We are currently producing Black Cypress: A Phillips County Survival Guide, commissioning members of the Arkansas Delta’s Black communities to collect stories, images, scriptures, songs, prayers, and recipes for hard times. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the current uprisings taking place around the country and the world, this project is a chance for the community members of Phillips County to contribute their knowledge and expertise about how to survive this moment together. The letters will be published in a physical book available fall 2020 (to be sold by local partners). We hope it will help to provide a record of this time for Black people in the area—handwritten truths of our history, not the narrative passed on by the power brokers of white supremacy; something to share with family, community, and future generations.
Faith, Hope, and Healing
The call from the Equal Justice Initiative, led by Bryan Stevenson, urged all of us to change the dominant cultural narrative by reframing what we remember about the racialized violence in this country’s past. The erasure or justification of that violence is what allows for the perpetuation and creation of racist policies. Our work has strived to subvert and expand our historic archives by centering culturally specific practices of remembrance and by affirming, collecting, and organizing stories that are not currently remembered. This is the work of our story bank, our Institute, our mixtape, Black 'n da Blues, the Survival Guide, the residency. These programs are an affirmation of the stories that have been passed down within the Black community and are currently being shaped by members of the Black community of Phillips County. Our archives are a way of organizing and centering these stories, and the ways we’ve gone about collecting them and performing them subvert traditional notions of what makes for legitimate historic documentation.
The true value of Remember2019 doesn’t live in the non-profit industrial complex’s use of the word “impact,” nor in numbers and audience count and survey forms. It exists somewhere in a more spiritual realm. It lives in a belief in something larger than ourselves, in faith. We know that audiences are changed while watching a performance. But it is hard to say just how. How are they different? What happens to people in their seats as they participate in hearing and sharing their stories? How are people transformed by cultural experiences and exposure? This kind of change can feel intangible, maybe even spiritual, as we enter a liminal space through the theatre.
Early on in the program’s development we decided we were only going to engage with the Black community. Remember2019 isn’t about educating white folks or building bridges to that facet of the community, which often seems hell-bent on preventing progress for their Black neighbors (and thus for themselves). Remember2019 works with and for the Black community and their self-determined art around memory, reflection, and healing. The program strives to offer spaces for that healing—a spiritual healing that can only happen in affinity spaces.
Our archives are a way of organizing and centering these stories, and the ways we’ve gone about collecting them and performing them subvert traditional notions of what makes for legitimate historic documentation.
Much work is asked of artists to justify their existence. On a national level, our capitalist country does not share a belief in the intrinsic value of art. So we must constantly re-explain how our work contributes to and enriches our society. But how do you measure the soul? Is there a scale of achievement for healing? Have we ever officially “healed”?
Our work as artists and cultural workers must always reach beyond what we think is possible. This reach is a species of non-arrival. This reach is a mode of living. It is to remain and work firmly in the present, as we engage and seek to understand history, and, at the same time, reach for different futures. It is from this location, inside the work, where we find ourselves, where we find our values, and where we find orientation towards life (or existence).
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