Harlem Duet CSI

Context:

Djanet Sears:

• Toronto  playwright, director, and actor; professor at University of Toronto
• Born in England to a Guyanese father and a Jamaican mother
• Named Janet by her parents; added the D when she found a town called Djanet on a trip to Algeria
• Founding member of Obsidian Theater
• First play: Afrika Solo (1987)
• Highly acclaimed, broadcast on CBC Radio
• Fictionalized account of her year-long journey through Africa in search of an identity
• Explored the complexities of growing up as an African-Canadian with a mixed cultural background
• Sears played the lead role; largely a solo performance
• Harlem Duet (1997)
• 2006: With this play, Sears became the first black playwright to have her work performed at the Stratford Festival of Canada
• Stratford Festival had a conservative, white image that modern audiences were becoming less interested in; Sears attracted a new audience
• Hoped that Harlem Duet would inspire a movement
• Motives for writing
• Feels compelled to write so black people continue to have a voice
• Not enough plays “filled with people who look like me, telling stories about me, my family, my friends, my community”

Harlem:

• Founded in 17th century as a village for Dutch immigrants
• Black people started emigrating to Harlem during the Great Migration (1905)
• 1920s and 30s was a center for black artistic revolution called “Harlem Renaissance”

Apollo Theater:

• Music hall noted for African American performers

Harlem Renaissance:

• Cultural movement during the 20s and 30s   
• Characterized by influx of Negro literature, music, art
• Also contributed to a new sense of identity within the black community
• Significant members of the Renaissance include
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Langston Hughes

Martin Luther King Jr:

• Non-violent protest
• Integration into white society
• Race doesn’t make us, just our skin not ourselves

Malcom X:

• Black supremacy
• Separate black and white communities
• Scoffed at racial integration

Intertext

• Shakespeare “Othello”
• handkerchief
• “sybil”
• Othello plans on going to Cyprus
• Chris Yago
• “There’s magic in the web of it” (3.4) and (35)
• HE:
• “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (2.6)
• Recites Othello’s speech of why Desdemona married him (2.9)
• Martin Luther King Jr “I have a dream” speech
• Billie and Othello recite parts of the speech together and then Billie recites it separately
• Aretha Franklin “Spanish Harlem”
• Cover of Ben E. King song, released summer of 1971
• Rose grows fulls of dreams but then is put in someone’s garden to grow to his standards
• Paul Gilroy: Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
• Race is an artificial label that is imposed by present-day society but no longer relevant in a global market
• Condemns “racializing and raciological thought,” endorses a “common humanity”
• Othello similarly claims to be “against race,” that his African history and black personhood are secondary to his cultural “American-ness”
• “I am a middle class educated man. I mean, what does Africa have to do with me. We struttin’ around professing some imaginary connection to a land we don’t know. Never seen. Never gonna see.”
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
• Argues that black people who lose their native cultural origin experience an inferiority complex
• “Corporeal malediction”—a term coined by Fanon
• Billie uses the term to refer to Othello as yet another black man who tries to “White wash” his life
• Shakespeare’s Pericles
• “HE” says Mona cast him as the “prince of Tyre”
• Prince of Tyre, flees from home, forms a family, is separated from his family but finally reunited
• Relates to the unexpected death of Billie’s mother and her strained relationship with her father, Canada

Subtext

• HER far more educated than HIM
• “Cleotus and Venus” (34)
• Similar to Desdemona’s intellectual superiority over Othello
• HIM demonstrates his love
• Stage directions rather than words
• HIM = Othello, a man of action
• The fatal handkerchief
• In Othello, the “ocular proof” that drives Othello to kill Desdemona and himself
• In Harlem Duet, literally fatal, having been poisoned by Billie
• Billie tries to warn Magi that the handkerchief was poisoned, regretting her actions
• Othello is talked out of using poison by Iago
• Canada
• Canada as a historical promiseland
• Canada the character is flawed, unable to improve Billie’s situation, but a symbol of hope nevertheless
• Reflects on Canada the location
• Three settings: the timelessness of racial prejudice
• Sears: “It gave depth that I wanted”
• Billie: “Trapped in history. A history trapped in me.”