The cultural theorist and critic Raymond Williams refused to perceive art and society, in their entire modern and postmodern make-up, as two opposing poles on the cultural continuum. Through his re-conceptualizations of the forces and practices behind/in cultural formation and cultural production, we encounter a rather engaging theoretical approach, which in its turn, opens up the prospects of studying a culture’s identification with certain symbolic representations, such as for example, its folklore, i.e., the narratives of a culture’s existence in time and space; its claim, imprint on that time and space.
August Wilson’s remarkable dramatic endeavor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), the first in a series of much-revered and eagerly awaited “cycle of history plays”, examines, among other things, the relationship between a repressed culture’s living heritage and its reception/appropriation within the confines of the greater socio-industrial apparatus.
It poses an important question, namely - can an artistic product, from one particular culture or community (especially when “the product” in question is a primordial example of the culture’s narrative treasure) be received by those in another one, that is the dominant one, while still carrying across its original meaning? How are such receptions fostered by the public? Are they supported, embraced? Are they understood, felt? Are they truthful?
August Wilson’s play offers a rather challenging way of looking more closely at a marginalized culture’s re-insertion within the dominant culture’s script, set against the historical framework of what Sandra Adell calls, in her essay on Wilson’s cultural poetics (titled “Speaking about Ma Rainey/ Talking about the Blues”) “the age of mechanical reproduction [which] reduces everything within the aesthetic domain to a simple matter of supply and demand.” Adell recognizes Wilson’s archaeological project as one deeply invested in the African American blues narrative. The blues paradigm of Mr. Wilson’s work, according to Ms. Adell, is not only there to serve the story’s likeable development into a coherent dramatic narrative; in other words, there is more than meets the eye in the play’s rendition of a two-act dynamics of a Chicago recording studio’s session, involving the larger-than-life personality of the legendary blues singer, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Ms. Adell reads Mr. Wilson’s use of the blues paradigm as “a way of securing for one’s self a temporary reprieve from the forces of oppression with which each of Wilson’s characters must always contend.”
While attempting to secure this much needed, desired, provisional reprieve, both Ma Rainey and her four-man band, experience the reality of the everyday reassertion of their marginality, as individuals, as professionals, as members of a subjugated culture. Each of them “handles” the realization in a discreetly singular way (some more successfully than others). We follow the character of Ma Rainey as she single-handedly battles the forcefulness of the recording business, asserting her vital presence in its up-lift even when not physically present on stage. She is well-aware of the managers’ disregard for her, Madame Rainey, as an artist, as a woman, as a subject with agency; at no point in the play does she lose track of her position as an African American performer in a white man’s business, nor does she forget who her true audience and fans are. We also follow the character of the younger trumpet player Levee and his inability to channel his accumulated anger and resentment towards the same institutions and their representatives whom Ma Rainey has successfully combated all her life. Consequently, Levee’s loss of faith in the idea of a Christian God grows into an unbearably difficult weight for a man to carry along, thus guiding his troubled “warrior spirit” towards the wrong end, claiming the life of one of his band members.
So what becomes of the blues tradition in August Wilson’s play? Is Mr. Wilson’s play a part of that tradition, its contemporary counterpart? Or is it an artistically fashioned attempt to finally bring the vestiges of African American life, in all of their being, making, to the cultures of present-day society, both American and abroad? I would like to believe that it is a combination of both. As an outsider to American culture, my vision is already pre-crafted; I encounter cultural objects in their ‘transliterated form’, whether I choose to or not. However, partaking of a work of art such as Mr. Wilson’s play, I am reminded once again that even Americans need a ‘transliteration’ of their culture, an act of artistic re-memberance, if you will. They, as well as myself, need the endurance of Ma Rainey’s blues, for, as Ms. Adell dutifully points out, “the blues is what excited the will-to-power of those beings who would otherwise lack the power to will beyond the narrow and racially defined spheres of their existence.” Since, “in the absence of the God of Christianity, the blues is what em-powers them to seek their truth in a “dimension of happening” that transcends the value-laden realities of the everyday.”
Never more than today do we (as a community) need the guidance and fluidity of the blues heritage. We crave its truthfulness and stoic lyricism, its imbedded tragic voice, to teach us how to breathe again, how to inhale and how to exhale. To take steps, to be responsible for our actions, to think before we act. To respect our differences, to learn from our idiosyncrasies, to remember our past, to know always where we have come from and how we have trespassed.
I do not presume, in all of my literary conceitedness, to understand fully the utter significance of the blues tradition to the African American community. I do not ascertain my presumptive ability to comprehend something that I did not grow up with, something which is far removed from my own ancestral tradition. Nonetheless, I feel that by acknowledging the power of socially aware artifacts, such as Mr. Wilson’s works have come to be, we may come closer to an understanding of the importance of art’s precursor, folklore, in the constant re-shaping and re-mapping of our conscious reception of the artfully real. And vice versa.
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