping’ forces and gives physical and spiritual life” (Jahn: 101, 105). Without the word—whether enunciation, incantation , or poetry—there would be no procreation, no possibility of change, no activity (Jahn: 133). Thus empowered by Nommo force, human beings can in...