"These Conversations are Long Overdue": An Interview with Ifa Bayeza

Abstract

"These Conversations are Long Overdue":An Interview with Ifa Bayeza* Corey D. B. Walker (bio) "Just as justice for Emmett Till is long overdue, these conversations are long overdue." —Ifa Bayeza Walker: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I have so many questions for you it is hard to know where to begin. So, let's begin by discussing your motivation and vision behind The Ballad of Emmett Till. Specifically, what is it about Emmett Till that continues to haunt you so? In what ways does your concern about the plight of young black men inform your artistic vision? How and why did you choose the form of the ballad for your engagement with Till? Is your choice similar to your adoption of the form of the Greek tragedy in Homer G. & the Rhapsodies in the Fall of Detroit?1 Bayeza: You just gave me a flurry of questions, all of which are really exciting. But let me start with the last one, which was your question about the connection of The Ballad of Emmett Till to my earlier piece Homer G. & the Rhapsodies in the Fall of Detroit. That's really where my journey with Emmett Till begins. Homer G & the Rhapsodies was an experimental theater piece that I started back in 1986 as a way to address the crisis I was witnessing with our young men, particularly boys on the threshold of manhood. I decided like, "Well, somebody needs to be addressing this. I know I'm not male, but as a writer, as a cultural worker, as a black activist, who is the descendant of black activists, I've got to do something." So I started working on Homer G & the Rhapsodies, transposing the fall of Troy to modern day Detroit. I was inspired by the Iliad and by a passage from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, where Malcolm X postulates that Homer might have been a black poet, a conquered, blinded African warrior.2 The ferocity in the Iliad, a story of warfare, bore such strong similarities to what I was sensing on the streets of urban America. Then I read Black Athena, which also describes ancient warfare and casts it in terms of race, and I thought, "Ah, I can use this. I can use this whole imagining."3 As I was working on Homer G, one of my characters, a factory worker named Prime started hallucinating and thought someone was following him. It looked like this angel [End Page 731] to me, this avenging angel. I couldn't see its face, but it was kind of a combination of bird and man—and it only said two words: "Bear witness." I was like, "Bear witness to what?" And it came to me that my character had been a witness in the murder of Emmett Till and had not come forward. I said, "Oh shoot I've got to go back to the library and research this." Just get some background—I thought! I thought, like many, I knew the story, but what did I know really? Walker: —The face? Bayeza: I only knew the face. I knew there had been an incident and I think I knew about the whistle, but it had been a very long time since I even thought about Emmett Till. So I went to the Schomburg Center in New York and started researching, getting into what was then the extant information, primarily based on the William Bradford Huie Look magazine story and some Chicago Defender articles, but it was mostly Huie.4 While I grew increasingly intrigued by Emmett's story, the more I researched the more problematic the information became for me. Walker: You just said something, you said "Emmett's story." Bayeza: Yes. Walker: In many ways, Emmett Till's story indexes a whole range of political and ideological positions regarding race, politics, sex, violence, and justice in America, but it became Emmett's story for you. Bayeza: It did, and a lot of things converged when I began the research. It brought back my own childhood memories of the experience of first seeing the photograph of his face from the funeral. My first...