Aspects of Africanness in August Wilson's drama: reading 'The Piano Lesson' through Wole Soyinka's drama.

The experimental flourish of the Counterculture and Civil Rights Movement eras brought tremendous developments in American drama. But by the mid-'70s, new conditions in the nation - political, social, cultural, and technological - combined to displace drama as a major vehicle of cultural expression (Herman 9). The move of drama from the center of the cultural stage has not meant its death, however. With Broadway's loss of primacy, regional, Off-, and Off-Off-Broadway activities have come to the fore, and this has meant unparalleled growth for minority (black, Chicano, women, gay) productions. In style and subject matter new patterns and concerns have arisen. Reverting to what Gerald M. Berkowitz defines as the mainstay of twentieth-century American drama, domestic realism, dramatists have started to express their concerns "through the everyday, personal experiences of ordinary characters" (167). In black drama, the traditional emphasis on cultural identity has continued. Instead of Amiri Baraka's once-dominant revolutionary style, characterized by images of revolt (Bigsby, Critical 414), at work now is the claim to possess an authentic black culture expressed through a recognizably black sensibility. This emphasis can be seen in the work of August Wilson, whose plays deal with the common folk, "those who were continuing to live their lives," rather than "what you could get from the history book" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 297). Wilson has little interest in those black figures and experiences that have been at the center of political and social activism.

August Wilson has dedicated himself to writing a cycle of plays dramatizing black experience during crucial historical periods in order to play out his individual sense of commitment to the cause of black America - which is to allow black men and women to tell American history, a history that, so far, whites have mostly told (Goldman 14). To him, blacks can best write and stage their experiences and cultural identity. This vision frames the significance of his project, which involves a concern for the survival struggle of black cultural values in the midst of a hostile white culture: "The message of America is 'Leave your Africanness outside the door.' My message is 'Claim what is yours'" (qtd. in Freedman, "Voice" 39-40). Wilson's sense of identity looks emphatically toward Africa, and carries a large part of his ideological program. He seeks the recognition of African American identity - acceptance of the fact that Afro-American mythology is not "strange," but "a common, natural part of life"; he seeks acknowledgment of African Americans' link "to Africa, to who we are" (qtd. in Freedman, "Voice" 2 (40). Wilson obviously denies the assumption that slavery exterminated African culture. He believes with Lawrence Levine that "from the first African captives, through the years of slavery, and into the present century black Americans kept alive important strands of African consciousness and verbal art in their humor, songs, dance, speech, tales, folk beliefs and aphorisms" (Levine 444). Despite the long and painful historical separation, there remains an African sensibility among African Americans. Wilson consciously seeks to integrate this sensibility and all else that stems from African culture into his plays (Goldman 6).

My aim in the present paper is twofold: first, to trace aspects of Africanness in Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson, by reading it through Wole Soyinka's drama; and, second, to probe the overall significance of Wilson's dramaturgic interest in Africanness. Methodologically speaking, my approach is not purely comparative. My interest in Soyinka's drama is mainly practical: a reference guide to focus my perspective, to ground my selection of African elements in The Piano Lesson, and to analyze or assess Wilson's African sensibility.

Conceptually and practically, Soyinka draws on Yoruba ritual drama and mythology. In his Myth, Literature and the African World, he explores African world views and rituals and how these can help to build a true modern African drama. Grounded in his reinterpretation of Yoruba culture, the book provides the foundation of his ritual dramatic theory, within which rituals function on both the literal and metaphorical levels. Ritual scenes, structures, moods, ideologies, and moralities pervade Soyinka's dramatic texts. The world view that dominates his plays recognizes the reality of the invisible world (gods, spirits, the unborn, and the dead - the ancestors) whose forces determine the lives of humans. Morality, the driving force governing the social and cosmic orders, lies in an harmonious relationship with the past (hence the ancestors), the invisible forces, and among humans themselves. To varying degrees, Soyinka's characters live out this essentially religious world view. Scenes and values that belong to the secular life do exist in his plays, but Soyinka believes that, if only because of its collective status, dramatic performance necessarily has something ritual about it (Soyinka, Myth 42-43). Hence he prefers the term participant to audience to name those who attend his dramas.

More than one critic has asserted that "elements of mysticism, ritual, spiritualism and storytelling" (Dworkin F2) pervade Wilson's plays, and Wilson himself makes the point that "I try to give [these elements] to both my characters and the audiences because [they are] part of what we are" (Goldman 6). The sense of the past is central among Wilson's concerns in The Piano Lesson. The past subsumes a number of the cultural aspects that I shall be considering and introduces the two main strains of twentieth-century black American cultural thought represented by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.(1) As Wilson asserts, "You have to make a decision about where you're going to go, whether you are going to assimilate or separate. I offer my plays as part of that debate" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 298). The debate rages in The Piano Lesson.

The Piano, Lesson dramatizes Wilson's complex notion of the past, which is at once the contemporary South, the slave era, and Africa (see Freedman, "Voice" 36). Wilson argues that it is only by assuming Africanness that the black American attains a sense of plenitude and eventually comes to understand who he or she is. Here he reveals philosophical affinities with Soyinka in that Wilson's attitude, like Soyinka's, exemplifies what we may term mythical thinking, since it assumes original oneness as the essence of being, of life. "When we left [the South] we left people back there. . . . [the] connection is broken, that sense of standing in your father's shoes. . . . what I'm trying to do with my plays [is] make the connection. Because I think it's vital. Having shared a common past we have a common past and a common future" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 298). Wholeness and life stand out, and are unequivocally and inextricably linked.

Soyinka observes that the sense of tragedy for the Yoruba involves "the anguish of [an original] severance, the fragmentation of essence from self" (Myth 145). Ritual ceremonies are an attempt to retrieve the original oneness; they are re-enactments of the gods' dramas in their first attempts to re-unite with humans (144). Retrieval and re-unification govern the structures of a number of Soyinka's plays, including Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests, which deal with the themes of the past, present, and future. In the Yoruba mind, these temporal sequences are intimately interdependent realities that confer meaning, harmony, and wholeness to life: "Life, present life, contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living and the unborn" (Soyinka, Myth 146). For the Yoruba, "the past is the ancestors, the present belongs to the living and the future to the unborn" (148). In ritual moments, the occasions par excellence when these three essential instances unite in a single locus, these three instances realize the state of original oneness. The past, the present, and the future are faces of the same reality, of life, of being. To deny or to search for the past engages and determines one's ontological self, one's identity.

Evincing the essential desire "to penetrate even deeper into that area of man's cosmogonic hunger, one which leads him to the profounder forms of art as retrieval vehicles for, or assertive links with, a lost sense of origin" (soyinka, Myth 54), Wilson displays, with his concern for the past, a true sense of Africanness. He, for instance, dramatizes, through the conflict between Berniece and Boy Willie over the piano, the past as encapsulating or evoking the present and the future. The whole point about the piano, says Wilson, is "What do you do with the past?" (qtd. in Rothstein 2). Through the pictures carved on it - by their "granddaddy Willie Boy" (52) - the piano symbolizes the Charles family and its history. It represents the soul of the family for various other reasons. Robert Sutter, the former white master, acquired it by selling members of the Charles family. After the emancipation, Boy Charles, Doaker, and Wining Boy deemed it essential to steal the piano from their former white master because "as long as Sutter had it . . . he had us. . . . we was still in slavery" (45). Boy Charles dies in the process of taking possession of the piano: a rightful and legitimate heirloom.

The divergence of Boy Willie's and Berniece's attitudes toward the piano indicates specific relations to their common past - and, therefore, with identity and connections with the future. The two main currents of black thought, represented by Washington and Du Bois, so inform Wilson's treatment of the piano that, at first glance, it would seem that Boy Willie and Berniece, respectively, stand for Washington and Du Bois. But, in fact, Wilson conflates attributes of the two leaders in a single and synthetic statement.

Berniece's relation to the piano is a paradoxical conflation of aloofness - a la Washington? - and sentimental attachment that, at a deeper level, gives expression to Du Bois's philosophy. (It is useful in this regard to recall that Du Bois's attitude evolved from a position in which he first cooperated with Washington, and then with the NAACP, only to break with the two of them - but, first, from Washington [Williamson 66-68].) The characterization of Berniece also suggestively evolves in the play. She used to play the piano for her mother, but since the latter's death, she has vowed never to touch it again. Her stance looks very much like a desire to let the ancestors lie in peace. By her opposition to Willie Boy's project to sell the piano, she evinces an uncompromising attitude toward her past - and, hence, to her identity. Berniece's attitude toward the past is a rather positive one that I will further expand upon, by contrasting it with Boy Willie's. For now, it suffices to characterize her stance as an unequivocal acceptance of her past, and this, as we have seen, suggests much about her identity and her becoming.(2)

Boy Willie's interest in the piano is complex, too. Selling the piano clearly signifies selling his past, his identity, and this is a clear expression of Washington's accommodationist scheme for blacks at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the same time Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy Sutter's land - the land on which his ancestors toiled to death - back in the South. This, as it appears, is more than just a desire to have his share of the American pie. There may be no clear evidence that Boy Willie is aware of the symbolical significance of the land, but that he associates it with the father testifies to Wilson's symbolic interpretation of Willie's project. Indeed, Wilson would argue that Willie wants to "wear his grandfather's shoes." What Boy Willie is seeking is what constituted his father's identity, for his project is to fulfill his father's dream: "If my daddy had seen where he could have traded that piano in for some land of his own, it wouldn't be sitting here now." He wishes to build his life and thereby assure his future on his father's legacy: "The only thing daddy had to give me was that piano. And he died over giving me that. I ain't gonna let it sit up there and rot without trying to do something with it" (46).

Boy Willie most evokes Washington in that he sees himself as pragmatic and interested, but not selfish. Boy Willie reproaches Berniece for her incapacity to go beyond the sentimental value of the piano. He contends that he too knows what sentiment is, for "I take my hat off whenever somebody say my daddy's name"; he just wants to build on what his parents left him. If Berniece had such a positive attitude, as he would say, "I'd have to go on and say, well, Berniece using that piano. She building on it. Let her go on and use it" (51). The irony with Boy Willie, as it had been with Washington, is that his pragmatism and reverence to his folks pass through a surrender of his, or rather their, soul - here symbolized by the piano.

Indeed, as Wilson says, the piano stands for the question "What do you do with the past?" The playwright handles this complex issue by deftly juggling Boy Willie and Berniece. First, the piano is not sold, but remains with Berniece after she proves that she can put it to meaningful use. Second, Boy Willie fulfills the dreams for which he had wanted to forfeit his identity by returning to the South. The play does not show what becomes of him down there, but this is not important. The journey back is a symbolic one.

The way Boy Willie intends to use the piano links him to his origins through the very idea of returning to the land, the South: "Why I got to come up here [the North] and learn something I don't know how to do when I already know how to farm?" (46), he asks Lymon. The land and the South resonate with selfhood and origin. The return to the South, for Wilson, is part of an essential quest, a quest for Mother Africa, for identity:

One [of black Americans' incorrect choices] was the migration to the North. We were land-based agrarian people from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's, and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are. (qtd. in Rothstein 2)

In this interpretation of black history, Wilson seems to echo a genuine sentiment among blacks who, according to C. Vann Woodward, returned in great numbers to the South in the 1980s. Woodward argues that "the attractions of the South for those returning were mainly old cultural constants rather than new gains in rights and status." He adds that "family roots" provided the principal motivation for most of the migrants (496).

Boy Willie's desire to return to the agrarian South undoubtedly symbolizes an awareness and an acceptance of his identity - "who he is." In this, he feels that he stands in direct opposition to Berniece, and he tells her so by the end of the play. For instance, he points out her refusal to tell Maretha the story behind the piano.(3) With this, Boy Willie reveals much about his own relation to cultural identity. Even as he remains blind - at least at this point of the action - to Berniece's relation to the piano, he is consistent in his own view. His argument about Berniece's failure to "believe it all" evinces an awareness of the tragedy inherent in renouncing one's past: "You can't go at nothing halfway" (95), he asserts.

In Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests, Forest Father explains his desire to have the humans confront their own ontological truth: "My secret is my eternal burden - to pierce the encrustrations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness . . . hoping that when I have tortured awareness from their souls, that perhaps, only perhaps [this will result] in new beginnings . . ." (71). The point is that knowing and accepting one's identity - "who you are" - is a source of life, dignity, and power. It gives purpose, hope, and direction to one's life; it is liberating. In The Piano Lesson, Berniece's refusal to accept her past - at least until the end of the play, when she undergoes a positive change - denies her a sense of fulfillment. On the other hand, Boy Willie's ready acceptance and return to the South makes him one of the most positive characters in the play. But, ultimately, Berniece is no less praiseworthy in clinging to the piano -and finally retaining it.

Like his statement on Boy Willie's return to the South, Wilson's point with the retention of the piano by Berniece must be taken metaphorically. The link between womanhood and cultural continuity is a universal truth that Wilson particularly emphasizes here. Furthermore, by remaining with Berniece, the piano stays in the North - industrial, not agricultural, America. So ultimately, Wilson's point is an assertion of black culture and identity within the industrializing culture. The return to the South and the retention - combined with a significant use - of the piano in the North reflect cultural choices that look to the dreams of both Washington and Du Bois.

As a source or a frame for the expression of identity and individual worth, the theme of the return to the South stands as a metaphor for mythical and ritual realization. This profoundly African way of asserting life also finds expression in the supernatural component of The Piano Lesson. People believe in, interact physically and verbally with, and determine themselves through supernatural forces. Most of Soyinka's dramatic works testify that this is consistent with the African world view.

A Dance of the Forests and The Road illustrate the point. The setting of the first play is a deep forest. Gods and diverse spirits dwell in the trees, the earth, the air. The human characters who enter the forest hear, talk to, walk, and commune with the spirits and their ancestors. The gods assume their true forms and natures. Like humans, they drink, fight, and express different emotions. Like the humans' world, theirs is hierarchical; each god has a prescribed function and domain, hence the plural Forests in the title of the play. Here is one spirit in the role of a Crier:

To all such as dwell in trees; rock devils, Earth imps, tree demons, ghommids, dewilds, genie Incubi, succubi, windhorls, bits and halves and such Sons and subjects of Forest Father, and all That dwell in his domain, take note, this night Is the welcome of the dead. (45)

The welcome of the dead marks the climax of the play. Presided over by Forest Father, the supreme god, creator of human beings, the ceremony gathers gods, spirits, and humans.

In The Road, Soyinka focuses on one god, Ogun, the Yoruba god of creation and destruction, the god of the road - physical and metaphorical. No Yoruba will travel or undertake any project without first sacrificing to Ogun, since failure to do so can have tragic consequences. Listen to the complaints and worries of one apprentice-driver to his boss-driver after a narrow escape from an accident:

Samson: [Despondently] Kill us a dog Kotonu. . . . Kill us a dog before the hungry god lies in wait and makes a substitute of me. That was a thin shave. A sensible man would see it as a timely warning, but him? . . . Dog intestines look messy to me he says - who asked him to like it? Ogun likes it; that's all that matters. It's his special meat. Just run over the damned dog and leave it there. . . . Serve Ogun his tit-bit so the road won't look at us one day and say Ho ho you two boys you look juicy to me . . . . (198-99)

Like the road which itself represents Ogun, all other natural elements are inhabited by spirits. The characters live and behave in full knowledge of this. Say Tokyo Kid, for instance, tells of his constant struggles against the spirits trapped in the timber he transports.

To a large extent The Piano Lesson partakes of this world view, with one important qualification. In Wilson's play, the supernatural forces are essentially ancestor figures, the dead. Still, most Africans reading The Piano Lesson will remember the famous poem on the dead, "Breath," by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, which Soyinka quotes in full in his Myth, Literature and the African World (131-33). Exerpts from the second strophe alone should make my point:

Those who are dead have never gone away. . . . They are in the waters that sleep, In the rock where the wind blows, They are in the forest, they are in the homestead. The dead are not dead.

So too do the dead exist in The Piano Lesson. The piano, for instance, relates to the supernatural through Berniece's ancestors and the pervasive ghost story.

The presence of Berniece's ancestors in the piano is expressed literally: Their figures are carved on it. But there is more. She remembers her mother's experience through the piano: "She used to have me playing on it. . . . Say when I played it she could hear my daddy talking to her. I used to think them pictures came alive and walked through the house. Sometimes late at night I could hear my mama talking to them" (70). In the early stage of the action, Berniece, unlike her mother, does not wish to commune with the dead, but this has more to do with her present mental disposition than with her fundamental attitude toward her ancestral culture. Berniece believes in the existence of the dead, hence her refusal to touch the piano since the departure of her mother: "I don't play that piano cause I don't want to wake the spirits" (70). Berniece remaIns ignorant of the use her ancestors, though dead, can be to her until the end of the play, when she becomes central both to the ritual-like scene and to the significance of the play. I will return later to this final scene.

Wilson believes that Africanness often operates in a subtle manner in twentieth-century America. As one critic says, in Wilson's plays "blackness [is] a condition of the soul" (Freedman, "Voice" 40). Berniece is simply too sentimentally involved to desire to let out her soul. She reminds us of Avery, the preacher, who is too steeped in Christianity to show awareness of, or to acknowledge, his Africanness. Perhaps there is a symbolic statement in Avery's desire to marry Berniece.(4) His account of the experience that led to his becoming a preacher indicates an unconscious but deep-seated Africanness of his intimate self. Indeed, his story posits a system in which humans and the invisible forces interact. Levine argues that it is this sort of subtle retention of Africanness that, functioning on a pattern of creation-recreation, has contributed to the survival of black culture in the hostile Western cultural environment (444). Therefore, both Avery and Berniece participate in their own ways in the same experience as Wilson's other characters who assert or express their Africanness conspicuously.

Invisible forces, in their relation to humans, can be benevolent or malevolent. "Sometimes you be in trouble they might be around to help you" (86), explains Boy Willie to Maretha in The Piano Lesson. A number of Soyinka's plays also feature scenes in which the dead are liked or disliked, depending on their intrinsic qualities or disposition to help humans. Remember the implications of Samson's complaints quoted above. A Dance of the Forests contains two illustrative cases. At the beginning of the action a dead couple emerges from the earth to answer Forest Father's summoning. The humans shun them because they are coming to the Gathering of the Tribes as "accusers" (97). On the other hand, in the middle of the action, unable to cope with their project of finding out the identity of the fourth character who is leading the three humans deeper in the forest, the village elders invoke the dead for help in a divination ceremony:

Dirge-man: Move on eyah! Move apart. I felt the wind breathe - no more Keep away now. Leave the dead Some room to dance. (36)

The dead, indeed, are not dead. They live; they are powerful, ubiquitous.

In The Piano Lesson the ghost story dramatizes the two faces of the dead. The first face, the benevolent one, finds expression in the cause of Sutter's death, and the second in Sutter's ghost. The evocation of the origins of the piano provides the most reliable explanation of Sutter's death. Tracking Bob Charles for his complicity in the loss of the piano, Sutter corners him on the Yellow Dog train and bums the boxcar in which he is hiding, thereby killing its four occupants. Hence, "people say it was the ghost of them who burned up in the boxcar that pushed him in the well" (45-46). This is much like Ogun in The Road sucking the non-compliant drivers into the river Ogun, or Eshuoro in A Dance of the Forests seeking revenge on the "impietous" Demoke, who dared "hack off" (43) the top of his tree - his head.

Dead, Boy Charles remained sensitive to the problems of his former human condition, and indeed to the problems of the living. Not only did he plague and kill his former master but also, as Wining Boy explains, he helped him change his fortune in life:

July of nineteen thirty I stood right there on that spot. It didn't look like nothing was going right in my life. I said everything can't go wrong all the time. . . . let me go down there and call on the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog, see if they can help me. I went down there . . . and called out their names. They talk to you too. . . . A lot of things you got to find out on your own. I can't say how they talk to nobody else. . . . I felt like the longer I stood there the bigger I got. I walked away from there feeling like a king. Went on and had a stroke of luck that run on for three years. (34-35)

The invisible forces can be positive to the one who knows how to approach or beckon them. The account of the experience tells about the person himself, for it is the experience of someone who knows "who he is,"' someone who partakes of the African world view. No wonder, prior to his account, Wining Boy answers Boy Willie's assertion that Berniece does not believe in the story of the Ghost of the Yellow Dog by linking her to the "white folks": "She ain't got to believe. You go ask them white folks in Sunflower Country if they believe" (34). The belief in the ghost story presupposes a certain cultural identity which Berniece does not recognize until the end of the play. (To be sure Boy Willie is not alone in doubting Berniece's Africanness.) Boy Willie and Wining Boy can easily find their way on Soyinka's "roads" or out of his "forests."

Alluding to his Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Wilson has pointedly remarked that "Blacks in America have been wrestling ghosts of the white man for decades, trying to exorcise them from their lives" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 296). Wilson literally dramatizes this statement in The Piano Lesson through the ghost of Robert Sutter, an ex-slaveholder who, once dead, becomes part of the invisible world. But Sutter's ghost represents the negative figure of the dead, at least to the black community. One may also argue that Wilson draws on the aspect of African belief according to which accidental deaths necessarily produce malevolent ghosts.

Sutter's ghost also allows Wilson to dramatize such other aspects of the African sense of the supernatural as its ubiquity and omniscience. The ghost dwells everywhere in the house (including the piano) and makes himself felt in the air whenever someone touches the piano. And when Boy Willie tells Berniece that "Sutter was looking for the piano" and that "he had to die to find out where that piano was . . ." (15), we understand that the dead are omniscient and enjoy total freedom of movement. No barrier of time or space applies to them. They travel with the wind and, indeed, are "like the wind" (86) - felt but invisible. This reveals, as we have seen, that not only do the dead continue to show interest in the affairs of the living but also that the dead have emotions.

The end of the play offers interesting instances illustrative of most of the aspects dealt with so far about the dead, but it also reveals other facets of their interactions with humans. In its ritual-like quality, the end of The Piano Lesson evokes the end of The Road. In Soyinka's play, following the evening communion (a session of palm wine drinking dedicated to Ogun, the god of wine, and part of Professor's strategy of finding the word), Murano becomes possessed by the divine spirit under the influence of the "agemo rhythm" (226) played by the participants. The session ends with a tragic struggle between Professor and Murano, in which the other participants side with Murano.

In Act 2, Scene 1 of The Piano Lesson, the action builds to the point where a confrontation with the ghost, which from the beginning Boy Willie has willed, becomes imminent. Lymon returns with a rope, which implies that the piano that the ghost jealously keeps is going to be moved, or at least shaken. Avery also has returned, Bible in hand, ready to apply the power of his God to Sutter. And Wining Boy comes back dead drunk and eager to play the piano. We now understand the meaning of the mask-like sculptures and the portentous stillness of the beginning of the play: They foreshadow and finally contribute to the ritual atmosphere by their mere presence. Conflated, the whole gamut of musical and atmospheric elements works up to stir the ghost, and the entire scene becomes ritual-like. Boy Willie becomes entranced and confronts the ghost in a "life-and-death struggle fraught with perils and faultless terror" (106).

Precisely at this crucial moment Avery resigns, confessing his incapacity to deal with the situation. He steps aside to learn the lesson of the piano through Berniece. For by then, suddenly "realizing what she must do," Berniece, for the first time since her mother's death, plays the piano, invoking her ancestors for help in an incantatory song:

She begins to play. The song is found piece by piece. It is an old urge to sing that is both a commandment and a plea. With each repetition it gains in strength. It is intended as an exorcism and a dressing for battle. A rustle of wind blowing across two continents. (106)

The shift from Avery to Berniece is a clear assertion of the original African cultural spirit that she retrieves bit by bit, to the detriment of Christianity, the white American cultural spirit. One critic judiciously avers that, in Wilson's plays, contact with the supernatural constitutes a "liberating moment" (Wilde 6). This is indeed true; for in ritual experience, according to Soyinka, "to act, the Promethean instinct of rebellion, channels anguish into a creative purpose which releases man from a totally restrictive despair, releasing from within him the most energetic, deeply combative inventions which, without usurping the territory of the infernal gulf, bridges it with visionary hopes" (Myth 146). Berniece's sudden realization of what she must do comes "from somewhere old" (106); her realization alludes to the ritual spirit which, through the "rustle of wind," bursts out, filling her with the necessary energy to "battle."

In this particular instance, Berniece assumes her African identity by fighting successfully against the white ghost. She simultaneously redeems herself and helps to exorcise the family's suffering. Undoubtedly, the piano fulfills several functions, dramatic as well as symbolic. It postulates that the significance of the past lies in its usefulness. Berniece's exorcism and redemption are metaphysical. The past should serve to free the black individual of white society's ghost, and thereby help the individual to assert him- or herself, to take responsibility for his or her destiny. Hence, it is significant that the piano remains with Berniece, for Boy Willie has always embodied the kind of ritual spirit which Berniece suddenly experiences, as his longstanding desire to confront Sutter's ghost implies. In the manner of a ritual protagonist, Boy Willie eventually vanquishes the force of death and opens up for himself and his community the sources of the energies of life. In the end, on returning to the South (a positive act in itself), he exhorts Berniece to "keep playing on that piano" (106), for that is how she can achieve her selfhood, her identity. Berniece's final "Thank you" in her song looks much like a "thank you" to both the ancestral spirits and Boy Willie for leading her to self-recovery. Maretha's embrace enjoys a similar significance. The final ritual-like scene is indeed a "form of revolution and affirmation" (Soyinka, Myth 146); it conveys much hope.

Music constitutes a fundamental aspect of Africanness, a cultural feature that functions at both the secular and religious levels. Soyinka describes the intrinsically poetic and mythic nature of Yoruba music (Myth 147) and asserts its ritual significance in the following terms: "Music is the intense language of transition and its communicant means, the catalyst and solvent of its regenerative hoard" (36). The notion of transition embodies the dynamic potential of rituals and music. One can hardly overstate the function of music in such plays as Death and the King's Horseman, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, and Kongi's Harvest. The music in these plays varies according to the identity of the human and divine actors and to the nature of the ceremony. Different kings, gods, or rituals have specific types of music. It would be a serious blunder to confuse them, for music, indeed, has a characterizing and symbolic dimension.

Wilson would agree with Lawrence Levine that music has proved to be one of the most enduring aspects of black American culture in its history. Wilson asserts that music has always meant more than entertainment for his race, and he employs song as a metaphor for soul and identity (see especially Joe Turner's Come and Gone). In this, Wilson would undoubtedly elicit Soyinka's agreement. Of blues music, Wilson says that in it he finds not only "an image of myself, but also the lives of [my] ancestors" (Freedman, "Voice" 70). In The Piano Lesson he shows this and makes music essential to his strategy of dealing with Africanness.

Paraphrasing Wilson, C. W. E. Bigsby corroborates his definition of the cultural significance of blues music: "The blues . . . mark a division between the black and white worlds. For one it is 'life's way of talking . . . a way of understanding life'; for the other, entertainment" (Modern 298). In Act 1, Scene 1, Wilson comments ironically on Maretha's innocent way of expressing the white culture which Berniece has been endeavoring to impose upon her:

Boy Willie: (Sits and plays a simple boogie-woogie) See that. See what I'm doing? That's what you call the boogie. . . . See how it go? Ain't nothing to it. Go on you do it.

Maretha: I got to read it on the paper.

Boy Willie: You don't need no paper. Go on. Do just like that there. (21)

Boy Willie's natural sense of music contrasts with Maretha's, and this tells much about their respective cultural identities. He belongs to a culture in which music comes in a natural way. Nor is it gratuitous that Wilson makes Willie say that Wining Boy could also teach Maretha to play the guitar with "no paper" (21) - in the natural way. There is a clear touch of stereotyping here, but, as usual with Wilson, there is a meaning beyond the bare fact. Stereotyping serves a purpose:

I think a lot of this [the qualities of life] is hidden by the glancing manner in which White America looks at Blacks, and the way Blacks look at themselves. Which is why I work a lot with stereotypes, with the idea of stripping away layer by layer the surface to reveal what is underneath - the real person, the whole person. (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 293)

To be sure, music is not the only element that leads to stereotyping, but all of the characters through whom Wilson plays out the theme of Africanness are musicians: Boy Willie, Wining Boy, Doaker, and Berniece at one moment or another get the chance to display their talents.

Music relates to the theme of Africanness in still other ways. Berniece, as I have shown, re-takes possession of her identity through playing the piano at the end of the play. In the process, she reasserts the functionality of music as a cosmic language, to employ Soyinka's terminology. Indeed, the ritual instances in Soyinka's plays reveal that at climactic moments only music serves and is effective in communicating with supernatural forces. For this particular function of music in The Piano Lesson, recall the final scene as analyzed earlier.

Music in The Piano Lesson also functions on the secular level, but essentially in the form of songs. And there, too, the connection with Africanness may be observed. Some are recognizably work songs, others are not. In Act 1, Scene 2, Boy Willie evokes the song Lymon used to sing when working on Parchman Farm in the South. Act 2, Scene 1 opens on Doaker in the kitchen, singing a "song that provides him with the rhythm for his work" (55). If only for their nature as work songs, these songs have a typically African flavor. No wonder they evoke, for instance, Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, which dramatizes prisoners working to the rhythm of their songs.

In The Piano Lesson the connection of the songs with Africanness also resides in their thematic contents. Whether they are work songs or not, they all play out the theme of the North/South. And through them, the characters take emotional journeys back to the South, where their African identities lie. Thus, in Act 1, Scene 2, Wining Boy's song - one of the most famous from his repertoire - evokes the difficulty of rural life "in the state of Arkansas" (47). Doaker's song focuses on his "years as a railroad cook" (55). The themes relate to their experience as black Americans.

The performance of songs often offers the singer and the listeners an occasion to express common emotions: a sense of community. As Boy Willie starts singing Lymon's song, he initiates a process of coming together: Boy Willie sings; Lymon and Wining Boy join in; then Doaker joins in, as ". . . the men stamp and clap to keep time. They sing in harmony with great fervor and style" (39). Spontaneously, a community forms and the song continues. They sing of their dreams, their sorrows, of things that belong to them as black men. In this way - through music, oral culture - they live out their identity, tell of "who they are," and preserve their culture.

Storytelling plays a role similar to music in The Piano Lesson. Soyinka's The Road provides illustrations that indicate the Africanness of storytelling as it appears in The Piano Lesson. Naturally, all the characters in The Road, save of course the dumb Murano, at one point or another tell a story either about others' lives or their own. Say Tokyo tells about the spirits whose homes (the trees) have been "cut down" (172) and which he carries on his truck. On and on Professor tells of his quest of the word. Salubi and Samson act out their lives as apprentices having to deal with the police and Ogun. They relate their dreams to become drivers.

Wilson captures the spirit and significance of storytelling for blacks in the following remark:

It's part of the black tradition. It's a way of keeping information alive. So if you're telling a story, your obligation as a storyteller is to make it memorable, so that the person hearing it will want to go and tell someone else - that's how it's kept alive. This is a very important part of black culture. So any time you have five black characters on stage, it's very natural for them to tell stories, because the stories are the only way that cultural information, ideas and attitudes, community sanctions, way of conduct, etc., are revealed. (qtd. in Goldman 15)

Fundamentally, Wilson's characters "are fantastic storytellers" (Goldman 15) because they share in African cultural identity; and as black Americans they have essential things to tell each other, things that they wish to preserve. Thus, Wining Boy explains how his former profession as a "recording star" - as a "modern" musician - has come to ruin his life and depersonalize him: "Now, who am I? Am I me? Or am I the piano player?" (41) He resolves to retire from being a musician in the white American way. On five straight pages (42-46) Doaker recounts to us the story of the piano and of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. In the course of this, he reveals much about the Charles family, the South, race relations, etc. - in fact, about the verities of black life in the South from slavery up to the twentieth century. Interesting also is Boy Willie's insistence to tell Maretha or have her told about the ghost (86) and the piano (91) - her culture and her past. He disagrees with Berniece on her decision not to tell Maretha the truth of her identity:

Boy Willie: You ain't even told her about the piano. Like that's something to be ashamed of. . . . You ought to. . . . If you did that she wouldn't have no problem in life. She could walk around here her head held high. . . . That way she know where she at in the world. . . . If you teach that girl that she living at the bottom of life, she's gonna grow up and hate you.

Berniece: I'm gonna teach her the truth. That's just where she living. . . .

Boy Willie: This might be your bottom but it ain't mine. (90-92)

That eventually Berniece transcends her initial sense of truth is a sign of hope for Maretha's future - for the future of blacks. Maretha, embracing Boy Willie in the final scene, is eager to identify with the things about life in the South - hence Africanness - which all through the action he has tried to get her to learn. Storytelling subsumes the cycle of death and life; it incorporates the motif of collapse and reconstruction. It is an assertion of continuity.

By its oral nature, storytelling commands a particular style of dramatic writing that is also a way of expressing Africanness. As Norine Dworkin has noted, in Wilson's plays, "often there is little action, just stories." Wilson, of course, fully agrees with her observation: "There is such a thing as African play-writing, which is very much different from Western play-writing. . . . This is what I participate in." Dworkin approves of Wilson's self-assessment and takes it a step further: "Wilson is a tradition-bearer in the manner of the old time African griots, or storytellers" (F2).

Africanness characterizes the aesthetics of Wilson's drama and determines its functionality: "I try to concretize the values of the black American and place them on a stage in loud action and to demonstrate the existence of [a black] 'field of manners' and point to some avenues of sustenance" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 287). One such aspect that still deserves examination is the sense of family. This is principally dramatized through contrasting Boy Willie and Berniece. Boy Willie's sense of the family is almost overly African, whereas Berniece's bears recognizably negative imprints of the Western culture. But again one must avoid definite categorization, for Berniece evolves through the action, and we must not idealize Boy Willie. In any case, in posing the family problem in terms of Willie versus Berniece, Wilson also seems to argue for the vindication of the black male. For, as he contends about an earlier play, Fences, "I had to write a character [Troy] who is responsible and likes the idea of family. . . . We have been told so many times how irresponsible we are as black males that I try and present positive images of responsibility" (qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 292). How responsible Boy Willie is may be debatable, but the fact remains that he displays some reasonable sense of family.

Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests offers an interesting framework within which we can assess these two characters' sense of family. Rola, one of the three characters who undertake the symbolic walk through the forest, is noteworthy in two respects: She is a woman (a supposed pillar of the family), and she is a prostitute (the lower and degraded type). Her exchange with Obaneji (Forest Father, disguised in a human form), in which she accounts for her desertion of the village and the ritual, captures her intimate self, and suggests how Soyinka feels she should have behaved:

Rola: The whole family business sickens me. Let everybody lead their own way.

Obaneji: It never used to be.

Rola: It is now. . . . That's why I fled. The whole town reeks of it. . . . The Gathering of the Tribe! Do you know how many old and forgotten relations came to celebrate?

Obaneji: Now we've got it. They pushed you out of house.

Rola: I've a mind to go back and set fire to it. If I haven't got a house, they can't stay with me . . . . (9)

Rola is the target of Soyinka's satire because of her dangerous move away from her African identity, from the African sense of family. Allowing her to take part in the walk through the forest, the author adumbrates a desire to see her transformed. Like Berniece, Rola takes part in the final ritual.

Berniece is no less the object of Wilson's satire. Boy Willie drops in unannounced with his friend Lymon, but is quite happy because it has been a long time since he has seen Berniece and Maretha. They are still in bed when he gets there, but he naturally insists on their coming down to say hello. Berniece's reaction when she comes down is similar to Rola's on seeing the "distant relatives" pouring in. The situation is fraught with irony: "You can't come like normal folks" (4), she remarks. One wonders who in reality are the normal folks. Berniece shows no emotion that comes close to that which animates Boy Willie. Instead, she irritates him in a way that indicates a radically different personality: "Aw hell, woman, I was glad to see Doaker. You ain't had to come down if you didn't want to. I come eighteen hundred miles to see my sister I figure she might want to get up and say hi" (4). Boy Willie is unwanted because he "come[s] in disrupting the house." Berniece crosses the Rubicon when she asks when he and Lymon are planning to go. She even chases them out because of the trouble they may bring, and urges them to leave "quick[ly]" (7). By the African standard that Soyinka advocates, these are alien values. Berniece's attitude in rejecting her relatives is indeed reminiscent of Rola's.

Boy Willie may be a wanderer, but he has not lost the sense of family values that Wilson defines as belonging to his African identity. The humor in the characterization of Boy Willie should not mislead us. One may even see this humor as an ironic counterpoint to Berniece's "serious" attitude. Boy Willie is generous, simple, and family-loving, despite his "shallow" appearance. He shares his melons and takes interest in Maretha's education. He cares for people and expects people to care for him. It is significant that he finds positive responses mainly from Doaker, his uncle, who is one of the bearers of Africanness in the play. Boy Willie is in no way "abnormal folk." To see him in that way would be to judge him by Western standards. To be fair to Berniece, too, we must recognize that in being hospitable to Wining Boy - she cooks for him (50) - she proves that she has not completely lost her cultural values. This is the reason that her transformation in the final scene is convincing. Personal grievance may partly account for her attitude toward Boy Willie: She, for instance, accuses him of being responsible for the death of her husband. Drunkard and selfish though Wining Boy is, she recognizes him as her uncle and treats him accordingly.

By infusing Africanness in his play, Wilson assumes his own identity as a black American, and wishes to see others doing so, with the ultimate aim of preserving black identity in America. Wilson's is a culturalist stance, as Stuart Hall would put it (see n2). "If black folks would recognize themselves as Africans and not be afraid to respond to the world as Africans, then they could make their contribution to the world as Africans" (Wilson, qtd. in Bigsby, Modern 293). Du Bois would undoubtedly assent to this assertion. Wilson also expresses or tries to achieve the preservation of black African identity through theater performance. For he defines performance in terms that are quite reminiscent of ritual theater. He shares in Jeffrey Goldman's idea of "the ritual of the theater"; that is, "an audience coming together to hear a story, to be moved emotionally and spiritually by a performance" (39).

The notion of communality of experience and of the audience benefitting from their relation to the performance is basic to the African cultural realization through rituals. Soyinka demonstrates this in his Myth, Literature and the African World by first showing a preference for the notion of participant over audience (39), and then by arguing that "the community emerges from ritual experience 'charged with new strength from action' because of the protagonist's Promethean raid on the durable resources of the transitional realm; immersed within it, he is enabled empathically to transmit its essence to the choric participants of the rites - the community" (33). Essentially, this is what, as we have seen, Boy Willie allows the other characters, participants, specifically Berniece, to achieve at the end of The Piano Lesson. With its ritual-like quality, the end of The Piano Lesson could fit perfectly within the dramatic structure of most of Soyinka's plays.

On the performance level per se, there are indications that Wilson's plays attain a certain degree of ritualness in the sense delineated above. As one critic has observed, "Wilson's theatrical works have engaged audiences on Broadway and regional theaters across the country with their celebration of the beauty and power inherent in the oral tradition" (Source? 12). In other words, Wilson's plays, through the Africanness of their contents, provide audiences with aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual satisfaction; these can effect significant changes in the individual and lead him or her to act positively. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that both Wilson and the chosen director of his plays, Lloyd Richards, share a common ground in their fascination for the world of the theater; and their common conviction, to use Wilson's words, is that "there's something about the communal experience of a live audience" (qtd. in Rothstein 4). To the question "Do you travel with the play [The Piano Lesson]?" Wilson answers, "I wouldn't miss it. I enjoy watching the show with the audience - I enjoy the audience." Richards's response to the same interviewer differs from Wilson's only in the choice of words: "I sit in the theater with an audience and live through it with them" (qtd. in Freedman, "Fine" 3).

With such a similarity of inclinations, it is not surprising that Wilson and Richards should form, to borrow Rachael Migler's expression, such "an elegant duet" (Migler 1). They partake of the same cultural identity, and each according to his expertise lives it out in the theater. They endeavor to enhance and to perpetuate it. Here may reside the reason that Wilson has always preferred to have his plays directed by a black person.

Africanness pervades The Piano Lesson, as placing the play alongside Wole Soyinka's drama helps to reveal. Wilson weaves both obvious and subtle aspects of African cultural values into the dramatic fabric of his play. Characters' thoughts, beliefs, songs - indeed, their way of being and conceiving the world - tell, literally and symbolically, of their relation with Mother Africa. Much of the play's success in terms of Africanness depends on Wilson's keen awareness of his ancestral culture.

Africanness in The Piano Lesson is ultimately a mode of writing, which, unquestionably, Wilson has acquired. Notwithstanding that some will - perhaps rightly - argue that Wilson's preoccupation with Africa reeks of sentimentality or romanticism, his objectives remain praiseworthy. His concern is to assert the identity, to perpetuate the life, to contribute to the survival of African Americans. That Wilson finds positive responses in America among blacks as well as whites is a sign that he is achieving what for centuries the griot in his Mother Africa has been doing: keeping his culture alive and thereby perpetuating it. In other words, being increasingly heard and listened to, Wilson's voice - or should we say the voice of his theater? - is establishing itself. That indeed allows for hope, not just for his drama but for the cause for which he is fighting: African American culture in America. His art is inseparable from life. The voice of his drama is the voice of black America speaking authentically.

Notes

1. The place and future of blacks in America is the central issue. Basically Booker T. Washington is associated with assimilationism, whereas W. E. B. Du Bois is identified with separatism. "Booker T. Washington offered one alternative, a relatively accommodative one in which blacks would strive to be superbly white but only in areas carefully selected to appear nonaggressive to whites. . . . But where Washington would aspire to achieve a perfect assimilation, Du Bois would stringently resist that end. For him, blackness was to be preserved and perfected, never totally lost" (Williamson 62, 68-69).

2. By actively assuming her cultural identity, Berniece, like the other characters in the play, participates in the making of history and culture, and thereby fulfills what Stuart Hall describes as a culturalist role (see "Cultural Studies").

3. See the section about storytelling, infra.

4. Perhaps, unconsciously, Avery wishes to embrace his African identity. This would suggest that Wilson rejects black Americans' adoption of Christianity. Avery's two failures, to marry Berniece and to deal with the ghost in the final scene, seem to corroborate the fact that Wilson thematizes the rejection of Christianity.

Works Cited

Berkowitz, Gerald M. American Drama of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman, 1992.

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

-----. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Diop, Birago. "Breath." Soyinka, Myth 131-33.

Dworkin, Norine. "The Wilson Chronicle." Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL) 22 Apr. 1990: F1+.

Freedman, Samuel G. "Fine Tuning: The Piano Lesson." New York Times Magazine 10 Sept. 1989: 19+.

-----. "A Voice from the Streets." New York Times Magazine 15 Mar. 1987: 36+.

Goldman, Jeffrey. "Of History as One Long Blues Tune: August Wilson." Dramatics Apr. 1990: 12-16, 39-40.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture and Society 2.1 (1980): 57-72.

Herman, William. Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1987.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Migler, Rachael. "An Elegant Duet: With The Piano Lesson, Director Lloyd Richards and Playwright August Wilson Once Again Prove They Make Beautiful Music Together." Theater Apr. 1990: 114+.

Rothstein, Mervyn. "Round Five for a Theatrical Heavyweight." New York Times 15 Apr. 1990, sec. 2: 3+.

Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forest. 1963. Collected Plays 1. London: Oxford UP, 1973. 1-77.

-----. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.

-----. The Road. 1965. Collected Plays 1. London: Oxford UP, 1973. 147-232.

Wilde, Lisa A. "Reclaiming the Past: Narrative and Memory in Two Trains Running." Yale Reports 14.5 (1990): 1+.

Williamson, Joel. A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

Woodward, Vann C. "Look Away, Look Away." Journal of Southern History 59.3 (1993): 487-504.

Amadou Bissiri holds a Ph.D. in African literature from Paul Valery University in Montpellier, France. He is currently on leave from his position at the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso, West Africa) and, with the aid of a Fulbright award, is pursuing a second doctoral degree, in American Studies, at Boston University.