“Griots,” we were told at the beginning of the evening, are members of a West African caste who bear responsibility for preserving the history of their people. Any vehicle for conveying this history—storytelling, song, dance—is acceptable, as long as it’s entertaining. Anyone who gets through the doors at MK expects to be entertained, and this expectation became Urban Griots’ license to perform. At the same time, through its four short performance pieces, the group showed that history-making is a complicated endeavor riddled with contradiction—a fact that’s constantly threatened by the hegemonic (read: white) view that reduces history to an all-too-neat, biased whole.
In “Contradictions of the Heart,” Walter Allen Bennett, Jr. exposes the painful twists and turns of an interracial relationship. A black woman defends to her black lover her decision to date a white man. She pins her lover’s jealous reaction on a logic that flips around and paradoxically demeans them both: “It just tears you apart because you feel white boys are allowed to have any colored woman they want and po’ you is just relegated to having a measly nigger wench like myself.” He claims that her “gray boy” is just another “liberal. . .with a plantation mentality in drag.” Rather than try to provide pat answers, Bennett lets the debate run its course and reveal its own complexity. In “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play,” Norman P. Johnson presents two Jamaicans with contradictory views of life in America. One is a cab driver, formerly from the upper crust of Jamaican society, for whom America offers an expansive landscape and the chance to make money. The other is his former maid, who ends up in his cab. For her, America is a place where she must be a “hard workin’ woman.” As she sees it, the cabbie is just slumming it, imagining that simply by leaving his class behind he might correct mistakes he’d made along the way. Johnson’s piece points out that American freedom holds forth the contradictory offers of survival or masquerade.
The functions of masquerade are key to both Celina Davis’ “Shades” and Sandye Wilson’s “Blackface.” Davis’ three characters, in unison, begin by reciting the lines: “I am a mask. One face with many sides. One for making a buck. And one for passing it.” These “many sides” include the faces of the past: “Malcolm, Martin, Bumpers, Stewart, Hawkins. . .and Huey too.” Constructing one’s African-American identity in the present is shown to be a matter of enacting history, of utilizing the masks of others, sometimes dead, to create an image of the living. Wilson deals with masquerade directly, placing her eight characters at a masked ball—from a bulimic hostess who continually tries to force-feed her guests, to an attorney who takes on the persona of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Beneath the veneer lie characterizations filled with irony and pathos. Lines are delivered in sentence fragments; the actors maneuver the stage like bumper cars. This low-grade frenzy is interrupted at one crucial point when a diva character presents a ballad to “dead Samo.” Delivered near the end of the evening, the ballad seemed to provide the conclusion binding Urban Griots’ work together.
In focusing on death as an integral part of history, Davis’ and Wilson’s pieces came closest to the tradition of the griot as described by Greg Tate in a recent article in the Village Voice. But there’s a major difference. Senegambian griots, Tate suggests, are ultimately marginalized: “The highest price exacted from the griot for knowing where the bodies are buried is the denial of a burial plot in the communal graveyard.” Urban Griots has no intention of being marginalized. Judging by the quality of its premier event, there’s no danger of that.
—Kathy O’Dell
