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Theatre Journal

May 2005

Performance Review

By Margaret Werry

University of Minnesota

The Fula From America: An African Journey

By Carlyle Brown.  Directed by Louise Smith.

Center for Independent Artists, Minneapolis

4-24 October 2004.

“What a brutal fucking irony that is, yeah?”

The phrase resonates through Minnesota-based writer/performer Carlyle Brown’s recent solo show, The Fula from America, a narrative meditation that traces the affective contours of the African diaspora, and dwells on the paradoxes of travel in the post/neocolonial world.  In 1983, disillusioned by the collapse of pan-Africanist ideals in the era following independence in Africa and the Civil Rights movement in America, the young Carlyle sets out for Africa to “discover himself” by returning to his ancestral homeland.  He lands in Dakar, Senegal, with nothing but a small backpack, his Afrocentric convictions, and the business card of a friend from Ghana, on which is scrawled the phone number of a high-ranking civil servant in Freetown, Sierra Leone.  By the time he leaves Sierra Leone, he is literally running for his life as the city founded by freed slaves disintegrates into another episode in the ongoing state of emergency that has become a way of life in West Africa.  Unlike his African brethren, however, he has a safe place to call “home” and the freedom to go there.  This, for “American Kal” (as he has been dubbed by his African friends) is the greatest irony.  In his few weeks in Mama Africa, he has been alternately humiliated and rescued by his instinctive exercise of rights and entitlements of American citizenship, the very right of inviolable individualism historically denied Brown and his African-American kin in the country of their birth.  Words like freedom and home shatter under the pressure of their encounter with postcolonial realities, and our narrator is returned to a complex, refracted, painfully ambivalent sense of belonging to a land that had robbed his ancestors of family, culture, and history and imprisoned them in slavery.

This most brutal of ironies plays out within a fairly conventional framework of theatrical storytelling: linear narrative, a bare stage with modest lighting and audio support, intimate direct address to the audience.  Within this simplicity of means, however, Brown’s performance is dizzyingly epic in scope: with deft economy and unassuming wit he traverses four hundred years of colonial and postcolonial history, racial memory and political economy.  On the one hand, he draws on the rich tradition of the travelogue, replete with colorful detail – boy soldiers in olive drab and lime-green plastic sandals, ramshackle “taxis” shared with goats and chickens – and equally colorful characters.  (These last were rendered with skill and acuity by Brown, with attention to the minutiae of gesture and accent that allowed the charm, cunning, kindness, and occasional cravenness of their subjects to shine through without caricature.)  On the other hand, Brown’s work is a fine-grained autoethnography, attending to the subjective awareness of its narrator as he negotiates unfamiliar social and cultural worlds, locates himself, and is located at new interstices of power and discourse.  When Brown’s program notes remind us that travel is a quest in which “the only thing we will discover is ourselves,” the gesture is far from narcissistic.  With this claim, his narrator forgoes the cosmopolitan prerogative of objectivity (traveling to discover the Other) and commits to an ethics of self-exposure.  He evokes for us the ridiculous vulnerability and profound social ignorance he experienced as a traveler – his struggle to regain autonomy that read to his hosts as self-delusion, stupidity, arrogance, or sheer insanity; the privileges he enjoyed as a guest of the Freetown elite (including the unwelcome one of being furnished with a twelve-year-old prostitute); his alarm at the ruthless opacity of quotidian African violence; and his exemption from the necessities that poverty imposes on African lives.  And he places all this insistently in the context of African’s tragic inheritance from colonial modernity and global capital, an inheritance that keeps it poor and unstable and at the same time beholden to the powers that impoverish and destabilize.  This kind of travel, Brown shows us, is bewildering, disorienting, humbling, and exalting: it both elicits a deep humanist wonder at the goodness of strangers, and terrifies by destroying every ounce of faith in the material potential for change or redemption.

At its thematic core, The Fula from America explores the poetics of diaspora: its circularities, its haunting and interpenetration of home and away, of ancestral past and present, marked by uncanny resemblances and revenants, misrecognitions and (re)discoveries of the always already known.  These are the bitter sweet ironies of Brown’s journey: the face of his grandmother glimpsed in that of an elderly Senegalese woman, the startling similarity of Freetown Krio (Creole) to the rural South Carolinian dialect of his youth.  The show takes its name from the most vertiginous irony of all: a fellow traveler in Guinea, a Fula, (mis)recognizes Brown as an expatriate member of his tribe and berates him for migrating to America and forgetting his people.  For the Fula from America, it is in the languages, the faces, music, and smells of Africa and African American, what Joseph Roach call the “kinaesthetic memory,” that he begins to feel and intimation of home – of the family, culture, and history that was never really lost – which has little to do with nation, birth, or citizenship.

On the way out of the theatre, a video monitor rested on a table in the foyer: it showed a young Carlyle speaking with a Sierra Leone television interviewer upon the eve of the violent upheaval that cut short his journey in that country.  The discussion enlisted the young traveler’s goals in a diasporic politics of affiliation, his ideal mirroring that postcolonial nation’s emerging pan-Africanist and global-nationalist consciousness.  He was astoundingly handsome, radiant with ascetic certitude, while his host was refined, articulate, passionate, idealistic.  It was clear that Brown’s real journey had only just begun.  Hers, in all likelihood, was cut short by exile, displacement, imprisonment, or perhaps just the grinding struggle to survive in war-torn West Africa.

Brutal fucking irony, indeed.

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