The Humanities Review

Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007

LONG BEFORE CARIBBEAN WRITERS began to discuss colonial and postcolonial identities in terms of William Shakespeare's The Tempest-way back, in fact, before Shakespeare was born-a black African trumpeter performed regularly in the English court. Treasurer's records mention a "black trumpet," variously identified as John Black or John Blancke, who, beginning in 1507, was paid eight pennies per day. He performed at the funeral of Henry VII and the coronation of Henry VIII, who later gave him a violet gown and hat as wedding presents, and his image is preserved in at least two early modern illustrations (Ashbee and Lasocki 72; Lowe 39-40). Little else is known about the man. But as a researcher and teacher chiefly in Shakespeare studies, I find myself thinking of him often lately.

In my mind he has become connected to a project spearheaded by African-born, Jamaican-raised writer, actor, and musician Kwame Dawes. In a sense the project began in 1964 when artist Tom Feelings relocated from New York to Ghana. There he was moved to illustrate the capture of black Africans and their journey across the Atlantic in slave ships. Feelings' series of images, published in 1995 as Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo, had a profound effect on Dawes, who sat down to write Feelings a letter of thanks. Dawes being Dawes, the letter became a collection of poems, which he called Requiem (1996). A few years later, in his office at the University of South Carolina, where I was a student, Dawes handed me Requiem and asked if it made me feel like writing music. It did, to say the least, and in 2003 our project debuted at the Columbia Museum of Art with Feelings in attendance (unfortunately, Feelings passed away later that year). His haunting images took center stage, Dawes read selected poems, and my band performed compositions based on the poems and art.

Since then, Dawes and I have performed Requiem before varied audiences: public school children in South Carolina, a Baptist congregation in rural North Carolina, diverse museum patrons, academics, and students in a number of settings. Observers tend to become emotionally involved in ways that a professor of literature, conditioned by the classroom, seldom sees. Maybe this happens because Requiem blends the personal with the conceptual. Graphic realism emanates from Feelings' images of the middle passage, and Dawes takes listeners through a number of emotional scenarios. Audience members, confronted with realities of slavery in an immediate way, situate themselves in relation to what they see happening to those Africans. That kind of personal assessment would be powerful enough for someone alone in a room with Feelings' and Dawes' books. But in a public setting, Dawes' words and Feelings' images inspire further assessment that includes consideration of one's relationship to other members of the audience and to the geographical site of presentation. London Mayor Ken Livingstone recently apologized publicly for his city's role in the slave trade, and negotiations are now under way to take Requiem to his offices. The heft of the Requiem experience was staggering in Charleston, South Carolina; it is difficult to imagine the potential for emotional reverberation in London.

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