The Darker Face of the Earth
BarbaraGoff, Universityof Reading, UK

My contribution to the ‘Reception’ seminar is an initial response to Rita Dove’s play The Darker Face of the Earth (first performed 1996).  I intend to include this play in a book-length study of Greek tragedy in African (-American) culture.  This book is a joint project with my husband Michael Simpson of the English Department, Goldsmiths’ College, London University.  This seminar happily gives me the chance to a) start organizing my thoughts on the play; b) advertise a wonderful drama to anyone who is not familiar with it; and c) shamelessly solicit enlightenment from others.  Like Robert Garland in the last session, I shall duly acknowledge everything I learn, although I’ll do my best not to give full credit elsewhere.

The Darker Face of the Earth is available as a text published by Oberon Books, London 1999.  I saw the play in the National Theatre production in the autumn of 1999 and read the book shortly afterwards.  I took copious notes on the performance, but discovered when I came to write that they were sadly inadequate in terms of allowing me to reconstruct what I saw.  So despite my best efforts I am stuck with the text again.  I would be interested in other people’s responses to such problems, and also to the difficulty of writing about art which has not yet been ‘received’ enough to generate a critical mass of other texts.  As classicists tout court we do not often face such problems, but if we are also trying to respond to contemporary culture in the making, the absence of guidelines can be troublesome.

The Darker Face sets the Oedipus story in the slave states of the American South; the incest and parricide are layered with the losses of children and of parents that are endemic to slavery.  Its major intervention is to make the Oedipus figure, here called Augustus Newcastle, the child of a white woman, wife of the plantation owner, and a black slave.  Augustus is given away as a baby because he is so obviously a sign of interracial sexual transgression, but he returns – he is bought – and becomes a leader of a slave rebellion, the lover of his mother/mistress, and the killer, eventually, not only of his black slave father but also of his master/the husband of his mother.  Its second intervention is to make the mother, Amalia Jennings LaFarge, a figure of tremendous initiative and force, so that the play is driven by her actions.  I will offer some thoughts on both these interventions and then close with comments on what Dove herself says about the play in the programme notes to the National Theatre production of August 1999.

The Darker Face is an Oedipal drama not only because of its subject matter but because it mounts an Oedipal challenge, that of the new to the traditional.  More precisely, it asks how European culture, in one of its most famous manifestations, copes with those who have been systematically exploited or degraded by that culture.  The play finds its own fathers elsewhere, and unsurprisingly, it can be seen to have at least two.  Fugard’s The Island offers a paradigm for reading Greek tragedy, within colonial culture, as both liberating and confining.  In the same way, Augustus is educated in ‘Milton.  The Bible./ And the Tales of the Greeks’ (55) and the play suggests that this kind of education fuels his intellectual independence and his eventual rebellion.  To succeed, however, he also needs other, historical, stories, in particular that of the slave uprising on Haiti, which he retells to his fellow slaves (he is among other things a compelling storyteller).  In the end Augustus’ classical learning does him little good – he fails to recognize himself in the ancient stories, even though, as he says, ‘the Greeks/were a bit too predictable’ (56) and in any case tragedy’s horror stories are matched if not topped by the tales of brutality and loss endemic to the slave society.  

The second father, the other paradigm for the confrontation between Africa and Greece, is Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus.  This play reclaims Greek tragedy for Africa  and the African diaspora by showing that African cultural expression comes closest to reproducing the totality of Greek theatre.  So in the Playwright’s Notes The Darker Face points out that its community of slaves ‘comment[s] upon the play somewhat in the manner of a Greek chorus’. What it could have pointed out is that this chorus is a true community of singers, and thus manages to be folded into the action in a way that escapes most contemporary productions of actual Greek tragedy.  It is a choir singing hymns, a chorus chanting songs of work and revolution, and a collection of named individuals who also speak for themselves and take part in the events on stage. The Darker Face can be seen to converse with The Gospel in its wider politics too.  On the one hand, its insistence on slavery can remind us that ancient Greece too was a slave state, and that the tradition is corrupt at its heart in the same way as for Augustus ‘something’s foul in his blood’ (77).  On the other hand, that classical tradition provided some of the best aspirations that America owns and might still live up to; the classical names of the slaves, which only Augustus can interpret for them, speak not only to the masters’ power of naming but also to the numerous towns of the northeast which proclaim their civic hopes in their parades of Scipios, Ciceros and Romes.

The Oedipal story, thus relocated in space and time, reframes the questions of roots and of dislocation to embrace the community as well as the personal level.   Most of the slaves could tell a similar story of loss of identity as can Augustus, although he is the only one marked out (by his anomalous education?) for the forging of a new, courageous and resistant self.  Its weight and reach similarly mean that the Oedipus story possesses the dignity to tell the story of Black Americans, all of whose history by now is one of miscegenation (as indeed is that of white Americans).  But the politics of the Oedipus are complicated in this play by the female, who tells that mothers, not fathers, are what is important.  It is the play’s ‘dirty little secret’ that Augustus’ success is partly explicable by his being his mother’s son; as well as his own circumstances, it is her feisty inheritance that drives him on.  Described in the directions as exhibiting ‘more intelligence and backbone than is generally credited to a Southern belle’ (8), Amalia has taken the initiative, before the play opens, in her social and sexual relations with slaves, especially with Hector the father of her child; when the child is born, she is utterly brazen in presenting it to her husband Louis, and plans indeed to keep it (11).  When she is prevailed upon to give the child away, she subsequently reinvents herself as the boss of the plantation and becomes more hard and masculine than Louis, and even, allegedly, than her father.  ‘Miss Amalia hiked up her skirts/and pulled on man’s boots…And Massa Louis took off his riding breeches --…and shut himself upstairs’ (25).  She is the one who authorizes the purchase of Augustus, and who then takes the sexual initiative with him. 

This recentring on the female is obviously something that a contemporary rewriting of the Oedipus cries out for.  It inverts the ‘normal’ story of miscegenation which focuses on the white man and the black female slave, and which is the story that Augustus presumes as his inheritance. ‘Missy couldn’t stand the sight of me./Just look at me!  It’s an old story’ (40).  Such recentring also has some historical warrant in that cases of specifically female complicity (social as well as sexual) with slaves are known to the records; cases of intelligent Southern belles are probably also available.  But difficulties do accrue around the figure of Amalia.  She lost her mother as a baby (70) and is repeatedly described as her father’s daughter (8, 19) so that any characteristics she passes on to Augustus can in fact be seen as her father’s not hers.  Moreover, I found the attraction between Augustus and Amalia undermotivated both in performance and on the page.  Needless to say, one can explain the attraction either in terms of family likeness or in terms of the erotic charge of inequality in power, but the play is never explicit about the attraction, and thus seems to invite us to come up with the usual explanation of romantic magic.  This romance is of considerable importance, however, (by contrast, for instance, to the Greek version), and we are required to believe in it, because it motivates the final conflict which destroys Augustus.  As part of the revolutionary cell, he is charged with the murder of Amalia, both to prove his commitment and materially to free the slaves.  This conflict generates what to my mind is some of the weakest writing in the play, when Augustus gives voice to the rather arithmetical calculation: ‘Everything was so simple before!/Hate and be hated./But this – love or freedom --/is the devil’s choice’ (102).

The romance also takes us to my last point, which is the interview in the programme notes with Rita Dove herself.  For her, the love story is paramount: ‘I thought of it [the play] as a love story and as a play about a man who tries to realise his own destiny’.  The origins of her play are in the Oedipus Tyrannus – no surprise there!  She rereads it and ‘The story haunted me.  Why is this so compelling?’  Her question is Freud’s, but her answer is very different.  ‘Once the analogy occurred to me of a slave plantation in the American South there was no holding me back.  I wanted to find out what happened to this man Augustus.  How does he come to terms with his fate and maintain some sort of dignity?’  Interestingly, both here and in the later sentence from the interview quoted above, ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ could be understood either as referring to slave existence or as referring to incest and parricide.  But in fact, after acknowledging the ‘analogy’ of the slave plantation, Dove abjures the notion that slavery is a driving force within her play.  ‘I never thought of The Darker Face of the Earth as a slave play.  I thought of it as a love story…’  She goes on to site the difference in the cultural divergence between Britain and the United States: ‘In the US we are so befogged by the guilt accompanying the subject of slavery that it’s very hard to work through, in a play like this, to the love story and the humanity…I’m tremendously optimistic about this production because given what I know about British theatre, the story itself, the human story, is going to be paramount’.

What is interesting to me, and what I hope will be interesting to other members of the seminar, is the evident disjunction between how she and I read her play.  Some of the questions raised by this disjunction are not unlike Robert’s in the last session, about the limits of politicisation, while others focus on what we can understand by and expect of the classical tradition in the present world.  In any case, this is an extraordinarily important and rewarding play.  I hope that anyone not familiar with it will feel it incumbent upon them to grab a copy!

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RESPONSE

Peter Meineck, Aquila Theatre, New York, USA

One more small but important point on The Darker Face of the Earth at the National. The Director, Jim Kerr received a first in Classics from University College London and was one of the founders of the UCL Greek play (Agamemnon in 1986). He went on to do post graduate study in Classics at the University of Illinois before heading to LAMDA. Jim is also a very talented actor with some serious theatre and film work under his belt.

A true Scouser (although an Everton supporter) he is a great guy and Barbara should definitely get in touch with him