Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

by Glory Edim

  My parents loved to open our house to all of their friends, who included artists, teachers, civil servants, and politicians. They threw the most amazing dinner parties. My mother went to college in Europe during the 1950s, and returned to Brooklyn with a distinct continental flair and the ability to make fabulous global dishes, like paella, bouillabaisse, and flan. My father always made sure there was plenty of red wine—he loved fine wine back when Black folks were still drinking just cocktails. My parents kept a jug of Mondavi wine beneath our orange Formica kitchen table, and it became an open invitation to people after work. Our neighbor Julius Hemphill might spontaneously play his flute at a party; he was a saxophonist with the World Saxophone Quartet. Or my father’s good friend Norman Lewis, a master abstract expressionist painter, might show up with a gift of art. My godmother, the novelist Paule Marshall, was often a guest. She was this beautiful, eloquent woman who had the distinction of having introduced my parents to each other at a gathering in Harlem. I loved that she was an elegant, warm presence who always elevated the level of discourse in the room. I knew from the time I was very young that she was an important writer, and I secretly thought, “I want to be just like her someday.”

  It was actually at my parents’ dinner parties that I tested out my first plays. I’d write scripts that my younger brother, Aaron, and I would perform for our parents’ guests. Thankfully their friends were patient and indulgent, and we received the kind of enthusiastic applause that you dream of for the rest of your life. We got unconditional love from everyone in the audience, and that was an incredibly transformative experience for me. It was intoxicating to create something original and be rewarded immediately.

  Being in that kind of creative environment really fed me both emotionally and intellectually; it also fed my imagination. My parents’ expansive and immersive view of culture was something I always admired about them. I aspired to be cultured, open, and inclusive in the ways that they were. I think that my writing is an extension of who they were. It feels like a natural progression.

  When I was a child, my parents were also deeply invested in ensuring that I had a relationship with Black art—they exposed me to the visual arts, music, the performing arts, and especially literature. I was a voracious reader: Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Charles Dickens, and the Brontës. I loved, loved, loved Wuthering Heights—I could read it every year. But I was really shaped by the books that I read by Black women. I happened to come of age during a renaissance of Black women writing, and so was fortunate enough to pick up the books of Toni Morrison, Rosa Guy, Louise Meriwether, Octavia Butler, and Alice Childress. Unlike many books that I read early on, theirs were filled with characters who were relatable and familiar.

  What really pulled me into the literary world was seeing representations of myself on the page. There were women who were writing about the South, which was remote and foreign to me, but there were also many women whose writings were about urban life, like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner, set in Harlem, and my godmother Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, set in Brooklyn. Growing up in New York City, those worlds I understood; they were incredibly familiar to me. Even though those women were writing about a different generation, I was just excited to read about young Black girls in the city. All of those writers are part of my creative DNA.

  However, in the theater, Black women’s stories were much rarer. When I first started going to the theater as a kid, plays written by Black men were insurgent and abundant. You saw so many strong, beautiful representations of Black men onstage—like in A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller—but rarely did you see stories with Black women at the center. Even though there were women writing, their work wasn’t finding its way onto the main stages of Black theaters. And so I was hyperaware that in most plays I encountered we never got to stand in the spotlight. At the time I didn’t have the vocabulary—or even the consciousness—to understand the nature of my frustration, but I knew that something was wrong, because we were absent.

  Then I saw for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf when I was in junior high school. I remember walking along the subway platform and seeing this beautiful Black woman on a poster on the wall, who turned out to be Ntozake Shange. Staring at that poster, I was completely intrigued—so much so that I went to see the play not once, but twice. For colored girls shifted my notion of how Black women could be represented on the stage. I saw, for the first time, a diverse group of women at the center of the storytelling, and there were no men present. They were telling their own stories in a really expressive, sometimes provocative way, and I thought it was just beautiful.

  When I got to college some years later, I advised a friend who was directing for colored girls at school, and that inspired me to produce and nurture my own writing. The first play I produced was about a pool shark in Harlem who represented death. He was this seductive figure that invited players to challenge him. It was called A Eulogy for a Missing Player. It was a wonderful, though difficult, experience—particularly because the play had an all-male cast, and there I was, the only woman in a room of ten guys who were constantly challenging me. Every time I headed to rehearsal, I had to conjure my inner goddess and say to myself: “I wrote this play. This is my universe. I am the boss.” But inside, I felt completely paralyzed and incredibly insecure—terrified that they’d ask me a question that I wouldn’t be able to answer. But of course, I could not let them see any of my fears. I had no choice but to rise to the occasion and present my best self. Years later I came to realize that in college I wrote a play about men because I had been taught that that was what constituted good writing, and I mistakenly embraced that notion as the truth.

  I had two incredible college professors who were really important to me, and who helped me evolve as a theater artist. One was a professor named George Bass, who was the executor of Langston Hughes’s estate and was this quixotic, creative man who taught me about the joy of making art. The other was a generous and talented woman named Paula Vogel. Up until then all the playwriting courses that I had taken were conducted by men, and although she was not a Black woman, she was the first woman I encountered personally who was writing plays. She introduced me to the notion that one could do it as a profession—that it could be more than just a fun hobby. I had always thought that eventually I was going to have to go on to much more “serious pursuits,” because I would never be able to turn playwriting into a living. But Paula taught me that I could be rewarded for leaning into my passion.

  During that time in my life I read The Color Purple. The form of that novel just blew me away, in part because so much of it was written as if it was dialogue. After reading it, I realized that what I was trying to do—what I could do—as a playwright was very much in conversation with what Alice Walker was doing as a novelist. I revisited that book a few more times throughout the years, and felt shifts in perspective each time. When I came to it as a young woman who hadn’t been in love, or felt that sense of abandonment, or had her heart broken, I read the book one way. Later, I read it as a mother. At that point, I could imagine more acutely what it might feel like to have my child wrenched out of my arms, what it meant to live a life defined by longing and absence. I understood what it meant to fall in love with someone, to have an unrequited love, and all those things that resonate in a very different way once you’ve taken the journey through life.

  A Raisin in the Sun is another excellent example of a piece of literature that continued to deepen with each reading. The first time I read the play I was in high school, and I saw the story through Travis’s point of view. And then when I got a little older and read it again, it was Beneatha’s point of view that resonated. And now it’s Mama’s. I’ve traveled through every single character’s point of view. With really good literature you’re allowed to take multiple journeys as your perspective shifts over time. It continues to resonate, as you find different ways
of entering and engaging with the narrative.

  With theater, there’s an additional dimension to the experience. Theater is a communal form, and often it’s the communal experience that allows us to explore and weave our mythology. Think about church. Church is not merely about biblical teachings; it’s also about how we worship communally and recognize together that there’s some higher spirit. And I think what happens in theater is that we collectively speak ourselves into being by creating a new mythology, a new understanding of culture.

  It’s where we really get to wrestle with some of the issues in a communal setting. You can’t discount what happens when you have bodies sitting in close proximity, and how that energy not only transforms what’s onstage, but also transforms the DNA of the people who are in the audience. When you read a book, it’s a solitary endeavor. You cry by yourself or you laugh by yourself, but no one else has that same experience in the same moment. But in theater, when someone else laughs and you’re sitting next to them, that energy literally is transferred from their body into your body. As an audience member, even though the narrative might not change, your presence in the theater could change the way in which that story is told and received. It’s magical.

  I went directly from undergraduate to graduate school at the Yale School of Drama. It was a special, singular time—Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, and bell hooks were all teaching there. Lloyd Richards, who is the granddaddy of African American theater, was running the drama program, and August Wilson was nurturing his work at the Yale Rep. I had the opportunity to work on plays and really see masters moving through their craft.

  However, it was also the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics in New Haven, and the more time I spent isolated on campus, the more I felt like the act of writing plays seemed very decadent and separate from the world. I kept asking myself, why am I writing plays when people are losing their lives? There’s more at stake than this. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to do something in social justice, something that was going to be in conversation with what was happening in the culture at large. I sold my computer and decided that I would become a human rights activist, and that’s what I did for the next four years.

  In many ways, my detour into human rights work was my second graduate school. I was the national press officer for Amnesty International USA, which at the time was the largest human rights organization in the world. It was a massive and stressful job, and there wasn’t much head space to do anything else. That job, however, introduced me to some of the great activists and thinkers of the time, and taught me about the power of activating one’s empathy. Eventually, there came a point when I realized that I still was interested in being an artist. The call to write was just too loud to be ignored.

  I truly believe that in order to write, you must own it. And I don’t think I could actually say that I was a playwright until my late twenties, after I had pushed writing aside for a period of time, battled my insecurities, and then rediscovered that it was what I really deeply loved.

  When I first sat down to write plays I thought, “I want to put the people I know center stage.” My mother, my grandmother, my friends—all the people I loved. Because for so long, people who looked like us remained in the margins. Now I think we’re in a golden age of playwriting. There are so many African American women playwrights who are producing work on such a high level—too many to name, in fact—and that is a fantastic sign. The dial has turned considerably. Just look at television: When I graduated, the thought of going into television as a writer was a near impossibility. There were very, very few Black writers in the writer’s room. There were no strong representations of us on the screen, except in fleeting moments. At the time, there wasn’t a television show, with the exception of The Cosby Show, that I thought I would want to write for. But now for writers coming out of school, there are so many options that my tongue would get tired naming them all.

  The universe, the landscape, it is all changing. It has not changed enough—that is a given—but it is changing, and evolution is something to embrace. Racism is alive and well and we still encounter microaggressions on a regular basis, but at least now we can go home and close the door and enjoy some entertainment, see ourselves on-screen, imagine ourselves as superheroes and goddesses. Before, you got hassled, you went home, and you had nothing. That’s the difference.

  A professor once told me that the characters we create are always based on the people who are closest to us, the people who are in our world. We are always only writing about them, even if we’re seemingly writing about something foreign or more expansive. In order for us to be part of the larger cosmology, we must continue to have people who are invested in putting our Black gods on the stage, and on the screen. For me, that’s why I think theater is so important. We can shape our own mythology and be the vanguards of change.

  Excellence always rises to the surface, and that’s what we’re seeing today. And so, when I hear my students talk about how hard it is, I say it could be worse, and it has been worse. I am an optimist. It is this optimism that inspires me to teach and allows me to nurture other writers. I say to my students on the first day of classes, “I want you to write so well that I never have to write again.” And I eagerly await the gold rush.

  WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:

  PLAYS BY BLACK WOMEN

  The Purple Flower by Marita Bonner

  Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress

  Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond

  Eclipsed by Danai Gurira

  The Mountaintop by Katori Hall

  A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

  Color Struck by Zora Neale Hurston

  Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy

  Detroit ’67 by Dominique Morisseau

  Sweat by Lynn Nottage

  Forever by Dael Orlandersmith

  Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

  Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith

  for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange

  In Boy, Roald Dahl starts his childhood memoirs with this story of his father. As a teenager in late nineteenth century Norway, his father falls from a roof and breaks his arm. A drunk doctor pulls up in a horse and buggy, gives the wrong diagnosis, and amputates the poor kid’s arm without anesthesia. Dahl assures the reader that his father managed just fine. In fact, the only great inconvenience he suffered was not being able to cut the top off a boiled egg. No other time is spent on this unnecessary loss of limb.

  I don’t remember how old I was when I first read Boy. But that blithe tone about an avoidable catastrophe was the first time I found my family in a book. Dahl sounded like my parents and their mass of Eritrean friends who had become our surrogate family in the Washington, D.C., area. Their stories were otherworldly, so different from my own life and the books I read. And the levity with which they treated their dramas—the deaths of loved ones, culture shock abroad, and nostalgia for home—only confused me more. Dahl’s voice echoed what I had heard in my home but nowhere else.

  Dahl fast-forwards to his father and uncle taking a country stroll to discuss their futures. They decide that Uncle Oscar will plant his flag in France, while Papa Harald will try his luck in the United Kingdom. A branch of the Dahl family splinters, and again, something felt familiar. Thanks to the independence war against Ethiopia, I didn’t know a single Eritrean who had family in less than three countries. Our circumstances were less idyllic than the Dahls’—most Eritreans trekked on foot to Sudan before eventually making it to North America and Europe—but here was the first time I read of families parting, mirroring my own sense of loss. There is nothing tragic about being a first-generation American, but the discontinuity is palpable. Your ancestors lived in the same place for hundreds of years until a dislocation, whether by force or design, hurls your parents a world away. Unlike my American
friends, I didn’t know all my cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I didn’t really understand the rhythm of my parents’ hometowns and early lives, nor could I visualize their journeys to the place I called home. Yet I needed my parents’ origin stories to make sense of my own.

  My parents were born in southern Eritrea soon after World War II, in the interim between the end of Italian colonization and the start of British administration. After the death of my grandfather, my six-year-old mother was sent to neighboring Ethiopia to be brought up by her uncle. My grandmother endured the three-day-long journey to Addis Ababa as often as she could, but Ethiopia wasn’t familiar, and her authority over her children was subordinate to that of her dead husband’s brother.

  My father was born the third child but became the eldest when his sister died of a treatable infection and his brother drowned. He was one of the first children in his village to go to a secular school, a decision that temporarily rendered his father, a respected and titled elder, persona non grata in their community. There wasn’t a nearby middle school, so my grandfather sold what he had to send my father to boarding school in Ethiopia. When he returned for his first break, he was met by wailing family members mourning the death of his mother. She had died earlier in the term, but the news was kept from him so he could focus on his studies. His baby sister, just a few months old, had died soon after. My grandfather remarried quickly and had more children, despite his grief.