The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

Abstract

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), states that black vernacular tradition stands as a metaphoric signpost crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference which Africa and Afro-America meet (4). However, concept of liminality within Afro-diasporic experiences, and more specifically within (African-)American context, is itself a slippery signifier. As a transitional or marginal state, term also suggests fixedness, or a stopping point--a condition of stasis, or non-movement. This, in turn, places in question possibilities of both voice (the power of enunciation) and agency. At same time, though, historical legacy of slavery and continued experience of racial oppression mean that peoples of African descent are often socially, economically, and politically positioned margins of dominant culture, Africanist presence remains central to foundation of America. Although democratic ideal, in material terms, has not been realized, just as Founding Fathers did not recognize direct contributions of black people in building of American nation, American culture remains (always already) product of black style and innovation. While black cultural production itself continues to endure problems of cross-over invention, freedom movements (particularly white women's and gay liberation movements), music, language use, sports, and fashion are indebted to cultural experiences of African peoples in America.(1) Similarly, while contemporary identity politics suggests that (monolithic) subject is now decentered, such a reconfiguration of History proposes, paradoxically, that condition of dispersed and fragmented is representational modern experience. Indeed, what discourse of postmodern has produced is not something new but a kind of recognition of where identity always was at (Hall 114,115), and as a result margin and de center, to use Mercer and Julien's phrase, is forever a convergence of twain. The crossroads of culture is once both liminal and polymorphous and multidirectional, for juncture represents possibilities of movement (as opposed to confinement or stasis); it is paradigmatic scene of arrivals and (Baker 7). Such arrivals and departures form central motif in Suzan-Lori Parks's play The Death of Last Black Man in Whole Entire World (1989-1992).(2) The death of play's title, however, does not represent end of life as such, for folkloric Everyman that is eponymous figure of drama continues to pass over, and through, Time and Space in a cyclical ritual of adversity and survival. Death of Last Black Man represents, therefore, in musical terms, a quintessential blues experience: impulse to keep painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness (Ellison, Shadow 78). And just as blues are the multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-American cultural discourse is inscribed (Baker 4), so Parks's play is an intricate riff on complexities of identity and subjectivity within context of an African-American cultural realm. The play's protagonist, Black Man With Watermelon (like his significant Other, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick), is caught betwixt and between margin and de center; he is once written out of History, yet placed center of his own (postmodern slave) narrative. Black Man with Watermelon is able to voice his (true) Self through personal pronoun 1, yet he is forever trapped within metaphoric parentheses of stereotype that transcends (linear) Time as History: (I bein in uh Now: uh Now bein in uh Then: I bein, in Now in Then, in I will be. I was be too but thats uh Then thats past. That me that was-be is uh me-has-been. …