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A Second Passport

Photo courtesy of the author / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,605 words)

In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.

We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi.
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How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools

Longreads Pick

Journalist and documentarian — and Stuyvesant High School alumna — Laurie Gwen Shapiro profiles Alice de Rivera, whose 1969 case challenging Stuyvesant to open its enrollment to girls led to so many other male-only secondary schools and colleges to abandon gender-based exclusion.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 26, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,795 words)

Why Marlon James Decided to Write an African “Game of Thrones”

Longreads Pick

Jia Tolentino profiles Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James upon the publication of his newest book, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf.”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Jan 28, 2019
Length: 38 minutes (9,727 words)

Edward Gorey: A Highly Conjectural Man

Edward Gorey posing with a set piece he designed for the Broadway production of "Dracula," 1977. Jack Mitchell / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (2,151 words)

 

Edward Gorey’s small illustrated books, many of which are collected in his Amphigorey anthologies, are seemingly quite simple and often morbid. Children are befallen by terrible fates. Parents disappear and reappear too late. Danger lurks nearby, as dusk makes its way across the moors. All of this sinister mischief is told in black and white pen-and-ink drawings, with occasional color highlights thrown in (which somehow only serve to make the image more dreary and doom-laden). The characters differ little in appearance, and the prose — when there is any — is often a few rhyming lines near the bottom of the page. Looking closer, one can see the intricacy of the cross-hatching, the careful etching-like strokes that, alongside Gorey’s fragile humor, underpin the darkness.

Edward Gorey, like his art, was at once mercurial and precise. His interests, hobbies, dislikes, and habits are well documented, from his late-in-life love for TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,to his devotion to George Balanchine’s work with the New York City Ballet, to his undying love for the cats with which he lived. His physical appearance — over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a long beard, draped in a huge fur coat, with rings on multiple fingers and scuffed up white sneakers on his feet — is as much part of the lore of Gorey’s work as the nonsensical creatures who populate his illustrations. Read more…

The Tale of Boozy Suzy and Her Hammer Fist

Elsa / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (3,959 words)

In February 2006, Polly Esther answered a classified ad in NOW Magazine, Toronto’s alt-weekly. “The Pillow Fight League wants YOU,” the ad read. “Tryouts, Sat. February 18th. Ask for Suzanne.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, this sounds interesting,’” Esther told me over the phone from her home in Toronto recently. “I literally have no idea why I looked in the back of the paper that day or why, for some reason, this spoke to me. I called and I asked a bit about it: ‘We’re gonna be this women’s fight league. It’s pillow fighting, but it’ll be a mix of boxing and wrestling and mixed martial arts as well.’”
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Carvell Wallace on ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCarney’s Next Acts

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 20: Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney during the MTC Broadway Cast Call for "Choir Boy" at The MTC Rehearsal Studios on November 20, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Walter McBride/Getty Images)

For a New York Times Magazine profile story, Carvell Wallace interviews the playwright Tarell Alvin McCarney, visiting a rehearsal of “Choir Boy,”  a “queer coming of age tale” about members of a gospel choir at a prestigious all-Black boarding school:

In the scene I watched the cast work on, the character of David, played by Caleb Eberhardt, decides to open his heart to another character, which he does by starting off a song, “Motherless Child.” The lyrics — “sometimes I feel like a motherless child/a long way from home” — date back to slavery, and like the words of most spirituals, they have a clear and heavy range of meanings. You can interpret them as personal, spiritual and political, all at once.

All those meanings are at play in the scene. The boys of Drew are, literally, a long way from home. They share showers, sleep in dorm rooms and can call home only once a week. They are left to build themselves out of whatever is in the air: tough but fair headmasters, a dignified but burdensome “black excellence” tradition, a sky full of forceful and conflicting expectations of black masculinity. It is too much and boils over.

Tensions are high among the boys in the locker room, who are still buzzing over a recent near-fight. David, on the way to the shower, stops to sing the first stanza of the song alone, then to a classmate. Then the entire group joins in, sending their voices echoing off unforgiving tile. It is meant to be heart-rending.

The problem, this morning, was that it wasn’t working. The director, Trip Cullman — he most recently directed Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” last year — was gamely trying different ways of transitioning into this fraught moment. What if Eberhardt did it from upstage? What if he went halfway off and came back? What if he started quietly and then built?

The playwright was present, wearing a cream-colored cardigan, crisp jeans and gleaming, off-white, all-leather Chuck Taylors, seated at a folding table crowded with script binders and room-temperature coffees. So far, I had heard him say little. But now he asked for the floor. The actors took seats. I noticed I was nervous for him. When the actors are struggling and the director can’t seem to find a solution, you’re forced to ask: Could the problem be the script?

But when McCraney talked, he didn’t talk about the play or the dialogue. Instead, he talked about grief. Casually, as though it were something that just came to his mind. He explained what it felt like to lose his mother at 22. He did not talk about how she died, and he hinted only a little at the complexity of their relationship; this address was not autobiographical. It was to do with emotions. McCraney described how grief lives in a person’s body, how it settles there. He explained its half-life, the unreliable nature of its decay. He talked about the phenomenon, when grieving a loved one, in which you begin to have memories of times after their death that you think they must have been present for. Remember when I won an Academy Award for my movie, and you were so proud? And then he talked about how things like that make you grieve their absence all over again, and how that grief catches you unawares, taking over your body when you least expect it. It sits in a small reservoir beneath your heart. It whispers to you at odd hours and yells at you in quiet ones.

I teared up just a little bit hearing it. My own mother died in my arms almost exactly 10 years earlier. My relationship with her was also complicated. My grief also weaves in and out of being with little explanation or predictability. McCraney was calling something into the room, I might even say invoking it. All that was happening was that he was explaining something about grief — something that he, at age 38, knew, and that the cast, talented black Broadway-level actors/dancers/singers ranging in age from maybe 20 to 25, may not yet have known but were capable of understanding.

McCarney’s deft direction and trust in the cast and his own vulnerability reshuffles the room; the men nail the scene. “Choir Boy” is McCarney’s first work produced on a Broadway stage. He’s most well-known for adapting the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonlight, another tender coming of story, from the play, “In the Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” which he wrote when he was 23.

Wallace and McCarney also talk about burnout and anxiety, Spike Lee’s filmmaking, and McCarney’s other upcoming projects, like Netflix drama High Flying Bird and the OWN show “David Makes Man.”

 

Alternative Reality: ‘Inferno in Paradise’

Homes leveled by the Camp Fire line Valley Ridge Drive in Paradise, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

President Donald Trump has obliterated any notion of off-time for round-the-clock journalists, but it was still a relief to see that the alt-weeklies I read for this installment in my regular reading list were starting off the new year strong. The Chico News & Review, whose work I have previously highlighted here, can be forgiven, however, for publishing an old piece, from 1993, in which a reporter basically imagines the Camp Fire before it occurred.

Other stories were equally ambitious, if newer. Tucson Weekly published a lovely and unexpected ode to Interstate 10, which cuts across the southern portion of the United States, while the Chicago Reader drew attention to the work of an underappreciated free-jazz group with a longtime residency in the Roscoe Village neighborhood.

The East Bay Express — whose entire editorial staff was, sadly, laid off last week — and the Rochester City Newspaper both published probing pieces on police accountability. The Arkansas Times highlighted the work of a now-forgotten muralist named Joe Jones. The Salt Lake City Weekly gave readers a comprehensive history of a secluded neighborhood called Allen Park, or Hobbitville, and the Colorado Springs Independent set its scope on a public land issue in Colorado.

1. “Inferno in Paradise” (Jonathan Franks, August 12, 1993, Chico News & Review)

Twenty-six years before the deadliest wildfire in California history decimated the small town of Paradise, Jonathan Franks of the Chico News & Review filed a disturbingly prescient dispatch from the Paradise Ridge in which he imagined a conflagration of disastrous proportions. The piece, which came out in the summer of 1993, was recently re-published in print and online.

After interviewing a number of local fire officials, Franks came to a jarring conclusion:

These guys have spent half their lives learning everything there is to learn about wildfires—from the conditions that breed them to the military-like strategies used to fight them. Listening carefully to their cautious, technical language, one can’t help but realize they are predicting a disaster almost too horrible to imagine.

Ridge topography, with its steep canyons and narrow plateaus, makes access extremely difficult for fire crews and ground equipment, they say. It also creates natural bottlenecks where fleeing residents could be trapped by walls of flame.

During wildfires, this sort of terrain can create a “chimney effect” where flames go roaring down the canyons and swirling up the ridges at terrible speeds.

Franks’ prescient prediction? “It’s going to happen, and it’s going to be bad.”

2. “Interstate 10: A Personal History” (Tom Zoellner, January 10, 2019, Tucson Weekly)

For Tucson Weekly, Tom Zoellner, the author of Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World, wrote a soulful paean to the barren portion of Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson, by his account an underappreciated stretch of asphalt that he refers to as “this most essential of Arizona’s rural arteries.”

Nobody writes a poem to this section of expressway, completed in the heyday of the optimism of the Kennedy-Johnson New Frontier between 1961-1971. I have lived in both Phoenix and Tucson off and on and have probably traversed this road more than 800 times, looking at the same sunbaked landmarks and thinking the same reliable thoughts: about old friends, old happenings, old mysteries of my life here. How many others mark their I-10 journeys with a mental libretto of musings on the roadside spectacle?

3. “Extraordinary Popular Delusions play free jazz two centuries deep” (Howard Mandel, January 10, 2019, Chicago Reader)

Like Zoellner’s I-10, the Chicago-based free-jazz group Extraordinary Popular Delusions, named after a 19th-century study by a Scottish journalist, is underappreciated. But the band, which has held a weekly residency at the Beat Kitchen in Roscoe Village for nearly the past decade, is given its due by Howard Mandel in this in-depth profile for the Chicago Reader.

Their shows are little heralded and often sparsely attended, but 13 years of continuous collaboration have turned this quartet into a beacon of Chicago’s indigenous avant-garde, with an unpredictable, provocative sound that arises from the commingling of its members’ diverse influences and experiences.

As Longreads contributor Aaron Gilbreath recently lamented in a thoughtful essay, music journalism has become something of an endangered genre — so it’s encouraging that the Reader is committed to robust coverage of the Chicago music scene.

4. “Oakland’s Lost Year of Police Accountability” (Darwin BondGraham, January 9, 2019, East Bay Express)

In 2016, Oakland residents voted to establish an independent commission to oversee the city’s scandal-ridden police department. The commission began operating last year, but so far it has proven ineffectual in holding the department to account, as Darwin BondGraham reveals in his thorough investigation for the East Bay Express. While some observers are hopeful that the commission will pull itself together in the new year, BondGraham writes that there is evidence to suggest that it will only further unravel in 2019.

Already, two of the best-qualified commissioners have resigned, one of them in frustration. In November, the commission suddenly and secretively fired its chief investigator after publicly clashing with him. Commissioners have also quarreled during public meetings with their legal counsel, and their first attorney quit after commissioners argued with her at meetings. The commissioners have also bickered amongst themselves, sometimes over email and text message, sometimes in public. And lacking experience with state open meetings laws, at least one of the commissioners committed a Brown Act violation in the form of unnoticed emails sent to a quorum of other commissioners.

Over the past year, the commission hasn’t made progress on the core work required of it under the city charter. They’ve yet to hold a single hearing in a police disciplinary case or participate in an OPD Executive Force Review Board to examine a shooting or similar critical incident. They’re ill-prepared to draft their evaluation of the police chief. They’ve yet to hold a community meeting.

5. “City Hall prepares to reform Rochester’s police oversight” (Mary Anna Towler and Tim Louis Macaluso, January 8, 2019, Rochester City Newspaper)

In Rochester, city council members are finalizing legislation that would create a police accountability board with the power to discipline police officers. The city’s mayor, Lovely Warren, has also submitted her own legislation, and a team of activists is advocating for the establishment of an independent civilian review board with broad investigatory and disciplinary powers.

The city council will be holding three forums to solicit comments from the public early this year, as Mary Anna Towler and Tim Louis Macaluso point out in their report for Rochester’s City Newspaper, one installment in an ongoing series on police-community relations.

The unveiling of Council’s legislation and the forums will be the start of what will likely be several months of emotional public discussion of a major community issue: how to handle citizen complaints about police officers’ conduct in a way that is fair to both the public and the officers. And how to do that in a way that builds trust rather than eroding it.

Perhaps Rochester can look to Oakland for lessons on what not to do.

6. “A mural to move Little Rock forward” (Leslie Newell Peacock, December 27, 2018, Arkansas Times)

A 1935 mural by the American painter Joe Jones — a triptych of sorts, which depicts, from left to right, sharecroppers, coal miners, and a lynching — probably shouldn’t still exist. But it does, thanks to a series of auspicious events that led to its restoration and installation at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s new downtown facility, as Leslie Newell Peacock details in an uplifting story for the Arkansas Times.

Jones, she writes, “could not have foreseen that the mural, painted on masonite, would survive intact for only five years before being dismantled — along with the college — and become Depression-era building material for a closet in a home in Mena.”

That it would be rediscovered 40 years after that and sold to a university. That 73 years after Jones put the last brush stroke on the painting, the mural, restored, would once again hang in an academic space, not in the dining room of a small left-wing college in a remote mountain town, but in a smashing new university venue on the bustling President Clinton Avenue in downtown Little Rock — where its story of Arkansas’s past sins will be seen by many, inspire conversation and, perhaps, show a way forward to Arkansas’s redemption.

7. “Hunters, hikers and anglers can’t access millions of acres of public land” (Faith Miller, January 9, 2019, Colorado Springs Independent)

A property battle ensues in Colorado Springs, where public land users are butting heads with private landowners who own property that connects with government land, reminiscent of an issue in California in which private properties block access to public beaches.

A recent study by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) and onX sheds new light on how widespread the problem has become. Researchers mapped 13 Western states with technology supplied by onX, a mapping service for hunters, hikers and anglers that identifies which lands are legal to access for recreational purposes. They discovered 9.52 million acres of taxpayer-funded public land—an area larger than New Hampshire and Connecticut combined—that the public cannot legally enter because they’re surrounded by private property.

One interesting wrinkle in the Colorado Springs Independent piece by Faith Miller is that mapping technology has led hikers and other recreationalists to notice what land they are missing out on. Mapping, Miller writes, “leads to an increased sense of injustice, as outdoor enthusiasts realize how much public land remains inaccessible to them, particularly in rural areas.”

8. “Hobbitville’s Last Days” (David Hampshire, January 9, 2019, Salt Lake City Weekly)

David Hampshire, a longtime resident of Salt Lake City’s Allen Park, a secluded community also known as Hobbitville — though there are no hobbits to speak of — was recently evicted from his residence as the fate of the the neighborhood is decided in probate court. While it’s unclear what will happen to Hampshire and his neighbors, in a delightfully reported essay for Salt Lake City Weekly, he educates readers on the odd history of Allen Park, which is named after an eccentric doctor named George A. Allen, a bird lover who acquired the property in 1931.

“From time to time, Dr. Allen would also keep zoo animals on the property,” Hampshire writes—including “an elephant, a chimpanzee and several reindeer. The family also collected an unusual assortment of ‘pets’ including a coyote, a sandhill crane named Sandy and a raccoon that sometimes followed the girls to school.

Times have changed.

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Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.

Theatre of Wokeness

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | January 2019 | 7 minutes (1,942 words)

There’s a certain kind of conversation everybody seems to be having right now. It takes place most often online, but sometimes in real life. Specifics vary, and its frequency and level of intensity ebbs and flows with the news cycle. An awards show, a White House firing, a video of police misconduct, a local ballot initiative on medical marijuana — anything tangentially related to race or gender can be fodder. It starts out engaging enough. Then tensions mount; participants morph into archetypes. Its substance diminishes into the reduced, neutered language of the “moment” before disintegrating altogether.

In a would-be map of this phenomenon, the first Women’s March, held the day after President Trump’s inauguration, is an inflection point. On November 9, 2016, Teresa Shook, a white former attorney living in Hawaii, created a Facebook event for “a women’s march” that quickly drew several thousand RSVPs. Shook quickly enlisted a small group of women to help with early planning. Organizers were frightened the incoming administration would “threaten access to women’s healthcare, erode protection against sexual violence and roll back aid to struggling mothers.” Shook felt “shock and disbelief that this type of sentiment could win,” she told Reuters. “We had to let people know that is not who we are.” Yet, Trump’s victory wouldn’t have happened without heavy support from white women in the electorate. Terms like “intersectionality” entered the mass media’s lexicon to help explain the difficulty inherent in assembling women into a voting bloc. Along with the election’s results, the terms proliferated in a major way via Instagram, hashtags, and memes.

The march’s founders and early organizers soon appointed a diverse cadre  of women to leadership, with assistance from activist and political connector Michael Skolnik. The organizers also made sure an anti-racism agenda was part of their framework. Pulled together in just a few short months, the March was a resounding success. The central protest, in Washington, drew an estimated half a million attendees (yielding more than a million rides on DC’s Metro, the second largest crowd in its history, after the first inauguration of Barack Obama). When counting the well-attended “sister marches” held around the country, “1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population” participated in a demonstration, reported the Washington Post.

It isn’t exaggerating to say people who weren’t before are now concerned about race and social justice. According to a CNN / Kaiser poll, 49% of Americans said racism is “a big problem” in 2015, up from just over a quarter who said so in 2011. Gender inequality, too, seems top of mind: A Pew Research Center survey from 2018 said about half of Americans think men getting away with sexual harassment or assault is “a major problem.”

Some say we’re living through “a moment,” that we’re “having a reckoning.” I have a hard time with those words — they’re soundbite-y, naïve, and incomplete, as if the “moment” is for people who hadn’t even had to think about inequality or dealt with it in any large or small way — being followed around a store, or subjected to different standards on a job, or denied an apartment for no obvious reason. And if that’s the case, how’s it different from any other moment? Does it hold up, withstand rigor, or is it a surface-level reckoning, concerned with optics and the appearance of social justice and equality?

The Women’s March’s leaders have had to answer such questions. Under charges of administrative mismanagement as well as anti-Semitism, due to its alleged negligence toward Jewish women and interactions with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, some leaders and sister groups have split off from the central organizing body. Last August, Black Women’s Blueprint, a Brooklyn-based organization focused on policy advocacy and grassroots organizing, wrote Women’s March, Inc. an open letter: “Rather than rubbing elbows and entreating known misogynist leaders… we charge you to meet us in the trenches.” Hastily organized and orchestrated in pursuit of an of-the-moment illusion of inclusion, or what I’ll call a “theatre of wokeness,” the Women’s March may be in danger of imploding. In November, the founder, Shook, called for all four co-chairs to step down, and over the past few weeks (leading up to the third march, taking place January 19), several former sponsors and partners walked away from the March, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, EMILY’s List, and the Democratic National Committee.

Along with institutional and personal reckonings, our “moment” has also birthed a category of creations and products that support, mirror, and mine it. Sitcom episodes, satirical bits, comedy specials, films, and music, and other performance art across and in between genres and mediums have attempted to mimic and explore our confusion, our dinner table banter, the rhythm of our outrage cycle, our anxieties, awakenings, and incipient healing. It’s a prolific time. The results, for me, have been mixed; sometimes, in an attempt to titillate or provoke, characterization, interiority, or reflection gets lost or weighed down in favor of an appropriate level of wokeness. Other times, I’ve questioned the motives of the creators, wondering if staying current and in tune with the “moment” is what it’s all about after all. More than anything I wonder what the whole point is of the reckoning. In our creative responses, are we, in some cases, reinscribing the same disappointments we’re trying to reconcile? Further, what comes after the problems get addressed? What happens if, when, and after a collective consciousness has been awakened?


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I had these and other questions watching Slave Play, a three-act satire that ran until January 13 at the New York Theater Workshop (I also heard whispers that it could be headed for Broadway). Director Robert O’Hara and playwright Jeremy O. Harris — a student at Yale’s School of Drama, and one of New York Times Style Magazine’s Black male writers of our time — imagines a world that, once fully revealed, looks very much like our own. Yet, we don’t know that at first. We see, instead, three interracial couples engaged in “slave play,” or sexual acts meant to simulate the race, gender, and class dynamics of antebellum America. Disorienting details hint that something is askew. The slave woman twerking on the floor to Rihanna while cleaning; the mistress twitchily summoning a tall, light-skinned fiddler to her bedside; the Black overseer crying frustrated tears through pleasure as his white indentured partner licks his boots. It titillates, it makes us (some of us, mostly the white folks) laugh. It, thankfully, ends quickly, giving way to a modern-day scene that sends up a certain kind of east coast, academic, therapeutic language, the language of our “moment,” to hilarious effect. It turns out the three interracial couples are all in therapy because the Black partners can no longer feel sexual pleasure in their respective relationships. And true to real life, the white partners (or those with closest proximity to whiteness) are emotive, externalized, and sometimes vocally annoyed, while the Black partners, for much of the time, simmer, stunned and silent.

All the actors play to some level of humiliation, but the Black woman in the therapeutic experiment, Kaneisha, played with a convincing prickliness by Teyonah Parris, seems to get especially short shrift: face down, she eats a busted cantaloupe off the floor in the first act, and by the third act, exorcises some trauma when her formerly petulant partner agrees to call her a “nasty negress” while they’re having sex. “Thank you for listening,” she says after the word play turns into several minutes of vigorous fucking.

The ending is an unsettling, confusing affair. I wasn’t sure if a rape had taken place or if it was, instead, a “breakthrough” achieved through consent. At any rate the labor of Parris, on whose character arc the entire show builds its human core, stayed heavy on my mind for days.

“I don’t want people to be able to walk away from a play about slavery and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s not about 2018,’” Slave Play’s playwright told an audience of donors, according to a Times profile. But who, exactly, doesn’t notice that the reverberations of slavery are still with us? If we’re really trying to wake up white people, I wish folks would say that. Slave Play’s Black cast members likely had to do heavier lifting — physically and psychically —  than the white (or white-ish) cast members in reimagining scenes drawn from America’s slave past. Do these interventions even work? And if they do, at what cost— to the audiences who may be harmed? To the cast and crew?

* * *

The politics of pleasure are as ripe as any place to dig, for creative play, for exploration and elucidation, mapped as it is into the subconscious, and there’s a legacy of its exploration in the work of Frantz Fanon and Adrienne Kennedy, both apparently influences on Slave Play’s playwright. The goal is to unsettle, to probe, and I can get with that, up to a point. What about context[1], interiority, reflection within the fictive universe of a piece? Maybe more of that would have been helpful in constructing Kaneisha as more than a spectacle. She speaks a lot, especially in the third act, but mostly, her character is seen through the eyes of her partner, as she talks about herself in relation to him and other white people from her past.

Even a journalistic endeavor could be improved with an ethics of care. In the six-part docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” which aired January 3-5 on Lifetime (and is still available on demand), the drama of Kelly’s victims’ pain is the main event, drawn out  for the benefit of the collective consciousness. I was well-acquainted with the story, yet still not entirely prepared for the grotesque details I saw and heard.

The series has already brought what feels like a shift: a lawyer for one of the families accusing Kelly confirmed that senior investigators from Fulton County, Georgia interviewed his client. The state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois has asked for victims to reach out. There have also been costs: survivors featured in the documentary have been doxxed, discredited, and disparaged online. I saw it in my own feeds, from people in my own family. I’ve seen Black women, unaffiliated with Kelly, report they’re “not ok” and had difficulty sleeping after watching or talking about the series. In the series, some survivors were visibly traumatized during their interviews. (Watching Asante McGee revist a room she recalled being held captive in reminded me of a question from In the Wake: “Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause…?”) How, really, should you manage when confronted with the truth of just how vulnerable you are?[2] More context could help. The music industry has a history of sexually exploiting underage girls—critics Ann Powers and Nelson George explain this powerfully in the series— but so does, specifically, the tradition of Black music upon which Kelly built everything. He’s a hip-hop generation misogynist who learned from his peers and from soul music forebears like Marvin Gaye and Al Green and James Brown, all of whom have allegations from harmed women tainting their legacies. Black Gen X-ers didn’t handle R. Kelly before because their forebears didn’t handle their own.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love writes, “For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.” Audiences and creators ask a great deal of people when they’re digging into the past, probing around the depths of ancient and not-so-ancient traumas. If the moment requires that the confusion of the present and the pain of the past get served up with realistic viscerality — if it’s about more than being current, and more than just theatre — special care should be taken with the subject matter as well as the casts, sources, and audiences most likely to be impacted.  

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[1] On January 14, 2019, Jonathan Square of the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom published a syllabus to help with processing Slave Play.

[2] Girls for Gender Equity and Black Women’s Blueprint produced and published reading guides and community toolkits for “Surviving R. Kelly.”

How Tarell Alvin McCraney Moved from ‘Moonlight’ to Broadway

Longreads Pick

Carvell Wallace profiles the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose ‘Choir Boy’ opened last week at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Published: Jan 15, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,799 words)

The Whitest News You Know

Longreads Pick

If there’s one clear moral to adduce from the horrifically prostrate coverage of the Trump movement’s white-nationalist profile in the mainstream press, it’s that the white-dominated media simply doesn’t care about changing in any meaningful way.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Jan 10, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)