You Must Set Forth at Dawn (47 page)

Then I thought it all had to do with insurance. Was a police on-the-scene report essential to ensuring that his car was repaired on his policy? Apparently not. Then I proposed: Well, maybe the animal was not dead and he was awaiting an ambulance—the Euro-American world is filled with animal lovers of the decidedly lunatic fringe, and maybe it would be considered cruel if he put the animal in the trunk of his car, even for the purpose of taking it to the nearest veterinary clinic. That would still appear a ridiculous proceeding, but I was willing to make allowances. But no, the animal was quite dead, he assured me, dead as warm venison. So what was the problem?

It was the law, he explained. He was not permitted to take the game away. In the United States of America, when game decides to commit suicide by car, it is only the police who can remove it! Malcolm plummeted in my estimation, from that moment, to a level from which it took quite a while for him to recover. The law? What did the law want of a dead deer—to perform a postmortem? Was Malcolm a closet vegetarian? I projected myself onto those moments of involuntary deerslaughter and the tame surrender of legitimate kill. Scene:
Commuters rushing to and fro, minding their own business. Self-sacrificial
deer jumps onto the road, hits oncoming car with violence (also damaging the vehicle!). Victim driver has been working on
The Road,
a play about the god Ogun,
sacrifice, ritual, and a mystic quest, knows very well that the director would gladly
relieve him of any burden of guilt
—
if any is felt
—
by organizing an after-rehearsal
convention on the mythological symbolism of a stricken deer, even if it required
motoring to some wasteland where a bonfire would attract little attention.
Malcolm, in short, had a ritual responsibility to have thrown that deer into the boot of his car and reported to the director of this production, who could not be bound by any impious American law under which policemen took charge of such carcasses, which then totally disappeared from sight.

To this day, no one has offered me a credible answer to the question: What happens to the mammals that are carted away by the State Police? Are they incinerated? Sold as dog food? Sent to veterinary teaching hospitals for dissection? Ha! And my assistant tamely hands over warm-blooded wild game to the police—it was most cowardly conduct, an act of betrayal and repudiation of every new knowledge I had imparted to the company. It was unacceptable conduct in a close collaborator. I refused to speak to him outside professional contact for days and viewed him with deep suspicion for at least a week afterward.

It would be my fate to be present at such deviant conduct in later years— once at Cornell University, with Skip Gates and a visiting collaborator from the days of the Orisun Theatre, Femi Euba. Skip was at the wheel of his car when we came upon a freshly slain deer, still warm to the touch, victim of a hit-and-run driver perhaps, no more than ten seconds ahead of our vehicle. Our duty to the world of rationality and ritual was to pick up that deer, repair to Skip's ample garden, and commence proceedings. I had no cooperation. On the contrary, Skip moved his car far from the carcass to ensure that I did not myself heave it into the car. I was becoming schooled in the peculiarity of Americans, so I contented myself with letting him know that he had inflicted a mortal wound on our friendship. The Chicago experience remained my introduction to the wastrel habit of American drivers after they have been victims of assault by rampaging game. A little more education, and such drivers would know that there was only one explanation for such “accidents”—they are a gift from Ogun and should be honored as such, atop a funeral pyre to the accompanying music of popping corks and roasting peppers.

It was that play,
The Road,
appropriately, that commenced the formulation of the image of the dying calf for any disasters I would later incur onstage. The contribution to that dismal experience by the lead actor was of such a nature and dimension that he became known as “the Black Hole,” so resolutely did he suck the energies and vitality of the rest of the company into the antimatter of his stage presence. The play should have been retitled, for that production,
The
Eclipse.
As for the director—hidden in a corner seat, having long abandoned the pointless exercise of note taking, I had only one wish left in the world: to sink into the theater vomitorium and be deposited directly into the underworld. Since that vanishing trick refused to oblige, I considered myself guilty of a double dereliction of duty by failing to step onto the stage in the middle of the ongoing performance to apologize to the audience for having abused their evening out, and would they please leave now and collect their entry fees at the box office—with a glass of champagne plus canapés, compliments of the establishment, and free theater seats for the rest of the season? And if anyone felt that this was not sufficient to assuage their assaulted dignity, they were invited to remain behind and witness an impeccable demonstration of a classic exit, to be performed by the director, in that terminal idiom known as
seppuku. . . .

When that evening is contrasted with another in the same theater, the production of
Death and the King's Horsemen,
the difference is instructive. This was a production that was bedeviled by more than the usual problems, giving off the feeling, sometimes, that the entire project was under a severe psychic attack, threatening the very survival of the actors. Despite such malevolence, however, this production, in Chicago and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—not its post-Nobel revival at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York!—proved to be an aesthetic and critical success, a rare combination. It earned a
New York Times
accolade as one of the twelve best productions of that year.

In Chicago, however, where it made its American premiere, accidents of a physical nature threatened its very emergence on stage—accidents on the highways, within the city, and within the theater. Unlike with
The Road,
no divine signal in the form of a productive accident came our way, only debilitating ones, such as that of “Mrs. Pilkings,” the wife of the district officer in that play, whose leg remained in a plaster cast till only a few days prior to performance, duplicating the cast-in-plaster-cast spectacle of Siena. No equivalent of Abraham's ram was spied entangled in the rigging, pointing us in the direction of what the gods demanded; instead, it was a stagehand who did his best to substitute. He landed barely one inch from the concrete flooring and the certainty of a shattered spine. Another day, giving directions from beside a plush curtain that covered an exit in the auditorium, I escaped, literally by sheer whiskers, the certain pulverization of my chin. I felt my goatee swept violently aside by an offensive weapon that had been inadvertently launched by one of the actors awaiting his entry—of course it had to be the actor who was also a fanatical bodybuilder! My beard was swept aside, and such was the gale force that followed in the wake of that truncheon that I finally understood the origin of the expression “a close shave.” I was astonished to find my beard still intact. And then the illnesses—in so many ways, the seeds of serene Siena appeared to have been sown in the wilds of Chicago.

There was a clear demand by invisible forces for some rite of exorcism. The black actors were of the same mind, but the management, though fully in agreement that some kind of psychic remedy was called for, balked at the proposed format. The Chicago bylaws, I was made to understand, forbade the slaughtering of a ram within city limits. What of a cockerel? I inquired. It made no difference; the Chicago city fathers definitely frowned on the conversion of public buildings into private butcheries. The accidents continued. The management let it be known that its position had not changed but noted that it was not equipped to prevent any illegal act that was committed without its knowledge. It was thus left to the company to let the management know roughly between what hours the company might commit any purely conjectural illegal act.

After the theater had closed on the appointed night, which was to be during a week of the theatrical run of another play, the entire company, black and white, plus the technical director assembled under the stage, gathering around an outsize white cockerel, smuggled in by one of the actors. Kola nut was offered, libation—moonshine, for lack of palm wine in its distilled form,
ogogoro
—was poured. The bird was put out of its misery. I improvised a ritual, sprinkling blood in hidden corners beneath the stage and smearing some more on the spots of the major near accidents. The cockerel was then prepared in the apartment of one of the actors and consumed, each member of the cast eating a piece, however small.

Miraculously, the accidents ceased. Not one more actor so much as stubbed a toe in the darkened theater, tripped over wiring, or suffered from food poisoning, neither during the rest of the rehearsals nor through the lengthy run, not even when the production left the scene of the sacrificial cockerel and transferred to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. If the spate of accidents had continued, I had my defense: substituting a cockerel for a ram and other forms of improvisation onstage are all very well for humans, but the deities reserve the right of a final, critical approval or rejection.

From Ghetto to Garrison

OF COURSE IT FEELS GRAND AND COMPARATIVELY STRESS-FREE TO WORK occasionally in theaters where everything is predictable—the stage mechanics work, actors are paid, there is a set division of labor, and so on—but I confess that such ventures leave me hankering for the more precarious existence that characterizes much of theater culture on the African continent. There, theater is not so much a noun as it is a verb; theater is where theater
happens.

Unlike my first, semiprofessional theater company, the 1960 Masks, I created the Orisun Theatre principally as a political vehicle. Its first home, the Mbari Writers and Artists Club, Ibadan, was its nurturing home, and that environment became a formative factor in the distinct characteristics of the Orisun Theatre. Mbari was located at the base of the Dugbe market hub in the chaotic city of Ibadan, a crossroads of beggars and touts, pickpockets and gangsters, improvised motor parks, open urinals, lunatics, street vendors and itinerant preachers, beer parlors that were recruitment centers and haunts of freelance thugs high on marijuana, local gin, and the guarantee of protection from their political masters, no matter what mayhem they caused. Often it struck me that the daily street theater, to which most people remained oblivious, was far superior to anything that we could mount on the stage, but of course, while that demanded no entrance fee, payment could be exacted in rather unpleasant ways. Certainly the drama of the very environment contributed markedly to the development of the character of the Orisun artiste, an existence on the thin edge of survival, and the ability not just to identify with but to merge, chameleon-like, with the colors, sounds, and pulses of its habitués.

It was only just, therefore, that
The Beatification of Area Boy,
a play evolved from the Nigerian slums in Lagos and from the improvisational working method of Orisun—it actually began as a series of sketches—would prove, fortuitously, the vessel on which the Orisun impulse would travel, and along the same route that African slaves had taken to “the New World.” It certainly provided me one of the most unforgettable—frustrating but infinitely rewarding— theatrical ventures I ever engaged in, and at a time when I desperately required some form of relief—its production took place during the high season of the anti-Abacha struggle.

First, however,
Beatification
made its—unexpectedly poignant—premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, England, under a British director, Jude Kelly. On the eve of its premiere came news of the hanging, by Sani Abacha, of the writer and environmental champion of the Ogoni, Ken Saro-wiwa, and his eight comrades. I was not present at the opening, but the news predictably cast a pall over the theater and created a quandary for the artistes—to cancel the event as a gesture of protest and respect or to dedicate the performance to their memory. They decided on the latter.

Six members from the Orisun workshop in Nigeria, the Sisi Clara Workshop, including three pioneers of that company, traveled to England to participate. I was involved in the production, unusually, as I prefer to leave a director of any of my plays to his or her own devices, but Jude Kelly was no less determined to block all my escape routes! As I lent a hand to her efforts, I returned wistfully again and again to that play's interrupted maturation in its own spawning ground and wondered whether the Yorkshire production would ever be seen by its intended audiences in Isale-Eko (Lagos), in Dugbe (Ibadan), the original Orisun home, or indeed in other Nigerian main cities—Kaduna, Enugu, Benin, Jos, or Port Harcourt. The production toured Europe, the United States (Brooklyn), and Australia, always to uplifting reviews and reception, but it remained, for me, just another successful production. Not even its transfer to the violent environment of Brooklyn came close as a substitute for Dugbe or Isale-Eko.

Then a Jamaican producer, Sheila Graham, ran across the play in a drama bookshop, read it, and said to herself—But this is Jamaica! This is Kingston, Jamaica, even if it did set out from Lagos! Sheila sought me out in Atlanta, where I was teaching at Emory University. A few months later, I was in Jamaica on a reconnoitering visit. I visited the various performing spaces, and, among the choices, never was a decision so well made in advance by the very social topography of a place!

As I confessed in my program notes, the easiest part of the production turned out to be the choice of a theater. Among all the contenders, including the far more modern Little Theatre, it was quite straightforwardly a case of— no contest! I settled for the Ward Theatre the moment I was driven through a pulsating community to confront this antique-looking structure from the Victorian Age. It was as if I had been transported to Broad Street or Yaba in Nigeria's Lagos! Groundnut sellers, cigarette hawkers, rickety stalls with the usual knickknacks were all on display; layabouts lolled on broken walls, tree stumps, and pavements in various stages of boredom and alert opportunism. Present and vacantly ambulatory was the regulation quota of an indulged street lunatic or two, probably high on ganja
. . .
summatively, an exterior of dust and noise and vitality but also—an efficient sound-insulated interior! It was a most unusual combination. Much as, confessedly, I feel at home in street theater, I also prefer major productions without unscripted “noises off.” The environment of the Ward Theatre was unbelievably the identical environment of Glover Hall in Lagos, whose boards had often played host to Orisun Theatre and its parent company, the 1960 Masks.

The
process,
however, proved to be no such easy walkover! Never before has that eve-of-performance greeting “Break a leg!” held such resonance as during the entire preparation of
Beatification.
Over the project, more than a mere leg was broken—literally this time—for better or worse: social mythologies, insularity, professional attitudes, aptitude limitations, conventions, performance concepts, taboos, and so on, not to mention my own stoic ceiling and personal endurance record! The very violent context of “the Area Boy Project” in Kingston also provided a powerful antidote to the pessimism that daily threatened my existence from the stubborn tenacity of a dictator's hold on my own political space, the daily reports of new atrocities on the populace, accompanied by news of capitulation and collaboration by much of the political class.

Focusing on
youth, youth, youth!
—that all-too-familiar marginalized, disadvantaged, frustrated, exploited, underutilized, straining-at-the-leash-of-opportunity, but also often dangerously romanticized
youth
—proved most efficacious as a restorative agent. There was also Tunji Oyelana, my dogged collaborator, as a constant reminder of an unending mission. He was, after all, a founding member of Orisun. Now, as co–musical director of the production, he was a figure of continuity: thirty-plus years of collaboration, the product of a rather stubborn social-artistic impulse that had begun even before the nation's independence. All the same, when one embarks on a creative adventure in an environment that is paradoxically both familiar and estranged, it is always wiser to prepare for the roadblocks of the latter, girding oneself for a bare-foot journey into unknown territory.

It was a welcome break—the first and only sustained break—from working to topple Abacha's regime and being hunted in turn by his goons. That is, I was insulated even from news about Nigeria. The long reach of the menace was, however, accorded due place, and I was assigned a police “minder” by the government for most of my stay in Jamaica. I felt reasonably safe, however; Jamaica was itself such a violent place that I felt that Abacha's agents would have met their match locally before they came within a stone's throw of their quarry.

I found myself thrust into a bubbling, undirected ferment of uneven talent, a dubious mix of professionals, semiprofessionals, and rank amateurs, several of them unaccustomed to the discipline that is basic to the theater profession. It helped that Tunji Oyelana was also available to take some of the strain. Tunji, with his wispy goatee and avuncular manner, never set out directly to be accounted a political dissident, but his consistent and stubborn streak of conviction, even when strictly engaged in an artistic pursuit, would invariably result in his being marked down for negative attention by successive regimes.

After the West Yorkshire Playhouse production, he had been unable to return to Nigeria, having been singled out for reprisals by the Abacha regime for his prominent role in that project. He had further compounded his pariah status by comments in interviews on the BBC and in a documentary that was made of the production and shown on Nigerian television. By now I had been formally declared a wanted man by the regime, and quite a few colleagues paid a heavy price even for association that had preceded the regime. As frequently happened, warnings from highly placed contacts reached us in time, and the other actors could take due precautions in their mode of reentry into the country. Until the death of Sani Abacha, Tunji's home and office in Ibadan remained under constant surveillance.

It was not simply a play project intended solely for rehearsals, performances, and dispersal. The Kingston venture was approached by Sheila Graham, from the very beginning, as one that would not merely rehabilitate the disadvantaged youths of Jamaica but transform the degraded inner-city environment. Would-be artistes were invited through advertisements and media promotion to apply for places in what was dubbed “the Area Boy Project.” They underwent auditions and a final selection process—hundreds, apparently, had applied! They also differed from Orisun in the quality of their background, much of which sometimes made the Nigerian sixties environments of Isale-Eko or Dugbe seem like boarding schools in comparison. They were young— the youngest was ten, the “granddaddy” twenty-two, with a deep baritone operatic voice—but mostly they were all still in school, yet already adult and life-stressed in various ways.

“Mamma,” for instance, a battle-scarred sixteen-year-old, was living alone and taking care of her younger sister. Her father had long since abandoned the family, and later her mother had died. She took in washing and did other odd jobs to survive and ensure that her sister went to school. “Clipper”—no one appeared to be without a nickname, and I wondered if this was another survival strategy, creating a deflective personality—was a boy cadet who was clearly enamored of the glamour and discipline of the military, while “Chicken,” perhaps one of the handful without a notable background of trauma, attended rehearsals under the ambiguous shadow of her stepfather. His principles were against his stepdaughter appearing onstage, but he found all the attention paid to Chicken's evident talents irresistible.

“Molewa,” by contrast, had a Rastafarian father, also remarried, who proudly appeared at rehearsals, seeking every opportunity to discuss world politics with me and to appear in photographs. “Sally,” fourteen, had lost an eye in mysterious circumstances. The widely accepted story was that she had been battered by a drunken father, but she persisted in her tale of a mysterious bird that had flown in through the window of her home one day and—smack into her eye! She claimed that the seemingly blind eye was not truly blind but was her eye into another world with whose denizens she could commune. For this reason she would not agree to visit an eye specialist. “Aston” had lost his brother in a shoot-out; during rehearsals, his father would also die, victim of another shoot-out. And Tanya Thomas would lose her life at fourteen, a few weeks after the close of
Beatification.
She walked out of her home one normal morning and straight into a bullet from the crossfire of a gang war. . . .

Jamaica
was
a space of violence. I knew that already. I had received my education on that island years before, during Carifesta, the Caribbean Festival of the Arts, when, ignorant of the turf wars that were being waged between the “garrisons,” two colleagues—Kole Omotoso and Abiola Irele, both university lecturers—and I had come close to a messy end with a taxi driver on a lonely road. Now I was thrust amid the products of those hard beginnings, amid youths who had been forbidden to cross the lines of close neighborhood. Enemy lines were clearly demarcated. Touching in their idealism and innocence, plaintive yet messianic were the voices of our young recruits:

My dream is to see the world come together and live as one in peace and love
and stop the killing.

I have learnt that you cannot categorize everyone as the same, each person has
their own feelings, you need to know how to deal di ferently with each person.

If we don't pull the “turfs” together, Kingston is not going to survive.

I believe that we as young people can make a di ference in the community.

Those were the voices of the garrison children, seeking liberation into a world of creativity and fulfillment, into which they also sought to liberate their community. At least half of them had emerged from broken homes. Most had known violence firsthand or indirectly, in one form or another. In the worst of the “war zones”—as they are actually described!—residents often slept beneath, not on, their beds, for fear of being killed before morning by stray bullets crashing through their thin walls at night. “Theater” was a strange concept to many. They had grown up learning to know their own turfs and accepting that it was dangerous to stray across certain streets or cross borderlines.