Orality and Performance: A Source of Pan-African Social Self

Abstract

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS - indeed, almost five months -1 had been struggling with an unfinished introductory statement on a special issue of Matatu: A Journal of African Society and Culture, which I had been invited to co-edit with James Gibbs, on Contemporary Ghanaian Literature, Theatre and Film.1 Gathering and analysing various texts, observing and living through a variety of performance situations, reliving several past experiences of performance situations and their lasting impact on memory and sensibility, I was gradually coming to the realization that perhaps the greatest frustration for the contemporary scholar of performance is the lack of an appropriate critical methodology and vocabulary that enables a full revelation of the communicative impact of the well-ordered performance event as a confrontation with and victory over forces of opposition, of conflict. With my own concentration eternally tom between one deadline and the next, between one meeting and another, I was beginning to despair of ever making meaningful sense of the rich variety of performance situations I had assembled in preparation for an introductory statement that was in danger of probably never getting done.It was with this sense of continual disruption that I sat on the L Train at 95th Street, South Side Chicago, in the middle of a cold rainy night. As the train pulled into 87th Street, two young African-American men made a sudden appearance in our coach, put a large size ghetto-blaster on one of the seats, turned it on, and flooded the coach with the steady heavy beat so typical of rap music. They stood some ten feet apart, facing each other, and began to sway to the rhythm of the beat. Then the one standing almost parallel to my seat began to do his thing. All this time, however, most of us in the coach reacted with visible annoyance at this invasion of our 'private space'. What followed next was, for me, a brief but pointed lesson in the complex dynamics of the informal performance deliberately planted in the social context of the politics of race relations in America.Let me begin by confessing that I was myself initially annoyed at this sudden intrusion into my private thoughts, even though I cannot now recall what in particular I was so busy thinking about. But this was how I came to miss most of the narrative of the performance. Gradually, however, the force of the rhythmic intensity of the music, combined with the carefully coordinated dialogue between the two performers, began to force its way into my consciousness, in spite of my initial annoyance and subdued hostility. I looked across to tiie young African-American woman sitting across from me, and saw on her face a clear concentration on the unfolding performance. I was obliged to follow her into that inner space of the performance where deep historical, political, and social meanings were created and re-enacted. The performer on tiie far end of the coach from me took up the narration in a voice deliberately pitched above that of his partner, dangerously close to breaking point. He spoke of the FBI and the KKK and of early death for the brothers and the sisters whose only crime was that they wouldlick no ass -snow whiteor charcoal black -they'd rather be freelike who they was bom to be.He took us with him into the jails of Babylon, all filled withblack brothers as youngas fresh as dream or dawnbut sure to go downwith the midnight train hell-bound.2At this point, the sister across from me smiled. Then brushed a tear away. She dipped her hands in her purse, pulled out a dollar bill, and handed it out to the performer standing next to her. He took it in with a casual sweep of the arm in its measured glide to the rhythm of his blues. At Garfield station, the two young men disappeared into that night of wind and rain and cold.In that brief moment, the two rap performers had taken possession of a space we had assumed was ours, and, with the audacity that only artists are often able to claim and maintain, transformed our consciousness into an arena of contending forces, challenged us to serve as jurors in an historical drama of social in/justice. …