There were many phases, and many
challenges, in the process of transposing Everyday Afroplay
into its latest iteration. Through the chaos guaranteed by a long
gestation period, the harmony and discord of collaboration—with
editor Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, myself, and numerous mentors and
readers offering suggestions, amendments, and questions months on
end—and the usual dramaturgical quandaries posed when manifesting
Everyday Afroplay,
Daaimah Mubashishr wrestled The Immeasurable Want of Light
into existence. Prefaced with an incisive introduction by Amauta M. Firmino, the result is a
funky intergalactic piece of afro-avant-garde theater, interspersed
with four complimentary digital collages by the artist and historian
Nell Painter.
I
wanted to connect with Mubashshir to document and interrogate what
had transpired. Over a few conversations, email exchanges, and a
slightly more formal sit-down interview, the central questions that
guided our conversations emerged and could be separated into two
major categories: What the Immeasurable Want of Light is;
how the play and its publication came to be; and what are the
stories, messages, themes, etc. being communicated by its highly
poetic, highly esoteric text?
Here,
I present an edited composition of our communications that addresses
that first pillar of our inquiry, what it is and how it got that way.
As before, my questions and comments will appear in bold with
Mubashshir's responses in plain text.
Okay,
so let's just start at the beginning. What is the book? How did it
happen? Who is publishing it?
Shortly after the show, actually in
August of 2017, I got an email from Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, who
directs 3 Hole Press, and she wanted to maybe talk about Everyday
Afroplay. And we had a conversation about what [publishing the play]
would look like and so that's how this book got “bornt” so to
speak. It's been oh my goodness a long journey. The thing about
Everyday Afroplay that is important is that I've envisioned it
as something that is a living play that should be used to fit in
whatever container.
Oh my god. I feel like there is a
different way to describe that. So, Whenever there is a collaborator
that I'm working with on Everyday Afroplay, I really want to shape
Everyday Afroplay to fit the space that, the destination space
so to speak. If it's going to be a show like at JACK or Bushwick
Starr I really think about the space that we're embodying, the people
that are involved, and so shape the text to fit that model. Also
duration comes into play. And I think with a book I had to think
about what is a publication, what is it to read this text on the page
and how will the end reader interact with this text and what does all
that mean? And so, in collaboration with Rachel and in collaboration
with 3 hole press, I reshaped Everyday Afroplay text into a
whole different play, The Immeasurable Want of Light. And
basically, The Immeasurable Want Light tracks an artist's
journey from becoming invisible to visible through the lens of the
star formation and looking at Dark matter and looking at a character
but out of space.
How
has the publication process, say working with Nalebuff as an editor,
been different from say working with theater-arts based collaborators
in the past like directors, actors, or me, or other dramaturgs etc.
It's basically been, really, it's been
wholly different, because you don't have actors or a director
involved, it's really been just me Rachel and Stephen kind of going
back and forth with the text.
[laughter]
Stephen, you mean me?
Stephen meaning
you, Stephen.
Could you
elaborate on that difference? Do you mean it's a little bit more of
an intimate process?
I'd say it's
definitely more intimate and definitely more cerebral. That's what it
is. It's a very cerebral process, keeping in mind the reader. And how
a reader is definitely different [from an audience member]. And
that's been a very long learning curve for me, learning that a reader
is different from an audience member. A reader I think grasps things
in a cerebral way where as an audience member has to live in moments
with the actors. So it's a shortened process because you're cutting
out the live actor, you're cutting out human energy that happens
live. So that's just a completely different language.
But don't you think some of that is
incumbent on your readers, to understand that reading a play is
different than reading a book?
Exactly. It is.
Therein lies another layer of the challenge of crafting text. And so
we've been looking at these plays collectively as a whole and as
individual Everyday Afroplays as sort of poetry; we've been
shaping the text as if it were closer to poetry than prose in the
literary way, if that makes sense. A lot of the comments that I got
were to treat the story as if it were something that someone could
enter into in the middle and flip back and forth. Which is not what
I've written. But I think looking at The Immeasurable Want of
Light as a book of poems, or like poetry, has been a measuring
stick of how to shape the play. And that's not what The
Immeasurable Want of Light is, it pushed against those boundaries
and broke them and disobeyed those rules in a lot of ways. In the
end, we got to a place that was in between something like a book of
poems and an entire play.
I think people
would find when they looked at it that it's got a significant amount
of variety in the way that it looks and the sorts of stories that you
present, but that's partially just the episodic nature of sort of the
Everyday Afroplay process.
Yes Everyday
Afroplay tends to be, because I write it very fast and it's
influenced by whatever I'm influenced by just that day, whatever I'm
reading, whatever I'm seeing. I've allowed myself to experiment with
form from day to day. So there's really no cohesiveness in form but
there's a cohesiveness in the underlying interaction with blackness.
That's the only thread that really ties all of this together.
Everything else is up for grabs.
Let's talk a little about how you
put this specific manuscript together. How did you choose the
individual Everyday Afroplays that would or
wouldn't be included? What new content did you have to create to
complement those designs?
Oh my goodness. Okay so initially
Rachel invited me to think of someone outside of theater I'd like to
have write an introduction to the work. And Immediately I had three
names that came to mind, that I would literally die if they were able
to write an introduction and that was Nell Painter, Hilton Als, and
Fred Moten. All of those authors have, in the past five years, given
me something artistically or culturally, something to hang on to or a
reason to stay on the planet and work. I don't know. They're like my
writerly big brothers and sisters, like it's okay to be here in this
crazy house that we live in. I felt a very special affinity and I
wanted to interact with their writing and their spirits. What would
it be like to maybe shape Everyday Afroplay around Nell
Painter's work, Hilton Als' work, or Fred Moten's work? And so
literally I gathered maybe 10 to 15 Everyday Afroplay plays
that spoke to my relationship to Nell Painter's work, I then came up
with, gathered 10-15 plays that related to Hilton Als' work or my
relationship to Hilton Als work, and the same with Fred Moten, and I
put all those plays together and was like okay guys here's your book.
And then Stephen, that's right you
Stephen, and Rachel was like ummmm this doesn't make any sense. No no
seriously they didn't really say that . But it wasn't yet a book. So
over the next six to eight months we have pushed and pulled this text
into finding out how to makes this into a whole work. And so I think
back in December, after realizing that the way I'd set up the book
into these three sections wasn't working at all, I threw away the
sections and all the plays that sort of didn't fit. Me and Rachel had
a session and we looked at all the plays that really felt like they
spoke to each other and we cut away [the rest], and then decided to
create a frame that would go over, that would hold, the core. There
were probably 10 to 15 core Everyday Afroplay plays that fit
together and I created a frame that could hold those plays, and
that's when The Immeasurable Want of Light,
as it is today, was finally born;.after a few months we got to
that place. And then I think over from December or January til now,
it's been about really shaping that work to make sense and that's
workable for the public or any arena.
How did Nell Painter come to make
original artwork for the play? How does the art interact with the
text?
When
I was at Columbia , I rediscovered Nell Irvin Painter. A professor
recommended I read The History of White People after a very honest
conversation about being black in an ivy league school. The book
saved my soul and brain. I became obsessed with Nell Painter and
discovered that she had been with me through high school and
undergrad. When I took any course on African-American History, Nell
Painter had been there. I'm not proud of this but reading historical
text as a young student I was more concerned with memorizing the data
than who wrote the text. I'm older now and pay closer attention.
Since
reading History of White People, I discovered Nell had changed
careers and is now a painter. I found her art to be equally engaging
as her history texts. Rachel and I had numerous discussions of the
possibility of using visual work to supplement the text. So when we
reached out to Nell for a contribution we let her decide the way she
would respond. She chose illustrations. Which I find stunning. Both
as a compliment to the story and as a artistic conversation between
student and teacher. As an emerging writer at the beginning of a
career to have my first publication illustrated by my number one
intellectual hero (she-ra) in the new way she is expressing herself
is breathtaking and beyond belief. It feels like a circle has been
closed.
You
touched on this already, stating that the big picture connection
between all these different things is their relationship to
blackness, but can you elaborate on what that means?
Just living in it. What does it mean,
what do we mean by asking the question of how best to make black and
brown bodies visible and what's it cost? What does it cost to make
black and brown bodies visible? And for me going back to Nell
Painter, Fed Moten, and Hilton Als, when I read their text when I
read their work, those were the moments where I felt most alive most
visible. I felt like I had been seen when I read their work.
So of course I wanted to answer back
to Nell Fred and Hilton; here is my journey to be visible with you.
And that is what the book is about, what does it look like to become
visible or what does it feel like in a body. And that ties to
Everyday Afroplay in the sense that its about the many
different ways, the many facts, the many, oh my god, what it's like
to live in black skin and there's so many, actually I mean there are
so many ways to live in the human body, no matter what your heritage,
ethnicity is. But the reason why I'm focusing on blackness itself is
because that's my body, and like, and I just realized I'm only
person. So Immeasurable Want of Light
uses blackness as a launching pad to talk about visibility.
Is it fair to say then that this
iteration of Everyday Afroplay is
more autobiographical than previous versions?
Some of it seems like it's very specifically about you, some of
the new Maker and Tress material.
There's this sort of loose, not even,
relationship that never happens. And it's a, it's a, you know an
African American woman and a white woman. And I'm clearly, I'm single
so kind of like... Tress isn't really about anybody specific.
Literally. It's only autobiographical in the sense that. Here, let me
back up. The relationship with Maker and Tress is not specifically in
a straight one-to-one, apples-to-apples autobiographical thing. What
Maker and Tress represent for me is my love relationship with
whiteness.
Ooh.
Ooh.
But you have infused some personal
information into the story? Like the student debt details.
Okay, so yes. See that's just the way
I write. I create, I create characters based on little fragments and
ideas in myself. Yes, that student debt is real, real, real, true.
All those numbers are true. [laughing] All those numbers are true.
They feel real.
That's real. Unfortunately because I'm
so ambitious and refuse to wait for people to notice me, I don't have
a social life. But that debt is real, because, I told this to Stephen
earlier, y'all don't pay me. And I want you to write that, Stephen.
Alright.
I'll make sure that gets included. Lastly, how many
drafts would you say you've done of this thing?
Hold on, let me
wipe up the blood. At least 30. Maybe 25-30. I didn't count but it's
been... I may have worked on this play more than any
other,consistently. but I think that that's because I've had a
different type of support. Putting on work for an audience at my
stage of development as an emerging playwright as an emerging
playwright that is not directly attached to an institution, I've
taken it upon myself to push my plays forward on my own. And
unfortunately there is just only so much I can do by myself which
I've learned. Without this publication deadline, I'm not sure how I
would have gotten to the place where I think, “We're going to play
with 30 drafts.” It's not that I don't like doing it, but I'm only
one human being. I thought I was five but now I'm realizing I'm only
one. I literally just woke up last week folks, last week.