The Limits of My Lackness (Or Black Thereof)

When I went to ask myself what great lesson I was learning about the limits of my blackness, I felt a bit guilty. Was I missing out? I would think that if I was "getting it", that I'd notice some discernible change.I was asking myself this - "what have you learned?" - because I didn't feel like I'd had any epiphanies.

Then I realized that the real issue was not my blackness or my relationship to it, but something else. In this show, or rather by doing this show, I define my blackness not by commenting on Stew's story, but by making my own Real. By going through the process of this show and creating, I walk a parallel path to Stew's. (It's not exactly his path. His real is his own and mine is my own.)

It's clear to me  that this show allows him to recreate his world in a way that he can deal with. By creating a microcosm of his life, he's been allowed to skew the trajectory of his life, or maybe to bend the image of it through a different lens. I do the same thing by putting his mantle on. In imbibing this show, we can resonate with some of the same struggles and experiences as him. I am the Youth, as you are the Youth, as he is the Youth. The pilgrim soul is the one reading this blog.


I took a class in college called Autobiography of French Women Writers with Dr. Durbin. The class was in partial fulfillment of my French degree, and it stuck with me. Marguerite Duras, writer in the Nouvelle Vague style, wrote two books that could be described as autobiographies. Their significance to me is that they tell two completely different stories, and that they're both real. The first is concrete and detached, the second is a cinematic ego-stroke. But because it was her own life that she commented on, no one can dare tell her that one is more real than the other. She says that over and over. Even details that conflict must reconcile each other by existing in the same space. And like the second of these books, Passing Strange is the Art that comments on (or reinvents) the life of the creator.

The line between fact and fiction is unclear. Stew has already himself admitted that some of the facts don't exist as presented in the show. But that's immaterial. The artist can rewrite his life, and thereby rewrite his own reality.

Believe for a moment, that your reality is not circumstance. It is not the sum of statistics and events. It is instead choice. It is what you choose to leave behind. The artist takes control of her life by choosing to rewrite it, because once you've decided it's true, it is.

The Youth tells Stew not to give up on Art because it is the one thing "that can bring her back." This scene is a recreation of his own conversation with himself; the one where he consciously chooses to be the author of his own life.  But as Scott has already made clear to me, there is a Zen permeating this piece. There is an abandon in the inevitability of it all.

"Don't be sad about your chosen path, and where it's taken you thus far. 'Cuz this is what you did, and that is who you are. And it's alright."

This show is its own Serenity prayer. God grant that I should change what I can, accept what I cannot, and be wise enough to know the difference. Can I get a Amen?

So this all being said, my relationship with my black costars, my relationship to the audience, the content of the show, the black idioms...none of these things define my blackness. More importantly, it is the choice to do this show that has the most effect on my identity. This process is the defining factor. Or one of them, at least. Who knows, maybe I'll write a Passing Strange one day.