‘And Scene’: A First Pass On Slave Play’s Final Act

I have never been so utterly shattered.

This ends with Habiba and I shuddering at the back of the theatre, bracing one another and wailing into a gaping mouth of applause.

We abstained from clapping. Our hands were busy tending to much more than we could see. 

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For those who are not familiar with Slave Play by Jeremy O’Harris (especially its premise, the controversy surrounding it, and how it has been received) I recommend taking a look here before reading on.

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I’ve known of Slave Play’s existence for several years but did not, until recently, feel compelled to engage it further. This had much to do with the fact that it was presented to me by friends who had either seen it, read it, or both, as something to be wary of. I was warned, in particular, to be emotionally and spiritually prepared to endure the final act (Act 3) if I ever engaged with the work in any capacity. Friends additionally shared their frustration around Jeremy’s unwillingness to answer to his flagrant use of rape as a plot device in the play’s final act. All to say, I was highly suspicious of the whole project from the outset (and rightly so). 

Leave it to Ziwe, with her archetypal fusion of wit and causticity, to distill in a matter of seconds the core quandary so many people, particularly Black women (including myself), have when it comes to Slave Play and, more specifically Act 3:

Ziwe: “So my first question to you is, Jeremy O. Harris, why do you hate Black women?”  

Jeremy O’Harris: “I don't hate Black women.”

[Jeremy O’Harris and Ziwe look at each other in silence.] 

Jeremy O’Harris: “My mom's a Black woman, my sister’s a Black woman, my best friends are Black.”

Ziwe: “Oh, you’re related to Black women! Okay, interesting.”

Jeremy O’Harris: “Yes. I happen to be related to Black women. I came from a Black female vagina so.”

Ziwe: “Shoutout to that. Now, as someone who claims to love Black women why would you use rape as a plot device in your play.” 

Jeremy O’Harris: “Well, I don't know that it's rape necessarily. I think that if you talk to people like Saidiya Hartman or, or even Soraya McDonald, the Pulitzer finalist this year, I think that they would have a more complex relationship to the last moment in my play than articulating it as rape.”

Ziwe: “Okay, so I'll just refer to those black women and have them do the labor of defending you. Now, what was the biggest cultural reset in American theatre —”

Jeremy O’Harris: “No, I mean I'm not —”

[Jeremy O. Harris freezes.]

[Click here for full interview]

While I certainly have words to exchange with the playwright about what Hartman (referenced by Jeremy above) meant when she wrote about “revisiting the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence,”¹ I am not so interested in delineating Slave Play’s merit. The reactions the play has garnered are polarizing, which I find unhelpful. I feel it necessary, for personal and political reasons, to anchor myself in the middle of the pendulum swing as a means of attending to the affective dimensions of the dust storm this play has kicked up and what its particular shape tells us about the collision between history and intimacy. After viewing the play, my qualms lie more with Jeremy’s hesitance to own his “creative choices,” as evidenced by the interview excerpt above.

(Do I believe this play’s existence in the realm of popular culture is potentially perilous, considering Broadway’s largely white audience and our collective lack of language to meaningfully discuss the dynamics Slave Play engages? Yes, absolutely. Do I know, concurrently, that seeing it was both jarring and healing in ways I need to untangle for myself without feeding into the one dimensional “vitriol or praise” model of commentary that the play has received thus far? Yes, absolutely. )

With this in mind, I feel compelled to honor the fact that the work made an indelible impact on me. Ultimately, Slave Play swallowed me whole. In its throat I lost something, something that desperately needed to be excised, and have since been retracing the experience to ask myself how and why?

And, of course, as I have learned from my Black feminist foremothers, I know that examining the emotional and spiritual facets of my experience will spit out truths about the social, political and discursive landscapes we currently traffic in, which are impossible to arrive at if we consider this solely through “art/theatre speak.”

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My presence in the August Wilson Theatre on January 23rd was catalyzed, as in most cases in my life, by some degree of harmony between my own readiness and cosmic synchronicity. 

Readiness because I felt fortified enough to reckon with how interracial intimacy has animated my own life across generations. (This is personal for me. My father is white and American; My mother is Black and French; My maternal grandmother was born out of wedlock to a plantation owner and one of his employees on the island of Martinique. In my own timeline, I have been untangling the residue of a relationship I was in several years ago, which fit the description of my parent’s union and my grandmother’s conception. All to say, this is personal for me, yes, but personal for my entire lineage too. We were all there in the theatre together.)

Synchronicity because, as motivated by this sense of readiness, I bought a copy of the script and planned to read it while I was in the city. I packed it in my carry on and while en route to the airport, I landed on an Instagram story posted by an internet friend of mine. “Does anyone wanna go see slave play this weekend.” My conscious mind had no idea I would be in town for closing weekend when I bought the script. Sometimes the universe opens her palm to you. Sometimes you have no choice but to encounter the yes within yourself and let it move you. I let it move me. We got tickets. I texted Habiba and she got one too. 

I wish to regard the happenings I will reference from here on out as shared knowledge and therefore invite you again, if you have not already, to familiarize yourself with the basic elements of the plot before reading on. My hesitance to rehash a more detailed play-by-play is motivated by a desire to back away from the spectacle Jeremy has created. I will not repeat it because I love Black women too much to repeat it and believe deeply in strategic opacity, illegibility and withholding as a political strategy.

At the start of Act 3, we find ourselves in Kaneisha and Jim’s bedroom, from which she is seemingly about to flee. An open suitcase lies on a bed. After a few moments, Kaneisha appears and begins zipping it up. Jim arrives, walks into the room, takes off his shoes, lays them (toes perfectly aligned) again one of the mirror’s that made up the set, then asks if he can come in (note the order of events).

As Jim enters, the largely unperturbed exterior Kaneisha presented in most of Act 2 starts to crumble. Some moments later, she begins lamenting, her voice and eyes glinting like a blade, hedging on the line of madness derived from feeling so utterly misunderstood. Her breath glistens as she calls down her ancestors: “The elders are watching me. They want me to know you’re a demon.” She speaks of Jim, of whiteness, of the history that winds the two together, as pervasive virus, as harbinger of inevitable violation. She speaks of fog, of vision, of obstruction.

She explains more: How intimacy obfuscates the tentacular legacy of the violation itself, about how she no longer feels ignited by their sex life and, by extension, their relationship more broadly. It is clear their relationship is dangling by a thread and it is in Jim’s hands to show up. Abruptly, he flips the script from the contemporary moment and snaps back into the antebellum role play.²

Kaneisha: “I don’t see a way for this to continue how it’s been going / Cause you don’t seem to —”

[Jim pushes Kaneisha face first into the bed.]

Jim: “Shut up you dirty negress.”

[He springs on top of her, pulls a whip from under the duvet and stuffs it in her mouth.]

Jim: “You been running your mouth for a good little times now / but when I look round this / damn room / I don’t see nothing done / from a day’s work / but a suitcase that’s half packed / and a bed that’s unmade. / Which leaves me thinking that you thought you could run away / somewhere. / Is that what you thought?”

[Kaneisha begins to speak]

Jim: “How many times do I have to tell you negress you don’t get to talk / till I tell you to talk.” 

[Jim enters Kaneisha, but the lines between consensual role play and non-consensual activity are entirely blurred]

The moment I became aware that Jim had entered Kaneisha, the moment the density of time locked behind his ravenous moans hit my ears, I began shaking uncontrollably; As if my bones wanted to rearrange themselves into some older form, to ease back into a shape that preceded all of this. Some seconds after that Habiba pulled me in, I buried my masked face into the crook of her neck and my throat just sort of cracked open and started oozing.

Eventually, Kaneisha screamed “STOP” and Jim reacted immediately. He rolled off of her. A pause. Then Kaneisha says with conviction: “Thank you, baby / Thank you for listening.” Immediately after we hear her voice, the stage lights drop black, a sudden oil spill, viscous and heavy and booming. Of course, abrupt endings cast echoes behind them so everything suspended for a moment as if every body pulled their ribs together, inhaled and held simultaneously (albeit for different reasons since our breath is too marked by our historical inheritance). Eventually the suspension dropped and morphed into thunderous applause.

The cast must’ve taken their bows. I’m not sure because Habiba and I were still spilling into each other, white knuckles gleaming across all four of our trembling hands. Something was pressing down on her too and it swelled through us both as the rest of the audience clapped and clapped and clapped. We stayed like this for what felt like eons. Gravity hugged us, reminded us of how history breeds fertile ground for violence to bloom, of why we do not believe in lines or anything else that does not outwardly love us.

I honor my ancestors when they land, even if it results in me sobbing uncontrollably in the back of a theatre. My grand mother, great-grandmother great-great grandmother, and so on, were with me, were crying through me, were trying to let me know something through the sheer viscerally of it all.

And then I cognitively realized the first key insight: I was so deeply unsettled in part because my body was picking up on how unconscionably violent Jeremy’s unawareness of how Black women watching did not arrive at Slave Play only as themselves. We are carriers, and so my tears were not only my tears. What about a consideration of who, in particular, was likely to be left reeling when the curtains closed? He seems to have willingly ignored the fact that we hold it all even after leaving the theatre.

Another key piece of what shook me to my core was how the whole context, not withstanding the mirrors that made up the set and reflected the audience back to itself, made it quite impossible not to calibrate the audience’s reactions at large. The moment a person laughed, gasped, shook their head, smiled coyly under their mask, closed their eyes, looked away, leaned forward, exhaled sharply, etc., revealed a lot about the stories that fill out what’s inside. To borrow from Jeremy, an audience’s reaction across the three acts reveals the extent to which they are proximal to “the virus,” or in other words, to whiteness.

I am not sure, for instance, why Jim emphatically cracking his whip on the floor next to Kaneisha’s face was funny. Judging by the explosion of laughter and the fact that the overwhelming majority of the audience was white, I know exactly who was laughing, and that horrifies me even now as I write this because I know that one’s capacity to genuinely find a moment like that funny as well as one’s sense that it’s appropriate to laugh reveals how an attachments to normative power operate on an affective level.

Here’s the kicker: Whiteness is it cannot exist without blackness as it’s foil. Whiteness cannot and never will exist in excess of blackness, even as it performs to move as much. That is, whiteness cannot be imagined as supreme power, control, domination and order if it does not constantly figure blackness, its purported antithesis, as abject, commodifiable and in need of relegation.

So, when we say race is a social construct, that also means said constructs — blackness and whiteness — are reconsolidated affectively and structurally each time we play out social dynamics that mimic the terms of colonially derived hierarchy. So, in the case of Jim and Kaneisha, whiteness is reconsolidated as we witness him dominating her and, as the audience, consciously or subconsciously note that his capacity to claim power over her has everything to do with their respective positionalities.

Another thing about whiteness is that it is cold, it resides in the realm of reason, it is unfeeling, numb. Blackness, on the other hand, is a wellspring, it is a cavern, it is that thing that goes deep, that thing that recognizes the inherent link between feeling, ontology and aliveness.

I am suggesting that one’s proximity to whiteness correlates to their capacity to deeply feel things like grief, empathy, sorrow and rage in response to witnessing a Black woman being violated by a white man, as in the case of Act 3. Ultimately, playing that final scene out on stage created space for audience members who do not experience the world as Black women to reconsolidate their sense of their own power by giving them a chance to reaffirm for themselves that they could never be in Kaneisha’s position. This reconsolidation moves precisely through a negotiation of affect. While Habiba and I were shaking like leaves, we witnessed and felt so many non-Black women identified audience members just… sitting there. But how else would they react when going deep with their “compassion” and “empathy” would place them closer in proximity to Kaneisha than Jim, thereby also rendering their being more precarious than it formerly was. The insidious part of all of this is that their lives, their entire sense of self, their internal ontological logics, depend on distancing themselves from the vulnerabilities that accompany Black womanhood and doing so, in this case, by limiting their affective response to witnessing a purported act of violence. And, effectively, their capacity to derive pleasure from this scene is only and exactly what makes them not-black.³

So, an audience member’s capacity to find Jim cracking the whip funny, for instance, or to have no palpable reaction to watching a Black woman’s body be violated, is also a moment where they signal to themselves and others that blackness/abjection/social death is not the orbit they revolve in.⁴

Black women’s positionality, on the other hand, does not allow us to reconsolidate our own sense of power through that scene. Instead, it reminds us, on a corporeal level, of the opposite: Not only can anyone can enter you any time, literally or metaphorically speaking, but the world is also ill equipped to help you deal with the aftermath.

It is not coincidence, after all, that the gutting sense of dismay, sorrow, horror, grief, betrayal, anger and this rumbling from my lineage struck the second I sensed the buzzing, electric pleasure the audience was deriving from watching and from listening to Jim fuck Kaneisha while simultaneously role playing as her “massa,” wielding both slurs spat in a southern accent and the serpentine whip as reminders of exactly who was in charge. And I mean “pleasure” in the sense that they knew, because they were not Black women, that they could never be hurt in the way Kaneisha was. What I don’t think many of these audience members realize, though, is that their access to the comforts that accompany proximity to whiteness (like, inalienable safety, for instance) actively hinge on Black women being regarded as fungible, empty vessels, which deprives the collective of the sprawling possibilities that aliveness actually holds.⁵

This scene is obsolete because it did not demonstrate care for Black women (which to me is a requirement for all cultural output) and by extension, laid out a canvas for normative power to continue reconsolidating itself at Black women’s expense.

Remember the Combahee River Collective Statement? Remember how no one will be free until Black women are free because our freedom would necessitate the liberation of every other oppressed group? Remember how Jeremy placed a Black woman’s body on a stage to remind us all exactly how proximal to whiteness we are based on our identities and the history that shapes them?

I want better for us. As E. Jane stated in NOPE (a manifesto) (2016), “we need culture that loves us,” and I too wonder what worlds (and therefore also cultural production) become possible when we hold care for Black women as a requirement?

Outstanding questions —

Where is Kaneisha’s “I’m the prize, motherfucker” moment? (IYKYK)

Jeremy has, on numerous occasions, rebuked the notion that he wrote it for white people, but it certainly wasn’t written for Black women. So, who is this play for, really?

How does Jeremy think through Hartman’s notion of “returning to the scene of subjection without “replicating the grammar of violence?”

Act 3 felt gratuitous, unnecessary, and irresponsible because it was devoid of care. So, naturally I wonder, had a Black woman written this play, how would Act 3 unfold? Would it have ever even come into being?

Again, what worlds (and therefore also cultural production) become possible when we hold care for Black women as a requirement?

1. See “Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman.

2. Recall: This is no longer playing out in the context of therapy, but rather in the confines of their bedroom. She listens to him, she obeys him, but it is not clear whether or not she desires to be in this scene, which I suppose is part of the “point,” and is likely exactly why Jeremy repeatedly cites Hartman. But, I wonder, as many others have, at whose expense said “point” is being made?

3. See Elizabeth Alexander’s “Can You Be Black and Look At This?”

4. See Orlando Patterson’s work on social death. The American project of slavery did not only depend on free labor, but also and more so on rendering black subjects socially dead — i.e. subjects whose familial, intimate, and relational bonds did not need to be acknowledged or respected. With this in mind, we can also consider how an audience member’s capacity to recognize their own distance from the condition of social death relates to their capacity to mold pleasure into a reminder of their social aliveness and mobility relative to blackness.

5. And with all of this said, the final scene as well as Kaneisha and Jim’s dynamic more broadly, siphoned something out of me; Something that has been lodged in my tissue for years. Really, these moments stole something from me, something that wasn’t mine, something I had to lose: A belief that the safety, mutual understanding, respect, love and care I seek in relation is possible with white people. More on this in the next installment of this writing…