This week, we continue our examination of plays influenced by the avant-garde that have shaped African American Theater. As you blog on the key term for this week, racial passing, see if you can identify the ways that Kennedy disrupts and/or reinforces the hierarchies between blackness and whiteness. Some questions that may prompt you to write are:
How does the playwright suggest relationships of power between the'selves' of Negro Sarah? What examples in the play does Negro Sarah give for wanting to be white?
How is her performance of blackness shaped by her hatred for all things "black"? What themes in this play are similar to other playwrights who experiment with the avant-garde such as Baraka and Genet?
Negro Sarah is trying everything she can to no longer be haunted by her African American past. She only associates bad things with blackness and her history “black is evil” (336). She only knows of the bad things they may have done or been associated with, and partly because I believe that she was influenced by her mother “the wild Black Beast raped me…” (336). After hearing her mother say this, she would have thought of her father (along with other black men) as ‘Beasts’, animals who do nothing but harm. Therefore, associating negative images with this. She herself does not want to be thought of as part of that group, as someone who is capable of something like that. But she doesn’t seem to want to be anything exceptional either “I want to possess no moral value… I ask nothing except anonymity” (336). Negro Sarah doesn’t want to be noticed, not for anything. She wants to be unseen. She is tired of being seen as something negative just because of her race, she would rather be invisible. And while she may not have “glaring Negroid features” (337), she says that her “one defect is that I have a head of frizzy hair, unmistakably Negro kinky hair…” (337). The usage of the word “defect” points to her hatred of being black. She hates herself just because of her hair. Thus when her hair falls out, is symbolizes that her blackness has fallen away, but she is bald so she doesn’t belong to the white race either. Getting her wish to no longer have “Negro kinky hair” has put her in limbo.
ReplyDeleteThe hatred that Sarah feels about her race comes from the fact that she wants to pass as white. She states many times in the play through her different identities, “My mother looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any white woman’s. I am yellow, but he is black, the darkest of us all. How I hoped he was dead” (20). This I see as her own declaration of her own confused identity and her desire to be like her mother as she adoringly speaks of her mother’s straight, white hair, and her pale skin; compared to her father, the “he” that she speaks of in the quote that she wishes were dead. The quote explains Sarah’s trouble with her race. She wishes to be white like what her mother passed for, but because of her father, because of his blackness she is unable to fully transition into that. Sarah finds herself haunted by her own blackness as she is unable to come to terms with it.
ReplyDeleteThis hatred of her father becomes her hatred of blackness, and it show the audience through the Tragic Mulatto that is so close, but will never achieve whiteness even if she dates a white boy, or is well educated, or has straight hair. Her yellow skin to her is a powerless identity where her choice is to destroy herself for not passing as white instead of accepting who she was.
Adrienne Kennedy’s "Funny House of a Negro" explores the subconscious mind of "Negro Sarah" – a young woman whose mixed racial heritage causes her to feel trapped in a constant crisis of identity. Kennedy highlights colour binaries as the prevailing conflict from the very beginning when Sarah describes her father as “the blackest one of them all” and her mother as being “like a white woman” (335). This statement emphasises how issues of colour and intra-racial conflict have created a sharp division in her identity, and from that moment on, as stated by Phillip Kolin, “Sarah obsesses in colour-coded language and thinking” (30). Kennedy portrays Negro Sarah as having many “herselves” (335) – some representing her European heritage and others her African heritage – to illustrate the characters inability to reconcile both aspects of her identity. This torment is then explored as part of Sarah’s internalised racism which has caused her to despise her own father and view her connection to him as a “black disease” (339). She views “whiteness” as an ideal, so much so that she wishes to surround herself with “white” images to “keep [her] from reflecting [...] upon the fact that [she is] a Negro” (336). The terrible internal struggle that Sarah faces is a powerful representation of the way racial prejudice in society caused men and women to loathe their black heritage because they were made to feel that this was a “defect” (337). Kennedy uses avant-garde methods – such as the shocking image of Negro Sarah as “a faceless, dark character with a hangman’s rope about her neck” (336) - to depict the horror of a society that could split a person’s identity, and cause them to believe the only way to be truly accepted was to destroy a part of themselves.
ReplyDeleteKara wilder’s character Sarah displays and embodiment of two realistic identities or genetic traits. But then displays the Sarah’s mind as an unrealistic misunderstood reality that cannot come to grasp. She says “I want not be.” A clear rejection of part of her real identity furthermore to adopt and pretend one never existed. She is lost in her own translation to become something more acceptable to the norms of society. She becomes a “child of torment” because of her idealized manifestations within her mind pulling her to become one and not excepting who she really is. To me it is ridiculous for someone to change their identity because they know who they are but cannot come to terms with it. She made it out more than it has to be because of she has witnessed. This is what fear does to people; she is afraid of the unknown “her future” then decides what is best for her in her own understanding. Reality and insecurity are replacing one another causing her not to examine that she is fighting a losing battle she has setup herself. It depends on the individual and how they strong they really are. Since she is a woman and they are looked at as the weaker sex. This theory can conclude that she is vulnerable because she is not emotionally strong enough to handle her own self. This is not true for all women but in this case it is unraveling throughout the reading. This weakness causes her to assert with something or someone to establish a foundation for meaning or purpose.
ReplyDeleteOut of all the plays we have read this semester this had to be favorite just because I could actually relate to it. Adrianne Kennedy shows the interracial battle with the character Sarah and the obstacles she faces because of she is biracial. I can relate to this because I am also biracial and understand how it feels to get pressured or pulled from either side of the family. This is common in a lot of people that are biracial, other’s force that person to pick or choose a side and stick to that. In Sarah’s case she does not want to be black or to have anything to do with it. Sara says the “blacks are evil” and also refers to her father as “the black beast” she absolutely hates the fact that she is half black and would do anything to be all white. Like all people that are biracial Sarah is stuck in between races and chooses to ignore her African American side of the family and wishes she was just white.
ReplyDeleteKennedy shows a drastic difference between black and white and what is dark and light, placing a hierarchy on white and light. This was done not only through skin colors but also by many different things in the play. For example “black” had a bad connotation when mother refers to black as “wild beast” and Negro refers to black as “evil and disease” (Hatch and Shine 336). As the word “white” in the play is associated with completely different words such as “pillow, perfection and dove,” (Hatch and Shine 337-341). When Negro discusses herself she states that she does not have too many dominant black features. However when she discusses her hair, she feels being interracial gave her the short end of the stick because it is kinky, and not straight hair like her mother who is a white woman. “My one defect is that I have a head of frizzy hair, unmistakably Negro kinky hair; and it is indistinguishable,” (Hatch and Shine 337.) Racial passing is an avant-garde theme shared between Genet and Kennedy. Victoria tries to make herself believe that she is not black by mentally tuning out her black father. Victoria states “Before I was born he haunted my conception, diseased my birth,” (Hatch and Shine 336).
ReplyDeleteAdrienne Kennedy shows us the line that some biracial/multiracial individuals feel they have to walk in order to succeed in society and as is with the protagonist Sarah shuns her heritage and characterizes her father as a beast and her mother is insane due to being "raped" by a "beast" of her father. This tragic look at the mindset of a troubled biracial individual is touching and brings together the important issue of appreciating one's heritage and accepting who you are. This play uses the symbolism of hair to show how each character has lost their way and desperately needs to find out who they are and needs to be reminded of where they came from. The symbol of the funnyhouse was one of my favorite symbols used in any play to display to the audience Sarah's skewed view of reality and of herself. As I brought up in my presentation, a funnyhouse is a house of mirrors that display a distorted view of the body especially the face, the area that Sarah struggles with the most.
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