|
 |
|
Aishah Rahman An ongoing urban drama with jazz and movement in one
act CHARACTERS Note: It should be difficult, at times, to differentiate between Aboulaye and Narrator; the two characters should appear with the help of music and movement to melt into one another, and actors should be lithe, able to move well.
Saxophonist plays quiet, spiritual music that evokes the dawn for a long time. Narrator (over the music): Morning prayer, 5:30 A.M. Aboulaye: America! I love
it! I love it! I just love it! Love New York, love the Bronx and
I love sneakers. I love America where every day’s tomorrow.
Aboulaye: Gonna, gonna take the 6 train. Hurry hurry hurry gotta jet downtown. Number 6 to one four street can’t be late don’t be late it won’t wait got to sell got to yell money money money got to get some run don’t be late african boy black boy Frenchie cool boy glowing feet shining, five feet six inches of thin jaguar skin nine eyes neon footed quick change artist catch the hurry hurry no 6, stop gotta dash, gotta book gotta split from the Bronx bush to downtown from north to south from east to west to downtown where the action is, money flows everything goes, through Harlem, through midtown downtown, is your town money money flows everyone knows . . . can’t be late money won’t wait. (Rushing music for several beats that stops suddenly.) Narrator: You make a bee line through your black and tan neighborhood where February turns brown to ash where everyone moves aside for your morning dash to the high in the sky train tracks rising above the rows of two story red brick doll houses on either side with four steps leading up to a tiny vestibule where two full grown adults cannot stand in at the same time. Aboulaye: Hurry! Saxophonist: A long interval of rising “subway music” that finally diminishes underneath the following Aboulaye: Hurry hurry hurry hurry do I have my wallet? hope I didn’t forget my wallet wallet got to have my wallet need my wallet, there she is, good old Baji right here in my hand. Narrator: Hurry! (music stops) As you board the train, your nose wrinkles at the scent of uncured leather that still clings to the wallet and you smile thinking “Damn that is one strong Fulani cow” as you put your Metro Card back in the square hand stitched wallet that Baba had given you years ago and return it to the deep pockets in your baggy black pants. And at that moment with your hands still on Baji, you spy him. He is wearing a pink voluminous robe and leaning on a black umbrella with a wooden handle. You have no doubt that it is he but . . . Aboulaye: Why is my Grandfather dressed in his ceremonial robes riding the underground in New York City instead of sitting beneath his fig tree or tending his beloved cows? Narrator: You put on your
train face. You hide behind a white man’s newspaper and cast
furtive looks at your Grandfather who you know is back in Guinea.
Narrator: You hated going
to the bush to visit me and those cows that I respected like human
beings. You always dreaded the fonio passed around at the communal
meal. Even the family tale of how your great grandfather had founded
our village, had brought relatives to raise cattle, become leathersmiths
and thrive on their own labor, did not ease the strange taste of
curdled milk and honey. “Badaw, do not scorn the cow, whose
milk is the essence of our life, our most powerful medicine, whose
skin protects us. Fulani respects the cow as we respect one another.
Do you understand?” Narrator: “Take this, it is Baji, who had a red belly with white flanks. A good milker when she was living and now she gives us soft leather Aboulaye: That day you put a red and white wallet in my little hand. Narrator: The train jerks you out of your reverie and you look for your grandfather’s face but instead all you see is a dapper gray haired man in a pink shirt carrying a walking stick wondering why you are staring at him. You get off the train wondering— Aboulaye: Is it an angel or a djinn I see on the train? How can that man look so much like Baba and not be a relative? Narrator: In the, in the quarter, in the quarter of the immigrants, languages flow like one dark river rising, Horn of Plenty for those selling by yelling and their shouts are really whispers of a love song in my ears. Aboulaye: Check it out checkit out check it out, mamacita papi Yo! Linda, Linda besame. Shoe laces one for 15 cents two for 45 grande grande one size fits all sidewalks bleeding money gotta be there to catch the flow. The great God Shango, drying out from bloody seas, sells incense two for dollar brand if you please. Bangladesh and Senegalese, Vietnamese, Mung dark as me, Thailand and Bangkok, Singapore, El Salvador, Guinea, Sierra Leonians, Nigerians, Liberians and Haitians, (those who made it) got rid of tyrant yesterdaddy and here he comes again today, guns and no butter starvation just a bullet away and oppression in all homelands is just about the same, casts a long, long shadow and adds sadness to all songs. Money, money it takes money to send to home. Narrator: But where are the
Albanians from Kosovar and other Europeans, near and far, who like
you seek succor from Miss Liberty’s hand? Not in your neighborhood
not in the crossroads of the immigrants and dark natives looking
for cheap buys. They are melted in the mainstreams of the land.
They are welcomed in Fort Dix by the hand of Hillary who plumps
up soft pillows on their individual beds for their ease in spotless
sunwashed rooms wired for computers as they eat musaka me patate
and INS begs them (through a translator) to apply within the year
for permanent resident status, thank you please. Hurry down the
long street to the small space you rent to sell your wares through
streets paved with 14karat gold chains and wiggling electric hula
dancers. Past Japan Express, Camera & Electronics, The Beeper
Zone, Export Specialists, Bedspreads, Curtains, We Ship Anywhere.
Apple green and precious pink taffeta and tulle waving in the air
on wire hangers outside a store and brass studded trunks spilling
into the street making it difficult for you to navigate on the street
of immigrants paved with gold chains in the crossroads of Liberty
& Opportunity where one size does not fit all. Narrator: Afternoon prayer—three
to four P.M. (music diminishes then stops) Aboulaye: Nada, everything is everything as they say. Narrator: Got to come uptown, Mr. Africa. Aboulaye: Downtown is good,
rent cheap, business high? You buy? No problem! Aboulaye: The people of Africa
are fine brother man. Narrator: For me. Why, Mr. Africa? Aboulaye: Because my Baba always says kindness is the greatest wisdom. Because you look like my old Baba. Because I’ve been seeing my Grandfather all day, he follows me from Africa in the faces of you African-black American-Africans. Narrator: Yeah Bro, we part of you, our long lost people, maybe even relatives my man. If only we knew. Narrator: Your last prayer of the day. Saxophonist: an interval of evening-sunset music that diminishes before the next speaker. Aboulaye: This time I am sure. It is Baba riding with me on the midnight train to the Bronx even though I am just as sure he is still back in Guinee. At the end of the car he sits and stares at me. Between dozes I stare at him and smile. Now I am not afraid. His face is familiar place made strange by the passage of time. When I get off the train and look around for him I am not afraid. Maybe grandfather will materialize again and maybe just stay at my side. After all it’s silly to be afraid of my own flesh and blood. Isn’t it? Narrator: You are anxious
to get home but you do know not to run or even walk fast for the
swarmy night air is swirling with police but it is hard for you
are so hungry and all you want to do is hurry home and eat. Narrator: With your mind
already home, you grow hungrier by the minute. As you near your
building you look up and of course the woman above you sits as usual
perched in her window. What is she looking at, what does she see?
You are thirsty. Narrator: In other times, other places you drank coconut milk or sugar cane juice but it is a cold drink of bright red bissop that you want right now. Saxophonist: A bloodcurdling wailing high note that cannot be mistaken for anything else but a police siren. Aboulaye and Narrator: OOOOOOOOOOOOO !!! I am standing in the closet
size vestibule of my doll house apartment building with my key halfway
in the lock when Aboulaye and Narrator: OOOOOOOOOOOOO !!! Narrator: You are startled at the closeness of the siren scream. Curious, you turn around, warily open the door and look straight into hell. Saxophonist: short stacatto screaming notes evoking “Hell.” Eight gunshot eyes and four barking faces. Their decision had already been made. This time it is not Calvary but high on a hill in Northern Manhattan in a place wrested from Indians in the quarter of the immigrants in a black and tan street of red brick doll houses. Aboulaye: Gunshot faces! Saxophonist: (gunshot music) Aboulaye: The Mosquitoes of West Africa. (mosquito music) Aboulaye: Saxophonist: Music evoking
the terror of the preceding lines for several beats. Narrator: “God is great” Aboulaye: “Great is
God.” Narrator: If you could run at that speed you could cover the length of a football field in about one second. It will be quick— Aboulaye: Before the old
man can finish his words, inside the miniscule foyer, my gory sky
becomes a crackling hailstorm. Second bullet enters my upper left
side under my arm pit and hurtles downward through my right kidney,
exits out of my back as the next one enters the left kidney and
travels up my right lung at the same time the third one enters my
arm in the front and leaves in the back almost colliding with this
one now crashing through my collar bone rushing to the opposite
side as if making room for the next bullet that smashes my chest
and rests a millisecond before exiting out of the back of— Aboulaye and Narrator: —to the knee bone to the shin bone to the ankle bone on the left side or this one now on the right side that comes in below the knee and takes a short quick trip to my knee bone on my left side while two more bullets make contact with my left side again in my left side again, and Aboulaye: in my left side again rupturing my spleen, kidney and any intestines I have left and this last one puts a hole in my right sole, passing from the bottom of my feet through my middle toe and through the top of my right foot turning off my glow-in-the dark sneaker! Narrator: Your breath is shot, bullet riddled. Your lips like wine. Your stomach pours into the ground. Now you are trains and stars, the shape of change. Now you are a giant and as you die they love you. (The two men become one—stand back to back and begin revolving, facing the audience and continue to revolve until they seem to melt into one another as Aboulaye speaks.) Aboulaye: One of the four
djinns kneels besides me and begs me not to die but Baba has already
taken me back to Guinea. Now, I am the siren sound in the gory midnight
as I circle between Africa and America, East and West, Earth and
Sky, wailing for the green ones who cannot drink water, a clamoring
frenzy for the unquenchable thirst for those in sapless lands, a
thrumming for parched youths with green mouths and purple lips in
a strange land with no succor. Now, I am the plangent song of elders
who must return their young to a haunting heritage in a desiccated
land. Now, I am a keening between a ravine and a skyscraper, ululating
between the Gambia and the Hudson, rising, falling, floating, pealing,
tolling while a woman in the window sits and stares not believing
her eyes.
|
