« *From Confrontation to Healing: in-yer-heart and in-yer-ear in debbie tucker green's ear for eye and Selina Thompson's salt.* »

Many young British women turned to the stage to express and share their rage at systemic racism in recent years centering their plays on the roots of racism, the retelling of slaves' narratives or the need to deconstruct inherited and deeply-rooted definitions of people according to the colour of their skin.

→ Janice Okoh, *The Gift* was created in 2020 and plays on two different timelines, in the 19th century with Queen Victoria and today, telling the story of Queen Victoria's adopted African daughter, Sarah Forbes Bonnetta.

→ Juliet Gilkes Romero, *The Whip*, also in 2020, about the discussions at the British Parliament which led to the financial compensation of slave owners when slavery was abolished (and the Bank of England only paid off these debts in 2015!!)

→ Winsome Pinnock (who is of an older generation, born in 1961, started writing plays in the late 1980s), her latest play *Rockets and Blue Lights* opened (just for a few days before lockdown) in 2020 and comments on Turner's famous painting *The Slave Ship* (about the Zhong massacre)

All those plays are history plays which aim at telling the History that is forgotten in many history books, opening perspectives and suggesting changing perspectives along with time frame.

I have decided to concentrate today on two playwrights who have made a different choice. dtg is now very well-known in the UK for writing political plays which are also stylistically innovative. In 2013 I invited one of her translators, Sophie Magnaud, at EMMA to talk about her translation of *born bad*, written in 2003, *mauvaise* in French, which is due to open in March at the MJC 93. That play is about incest, the text insists all characters are black. *stoning mary* (2005) deals, among other stories, with a child soldier, and the stoning of mary who killed him. This time the characters are white, dtg wishes to force the spectators into a different position: what if those stories happened in the West, to White people?
Her latest play is *ear for eye*, which opened at the Royal Court in 2018 and is also available on BBC iplayer as a film directed by the author. SHOW TEASER

It is divided in three parts. The first part is a series of sketches, or scenes, with a majority of Black characters who express their anger and rage at the racism they encounter in their everyday life, both in the UK and in the US (some scenes have British characters, others African Americans). For instance, the first scene presents us with a young man who asks his mother what he should do with his hands if/when he finds himself confronted to the police. Indefinitely, the mother rejects his attempts, describing them as “aggressive, provocative, belligerent, defiant, sarcastic, challenging etc.”. The massage is: there is no solution for young Black men to live and move in the public space.

The second act is the confrontation between a white man who develops his explanation, or excuses for a white supremacist who has killed Black students, and a Black woman who tries to expose his prejudice and ingrained racist vision.

The last act is a succession of videos showing White people who read extracts from the American Jim Crow laws and the French and British slave codes. This historical perspective hammers in the message: systemic racism is the result of centuries of racist laws which have indelibly marked our vision in the West.

**NEXT SLIDE:**

Selina Thompson is a performance artist whose work focuses on the way our identities are shaped by our environment and, conversely how our identities shape our lives. In *salt* which was created in 2017 in London and is still on tour today (lately at the Shaubuhne in Berlin), she plays her own role and invites the audience to a ritual commemorating the thousands of men, women and children who died on the transatlantic slave triangle, a journey she herself took on board a cargo and planes, from Europe to Ghana to Jamaica.

Throughout her journey she herself experienced systemic racism, being searched at airports or talked down to and despised by the Ship's captain whom she was ordered to call "Master".

Both playwrights and both plays are at the same time deeply personal and tackle much wider social and political issues: their aim is to turn individual responsibility into collective responsibility. The spectators, mainly white, are presented with stories which turn out to be transnational and transhistorical, and as a result they are asked to share the blame, today.
Both playwrights are also vociferous and eloquent: they want to shout that Black Lives Matter, both are angry at the way the West is unprepared to recognize systemic racism. You have noticed in my first slide (though not in the programme because it remains almost impossible not to be corrected, at some point, either by the computer's word processor or by some editor in the process before it finally gets to print) that dtg, and the titles of both plays are in lower cases only: this is of course symbolical of a refusal of settled hierarchies. It also reads as a homage to bell hooks, the African American activist who died recently. In her book *Killing Rage: Ending Racism*, she distinguishes between rage as an oppressive force and rage as an empowering emotion (read quote 1).

When comparing both plays, I feel that dtg indeed sees rage as "an appropriate response to injustice (Killing Rage, quote 2) and as a means to overcome victimization.

Selina Thompson, on the other hand, seems to me to be trying to heal, despite the salt that is constantly shed by society on her wounds. She sets out to recreate a sense of community which starts in the acknowledgement of a shared responsibility but builds into a "re-membering" of the collective. This is also at the heart of bell hooks' thinking, to whom I am indebted for the portmanteau word "re-membering" quote 3 -> now S. Thompson, in 2017, believes it is possible to re-member together with her white audience.

My aim today is to try and compare the plays of the two playwrights in what I see as complementary tactics to tackle and expose racism and the rage it gives rise to, but also find ways to bridge gaps, heal wounds and move forward, while constantly recognizing where we come from and how the past shapes our lives.

Here it is important to know a little about the recent history of theatre in the UK: the contemporary stage in Britain is accustomed to violence on stage. Most recently, violence on stage was at its peak with what came to be known as in-yer-face drama, which was heralded by Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill in the 1990s. But today, 30 years after Kane, how can this anger, this rage and violence be shown, heard and seen on stage?

I am here indebted to E. Angel-Perez for her article on "in-yer-ear theatre" (read quotations), a theatre that strikes the ear rather than the eye, as evidenced by the clip I showed you, a theatre that manages to evoke situations, some of them close to us, because they happen around us though we sometimes don't want to see them, or because they are embedded in
our visual memory thanks to the photographs of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner or George Floyd; some of them far away in space and time (the prison for slaves in Ghana or the paradise of Montserrat and Jamaica for Selina Thompson).

Both playwrights manage, thanks to a very evocative language, to give life to those stories and make the audience envision those spaces on a bare stage (in the case of *efe*), or a stage which is organised for a ritual, with symbolic objects, shapes and costumes (for *salt*).

Furthermore, both playwrights strike at the heart of systemic racism, and in the heart of their spectators, with texts that are powerful, though they work their way to the heart along different paths, which I would like to follow with you.

I will thus examine both plays concentrating first on the message, and the language used to deliver it, then on space and time, and finally on the characters they picture.

## I. The message

Both plays denounce systemic racism and the violence that Black people face. They both list endlessly the aggressions:

*Efe:* ""**Bullets, bombs, burning, hangings, lynchings, mutilations, shootings, destructions, defacing, torture, intimidations, abominations, perversions**"

*Salt:* "**asphyxiation and decapitation and drowning, suffocation and flesh boiled in sugar cane, bodies blown up with gunpowder, hanged, burned at the stake, bodies left to putrefy, pecked at by vultures, devoured alive by fire ants, roasted on pikes.**"

Both texts are alliterative, repetitive and based on a trochaic rhythm which makes them at the same time musical and very striking, but I notice here already a difference nevertheless: dtg's text sounds more violent to my ear, because its words are shorter and because it is a succession of single words.

This is representative of the difference between the two texts: in dtg's play, sentences are cut short, never finished, and this mimics the silencing of Black people, and the cutting short of their lives.

Dtg plays hopscotch with words, and comments uncompromisingly on her people's inability to express themselves: SLIDE 8 "you ill-formed, your ill-informed not fully formed half-thinkin words in my mouth" p. 26.
Her powerful style enables spectators to feel the heartbeat of her characters and feel their own hearts beat on the same rhythm, in synchronicity and synesthesia: “you can’t see *feel* it” p. 34 -> no punctuation, no space between words, acceleration of the rhythm.

But most of all, “aggression” is a key word and a key feeling throughout the play: the Black characters describe the constant aggression that they encounter at the hands both of the White and the Black. In return, they are constantly perceived as aggressive, in their words and in their body language: “bein aggressive”, “acting aggressive”, “talkin aggressive”, “gesturing aggressively”, “we all sound aggressive to them anyway” p. 16-17.

The epilogue of the play SLIDE 9 represents its tone in a nutshell (read): broken sentences are shared among different characters, who use negative structures the better to affirm an active stand: what they will do in reaction is left unsaid, its violence all the more frightening as it remains unformulated.

In comparison, *salt*. is a play about pain, grief, and the will to survive the trauma. And this healing of the soul and of the body requires us, the audience, to slow down and be quiet.

In the small note that Thompson wrote to accompany the play-text, she states her wish to remain “quiet around *salt*." p. 5. SLIDE 10

Her journey is one of reconstruction after the damage done by racism: “I had hit an impasse, in my very bones, in the very delicate fragments that make up my soul, and I did the journey that made this work to bring the fragments back together.” (p. 5).

The message seems to be situated at a different moment in time: while dtg documents the shock, sthompson’s ritual takes place after the shock, it describes a reconstruction, and as a consequence

the tone is also different: where dtg consistently unveils, reveals the anger of her characters, strips them naked, S. Thompson seeks to build a protective shelter for her, adding a layer of comfort which serves as a bumper against those shocks.

One of those bumpers is her nanny, so that when she boards the ships she can feel “the shelter of her love around [her]” p. 5; another is the audience: “I go [to sea] with the presence of the audience around me, as cloying as it is comforting.” (p. 23): she thus clearly re-members an inclusive community, speaking directly to the spectators whom she invites to journey with her: “You are at sea with me” p. 25
That communion is evidenced from the start of the performance, when she gives the rules (she’ll be hammering at a huge rock of Himalayan salt with a sledgehammer): “During the show, I’ll be working with a sledgehammer and safety goggles. The rule is, that when I am wearing mine, you also need to be wearing yours.” (p. 14). Spectators and actor don the same protective costume, synchronously, because they are threatened by the same aggression.

While dtg's characters are vociferous, it seems the Woman's anger is kept inside, silenced and hidden away: "if you ask me where my grandparents are from, in my head I'll flip over a table; but out loud, I'll say 'Jamaica'" (p. 15)

Quite tellingly, Thompson's text multiplies passive and negative structures, as she mentions how she should have reacted, or how she regrets she did not react. She "relent[s]" p. 24, "give[s] up" p. 27, and concludes, very distinctly from dtg's more active epilogue, but perhaps also paradoxically more optimistically: "I am not healed. But I decide to keep living." p. 51

On the whole, a comparison between the two plays reveals that though the overall political message is the same, that racism is systemic and needs to be addressed, the way to deal with racism, the solutions offered, are not the same: dtg's characters voice out their rage and return aggression for aggression, while ST's Woman proposes to grieve, make room for the pain as the only way to move on and live on and together.

I would like now to look more precisely into other differences in the structure and dramatic characteristics of the two plays, which may also explain why they resonate so differently, in the ears and in the hearts of their spectators.

## II. Space and Time

If we first concentrate on the treatment of time, we notice that both plays are stuck in the eternal repetition of the same, which symbolizes the impossibility for the characters to escape their fate. Temporal references are actually omnipresent, the better to show their ineffectiveness.

In scene 2 of efe for instance, an older activist dismisses the claims of younger activists that they will be able to make things change. She in fact reminds them that her generation fought as well, but to no avail.
Throughout the scene she repeats the adverb “before” no less than 64 times, while “when” is repeated 10 times, and the general message is that generation after generation of Black protesters find themselves stuck in stasis, stuck in a vicious circle inside which the possibility of evolution is only superficial, and the conclusion remains the same.

In that closed structure, polyptotons (“hailers start hailing” p. 10; “the hustling positioning and the hustle for position” p. 11) and all kinds of repetitive structures work with words just as society works with black people who are mere pawns to play with, and who will lose whatever the strategy the player tries.

## SLIDE 11

In the same scene, the older activist observes
> “Before people stood up and spoke
> stood up and spoke
> stood up and spoke for me without asking
> me if I needed to be stood up and spoke up
> for” (p.11)

In those few lines, the repetition becomes oppressive, and what seemed a positive action turns into an act of passive aggressive violence, in a structure which is modulated from an active voice to a passive voice.

The positioning of the words on different lines underlines this process: “me” is put in the spotlights by the run-on-lines, but remains silenced by other voices who speak for it, instead of it.

This vicious circle is itself repeated in different levels of the play-texts: on the level of words, as we have seen, but also on that of scenes and situations, as, for instance, scene 3, where a woman tells of her traumatizing arrest by white policemen, is repeated in scene 11, with a man. There are only a few variations between the two scenes, for instance the fact that there are even more policemen surrounding the man than there were surrounding the woman: if change there is, it is rather for the worse.

And while Black people are invariably killed, maimed and tortured, the Whites enjoy the privilege of reliving the same situations without losing anything: “You do [have nine lives] and you don't even know it.” (p. 115)
Part 3 of the play, as I said, is a series of videos in which White people enounce Jim Crow Laws or passages of slave codes: this last part seems to put the rest in historical perspective, by showing how the past has shaped the present. But all those laws are in the present tense, and the resulting feeling is once more stasis and eternal repetition.

salt. also is built on repetition: while the Woman repeatedly hits at the rock with her sledgehammer, she also hammers her ideas in, commenting on an endless series of aggressions: she begins by telling the terribly racist tale that a teacher told her grandmother and punctuates: ""That's what she said, the teacher. That's what she said, to my grandmother, as a child." p. 17. The pauses, the telegraphic style here add up to the violence, which is repeated all over again as the grandmother tells the tale again to her granddaughter, who in her turn tells it to the spectators, each night.

But while the repetitions in efe seem to add up to the violence, those in salt. seem to blunt the violence, so that the Woman becomes accustomed to a nagging pain:

"I am growing accustomed to a timeline, an endless feed of black pain, black rage and black people having to assert that black lives matter because black death is normal" p. 20-21.

She is also stuck in a stasis but this is her choice: she comments "I choose not to move on. I refuse to get over what is not yet over (...) living in an ever-recurring apocalypse, spinning back and repeating itself." (p. 22)

Both space and time are immovable and this comes as a paradox considering how much she travels, or rather recounts her traveling.

## SLIDE 12

Indeed, if we now look at how space is evoked in salt. we may notice that the Woman tells, retrospectively, of her long travel around the world, from Antwerp to Ghana, Jamaica, North Carolina and back to Antwerp. Though she has traveled, on her return to England nothing has changed: "I arrived in Birmingham, UK, on the twelfth of April, and stood with my mum and dad in their kitchen, holding hands. Then my mum went to work at Dorothy Perkins, and my dad made himself a sandwich before going to sign on." (p. 15)

Space is metaphorical much more than it is real, "it is a dream" (p. 15), or a triangle, reproduced on stage and lit above the head of the woman, symbolizing the transatlantic triangle of slave trade.
Her moves and her ritual celebrate the dead rather than the living and the stops she makes on her journey resemble Stations of the Cross. They turn out to be as many prison cells which close space around her:

the closed cabin of the ship: "Not allowed on the deck, we have no windows in our cabins, so sunlight (...) the doors of the ship are locked with us inside. No fresh air." (p. 27),

the cells for slaves in Ghana: "lock[ed] up in the room where those that rebelled were left to starve" p. 36,

the airport: "I join a host of Black women detained in rooms" p. 40

Even the skype calls that she makes with her family back at home enclose her in a series of boxes that are enshrined one into the other, in a kaleidoscopic but stifling space, constantly repeating the same: "They are in bed together, their room in my room in Jamaica, the sea, and the sound of their little electric heater mingled together." (p. 45)

### III. Communion or confrontation?

The treatment of time and space in the two plays is in fact symptomatic of the positioning of the characters in relation to the world outside, both in the space of the theatre and in society. Thus, that space of the room in Jamaica, where the Woman sees her parents' room through her computer, mimics the space of the theatre in which she partakes of her experience with the audience. In *salt*. the Woman addresses the spectators directly, sharing with them her story, asking them to don the same costume, sending them home with a piece of salt that she has crushed in small pieces, as a symbol of the pain that she wants them to take away with them.

She symbolically imprisons them in her cell, puts them in the position of the victim, rather than of the oppressor. She indicts not individuals but a continent, Europe, impersonal, dehumanized: SLIDE 13

"Europe is awash in blood (...) is built on suffering (...) is a cursed continent" p. 19. She also describes herself as a split, or torn character, part black from her ancestry and part white because of her education. And she sees herself as an objectified repository of the pain that she expresses, passively: "All of the poison of the world is seeping into me, adrenaline in my body, depression without end." p. 22
Rather than an angry and rebellious activist, she positions herself as a victim: in the cargo ship, she is once more a slave locked up in the hold, in Ghana when she visits Elmina's castle, she does not remain an exterior witness but is imprisoned in the cell where they put rebellious slaves; and as throughout the performance she hits at the salt rock with the sledgehammer, she conjures up at least unconsciously images of African American prisoners in hard labour.

The spatial organization of efe is even more traditional, with a fourth wall and "No direct address to audience" p. 3. dtg diagnoses the same stasis, the same reproduction of systemic racism, generation after generation, in the UK and in the US, but she draws a different conclusion: she reasserts the need to not only protest and denounce but actively rebel.

Her Black characters are set against the Whites (through a series of pronouns "I"/"them"; "my people"/"they" p. 17), and set against each other also: the young protesters against the older ones, the first-time protester against the veteran, the son against the mother, and the father against the mother. Confrontation is what spurs all the characters, agreement is short-lived, and a possible communion is seen as a myth.

## SLIDE 14

The various scenes between the parents and their son are representative: the trio recurs in part one scenes 1, 6 and 8. In scene 1, only the mother tries to warn her son; in scene 6, the father has joined her. The parents are the type of the Black parents, trying to protect their child by warning him against the racist discrimination he will face, and generally being more violent than white parents, though in this case the violence is not physical but verbal. The idea is for the parents to prepare their son for the world outside. But though they want to reassure him that they love him and value him, this love disappears when the son leaves the protection of the family nest:

"Dad. Youmeantheworldtome youmeantheworld tome you mean the world to us.

Son. ...And the world? (...)

Dad. This side of it...You don't. (...)

You are so loved. (...)

Son. And in this world?

Dad. You are not.

Son.
Dad. ...I love you.

Son. I know. I –

Dad. but you're not.

Son. I love –

Dad. I know Son

but you're not.” p. 46-47

The short and unfinished sentences, and the nagging repetition of the negative structure all hammer in the disharmony. But that disharmony of the world, which had already contaminated the relationships between parent and child, also contaminates the relations inside the couple in scene 8, as the father accuses the mother of being too rough with their son: SLIDE 15

"Dad. I'm trying I'm *trying* to – but how you're going at it how you're going at/him-(...)

Mum. and I'm not 'going at him' and I'm doing all the talking cos you/aren't.

Dad. talking like that talking to him like that

Mum. we agreed.

Dad. I agree – I know we *agreed* I agree – but not like this" p. 54

This time the negative structures aim at the partner, and not society. The violence of racism has contaminated the family.

Similarly, SLIDE 16

two echoing scenes between an older and a younger activist show the conundrum and the
resulting violence:

In scene 4, the older generation seems to still believe in conciliation

"Adult. ...(It) would lead to a bloodbath

Young Adult. this is a bloodbath.

Adult. Would lead to a war

Young Adult. This is a war" p.30

But in scene 12, when the young man wants to believe in a sense of community, the older one dampens his spirit:

"Young Adult. And it ain't about me. / But iss about me. / Collective.

Adult. Selfish.

Young Adult. Communal.
Adult. Self-centered.

Young Adult. Empowerin.

Adult. Egotistical.” (78)

Conclusion

Overall, and though both plays identify the same reasons for and workings of systemic racism, efe feels angrier while salt. seems to aim at healing the wounds. I am in the process of trying to assess how this feeling is embedded, not in the words themselves, which are very similar, but in other aspects of the work. I have so far identified differences in the positioning of the characters, their relations to each other and/or the audience, and the tone of their message, which is a result of their positioning in society, and the world at large.

I feel I still have to work on those two plays to find why and how we have the feeling that one is full of rage and ready to confront its white audience, while the author wishes to offer a reconciliation which is seen as the only viable option to heal and go on living.

Marianne Drugeon