Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.

Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 418 pp. $27.95.

Paul Carter Harrison, who brought us The Drama of the Nommo (1972), is a wisdom-keeper devoted to revealing the multi-dimensionality of Africana drama. Harrison describes his latest effort, co-edited with Victor Leo Walker and Gus Edwards, as "the first collection of essential texts to offer a critical analysis of the historical, theoretical and performance commonalties of Black Theatre practice throughout the African Diaspora." Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora includes thirty-two well-crafted, rigorously researched essays grouped into four interconnected sections: "African Roots," "Mythology and Metaphysics," "Dramaturgical Practice," and "Performance." These sections are largely symbolic, as the essays signify with and against one another in a text best appreciated in its entirety.

The contributors seem to agree with Harrison that, "whatever value it might have as entertainment, the inventive process of Black Theatre must illuminate the collective ethos of the black experience in a manner that binds, cleanses and heals." The essayists undertake this binding by re-membering various aspects of life and spirituality to art and performance. They cleanse Africana drama by revealing its philosophical depth and inherent critical reflectivity. By embracing forgotten and disrespected forces and figures, the essayists and dramatists undertake cosmic and critical healing. Joni L. Jones's exploration of Shay Youngblood's "radical re/membering," Keith L. Walker's elucidation of Aime Cesaire's ifogbontaayese ('using wisdom to remake/improve the world'), Andrea J. Nouryeh's analysis of Aishah Rahman's applications of "Nommo force," and May Joseph's spiritual-geographical-genealogical study of Sycorax are some examples of the diverse binding, healing, and cleansing techniques exhibited in Black Theatre. These studies complement the groundbreaking efforts of J. C. de Graft, Derek Walcott, and Wole Soyinka, whose classic expositions are reprinted in Black Theatre. Additionally, Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, forerunners of contemporary drama, offer the brief and brilliant "Bopera Theory" and "Porque Tu No M'entrende?: Whatcha Mean You Can't Understand Me?" respectively.

It is often the case that discussions of African continuity in the African Diaspora are one-sided, as if historically dislocated Africans (especially African Americans) must prove their "African-ness." In Black Theatre the discourse is cyclic and truly Pan-African. In "The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance," Babatunde Lawal argues that "visual and performing arts have been an integral part of African cultures since the dawn of human consciousness." He then traces the dawn's radiance from Yoruba ijuba (homage) to African American juba (homage), uniting Gelede to 'Lection Parades, Jelly Roll Morton to Fela, and FESTAC to AfriCobra. Over 200 pages later, Harrison whispers h la Sly Stone, "Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa," and shows himself to be an ibeji (twin) of Lawal. In "Form and Transformation," Harrison analyzes the Okra (soul) of the Second Line, Ring Shout, Shiny Man, and Spiritual-Blues, revealing the sacredness of all Africana art and the divinity and dexterity of Africana artists: "We play the changes, making those improvisations that aspire toward a reconciliation between the visible and invisible, adorning the appropriate masks for secular and sacred performances that will invoke the ancestral spirit."

The dramatists and critics featured in Black Theatre reclaim the language, concepts, and comprehensiveness of their ethos and liberate themselves from Western traps of bifurcation and a predilection to define and thereby diminish. Lundeana M. Thomas offers a stunning exposition of the remarkable life-craft of Barbara Ann Teer, who, when asked to define "black drama," replied, "I don't define it. I don't know what 'black drama' is. I just know that I'm a certain way, and that way nurtures me, and that's all I know to write about.... I don't separate dance from singing from writing from directing. There's really only the experience." For Baraka, this holistic experience is Bopera--"poetry and music and heightened movement." An ancient and holistic metaphysical force of the African continuum--"Sun Ra brought back the Pythagorean application of Egyptian understanding that 'everything is everything,' and that music, color, number, emotions, the laws of matter in motion are revealed as inextricably tied together"--Bopera gains power through its articulation and multitudinous creative products: "Bopera is re-Creation, inner attainment, gained by tightening our everyday language into verse and lifting it into the zoom zone of the spiritual, giving it emotional and intellectual impact through music."

The preacher is kin to the babalawo; Esu struts in the strides of hard legs from Brooklyn to Ngula Bayou; and jazz's paradoxical ability to regenerate and multiply itself in the nadir of the Middle Passage is the seminal force of re-creation that underpins the signifying whole. Consequently, while Africana drama can be found on stage, it easily makes a home in earth, human beings, vinyl, paper, and concrete--the stylings of soulforce know no bounds. Honing his inheritance of eclectic soulpowers, Keith Antar Mason crafts a remarkable ritual/performance composition. In "From Hip-Hop to Hittite: Part X," Mason reproduces the healing/saving/claiming "Hittite rant" he created to cohere his fragmented community and kin. Mason's "wildassed performance text in itself meant to be read out loud ashe" vibrates from the ink to the soul of the reader/initiate.

Proving the ancient circle unbroken and revolving and evolving, the essays in Black Theatre boast ideological harmony and are organized in such a way as to complement those that come before and after. The essayists often pay juba to the same forerunners (W. E. B. Du Bois, Oyin Ogunba, Aime Cesaire) and "make Ifa" to the same Orisa (Esu, Osun, Ogun) and powers (ase, nommo). However, Esu, Ogun, nommo, and Osun are only a few of the multitudinous forces that inform Africana ritual drama. Another important phenomenon is the Yoruba Gelede festival. Described as the "ultimate spectacle," Gelede is arguably the apex of Yoruba ritual drama. Although Lawal is the only essayist to mention Gelede, its influence in contemporary Africana life and art is vast. Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Teer's "ritualistic revivals," and Clarke and Dickerson's Re-membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show all evince the creative, critical, healing, and evolutionary properties of Gelede. Additionally, Sydne Mahone describes Anna Deavere Smith as a one-woman Gelede: "Her goal, far beyond impersonation, is the embodiment of the spoken word which reveals the essence of human character. Her performance assembles a diverse group of characters in a way that is only possible within the contextual reality of her work in the theatre." Furthermore, many male creators don the Great Mother's Mask and truth-tell, whirl, encode, and decode in Her and his honor: August Wilson, who words and works inspired Black Theatre, Baraka, Cesaire, and Tupac Shakur, whose thug life, death, and afterlife are deeper than we thought (see Melvin Gibbs's "ThugGods: Spiritual Darkness and Hip Hop" in Greg Tate's Everything But the Burden), are also creators in the Gelede tradition. While twenty-seven diverse essayists invoking many of the same forces and figures is a profound testament to the magnitude of the African continuum, there are myriad contributing deities and forces that uniquely signify, complicate, and elucidate, and they await re-membering.

Another problematic issue that may stem from Black Theatre's ideological uniformity is the usage of the word black. Although in the majority of cases black is used as a proper noun, referring to the collective culture, history, way of life, and spiritual/political foundations of a people, and used synonymously with African, Caribbean, Yoruba, et al., it is not capitalized. The most jarring usage occurs in Walker's "Introduction to Part I," where he repeatedly uses the phrases black Africans in the Diaspora and black Africans in the Americas. The quasi-adjectival use of the word black in this instance and many others is incongruous at best. Africana peoples are diverse and have adopted many terms over the years. Although the lower-case "black" is by no means uncommon, the editors of Black Theatre, as have editors of other anthologies, should have included a brief note explaining the text-wide usage.

Speaking of "black," Beverly J. Robinson, Tejumola Olaniyan, George C. Wolfe, and others discuss how and why European-American minstrels turned Africana art into lucrative "black" ritual trauma. And many essayists, including Femi Euba, Deborah Wood Holton, Gus Edwards, and Walker, analyze the various ways by which Africana dramatists slay artistic oppressors with their own "black" (nefarious, sub-human, buffoonish, lascivious) weapons. However, Black Theatre offers little critique of the internalization and manifestations of self-hatred that have pervaded many Africana ritual dramatic efforts from the 1850s, when many Africana performers were forced to don blackface, to this era. Wolfe's epiphany in "Performance Method" that European-American minstrels were suffering from melanin-envy and "fractured cultural identity" is telling; but sadly, "black" ritual trauma, as performed by Africana peoples, remains more marketable and pervasive than consciousness-raising Black ritual drama. In order fully to appreciate the African continuum and truly heal what Harrison terms the "corrosive effects of self-deprecation," artists and critics must remove and scrutinize all the masks in the Africana repertoire--those inherited from Africa and those donned for survival in heinous lands.

Through the answers it offers and questions it raises, Black Theatre prepares its audience for the difficult and ongoing work of holistic artistic expression and cultural recovery. For students and scholars of dramatic practice and theory of all ethnicities, ownership and close study of Black Theatre is essential. This book illuminates, challenges, and expands the consciousness. It also inspires the reader to undertake re-vision, re-member additional theoretical paradigms, and continue the translocation of creative, analytical, performative, and spiritual powers to "the fourth stage."

Teresa N. Washington

Kent State University