The Violence of Duality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro

Adrienne Kennedy’s psychodrama Funnyhouse of a Negro personifi es in her protagonist, Sarah, the internalized racism and mental deterioration that a binary paradigm foments. Kennedy also develops the schizoid consciousness of Sarah to accentuate Sarah’s hybridized and traumatized identity as an African American woman. Kennedy’s play was controversial during the Black Arts Movement, as she refrained from endorsing black nationalist groups like Black Power, constructing instead a nightmare world in which race is the singular element in defi ning self-worth. In her dramatized indictment of both white supremacy and identity politics, American culture’s pathologized fascination with pigmentation drives the protagonist to solipsistic isolation, and ultimately, to suicide. Kennedy, through the disturbed cast of Sarah’s mind, portrays a world in which race obsession triumphs over any sense of basic humanity. The play urges the audience to accept the absurdity of a dichotomized vision of the world, to recognize the spectral nature of reality, and to transcend the devastation imposed by polarizing rhetoric. In the wake of the Charleston shootings on June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old white man entered a historic black church in South Carolina and murdered nine African Americans in a premeditated act of radical, leftist terrorism, Jon Stewart, in his popular comedy series The Daily Show, in a rare diversion from humor, spat the following words into the camera: [...] once again, we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a, just, gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confi dent, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack s–. Yeah, that’s us. (Yahr n.p.) Stewart voiced the immense frustration currently boiling over in the United States, as videos and images of brutality against blacks dominate news cycles and social media, sparking protests and the birth of movements like Black Lives Matter. At a moment when the historically racial confl ict between blacks and whites has 122 Quan Manh Ha and Conor Hogan once again risen to the forefront of the national consciousness, literary works like Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro remain painfully relevant. The plot of this drama consists of actions by attendants who surround Sarah, the female protagonist, and projections from Sarah’s mind in the moments before her suicide, as her various selves, all major fi gures in Western history, discuss the self-revulsion that Sarah has been conditioned to feel as a black woman in the United States. 1. The Detrimental Eff ects of Assimilation Each of Sarah’s projected selves represents a facet of Western culture, and Kennedy contrasts each with the others to expose how current rhetoric perpetuates a simplistic, fl awed, and in Sarah’s case, fatal paradigm. Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, historical principles of the colonial epoch, become demonic, wanton, and violent fi gures who represent the devastation that imperialism wrought upon the African continent. Interestingly, Queen Victoria had African ancestry: DeNeen L. Brown writes in an article published in The Washington Post that Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) was Britain’s black queen who “passed on her mixed-race heritage to her granddaughter, Queen Victoria” (Brown n.p.). Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Congolese president, often a symbol of resistance for the Black Power movement, is cast as a broken, defeated rapist, representing the ultimate failure of various black nationalist groups. Jesus, the founder of Christian faith, is projected as a hideous, tortured dwarf, who symbolizes the role that Christianity has had in African American disenfranchisement. In her article written for The Huffi ngton Post, Taryn Finley quotes Franchesca Ramsey: “Historically, white Jesus has been used to oppress and erase the histories of people of color [...]” (Finley n.p.). Ironically, the portrayal of Jesus as a tortured dwarf evokes the image of a physically abused and exploited black slave. Through these historical characters, Kennedy examines the crushing weight of history on the black individual, which in the extreme can drive African Americans to insanity and selfdestruction. Journalist and author Ta-Nehesi Coates writes: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor – it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random mangling, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. (103) In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kennedy off ers a harrowing vision into the private, personal torment born of this historical destruction, a destruction so often described clinically, with charts and fi gures. Yet rather than suggest black nationalism or separatism as the solution, the play makes clear the fallacy of any response with Th e Violence of Duality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro 123 race at its core, and the resultant suff ering when the worth of an individual is reduced to demographic identifi ers like ethnicity or gender. Performance art diff ers in its examination of the human condition from the plastic and literary arts most signifi cantly in the directness with which it communicates with the viewer. Rather than off er a work to be contemplated at the audience’s leisure, staged performances present a dynamic, shifting universe that demands constant, active engagement. The proximity of actor and spectator removes layers of separation between the work and the audience, often eliciting a primal, rather than cerebral, response in the onlooker, contributing to a more personal, intimate experience. Traditionally, playwrights construct a plot within which their characters interact, conveying insight into various aspects of consciousness and society. It is seldom, however, that authors manage to create a new mode of artistic investigation and expression within established genres, employing truly innovative methods to reveal the generally concealed dynamics of interaction between human psyche and culture. Kennedy is one of those rare innovators. In her terrifying dreamscape Funnyhouse of a Negro, she constructs a play in which the action occurs almost entirely within the rapidly deteriorating mind of Sarah, during the brief moments preceding her suicide. Delving into the surreal world of the subconscious, Funnyhouse of a Negro is unconstrained by temporal, physical, or logical restrictions. The action consists in a series of parallel internal monologues or projected conversations between Sarah’s various selves, all monumental fi gures in the racial and colonial history of Western civilization, interspersed with cynical interjections by a Funnyhouse Lady and Funnyhouse Man – Sarah’s landlady and boyfriend, respectively. Through the staged projection of Sarah’s mind, Kennedy deconstructs the complex of culturally ingrained attitudes of mind that have infected the psyches of Americans. To understand one result of such infection, we refer readers to a chapter on “Black Aesthetics,” in which Vincent B. Leitch paraphrases Houston A. Baker’s insightful observations: “Black culture in America possessed a collectivistic rather than an individualistic ethos, a repudiative rather than an accommodative psychology” (Leitch 294). Imposed by white slave owners, the lie of a natural racial hierarchy, suggesting that blacks are inherently inferior to whites, once internalized, foments the selfloathing psychosis that ravages Sarah’s consciousness. Kennedy’s deviation from the conventional Aristotelian plot structure of a beginning, middle, and end refl ects the aesthetic she employs: “I see my writing as a growth of images. I think all my plays come out of dreams I had [...].” She also states that “autobiographical work is the only kind that interests me” (qtd. in Gates and Smith 617, 619). In writing Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kennedy draws from her own experiences, relating some of her intensely personal feelings of anxiety, disenfranchisement, and frustration, and her play rings with authenticity, despite its surrealistic structure. Kennedy captures a reality familiar to many African Americans living under the constant threat of violence in a society that 124 Quan Manh Ha and Conor Hogan views them as racially inferior. She exposes truths that white Americans often refuse to recognize, but which blacks must grapple with on a daily basis. Claudia Rankine, in an OpEd piece for the New York Times, wrote in the days immediately following the June 2015 South Carolina massacre: The Confederate battle fl ag continues to fl y at South Carolina’s statehouse as a reminder of a history marked by lynched black bodies. We can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrifi c killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued eff ects. (n.p.) Kennedy, through the fragmented hallucinations of Sarah, illuminates the darker, often denied, part of America’s history, juxtaposing classically confl icting ideologies to lay bare the violence that a binary social order generates. The distorted world of Funnyhouse of a Negro, far from rejecting history’s eff ects, magnifi es them, urging the viewer to recognize the necessity for a re-examination of racial politics in the United States. By casting the entire play in a nightmarish pall, Kennedy anatomizes and reconfi gures Western notions of good and evil, of positive and negative. Through her hyperbolic demonization of the black as well as the white communities, she also rejects the reactionary rhetoric of the Black Separatist movement, of Malcolm X’s early declaration: “No sane black man really wants integration [...] for the