I was interested in the
visual textures of race
and made
the choice
to use
blackness
as a
“material”
in my
writing...
21
brought this story in to a creative writing class about two brothers dealing with a schizophrenic parent and there was this moment, after the initial critique was over, when my
professor– this very famous novelist– sort of leaned forward and was like, “Um... so I have
a question. What race are these characters?” And I was so confused. I had no idea what to
do with that. I guess I hadn’t “marked” their race in the telling of the story– which was from
the first person– but, in my reading experience, I’d never seen anyone write, “Jane Eyre, who
was white.” I remember in that moment thinking, “Oh no. There is an anxiety that people
deal with when they read my work because they know I’m black. And there is an expectation
placed on me to deal with that anxiety.” Or something.
I was so traumatized that I couldn’t take any more fiction classes, so I took a playwriting class, because it felt like those questions of who was what could be answered later,
though now of course I look back on all those works and see that I was cleverly avoiding
the issue– setting things in “racially neutral” workplaces, using stock characters, or messing with form in some strange way– like making the theatre itself talk or structuring the
whole thing like a spelling bee. If I look back on it, I was always questioning form. Form
was always a character to me.
So that all happened and then I had this really intense moment with my professor, who
said to me near the end of our class, “I think you’re a playwright and I think you should
deal with that and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I remember going back to my apartment
and feeling my life change. Suddenly, playwriting was a real option for my future or
something? And I felt this intense obligation to learn everything about theatre, ever.
Signature: A daunting task.
BJJ: It was a daunting task, but I took it very seriously. I took one of my first playwriting
classes with Neal Bell and the first thing we did was read Red Cross by Sam Shepard,
Jake Hart and Daniel Manley in The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon at P.S. 122, 2010.