reading a play by Ishmael Reed

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READING A PLAY BY ISHMAEL REED

 

Our schools taught us to read plays in a traditional Western manner. It was assumed that the West had all the answers.  My generation was not trained to deal well with challenges of genre classification and empirical aesthetics presented in contemporary drama, especially in works that have investments in local knowledge.   Kelley Griffith's Writing Essays about Literature (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011) is one of many books that provide concise descriptions  of what one was expected to know about length, audience, plot, characterization and dialogue, performance, setting, theme, irony and subgenres.  Description is not praxis.  My generation learned that not in a classroom but by way of trial and error.  We confronted  the necessity of  devising  our own strategies for making sense of a play in the absence of performance. A few books and articles did address "the theatre in the mind," but we were not urged to study them. 

 

When we can't witness a performance, an extraordinary use of imagination must suffice.  One has to hear and see in one's mind what the script, the direction score, bids a director and actors to manifest.  That task is minimized if we can watch a video of a performance, but even then the sensorium of being in an audience is lost.  Although I did see a televised  Nuyorican Poets  Café reading of Ishmael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda (Brooklyn: Archway Editions, 2020), my actual reading of the  text imposes the sense of loss and of what is fortunate about being a member of the radio generation, Reed's generation.

 

Like much of his fiction, Reed's play accomplishes an un-writing of history that is not to be equated with how professional historians usually revise history.  Study of Reed's early novels makes that point clear. Un-writing is a prelude for seeking greater accuracy in determining how narratives of time past ought to be constructed, and it includes a pinch of deconstruction.   Un-writing is a part of a historian's toolkit, but its role is usually so buried in density of historiography and methodology that we fail to notice how it functions.  We learn some details about what drives un-writing from Erving Goffman's famous study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), a book that uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework.. 

 

Reed brings theatrical performance  upfront and slams it in your face.  Consider how his novel Mumbo Jumbo like Toni Morrison's Jazz altered understanding of the celebrated Harlem Renaissance.  In the Age of Trump + COVID1-19  pandemic, altering  (altaring) our cognition is essential.  Dealing with the still emerging history of a contemporary commodity (Miranda's Hamilton) is more problematic than is dealing at some distance from what we wish to believe is over and done.  Nothing human is ever over and done   In his paratextual introduction, Reed addresses this problem by inserting his undated letter to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, requesting support from that institution for The Haunting by providing tickets for students "as you did for the thousands of students whom you sponsored to see Miranda's so that students receive both sides of the debate?"  The debate is focused on whether Alexander Hamilton was an abolitionist or a champion of slavery. Reed has been genuinely concerned for many decades  about the psychological damage of historical propaganda liberal and conservative.  When lies are multiplied in those narratives deemed to be history, ordinary people are duped into laying elephant  eggs.

 

Reed's target in The Haunting is Miranda's wildly acclaimed portrayal of Hamilton as an abolitionist, as capital an example of artistic duping as was Quentin Tarantio's Django Unchained( 2012) . And it must not be overlooked that Reed edited Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood ( Chicago: Third World Press, 2015). His play gives us a partial, partisan commentary on the State of White Broadway.

 

 Miranda based his musical on Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (2004).  Were Harold Bloom still alive, he would likely praise Miranda for capitalizing a grand act of poetic misprision and chide Reed for anxiety of influence.

 

It is not to Bloom but Alexander Hamilton himself  to whom we should look for irony.  The true irony, as Reed discerns, surfaces in a brief passage from Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 29 (January 9, 1788)-----

 

"In reading many of the publications against the Constitution, a man is apt to image that he is perusing some ill written tale or romance; which instead of natural and agreeable images exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes  --- Gorgons Hydras and Chimeras dire ---discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents and transforming every thing it touches into a monster."

 

For Reed and those who share his values,  Hamilton is the monster, the creation that defies the creator's control.  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) aptly depicts this inconvenient reality.  We can consult Elizabeth Young's Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: NYU Press, 2008), which gives attention to racial and political resonances.   Indirectly, Annette Gordon-Reed's recent remarks on "rebellious history" give  credibility to Reed's transforming criticism of an artistic product into a stern warning about the shaping of the American mindscape in the twenty-first century.  The reason is not far to seek. There has been much talk of late about the role of art in effecting social justice and scant discussion of how certain works of art reify injustice and serve to buttress State-sponsored national ideologies. Reading The Haunting increases the probability of knowing what is afoot.

 

Reed's economy of dividing The Haunting into two acts heightens awareness that the plot is the discourse.

 

Act 1, Scene 1 ---Under the influence of Ambien, the character Miranda experiences dream segments which emphasize what Chernow's study of Hamilton chose to omit.  George Washington and Hamilton have a pro-slavery conversation, and Miranda is frustrated by discovering so-called founding heroes were "not altruistic, but craven."  After an awakening exchange with his literary agent, Miranda is visited by spirits, type characters ---Ben,  Negro Woman (who sounds like an echo from Sherley Anne Williams' novel Dessa Rose), Native American Woman and Native American Man.  The parade of spirits obviously alludes to Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  In the heat of testimonials, Native American Man and Ben begin to enact a verbal divide and conquer strategy employed by Euro-American imperialists, for it is quite important to note the co-operation and the tensions between Reds and Blacks in the  matrix of democracy and systemic racism.  The act ends with the spirit of Hamilton informing Miranda that the musical isn't owned by the author but by investors, the managers of capitalism.

 

The five scenes in Act 2 are less surreal.  They foreground the agency of those silenced by mainstream histories, an agency that effectively teaches Miranda the errors of his artistry.  He is bopped by the boomerang he threw forth.

Scene 1 ---Harriet Tubman tells her own story

Scene 2 -- Indentured Female Servant spills the beans about how Hamilton's in-laws (the Schuyler family) use the license of slavery's Constitution to treat human beings as animals.  The indentured woman reminds Hamilton and the audience that caste and racial difference have a central  permanence.

The most poignant  testimony in this scene comes from Diana, the runaway slave who has an excruciatingly painful death: torn to pieces by dogs, her fingers and toes cut off as souvenirs, the remains of her body a feast for wild animals.  Diana's spirit pleads with Miranda to help her find her bones, so she can have an African funeral.  Miranda's reply is "I was just following Ron's book."  We know from post-WWII war crime trials how lame the excuse is.

Scene 3 ---Miranda and Chernow argue about the importance of historical facts.  Chernow does not respect Miranda as an artist. He does not respect Miranda's emerging scruples.  He respects the wealth he and Miranda have accumulated and his own ability to look at truth with one eye closed and the other eye fixed on capital. "Yes, maybe I did know that these Founding Fathers were scoundrels, but do you think that I could get course adoptions, bestsellers and awards if I told the truth" (63).

Scene 4 ---Miranda's agent wants him to write a musical about Columbus, and he is outraged by Miranda's new embrace of principles.

Scene 5 ---Miranda refuses the accept the Great White Way Award for Hamilton.  He confesses

 

"I won't be accepting the award.  If I did, I would continue to be a co-conspirator in a crime against humanity.

…

Because of me, thousands of school children are trapped intellectually in the same lies as I was.  I trusted this historian Ron Chernow.  It was his credentials that faked me out.  But now I know better" (66).

 

At the end of The Haunting, Miranda is in much the same position as was Prospero in the epilogue of The Tempest.  "…Now I want/ spirits to enforce, and to enchant,/And my ending is despair,/ Unless I be reliev'd by prayer…"  He is at the mercy of prayer and history.

 

Reed's ending is wished-for romance effectively undermined by the pragmatism and skepticism a reading of the play invites.  If he so wishes, a reader can become a co-conspirator with Reed in a project of un-writing history for the sake of inscribing a history that does not countenance dehumanization.  Reed's ultimate target is what Pankaj Mishra describes as "the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism" (see NYRB, November 19, 2020 ). We are aware, of course, that Western conservatives share with liberals the bubble of self-congratulation.  Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in The Atlantic (December 2019) that

"All art is political.  In tense, fractious times ---like our current moment ---all art is political….Art lives in the world,  and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it."

Reed and Miranda might agree that they are both indebted to DuBois' formation " Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists" ("Criteria of Negro Art," 1926). For Miranda, art "allows us to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us."  In contrast, Reed refuses to tiptoe around the icon of devastating mechanisms, including history as mechanism. He doesn't sell his integrity for a fistful of dollars.  He is a shrewd  iconoclast who smashes nonsense with a purpose.  That is one of many things I take away from my first reading of The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 2, 2020