Fences

African American Review:

by Sandra  G. Shannon

 

Critical discourse on August Wilson's dramatic agenda is now well underway. Fueled by the prolific playwright's current critical acclaim and the ever-increasing attention his controversial views command, discussions of his plays and his politics continue to escalate. Such attention has not always been accorded the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. A few scholarly commentaries, such as Mei-Ling Ching's "Wrestling Against History" and Philip Smith's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Playing the Blues as Equipment for Living," surfaced during the late 1980s. But Wilson's work has since sparked even greater interest among academics, especially following the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame televised version of The Piano Lesson in February 1995. Recently, August Wilson's body of work has become a fertile area for scholars in areas such as theatre, cultural studies, African

American literature, music, art, and the like.

 

 

What is so extraordinary about August Wilson's work is that it invites a wide range of interpretations and, much to the pioneer researcher's delight, is still open to much more intellectually challenging and innovative discourse. Already Alan Nadel and Marilyn Elkins have assembled an array of incisive critical perspectives on Wilson in their recently published collections "May All Your Fences Have Gates": Essays on the Drama o[ August Wilson and August Wilson: A Casebook. And I have offered the first comprehensive study of the playwright in The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson.

Now Kim Pereira joins the growing list of pioneer scholars mining this terrain with a very insightful thematic discussion of four of Wilson's best known plays.

 

 

August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey explores themes of separation, migration, and reunion in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson. Pereira's efforts throughout this study--which began as his dissertation project at Florida State University--are threefold: to demonstrate how Wilson transforms these three historical forces into symbolic indicators of an entire race's quest for personal and cultural identity, to point out the correlation between the evolution of black music in America and African Americans' quest for affirmation, and to demonstrate Wilson's insistence that his characters are all "Africans in America."

 

 

Of the many themes that permeate Wilson's work, Pereira's concentration on the long-range toll that slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Great Migration have taken on African Americans is essential to understanding what is at the center of the playwright's dramatic agenda. Like Herald Loomis, the nomad protagonist of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, who knows the importance of determining one's "starting place" or one's identifying point of origin, Kim Pereira, in August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey, cuts through the myriad of themes operating in Wilson's four major plays to reveal those that form the foundation of his dramatic agenda.

 

 

Pereira assesses these patterns of restlessness by closely analyzing the prevalence of dislocation, constant movement, and occasional reunion as reflected in various aspects of the four selected plays. In fact, these same themes occur to a lesser degree in each of the other three plays that comprise his ongoing ten-play project: Jitney!, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars, his most recent play.

 

 

In conveying the prevalence and function of these themes in the four selected plays, Pereira draws upon an impressive knowledge of black music and African lore to situate each work within a realistic historical context. Yet despite the relevance of the blues and images of Africa to Pereira's assertions, at times he overindulges the reader with excessively long asides that detract from his focus upon separation, migration, and reunion. His analysis also loses a great deal of its focus when his close reading of the plays' texts begin to lapse into elaborate plot summaries and undue attention to obvious details.

 

 

Nevertheless, Pereira's close reading may prove helpful (especially for the novice Wilson audience or reader) in uncovering the many layers of meaning Wilson's plays offer. Pereira is at his best in his discussion of Joe Turner's Come and Gone--deemed by some spectators and critics alike to be one of Wilson's most difficult plays. Pereira's detailed analysis provides welcome insight for those who, for example, do not concur with the playwright's stated mission to make his characters recognizably African. Here, Pereira's knowledge of African lore proves particularly useful in bringing to light the play's potentially obscured African context. His assessment of Bynum, the play's conjurer, exemplifies this:

 

 

Bynum owes his mythological ancestry to the If a tradition--whose presiding

 

deity is Orunmila--in Yoruban cosmology, his sharply tuned intuition appears

 

to endow him with the gift of divination, particularly when it come to

 

sensing which relationships need consolidation. His is the oracular voice

 

from which the other characters seek affirmation and

 

solutions, the steadying influence in this world of upheaval.

 

 

Pereira not only describes each of the characters in Joe Turner as conceivably African, but he also provides sound evidence to support Africa's rich presence in various images, such as Loomis's nightmarish vision of floating bones and the ritualistic juba dance performed by boarding-house tenants. Moreover, Pereira diffuses the play's subtext, rife with tension from the seemingly explosive opposite religious ideologies of African spiritualism and Christianity, asserting that "this play is an Afro-Christian tapestry woven with threads from both traditions. In various ways the characters seek self-affirmation through constant spiritual renegotiations between symbols and customs of African and Christian mythology."

 

 

Rather than regard the two religions as diametrical opposites, he sees them as inseparable, indeed complementary, in African American culture.

As a welcomed addition to the growing field of scholarship on August Wilson, August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey provides a helpful "starting place" for understanding the thrust of the playwright's mission.