when history haunts


 WHEN HISTORY HAUNTS  ORDINARY PEOPLE

I am operating on CPT (crisis panic time), so tonight  I missed the first one-third of the July 14 Nuyorican  Poets Café screening of Ishmael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The two-thirds I watched was pure vintage Ishmael Reed,  an always on target, disturbing and nuanced critique of the sinister partnership of perfumed capitalism and funky systemic racism.  The Haunting forces  many of us to burn our fingers in realities.  Co-conspiracies against history as exampled by Miranda's Hamilton lock us in intellectual pain  Reed  attacks the half-truths and outhouse lies implicit in Miranda's pandering to  liberal wallets, a version of whoring for the prize.. Reed's deconstruction in the play of culture and imperialism (echoes of Edward Said) is simply powerful, but nevertheless in need of editing to reduce distracting verbosity.  Pungent monologues and tense  dialogues make the point, but editing to reduce verbosity ( the bane of August Wilson's plays) would give the point greater force.  The melodrama at the end of the play ought to be reconsidered.  Until such trimming is done, we swing between  the extremes of Miranda's Hamilton and Reed' s The Haunting. We burn with anxiety regarding where truth can find a home. As long as we are alive, truth is relative and contingent.  When we are dead there's some probability we can possess THE TRUTH.

Reed is especially critical of Miranda's failure to do exhaustive research before giving voice to the enslaved, the enslavers, and the multiple guises assumed by the American system of enslavement. Perhaps he supplements what he and others said in Black Hollywood Unchained:  Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood (Third World Press, 2015), and what he has exposed about how wanting history is in  many essays.  Who is listening?  Who is concerned enough to re-read  Ron Milner's "Black Theater ---Go Home"/

In the December 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Miranda published the politically correct essay "What Art Can Do," pages 112-114. His assertion that "All art is political" (112) echoes the ideas of twentieth-century African American thinkers, and his tentative conclusion

"At the end of the day, our job as  artists is to tell the truth as we see it.  If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it" (114).

 can pass muster until his motives for the assertion are calling into question by Reed and others in  articles that might serve as prefaces  for The Haunting.  Reed bid us to be skeptical, to ask for whom contemporary theatre as iconoclasm or idolatry  is designed.

The truth we can possess as long as we breathe depends on comparisons.  We must ask over and over how notions that belong to cultural  genocide ensured the success of Hamilton. We arrive at different responses at different moments of  historical  consciousness The narratives we deem history to be are never absolute.  They do not ascend to a sublime level of accuracy, no matter how much they assume pseudo-Biblical authority.  Therein is the Catch 22 that makes fools of everyone, the lure and lore of rampant capitalism..   

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 15, 2020

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