Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left

A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479842186
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Articulatesthe role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. These ideas paved the way for imaginative models for social transformation through performance. Using the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—Malik Gaines considers how performances of that era circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling commonplace understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following the transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and other modern political actors, from the United States to West Africa, Europe and back, this book considers how artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester—Gaines explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction. Bringing the lens forward through contemporary art performance at the 2015 Venice Biennial, Gaines connects the idea of sixties radicality to today’s interest in that history, explores the aspects of those politics that are lost in translation, and highlights the black expressive strategies that have maintained potent energy. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left articulatesthe role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties, following the evolution of black identity politics to reveal blackness’s ability to transform contemporary social conditions.

1

Nina Simone’s Quadruple Consciousness

For some time there has been much talk about the Negro. A little too much.

—Frantz Fanon

One time in New York I went to see an off-Broadway play with Bill Dukes and Brock Peters—two fine black actors—in the cast. I thought the roles they played were insulting to black people, and I got up there on stage in the middle of the show and told them so. I stopped the play in its tracks to ask them why they were doing trash like that. One of them said something about needing the money, but that was no excuse. They apologised, and took me home in a cab. I was half-crazy with anger that night, a woman on fire, and that was how I felt most of the time as I watched my people struggle for their rightful place in America.

—Nina Simone

Introducing Miss Nina Simone

While performing her anthem “Mississippi Goddam” in a 1964 concert, Nina Simone quipped, “this is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” This statement typifies the singer and pianist’s expressive approach, performing agency where it is a structural impossibility. Simone’s body of recorded music reveals an anti-racist agenda enacted through performance. Simone used black American musical, textual, and theatrical strategies, elaborating a history that has transformed the locations of marginality and exclusion into improvised positions from which to speak. This black American approach was consistent with the breadth of Simone’s non-exclusive musical culture; the artist situated her own activist compositions among songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, songs associated with black authors, standards of the American theater, a diversity of ethnically marked folk materials, popular hits, and works belonging to other genres and types. Her combinatory textual approach, along with her transformational uses of persona, costume, and voice, are mobilized into an expressive mode that I call quadruple consciousness. Drawn from a reading of the song “Four Women,” this hyperbolic term multiplies W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous double consciousness formulation, transforming the displacing alienations of marginality into a set of unreconciled positions from which to perform. Simone outperforms the oppositional structure of Du Bois’s divided self, forecasting Brent Edwards’s demand of double consciousness: “Just two, Dr. Du Bois, we are forced to ask today? Keep counting.”1 The precariousness of this position is its ambivalence: neither singular authority nor dialectical progress can be oriented around the shifting terms of quadruple consciousness. Rather, this ambivalence produces multiple positions, provisionally destabilizing the concrete terms around which race and gender have been punitively oriented. In the black expressive context, as in Simone’s performance methodology, multiple positionality is a source of provisional power, and a way to act in excess of the permanent exclusion experienced in any one location. Rather then a dialectical synthesis achieving wholeness and agency for a divided subject, Simone’s performance goes the other way, allowing multiplicity to transform the negativity of alienation into a productive force. This kind of productive ambivalence is evident throughout Simone’s activist performances of the sixties.

This chapter contributes to an emerging field of Nina Simone studies, building on the work of performance scholars Fred Moten, Shane Vogel,2 and others, who have sought to define the feminist and resistant terms of jazz and blues vocal traditions, and notably elaborated by Daphne A. Brooks’s “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” which pays particular attention to the radicality of Simone’s combinatory approach. Brooks notes that “Simone’s social activism was not only overtly incorporated into the content of her material, but, just as well, that it permeated the form of her musical heterogeneity that worked to free African Americans from cultural and representational stasis.”3 Investigating this heterogeneity, Brooks’s study considers Simone’s revisions of music by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in order to evaluate her relationship to that tradition of political performance. This chapter continues that investigation, seeking to further define the political dimension of Simone’s theatricality.

Simone’s quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms, is a performance position that marshals paradoxical and simultaneous differences to present a provisional form of subjectivity. Quadruple consciousness playfully hyperbolizes double consciousness while rehearsing a movement beyond its confines, from positivist subject to divided subject, through negated subject and into multiplicitous subjectivity. Though exceeding a dialectical choreography, this position draws on a Marxian analysis suggested by her association with Lorraine Hansberry and other intellectuals, and alluded to by her investment in Brecht, while Simone’s performance also relies upon the affect of black expressive forms. The contradiction between critical distance and authentic experience is assimilated into the performance of blackness. Within the field of representation, blackness is infinitely visible as an object, in the third person. It has been argued that blackness cannot constitute a full subject position from which to view and, as Frantz Fanon points out, ontological models like that of the knowing Cartesian subject fail to account for blackness, which can exist as a term only in relation to a prior term: as an object of inquiry, as the other who lends meaning to the self, as a slave to the master’s dialectic. In this sense, any iteration of black subjectivity where a black subject is prohibited, whether grounded in intellectual criticality or emotional affect, is a constructed position, made provisionally available through combinations rather than an a priori unity. Consequently, there is no clear political distinction to be made here between an alienated and an embodied performance. In comparing this African American expressive strategy with a Brechtian program, the role of alienation must be reevaluated, not simply as a performance technique, but in relation to its location at the source of African American identity. Further, reapproaching Brecht from this provisional black and gendered position foregrounds the impurity of that dramatist’s own supposed theatrical orthodoxy. As in Simone’s performances, performative blackness, in all of its ambivalence, destabilizes the rational terms that constitute power, but also complicates the terms under which Du Bois, Brecht, and the enlightened left operate.

Protest Performances of the Black Intelligentsia

Simone credited her friends of the black intelligentsia for facilitating her political education in the sixties, offering a set of strategies for critical analysis of the cultural situation. Prominent among them were other socially engaged writers and dramatists: Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry. Significantly, these figures were outspoken critics of American racism whose literary and dramatic works reflected this critique. Of further importance is that Simone’s political tutors, like herself, brought to their works a sense of race complicated by gender difference, underscoring a sense that race and gender are always critically entangled. All three of these authors expressed what could now be called queer affinities. Simone’s circle was deeply involved in civil rights activities and the development of black political consciousness, and brought the nuanced experience of race imbricated with gender and sexuality to their civil rights efforts. It was with Hughes that Simone made her first trip to Africa. Hansberry’s unfinished play “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” became the source of Simone’s anthem of the same name, later adopted as a theme song of the NAACP. It was with Hansberry that Simone attended organizing meetings in New York.

By the early sixties, politicized black artists like Hansberry and Simone were bringing the politics of race and gender together in their works, and thinking about both of those in a world context informed by class struggle. Of Hansberry, Simone wrote: “Although Lorraine was a girlfriend . . . we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk. . . . Lorraine was most definitely an intellectual, and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle. . . . Lorraine started off my political education, and through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.”4 Because of her leftist activities, Hansberry had been under FBI surveillance since 1952, following her work on Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom. The agency had an informant report on the content of her play A Raisin in the Sun before it opened, to be sure it was not overtly communist.5 Informed by Hansberry’s analysis, Simone’s account of her own thinking reflects a critical self-awareness defined by broad terms of opposition and contextualizes a performance of resistant subjectivity politicized by race and gender.

Simone’s original song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” reflects the politicization of her music and performances, and the influence of Hansberry. Having incorporated the composition into her regular set, Simone performed the song from the piano while her band accompanied in a 1969 concert in a Morehouse College gymnasium in Atlanta, Georgia. The men in the band wore dashikis, while Simone wore an elegant black suit, made fashionably militant with high black boots and a large Afro hairstyle, and accessorized with silver jewelry, Cleopatra-style eye makeup, and a corsage. The song suited the college gymnasium setting, as its repetitive refrains and simple melody convey a direct, pedagogical quality removed from Simone’s jazziest techniques. As one of the choruses explains:

When you’re feeling real low

There’s a great truth that you should know

To be young, gifted and black, you’ve got your soul intact6

The song is an exercise in black pride, directed at motivating the coming generation, such as the excited group in attendance at Morehouse College, many of whom were young African American women wearing Afros themselves. With black studies courses and programs emerging around this time in American universities, this song asserts a politics of redefinition, updating a Du Boisian “talented tenth” sensibility with the more inclusive language of black positivity. That music star Aretha Franklin adapted the song for her successful 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black indicates the popular reach of this discursive effort.

Speaking directly to her audience, Simone ad libs a few words in this energetic performance, adding to the song’s written lyrics. Rather than “when you’re feeling real low,” Simone elaborates, “when you’re feeling depressed, alienated and low”7 framing the notion of feeling with emotional and political dimension. Typical of Simone’s performances, additional utterances lead to sections of mid-song oration, delivered here as the music continues to play.

Feeling good now? Yes, yes, yes. Langston Hughes is gone but he meant the same thing. And all you know about Billie, poor Billie, they killed her for the very same thing that you have a party on. You know? They killed her ’cause she smoked pot. Really. They killed her. And now of course Lorraine is gone. Enough, enough, enough, Nina. Feels so good. By the way this is a black orchid given to me last night—where were we?—Jersey City—by the black students council and I preserved it until tonight so you could see it.8

This interjection, typical of Simone’s self-interruptions, specifies a historical context for the performance. Simone places herself in a tradition of transgressive black women singers when she invokes Billie Holiday, who had died in police custody a decade earlier. Simone’s creative interpretation of Holiday’s death suggests an act of black imagination, while indicating the stakes of the song, oriented around an urgent political need for new black leadership. Simone aligns herself with Hughes here, offering herself as a surrogate when she says he “meant the same thing.” A similar sentiment is offered in a 1967 live recording of Simone’s song Backlash Blues, an adaptation of a Hughes poem, in which she sings: “When Langston Hughes died—He told me many months before—Nina keep working until they open up that door.”9 Simone figures herself as a continuation of Hughes’s political and artistic project. At the Morehouse event, Simone completes this story with Hansberry, who had died of cancer several years before. By the time of this 1969 concert, these deaths would have been framed in the imagination of this young, predominantly black audience by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Simone’s elegy meditates on life and death in Afro-America, but rather than discussing black leaders in the political sphere, she emphasizes artists as radical agents. The meaningful absences invoked in this spoken libation are finally met by the presence of the corsage, given to Simone by black students in the North and delivered here to the South in a symbolic act of solidarity. Simone’s messenger/courier routine manages twin surrogations, establishing a continuity of her political project with her deceased mentors, while linking their project to the emerging black political movement of which “young, gifted, and black” students would be the custodians.

A similar investment in futurity is found in Hansberry’s use of the phrase, which Simone adapted for her song. Hansberry wrote the term “young, gifted, and black” into an address to the winners of a United Negro College Fund writing contest. In her comments, Hansberry adds, “in the month of May in the year of 1964, I, for one, can think of no more dynamic combination that a person might be.”10 This episode appears toward the end of the published text of Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a posthumously assembled series of fragments in the late author’s voice. The book, which was adapted as a play and presented at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater in 1969, speaks from multiple perspectives about the problems of race, gender, and life’s possibilities. The decentered text, which moves through scenes of plays, letters, short prose, and other notes provided by the author, resembles the multiplicity found in Simone’s formal approach, one which assembles diverse materials, and allows for interjections and exclamations to circulate throughout her performances. The continuity of To Be Young, Gifted and Black is the discontinuity of Hansberry’s experience. Hansberry was not only a friend and tutor to Simone, but this final work in her oeuvre formally resembles Simone’s own complex enactment of multiple positions that exceeds prohibitions on a unified black subject. However, unlike the work of Baldwin, Hughes, or Hansberry, Simone’s expressive mode was not just founded in her body, but deployed through her body as well.

Accordingly, Simone’s criticality was not only configured in intellectual terms. Simone describes the physical dimension of her political awareness in her autobiography: “The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what...