I Used to Love H.E.R. and Abduction: African Caribbean MixFest at Atlantic Theater Company

Before we begin today, a quick story!

My tenth grade English class was one of my favorite classes of all time. The course was BritLit, but my teacher, Ms. Penman, themed the curriculum around the nature of good and evil. We read Macbeth, Paradise Lost, Beowulf, Lord of the Flies, 1984, etc. We also learned literary theory and about allusions and allegories, which all included having pajama parties, reading children’s books, and watching The Simpsons. It was a great time.

One of the core texts of the year was Geoffrey Chaucer’sThe Canterbury Tales. If you know anything about The Canterbury Tales, you know that the best character is The Wife of Bath. This is objective truth. We love a saucy old broad! So, imagine fifteen-year-old me, sitting at my desk in English class, and as we’re going over the general prologue where Chaucer introduces every single character, The Wife of Bath is describes as “gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.” In modern English, this basically translates to, “she was gap-toothed, truly.”

Ms. Penman turns to the class: “Does anyone here have a gap-tooth?”

As you may recall from the picture of me on the front page of this website, I have a gap between my two front teeth. I raised my hand.

My teacher asked me, “Do you know what it means if a character has a gap-tooth in middle English literary symbolism?”

I didn’t.

She said, “It means she’s had… many sexual partners.”

And that’s the story of the time a teacher called fifteen-year-old me a slut in from of my entire English class!

Just kidding. It was very funny and I really didn’t care at the time, nor do I now. I’ve never had a problem with my teeth, and I think it’s hilarious that they’re a symbol for Medieval slut-shaming.

So imagine my delight when in Jasmine Lee-Jones spoken word solo piece, I Used to Love H.E.R., The Wife of Bath was put in dialogue with Queen Latifah?

African Caribbean MixFest at Atlantic Theater Company

Okay, I know I said festival season was over, and the weird January experimental theater festival season is over, but there are always festivals. The African Caribbean MixFest is a festival of readings of new works by African and Caribbean playwrights. It does what it says on the tin, doesn’t it?

I Used to Love H.E.R.

I Used to Love H.E.R. begins with British writer/performer Jasmine Lee-Jones reciting Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be…” soliloquy. This transitions into her recollection of how she fell in love with poetry through the capital G Great works of the English poets and playwrights she studied at school. As the piece continues, she begins to uncover new contemporary poets, with a new type of rhyme and rhythm but never abandons the writers she fell in love with at the beginning, she simply puts them all in dialogue with each other. She explains how Sir Walter Raleigh and Run DMC both used politics in their poetry, how Lauren Hill responds to the work of Christopher Marlow, and how Nicki Minaj takes a page out of Paradise Lost.

She weaves an intricate dialogue between poets past and present, and her knowledge and command of rhythm and language is clear and incredibly enjoyable. In a way, she reminds me a young Lin-Manuel Miranda, taking from every source that’s made her the writer she is and generating something completely new. Her love for poetry and music is palpable through the screen, as she looks directly into the camera almost the entire time, just standing against a plain white background. As we’ve discussed previously when I covered the motown project, I love when we are given the opportunity to examine “high brow” art and “low brow” culture next to each other and create a conversation between the two, and while I enjoyed the motown project, I found I Used to Love H.E.R. much more successful because Lee-Jones’ connection to every single work she referenced was clear and powerful. I loved the piece, and I look forward to seeing her trajectory as a writer and any of her future works that are produced in the city.

Abduction

The next piece presented in tandem with I Used to Love H.E.R. was Abduction by Whitney White, who you may remember as one half of the team behind Capsule at Under the Radar Festival. Abduction features a young Black woman, played by Amara Brady, being interviewed by an unseen AI/robot/alien situation, played by Travis Artz. After asking a few basic questions, the alien asks when Brady’s character realized she was Black. She tells a story about going to a predominantly white pre-school, and from there the interview delves into more detail about her identity as a Black woman. Like I Used to Love H.E.R., in Abduction music is featured. The alien plays a series of songs, all by prominent Black artists, including Michael Jackson and Prince, and asks the woman to respond to them. This was the most joyful part of the piece, before things get darker. The alien then begins to ask her to unpack her trauma, and they start by going over a series of racial slurs and their origins.

For me, this was when the piece started to feel oddly familiar. As the alien kept persisting that the woman explain things that it doesn’t understand, you can see her get tired and worn down by this line of questioning and having to go over traumatic parts of her lived experience. At one point, the alien asks where the term “Jim Crow” comes from and if he was a real person. The woman replies that Jim Crow was a character and not a real person, but she doesn’t know the exact origins. The alien says (and I’m paraphrasing), “you don’t make it a habit to have in depth knowledge of all the words used to oppress you?” It then just looks it up on Wikipedia.

During this interaction, I saw conversations that people are having every single day. I think Whitney White used satire masterfully by putting a real person in an unrealistic situation and turning it on it’s head. Having to explain racism to an alien shows both the inherent absurdity of white supremacy and how human beings on this planet often behave as if we are all alien to each other and struggle to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Overall, I really enjoyed both of the readings I saw from the African Caribbean Mixfest, and look forward to more opportunities to support the work of Jasmine Lee-Jones and Whitney White. I just love good theatre so much.