Why I Write

June 28th, 2007 | Writing | E-Mail Article | Print Article

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Back in the early eighties when I was learning to read for pleasure because the lives of black people were not reflected on British TV, I would recite The Politics of Rich Painters and other similar poetry to any and everybody who cared to listen.

A few years later, when I first started to write, no wonder my thoughts were filled with the language and imagery of Amiri Baraka and the â€œagit-propâ€ tones of the Black Power Movement. To my family, friends, and colleagues in our part of multi-racial London, I was generally considered a very angry young man. “Too black, too out-spoken, too political.”

It didn’t help that I couldn’t relate to any concept of “Black Power” lacking an economic base, nor that at the time I was in a “mixed-race” relationship, both of which only served to propel my anger at the world and fuel a sense of self-loathing. Amiri Baraka had introduced me to the possibility of writing “black,” and at the same time writing anything I wanted to (even that which other black people may not understand or embrace). Blackness was not formulaic, but was it universal? In hindsight, I know now that I was writing from a restrictive position of opposition to the world and myself.

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room was the first book I read by a black author. It may well have been a subconscious inspiration for the play Boy with Beer, but at the time, I found the whole novel rather sombre and very depressing. Yet, that didn’t prevent me seeking out other available titles by Baldwin within a 10-mile radius of my local library. I already knew the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and even Mark Twain, now I was hungry to see the contemporary world through the eyes of others that looked more like me.

Jimmy served this purpose to a certain extent, but I could not warm to his sentimentality or the overtly religious sermonising of his novels, that is, until I read Just Above My Head . That book opened a lot in me because it was so full of love and passion. That’s when I started thinking. Up until that point, I was used to reading and writing so much about the people we despise, and who despise us, that my priorities had become a bit jaded. Just Above My Head was like walking into a black community and opening the door to a whole other world where wild things happen, but there is still so much devotion. Before then, my heart had been filled with anger and pain at the “motion of history” as Baraka puts it, but now my characters could live.

When I wrote Boy with Beer in 1991, I didn’t know what I was doing. My best friend Derek St. Louis had just died suddenly of an AIDS-related illness, and I knew that I wanted to commemorate his life, but beyond that, I had only some vague idea about taking the concept of self-love to its ultimate conclusion. With some plays you know exactly what you want to say, and with others it’s a case of opening up your mind to allow what comes to come from beyond your own direct experience or knowledge. This is the essential difference between Wicked Games and Boy with Beer. The former came out of a real trip to Ghana, and the latter just evolved.

I remember sitting down to draft the first scenes between Karl and Donovan after coming back from the theatre with filmmaker and director Topher Campbell. He had invited me to see a gay play by a white writer, and at the end of the production, he turned to me and said, “That was crap. You could writer better than that!” I thought, “bloody cheek!” I went home immediately, sat down, and wrote the first act. I fell asleep at the computer, woke up later, looked at what I’d written and thought - “What the f**k is this?” It wasn’t until I showed it to a group of friends (which triggered a massive discussion) that I realised what I had done. “But can you write another 30 or 40 pages,” they kept asking, “this is not the end?” Never one to miss a challenge, I thought I’d give it a go.

I had always been attracted to the works of Toni Morrison; I just couldn’t read her novels. I would get through thirty or so pages, but just don’t ask me what it was all about! I must have struggled with The Bluest Eye for years, before I finally gave up and decided to read something completely different. Dad had always talked about Ghana, and I naturally turned to Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers and Two Thousand Seasons when dad died in 1984. I had never heard of Jungian Psychology, so when I finished these two books, I though that I had discovered the term “Collective Consciousness.” I found out later that Jung’s great achievement was to explain how the unconscious could be accessed through mythology and archetypes, and Armah had certainly accessed my unconscious with his vision of reciprocity and unity. I kept thinking as I read, “I know this…I know this. This is so familiar.” Thereafter, reading Toni Morrison was a breeze, I started with Beloved, and everything fell into place. In fact, I now craved elements of the wild and magical in all fiction, and I just had to write for public consumption.

No prizes for guessing that writing for film and television was my first choice (most people can detect this from my work), but since this area of the industry was already sewn-up, theatre seemed a more realistic option. Yet most theatre professionals will tell you that “black people don’t go to the theatre in England,” and even as I write this, our one black theatre company, Talawa, doesn’t own a building and has to rely on co-productions and apologises for only accepting material from black writers.

“I’m ashamed to observe that we lost many opportunities for what is called colour-blind casting. We even staged plays about young Londoners and one about the merchant Navy with a cast of twenty and managed to have no black actors in them. That wasn’t even realistic for British life at the time, let alone progressive for our theatre policy. Such narrowness of mind was the result of a middle-aged director like myself, and all the white guest directors we employed at the time casting principally from actors they know, and from their minds running along ‘conventional,’ meaning ‘white’ lines.”

- Philip Hedley, former Artistic Director of Britain’s Theatre Royal Stratford East in his essay, A Theatre Director’s Journey to the Obvious.

The Theatre Royal Stratford East was among the first places I sent the finished Boy with Beer script, but the various rejection letters spoke of “pornographic,” “lewd,” and “unworkable,” so I decided to produce it myself. Many prominent theatre directors including Hedley were among the first row audience, and the play has been produced several times since (although the screenplay remains languishing in a draw).

Any British audience seeing Wicked Games will assume from the cast list alone that the play is about racial identity. Two white, one mixed-race and three black characters generally signify a “black play” to an English audience, regardless of theme or subject matter. From the opening scene, we have mixed-raced Kofi talking about plans to visit his father in Ghana for the first time, and what this means to him. He has invited his friends, Leo and Helen, on a “homecoming” trip - a holiday of a lifetime - that was meant for him and his girlfriend, Lyn, who has just lost their child. But Africa scares Kofi, his father rejects him, everything goes wrong, and the worms don’t want to get back in the can.

Take the group dynamic as the central character or theme of the play, and the audience should become aware of how the group lives through the bigger social structures that shape their expectations of each other. On what grounds do they bond, what shapes their friendships, and why their alliances shift and break? In Wicked Games the games are invented by a contemporary London group of friends and expresses what is special about their multicultural pact. We might also notice how the “race card” is played or we may choose to concentrate on notions of black and/or British identity, culture, dreams, and a shared sense of the British abroad.

The organic development of plot and character as in the works of Chekhov, Mamet, Tennessee Williams was the inspiration here. The natural progression of a planned group trip (the fights, arguments, affairs, clubbing, and sunbathing, the very rhythm and movements of tourists and what they want from the holiday) was more important to convey than any adherence to strict rules on the three-act structure. What should be accomplished by the constant movement of characters and scenes is the impression of having seen a holiday drama unfold - the actual physical journey is played out like a dance before our eyes - the day-to-day developments, events and crises that draw people together and apart.

I started to write because the lives of black people were not being portrayed on British stage and screen. Although there have been some improvements lately with the inclusion of black characters in mainstream television programming, it is still rare to see black life at the centre of serious drama in England. In this respect, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Internet in its ability to bypass borders and barriers in bringing the work of black writers and artists to the attention of wider audiences.

Boy with Beer is published in Black Plays 3 by Methuen Drama.

Wicked Games is published in Black Drama.