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The Black experience
Thursday October 13 2005 17:21 IST
Nibir K Ghosh
August Wilson, the
two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and a giant of the contemporary
American theatre, died on 2 October at the Swedish hospital in Seattle. I
knew he had been ailing from liver cancer but I, like many of August’s
friends and admirers, thought the fateful day was still far away. When I
received an email from the celebrated Charles Johnson informing me of
August’s death, I was a little shocked and benumbed and all I could write
back to Charles was: “Death has been unusually harsh in showing such undue
haste.”
The news brought in with a rush the fond memories of our meeting at the
Broadway Grill in Capitol Hill, Seattle on 11 November, 2003. Based at the
University of Washington, for my senior Fulbright research project, I just
couldn’t resist the temptation of desiring a meeting with the legendary hero
of the contemporary African-American Theatre. I had heard from several
quarters that meeting August Wilson was a tough job as he was a busy
playwright and was not easily accessible. Imagine the thrill I may have
experienced when I got a call from Charles Johnson saying that none but
August Wilson had invited us (me and my wife Sunita), to be his guest at
dinner at the Broadway Grill and that Charles would be happy to take us
there.
August met us with a great deal of warmth and in a little while we felt quite
comfortable in his formidable presence. He began to talk and the conversation
centered around his life, his work, and his characteristic controversial
stand related to black theatre. Born on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh to a
white father who never lived with his family and a black mother from North
Carolina, August shared life with his mother and five siblings. He dropped
out of school at the age of 15 when a teacher falsely accused him of
plagiarising his paper on Napoleon Bonaparte, an insult he could not tolerate
even in that period of adolescence. He received his education in libraries
and town hubs at Pittsburgh, the city that provided him with the theme, the
locale and the setting for almost all his plays.
Inspired by his mother, August learned to read at the age of four and had his
first library card when he was only five years old. His favorite haunt after
he dropped out of school was the Carnegie Public Library where through avid
reading he discovered the joy and terror of remaking the world in his own
image through the act of writing. His involvement in the 1960s and 70s with
the Black Power Movement contributed immensely towards shaping his
sensibility as a spokesman of the blacks in America. He acknowledged the
Movement to be “the kiln in which I was fired, and has much to do with the
person I am today and the ideas and attitudes that I carry as part of my
consciousness.” He first got involved in theatre in 1968 at the height of a
social tumult as he thought he could use theatre as a tool to document black
American culture and history. August Wilson lived and wrote in St. Paul from
1978 until 1990, a productive period that saw the completion of some of his
best-known plays, including Fences and The Piano Lesson which won the
Pulitzer for drama in 1987 and 1990, respectively. His other works include
Jitney, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains
Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf.
With his decade-by-decade cycle of African-American life in the twentieth
century, beginning with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and ending with Radio Golf,
Wilson has created the most complete cultural chronicle since Balzac wrote
his vast Human Comedy. In these ten plays that constitute what is popularly
known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, Wilson celebrates the struggles and
aspirations, fears and hopes, of the average black American citizen, and
emerges as the unquestioned spokesman of African-American theatre.
Intuitively endowed with a strong sense of history, Wilson’s plays on black
history originate in “the blood’s memory.” “My generation of blacks knew very
little about the past of our parents who shielded us from the indignities
they suffered, the hardships they had endured. My purpose is to illuminate
that shadowy past whose impact can be felt even in the present.”
He showed his fondness for Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden and the Blues. But
unlike Bearden for whom art is a collage of western, African, and Asian art,
as well as literature and music, Wilson firmly believes that only black
experience inspires black artists and that black actors should only perform
black roles authored by black playwrights. “I believe that race matters —
that is the largest, most identifiable and most important part of our
personality. Race is also an important part of the American landscape. We
cannot allow others to have authority over our cultural and spiritual
products. We will not deny our history, and we will not allow it to be of
little consequence, to be ignored or misinterpreted. We are unique, and we
are specific. We have an honorable history in the world of men. We reject any
attempt to blot us out, to reinvent history and ignore our presence. We are
black and beautiful,” he said.
Wilson talked a good deal about the great Migration from the South to the
North, ‘a transplant that did not take,’ a theme that runs through most of
his plays. He lamented how after being uprooted from Africa, the black
community spent 200 years developing its culture as black Americans. And then
they left the South in an attempt to transplant their culture to the
pavements of the industrialised North. And it was a transplant that did not
take. People left for the North in search for jobs and were disillusioned.
Wilson resents the idea of colourblind casting because he sees it as nothing
but a tool of the cultural imperialists who cannot conceive that life could
be lived and enriched without knowing Shakespeare or Mozart. He emphasises
the need for black theatres because “of the sixty-six LORT theaters, there is
just one that can be considered black.” According to him, “Black theater in
America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital…but it just isn’t funded…We need
black theatres to promote art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life
of black America by designing strategies for survival and prosperity rather
than celebrate art meant to entertain white society. Theatre may be a part of
art history in terms of its craft and dramaturgy, but it is part of social
history in terms of how it is financed and governed.”
When I asked him if there were any common strand that links all his ‘period
plays,’ and whether there was something called the universal element in them,
he quickly remarked: “All my plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal —
things humans have written about since the beginning of time.”
Though he has been thrilling audiences ever since his first production of
Jitney, he says his plays do not cater to any particular audience: “I am the
audience and I try to create a work of art that exists on its own terms and
is true to itself.” Writing to him is an experience that involves anguish and
pain: “When I write,” he says, “I try to leave some blood on the page. You
can’t get that stuff out of yourself without hurt. It’s not therapy; it’s more
like revelation.” Like his character Bynum in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone he
seems to confess: “I don’t do it lightly. It costs me a piece of myself every
time I do.”
The pain and the anguish of it all seems to have taken its toll and as Wilson
seeks rest and peace in another kind of wood, it is no mean consolation to
believe that his words will continue to reverberate in human memory : “You
got to fight to make it mean something…What good is freedom if you can’t do
nothing with it?”
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