5. Cultural Figures to Re-Construct the Past
5.3 History in the Making
In order for an individual to enter cultural memory and to become a cultural figure, he or she has to have enjoyed high public attention at some point in time. The creation and the establishment of an iconic figure is indeed strongly influenced by how much public attention a person receives and how he or she is represented in newspapers, radio shows, or on TV.
It is this impact of media and media coverage on the creation of cultural figures that is critically dealt with in Judith Alexa Jackson’s play WOMBmanWARs (1992). First performed in 1992, the play draws on the political controversy about the court case of Anita Hill versus US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, which was a major issue in the US news at that time. In the play Jackson includes original clippings and footage materials in order “to remind the audience through visual and audio means of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee’s insensitive handling of the harassment charge brought against the Supreme Court nominee” (WMW 153). This emphasis on public media is supported by the stage setting:
Audio/visual: Integral to the set design are the audio/visual components.
Not just there for amplification, the electronic media must pervade the performance space and evoke the mediated experience had by all who watched the confirmation proceedings. As was apparent during the hearings, microphones on stands are in abundance and are strategically placed about the stage for the convenient use by the performer. There are two television monitors, mounted on six-foot pedestals and positioned downstage right and left, and a large screen upstage center. Appropriate lenses and projectors are requisite for video and slide images to fill entire screen. One video camera on a tripod is visible upstage right.
(WMW 152)
The large amount of media equipment on stage and the variety of the material included signifies the vast media attention that the court case received in 1991. During the play the audience is repeatedly confronted with original clippings, video portions, and news reports about Anita Hill, Judge Clarence Thomas and his wife, President Bush, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other people involved, merging the fictional world on stage with the audience’s real world experience. The fact that the hearings caught more public attention than any other issue at that time becomes especially obvious in the news reporter scene. Accompanied by projections of print-media headlines published in 1991 in the background, a news reporter reads the latest news to a camera on stage:
REPORTER (Speaks into the mike): October 12th, 1991: THOMAS’S ACCUSER TELLS OF OBSCENE TALK AND LASCIVIOUS ADVANCES!
other news: former assistant secretary of state admits (She yawns) guilt in iran/contra scam.
JUDGE PREFERS DEATH BY ASSASSIN’S BULLET OVER LYNCHING!!
5. Cultural Figures to Re-Construct the Past 90
other news: all charges dropped against oliver north. (Looks bored) TALK OF BIG BREASTS AND GIANT MEMBERS!!!
other news: slave practices discovered in oil-rich Kuwait.
LONG DONG DOGGETT EXPECTED TO MAKE APPEARANCE AT HEARINGS!!!!
other news: haitian president ousted, haitian boat people refused refuge in the states.
PUBIC HAIRS FOUND IN COKE!!!!!
ex-head honcho of kkk gains in the polls.
ANITA IS LYING!!!!!!!
[…]
(WMW 176; capitals and italics original)
The capitalization in the dramatic text visually illustrates the huge space that the affair occupied in American society in 1991, superseding other national and international bits of news. Through voice, mimic, and gesture as well as through the selection of provocative vocabulary and manipulative phrases the reporter makes sure that her audience’s attention is primarily focused on the Hill-Thomas affair. The authoritative and manipulative position of the media with regard to what is broadcasted is most obvious when the reporter at the end of the scene provocatively explains that “[a]lthough street reactions to the hearings were mixed, we’ve selected to air only the views which reflect those like our own” (WMW 177). This scene in the play strikingly illustrates what Jackson criticizes in the introduction to WOMBmanWARs when she says that “[s]ex takes priority in this country in the news” so that we “always get sidetracked from really big issues […].”151
In Jackson’s play, the omnipresence of the hearings in public media is also noted by the characters Sapphire and her husband Danny who watch the hearings on TV. Danny tells his wife: “Ain’t nothing else on but Clarence. (He clicks remote control) Clarence.
(Click) Clarence (Click, click, click) Clarence” (WMW 155; italics original). The couple watches the broadcast of the hearings together, but their reactions to it are very different from each other. Although Danny’s and Sapphire’s attitude towards the truthfulness of Hill and Thomas slightly vary during the play – Danny calls Clarence first “Uncle Tom”
and then “homeboy” (WMW 160) as Sapphire provokingly remarks – their positions are finally made clear. When Danny accuses Hill of “acting,” Sapphire answers: “Act? That’s
151 Judith Alexa Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)," Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women, ed. Sydné Mahone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994): 147.
no act. That woman is telling the truth. I believe her” (WMW 156). She identifies with Hill and condemns Clarence who “[doesn’t] mean black folks no good if he’s sexually harassing young black women on the job” (WMW 162). Danny, however, accuses her of being “some kind of a feminist” (WMW 156) and fervently supports “[his] man” (WMW 162). While Sapphire notices Thomas’ “lying eyes” and the “guilt water” (WMW 162) of sweat running down his forehead, Danny interprets Thomas’s body language as “rage”:
A black man’s RAGE! That’s 400-years-of-being-treated-like-a-slave RAGE! That’s I-don’t-have-a-job-! RAGE. That’s I-can’t-feed-my-family RAGE. That’s What-does-it-take-to-get-through-to-you-people-? I-went-to-Yale-dammit RAGE!!!
(WMW 162; capitals original)
For Sapphire and Danny, Hill and Thomas become projection screens for their own interpretations of the world. While Hill stands for the fight against sexual discrimination and against the victimization of black women by black men, Thomas becomes the black hero who fights a white racist American society. The characters’ reactions to the broadcast on stage indeed mirror the general discourse on power politics in the US with regard to questions of race, sex, and gender that the affair resulted in.
In the Hill-Thomas event “sexism and racism become interchangeable”152 as both Jackson and contemporary scholars such as Lisa B. Thompson and Elizabeth Alexander point out. Thompson argues that Hill has become “one of the most recognizable and visible icons of middle-class black womanhood”153 in U.S. culture. Alexander refers to the Hill-Thomas affair as a galvanizing moment for black women “to come together collectively and be articulate and proactive about the issues facing black women across boundaries as the new millennium approached.”154 Anthologies such as Toni Morrison’s Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992) attest to the social and cultural meaning the Hill-Thomas affair has gained within a very short period of time. In the introduction to her anthology that features eighteen essays by prominent intellectuals and academics such as Nell Irvin Painter, Paula Giddings, Cornel West, and Homi K. Bhabha, Morrison writes
152 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 145.
153 Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, The New Black Studies Series (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009): 22.
154 Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (Saint Paul, MS: Graywolf Press, 2004): 102.
5. Cultural Figures to Re-Construct the Past 92
that the collection wants to explore “what happened” as opposed to “what took place”155 at these hearings. She explains that “what was at stake during these hearings was history”
in that “the site of exorcism of critical national issues was situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people.”156 Morrison describes the hearings as an exchange of “racial tropes”157 that the figures of Hill and Thomas were to embody. In accordance with Morrison’s critical analysis of the hearings Jackson points out that
“WOMBmanWARs was inspired by what [she] perceived as the ‘high-tech lynching’ of Anita Hill after checking out the twenty-one or so odd hours of primetime woman- bashing.”158 With her play Jackson aimed to question the American “gender socialization”159 that the hearings demonstrated for her and that are mirrored in the characters’ reactions to the TV broadcast.
The significance that the court trial acquired in American and especially in black American history was also pointed out by Clarence himself, who himself used the term “a high-tech-lynching” for the trial. His famous comparison is quoted in Jackson’s play in the original:
THOMAS: “This is a circus. A national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”
(WMW 183; quotation marks original)
By referring to the practice of lynching Clarence puts himself into the historical context of racial violence against African Americans that rose in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The adjective “high-tech” again emphasizes the role of the media and their power to influence the “construction of social reality”160 and the construction of iconic
155 Toni Morrison, ed., Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992): x. Another anthology that focuses on the 1991 affair is Robert Chrisman and Robert L. Allen, eds., Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Clarence Thomas Vs. Anita Hill (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).
156 Morrison, ed., Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality: x.
157 Morrison, ed., Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality: xvi.
158 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 145.
159 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 145.
160 Morrison, ed., Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality.
figures such as Hill and Thomas. As Danny tells his wife Sapphire: “Baby, I’ve got to watch this thing. This is history in the making” (WMW 178).
5.4 Conclusion
In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out that the disregard of African-American forefathers in American school books obscured the “great contributions of Afro-Americans to the growth and development” of America. He explained:
When we send our children to school in this country they learn nothing about us other than that we used to be cotton-pickers. Every little child going to school thinks his grandfather was a cotton-picker. Why, your grandfather was Nat Turner; your grandfather was Toussaint L’Ouverture;
your grandfather was Hannibal. Your grandfather was some of the greatest black people who walked on this earth. It was your grandfather’s hands who forged civilization and it was your grandmother’s hands who rocked the cradle of civilization.161
Throughout the 20th century the commemoration of African-American freedom fighters has served an important vehicle of the re-narration of African-American history and, thus, of the construction of African-American identity. The institution and creation of commemorative occasions and holiday traditions such as the Black History Month and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as well as the practice of commemorative street naming
“provided visibility and a public voice to African-Americans.”162 This process of revitalizing the past was however not considered the sole responsibility of historians, but
161 Malcolm Little, Malcom X on Afro-American History (New York, NY: Pathfinder Press, 1982): 64-65.
162 Keith A. Mayes, Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2009): 41.
According to Derek H. Alderman, a cultural geographer at East Carolina University, by 1996 there were 483 streets in the United States that were named after Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2003 he assumed that “[g]iven the problematic nature of collecting such data and the popularity of the commemorative practice, the current number of streets is likely much higher” (Derek H.
Alderman, "Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. within the African American Community," Area 35.2 (2003): 163-164). His argument is supported by the politics of street-naming in Harlem. After the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, many of Harlem’s street names were changed to honor prominent African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Malcolm X. Even fifty years after the movements in November 2009, two streets were re-named in honor of A.
Philip Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois, two civil rights leaders (cf. Jennifer Lee, "Two Harlem Streets Named for Civil Rights Leaders," The New York Times November 9, 2009.)
5. Cultural Figures to Re-Construct the Past 94
it has also been the concern of 20th-century African-American female playwrights, as the analyses above have shown.
In the plays considered here the re-writing of black American history attaches itself to the introduction of and reference to specific iconic figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Anita Hill, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. They all represent strength of resistance against different oppressive forms of racism and racial prejudice from the late 18th to the late 20th century. As intellectuals, leaders, activists, and politicians these cultural figures have captured the public’s attention and have thus gradually gained entry into African-American cultural memory. This creation mechanism is strikingly illustrated in Jackson’s play WOMBmanWARs, which focuses on public media such as television and newspapers and their impact on the representation of Anita Hill and Thomas Clarence in contemporary collective memory. By including original material Jackson directs our attention to the role of the spectator and the audience in the construction of iconic figures, transcending the sphere of the fictional world on stage. It is very unlikely that there will be an Anita Hill holiday or a Thomas Clarence Avenue anytime in the future, but there is no doubt that they have both gained entry into the iconic system of African-American cultural figures.
However, the plays themselves also contribute to the meaning of these public personae in collective memory. Just as media coverage influences the creation of cultural heroes as seen in WOMBmanWARs, the theater stage helps to promote and to establish their meaning in collective forms of memory. With the plays functioning as carriers of cultural memory, the inclusion of cultural heroes in the plays supports the creation and solidification of their cultural significance in general. In the dramatic texts the cultural figures are kept alive as parts of a unique African-American cultural memory that constitutes a counter-memory to white American history. As George Lipsitz points out:
Counter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions
and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story.163
The commemoration of individual freedom fighters and cultural icons in African-American theater contributes to the formation of an African-African-American counter-memory on the basis of “the local, the immediate, and the personal.” In the plays the characters identify with specific African Americans who, as important parts of African-American history, are turned into personal role models, thereby offering different possibilities for identification with and a re-interpretation of African-American history to the audience.
The theater performance enables a staging of the past that transgresses a mere re-narration of it, making it directly perceivable and tangible for the audience. The act of remembering specific African-American freedom fighters in the plays is indeed a conscious gesture of honoring their struggles and their significance for black American history. The cultural heroes introduced in the plays represent idealized or even divinized ancestors, whose memories are transmitted and preserved in the dramatic texts, serving to establish and transmit an understanding of African-American identity that is deeply rooted in the commemoration of history and its heroes.
163 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990): 213. The concept of counter-memory was first introduced by Michel Foucault (cf. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977)).