5. Jordan Laffrenier: Preparing to direct Slave Play:
A travel guide to Richmond, Virginia
10 A Note on Your Discomfort
Essay by Morgan Parker on confronting racial and sexual trauma in Slave Play
11. Jeremy O. Harris: Notes on Style
Excerpts from the script, dramatis personae and authorial framing
12. Slave Play in a Canadian Context
Toronto Star article by Afua Cooper called The Invisible History of the Slave Trade
16. Interview: Jeremy O. Harris & Tonya Pinkins
From American Theatre – race, sex, supremacy and the provocation of the play
26. Slave Play in Slave Play: #ConsentSoWhite
Essay excerpt by Avgi Saketopoulou from Los Angeles Review of Books
30. Glossary of Terms
Key concepts related to Slave Play, psychology, sex, trauma and race
33. Reflection Prompts
A series of questions to deepen the engagement with the play
34. Further Reading & Resources
Books that influenced Jeremy O. Harris
Black sexuality and performance studies
Suggested collections and archives (Rita Cox Collection)
Jordan Laffrenier: Preparing to direct Slave Play: A travel guide to Richmond, Virginia
This essay is my attempt to talk about Slave Play without talking about Slave Play, because it’s one of those shows that’s best experienced when you go in knowing nothing at all.
My introduction to Richmond came long before setting foot there. I remember my mother explaining racial segregation to me after revealing that my grandfather (white) and my grandmother (Black) used to get kicked out of restaurants in Hamilton, Ontario — and she brought up the case of Loving vs. Virginia. Too young to understand, I took away the idea that somewhere in this southern place called Richmond, love stood up against the state that tried to contain it, and won.
When I think of my grandparents’ story now, I wonder what it meant for them to hold each other’s histories during times they were refused a table and asked to leave, to confront not only segregation but all that came before it, to hold each other and see pain inflicted and strength endured, to hold each other against the violence of history as they wrote mine. History is not neutral; it arrives through a series of inheritances, conquests, resistances, and betrayals. We don’t choose what we inherit, nor can we understand how it lives in us, but it is there and comes out in ways we don’t always expect, including the ways that we love.
In preparation for directing Slave Play, I spoke with psychoanalyst and therapist Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, in which she writes about her profound interest in Slave Play. I asked about generational trauma: Is it epigenetic? What gets passed down, and how?
She believes history lives in our bodies and is transmitted through relations of care: A white mother whose child explores a pediatrician’s waiting room may see, and expect others to see, her child’s curiosity as something exciting, while a Black mother may worry that it will be seen as an intrusion of privacy and property. The way each of these mothers may say “come back here” has a different level of anxiety, and that contrast is threaded through history and with history.
When I think of my own parents, I can feel an inevitable truth that is carried and passed down. The weight of history lives in their bodies: in their tight clutch whenever I leave their homes, the insistence in their eyes as they tell me I matter; their fear, their anxiety, my mother’s plea to not go to America right now, not go to Virginia right now, and in all the ways they told me and still tell me to get back here.
At a restaurant in Richmond, a few miles north of where Slave Play takes place, a few miles east of where my great-grandfather was enslaved, I meet a warm local couple who’ve been living together in Richmond for over two decades.
We talk about the city’s recent history of redlining and gentrification; how the life expectancy of a Black person living in Richmond is 20 years lower than a white person; the way the municipal government has raised property taxes in order to push Black communities out of the historic neighbourhood where my AirBnB is located.
We discuss the confederate monuments that once lined Monument Avenue, blocks away from the restaurant we’re at, but which the city tore down after protests in 2020. “It’s difficult for me to explain, and my mind has changed on this subject many times, but I want to see the monuments,” I tell the couple. “My great-grandfather escaped slavery, he fought in the Civil War — I don’t want history erased, I want to confront it.”
I spoke without a full awareness of what these monuments were.
“You can’t understand the imposing scale and presence of these sculptures,” one of them responds.
What I understand now, that I couldn’t understand when I spoke to the couple, was that the sculptures were larger than life — that they weren’t erected during the Civil War, but during Jim Crow, to intimidate Black Americans: White supremacy physically towered over the city. Confronting history was recognizing history and literally tearing it down.
They show me pictures of the monuments, taken just weeks prior to them being removed. It’s the photos that undo me.
The sculptures are covered in the very root of Black North American expression: Four hundred years of pain translated and transformed into murals and graffiti. The photos show songs of love and protest being performed in front of them — people dancing and chanting. These artists, through their art, pry open the monuments, reveal everything these sculptures have witnessed, everything they attempted to maintain: centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, generations of racist housing policies. History they claim to honour as they repeat.
This is the part of Black expression that cannot be replicated (no matter how many times Elvis, Adele, or Bruno Mars are awarded for attempting to do so). The part of Black expression that has a cultural stronghold over most of the world. The reason the music we listen to is closer to the music the enslaved chanted than the enslavers, or that the food we deem American is spiced and prepared to mimic that of the captured.
“This is the music of a people who survived, who not only won’t stop but can’t be stopped,” New York Times critic Wesley Morris wrote in an article about the
appropriation of Black music. “Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music.” The voice that we use to deliver is a “cry of ancestry,” Morris wrote, delivered from (and delivering) each generation. It is all the ways we speak into the past and the future when we sing “I’m Coming Home.”
The visual artist Kehinde Wiley, whose work is a notable example of how art can play with history and deepen its contemporary meaning, has made a name for himself by repositioning Black youth within the European tradition of power and status. In Richmond, Wiley responded to the self-aggrandizing monuments with a monument of his own, “Rumors of War.” His monument, commissioned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was originally meant to be in conversation with a neighbouring monument of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart.
Wiley’s vision molds an African-American equestrian with dreadlocks, torn jeans, and Nikes. Through this depiction, he commemorates the African-American youth who continue to be lost to social and political struggles in America.
The sculpture of J.E.B. Stuart was torn down one year after “Rumors of War” went up. Though the confederate statue has fallen, the Black child depicted in Wiley’s sculpture continues to hold his ground. To me, “Rumors of War” is a monument that could never be large enough. It holds our history and our present in ways that are made both obvious and less obvious by viewing. It takes history and restages it, in ways that are confronting.
I’ve seen something similar happen in theatre. Black playwrights have revolutionized the form by interrogating, remixing, and exploding history in provocative, genre-defying, and revisionist ways: Obaaberima by Tawiah M’Carthy, An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, blood.claat by d’bi.young anitafrika, Father Comes Home From the Wars by Suzan-Lori Parks, Sal Capone by Omari Newton, Insurrection by Robert O’Hara, Oraltorio by Motion, Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, Shakespeare’s Nigga by Joseph Jomo Pierre, and, of course, Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris. The plots are rarely linear, but history is always present, and the fragments are revealing. These plays ask us to work through history, process history, to acknowledge history even though it can never be exorcised. These plays ask us to do something with the history we inherit. They don’t depict perfect pictures of what can never be depicted: They use history, write it into the present, and make audiences see it in new ways.
On my Virginia plantation tours, each guide acknowledges the wealthy white families who lived there, the architecture, and how the plantation functions now (a couple of them are wedding venues). The guides claim their plantations to be haunted as if a matter of fact, but the further in the state I travel from Richmond, the less the acknowledgement of the enslaved. For context, the population of Richmond is almost 50 per cent Black. The rest of Virginia? Well, the rest of Virginia is not that.
On the tour that’s the furthest away from Richmond, the guide calls the enslaved people who lived there “servants” because “that is how they were referred to at the time,” and when someone asks if the family who occupied the plantation owned slaves, the guide quickly replies that “everyone in the south owned slaves.” Surely the enslaved didn’t own themselves.
I tell this tour guide I’m in town to find the plantation my great-grandfather was on. She tells me they have a board member with that name. Neither of us speak. We both understand what this likely means.
When people ask me how Slave Play will translate to a Canadian audience, I think about our distance from Richmond as a metaphor. How in both my Jamaican roots (paternal) and my Black American roots (maternal) there were slaves, and how this history is carried in many Canadian families but is rarely acknowledged, and yet — it is not a history that was, but a history that is ever-present, a history that all North American life is based on.
Returning to Toronto, the question I’m asked most frequently is: What did it feel like to be on those plantations? To sit on the lawn of the master’s house? To run my hands along the indent left by the hands of the young Black men and children who built it? To sit in the chairs that are used now to witness vows of love in sickness and in health, in good times and bad? To look at the tide of the James River and want to swim, to want to swim faster, to want to swim to be free?
Slave Play is above all else a love story. “All the plays I’ve written so far have been stories in and around love,” said Jeremy O. Harris last year. “Slave Play [is] about the impossibility of loving blind of history and also about how to navigate the fact of power in the context of the stories that are written upon us because of things we cannot control.”
Thinking of my great-grandfather now, I imagine him standing at the altar, face to face with my great-grandmother in Hamilton, sometime after the war he fought for our freedom. She was white, a European immigrant. What did they see when they looked into each other’s eyes? What was their power dynamic? What did they vow to each other? What does it mean to hold someone’s history?
Since reading Slave Play, I’ve asked every romantic partner whether or not they experience a racial dynamic between us in the bedroom. No one has given the same answer.
What is it that I am asking them to acknowledge in these scenarios?
Who is it that I am asking them to hold?
What does it mean to hold someone’s history?
In every decade of my life I have been yelled at, numerous times, by white strangers. On one occasion, a white person cut me in line; when I politely let them know I was waiting, they screamed at me and threw fries in my face. An onlooker caught the incident on their camera phone, and said to me after: “I never thought I’d witness this in real life.” On more than one occasion, I have been called the N-word. In every instance, I have wondered, as I stare at their red faces, “What is it that lives in you, and lives in me, that makes you think you are allowed to do this?”
As a child, I twice had a rope tied around my neck. Once, on a school playground, the other kid simply wanted to play a game where we reenacted history. My mother pulled me out of the school three weeks later. I still remember the way that she hugged me that day.
What does it mean to hold someone?
In Sexuality Beyond Consent, Saketopoulou writes about the myth that trauma can be healed, how this myth has been commercialized and capitalized on. To her, trauma is something that forever changes the body, and when we acknowledge this, it becomes less about how we deal with or repair trauma and more about what we do with trauma. “Trauma,” she argues, “needs to circulate, it needs to be revisited.”
Slave Play is an example of what we can do with trauma. It is not a play about healing, it’s a play about doing, about wanting, about feeling. It’s a play that is meant to challenge — that acknowledges painful experiences are sometimes the most transformational. It’s a play that asks its audiences to give as much as they receive. To laugh out loud fully. To learn nothing that they don’t already know. To hold history, to feel what has been written on your body, to cry, to savour, to love, to find perspective in the fantasy that is theatre, to work within the fantasy, to act and react, to see more fully, to see, to see and be seen.
“Who am I to hold your past against you… I [just] hope that you see this through, I hope that you see this true.” — Rihanna
A Note On Your Discomfort
“One could make a case for mutual lust and jealousy as the basis for racial conflict in America.”
— Price M. Cobbs and William H. Grier, Black Rage
This might hurt. This could prod open regrets and secrets and what you find could be shock. But there’s nothing in Slave Play that part of you doesn’t already know. The setting: a plantation. Time: irrelevant. Lights up on a Black woman working. Before I saw it, all anyone would “give away” was that Slave Play would resonate with me — as a Black woman and particularly as someone who’s tried to post-coitally tell a white lover that when we have sex, there’s a blip wherein I suddenly inhabit an ancestor’s body, and he the body of a pale, pilfering master. Whitness was difficult for my lover to hear about and mid-thrust ancestral abduction perhaps incomprehensible, but it got said. Pain can be useful once it’s off our chests, even funny. This aching humor is a Black necessity and art form Slave Play deftly exercises and exploits. There’s a gun in the first act — it’s a big black dildo. The cock of the gun is a long Black memory. Illuminating, uncomfortable, but plain as lust. Totally varied in our levels of comprehending the general materiality of Black America, my audience laughed, gasped, and one June Jordan said: “We’re saying aggression but really dealing with power.”
— Morgan Parker
(American Poet, Author of “Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night”)
Jeremy O. Harris - Notes on Style:
From the opening pages of Slave Play
This page is taken directly from the opening pages of the Slave Play script. Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be played as such. I’m not sure where the music is coming from but it’s there. You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all...
Everything in life is a performance. I’ve chosen to present a performance of antebellum life that is in conversation with the ways in which that time has been presented to and informed the world’s collective imagination of life in the American South during slavery.
“Plato and Socrates, Freud and Jung, Bataille and de Sade, Afrekete and Audre Lorde, Sun-Ra and Parliament, and Prince and Sheila E have all contributed to our understanding of eros and eroticism and labor and leisure. However, only the last three cohorts have considered how to adapt eros to decolinzing efforts or funk with the erotic.”
— L.H. Stallings “Funk The Erotic: Transaethetics and Black Sexual Cultures”
“All that I wanted from you was to give me Something that I never had Something that you’ve never seen Something that you’ve never been”
— Rihanna “Work”
“When you ah guh Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn Meh nuh cyar if him Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurting”
— Rihanna “Work”
“Please recognize I’m tryin’, babe”
— Rihanna “Work”
“I mean who am I to hold your past against you? I just hope that it gets to you I hope that you see this through I hope that you see this true”
— Rihanna “Work”
Slavery in a Canadian Context
The Invisible History of the Slave Trade by Afua Cooper for Toronto Star
In our everyday lives, we invoke the metaphors of slavery. For example, if you feel you are being exploited you might say, “I am being treated like a slave.” Yet few people actually know about the slavery that they constantly refer to –the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
Paradoxically, for all our invocation of slavery, there is still a real silence around the topic. For example, if one raises the issue of the slave trade, people suddenly become uncomfortable. One is asked to “forget the past” or “not to bring up that ancient history.”
The slave trade and slavery in Western society, life, and culture is still by and large an invisible history.
This is the perfect time for all of us to learn more about this ignoble past. The United Nations has declared 2007 as the year to recognize and commemorate the slave trade and today we mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
Recognizing the marginality of the slave experience in Western historical discourses and consciousness, the UN has expressed concern that it has taken the international community 200 years to acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity. The silence, I believe, is directly connected to the fact that during the period when these heinous activities took place, black people were turned into objects. Blacks were treated as chattel, items of commerce who were bought and sold by those in power.
As a result, Africans were cast out of humanity and “reduced to the category of animal or thing.” Since the start of the slave trade, discourse, including socalled “enlightened” discourse, has centred on the sub-humanity of African peoples. “Educated” people like U.S. president and slaveholder Thomas Jefferson stated that Africans were only three-quarters human.
Because of slavery and the maltreatment of blacks, there was also the belief that Africans had a higher pain threshold than other races.
Little wonder the brutalization of the black body was a daily feature of slave life.
Thus, for the longest while, the idea that Africans were not fully human circulated in the Western psyche, mind, and culture; their pain, therefore, was not worthy of recognition and acknowledgment. Only this belief explains the long silence about slavery.
The silence is more than tragic and unforgivable given that, at the time, slavery underwrote the entire Western economic system.
Profits accrued from the slave trade and slavery led to rapid investments in various industries in Europe. The British (and American) industrial revolutions took place because of capital accumulation and investments from the slave trade and slavery.
The first financial institutions were founded as a result of the slave trade. Insurance companies, the most famous being Lloyd’s of London, for example, sprang up in order to insure slave ships and their human cargo. Barclays Bank, the Bank of England, and the ill-fated Barings Bank were some of the major financial institutions established because of the wealth their founders gained from the slave and plantation trades.
British cities such as Liverpool, London, Glasgow, Bristol, and Plymouth grew rich from the gains of the trade in African human beings.
The cotton and iron industries were established on the backs of slaves.
Even cultural places, not usually associated with slavery, such as the British Museum and Art Gallery, must thank African slaves for their rise and glory.
Every important British European family, including the royal family, invested in and grew wealthy from the slave trade. In fact, the Royal African Company, an English slave-trading outfit, was founded by the Duke of York and his brother Charles II.
The 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century wars fought on the high seas between the nations of Western Europe were directly about the slave colonies.
Literally, the “building” of such countries like Britain was done on the backs of slaves. This was true not only for Britain but for all the other major western and northern European powers, and the United States. Europe’s progress and modernity was predicated on Africa’s misery.
Canada, itself, was part of the wider phenomenon of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.
First, Canada was a colony of France and Britain, the two largest slave traffickers. Second, because the Atlantic slave-trading activities connected diverse economies, for much of the slavery period there was a brisk trade between the capitalists of eastern Canada and the slaveholders of the Caribbean.
Fish from Newfoundland and eastern Canada fed the enslaved people in the West Indies. The maritime products were then exchanged for slave-grown products: sugar, rum, molasses, tobacco, coffee, and the like. West Indian slaves were also bought by Canadian slaveholders and merchants.
Most important, enslavement of Africans itself was institutionalized in Canada. The enslavement of black people existed from at least 1628 to 1834 when it was abolished by imperial fiat.
Enslaved blacks like Marie-Joseph Angélique, who was executed in Montreal in 1734 for allegedly setting fire to that city, speak to the fact of slavery in Canada.
Likewise, the 47th article of capitulation at the time of the Conquest in 1760, in which the British recognized the French colonists’ rights to keep in bondage their black and aboriginal slaves, underscores this fact of slavery in Canada.
Today, we still feel the effects of the slave trade and slavery.
Among other things, slavery was a racist system predicated upon an alleged black inferiority and white supremacy.
Those who profited from this system justified it by arguing that blacks deserved enslavement because they were inferior people.
Today we still feel the impact of this kind of thinking.
Institutionalized racist practices, anti-black racism, the colour line, colonialism, African underdevelopment and also that of former slave societies in the New World, duplicity of western governments, white supremacy, economic disadvantage, racialization of black peoples, and psychic distance between black and white have all been identified as legacies of the slave trade and slavery.
This is why it is important to disseminate knowledge about the trade and its legacies and to educate each new generation about these facts so that these horrors never occur again.
It is high time that this crime against people of African descent be acknowledged and steps taken to repair it. Yet, whenever blacks insist that Euro-dominated governments address this issue, they are often met with ridicule.
Recently British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed “deep regret” over slavery but opposed reparations because he said slavery was perfectly legal at the time it was practised.
However, sociologist Patrick Wilmot notes that under Hitler the killing of Jews was legal – but this did not save the killers from hanging after the Nuremberg trials.
Wilmot further notes that as a lawyer Blair should have known that “Crimes against humanity are so heinous they transcend national boundaries.” Further, Britain “recognized the need for reparations when it paid billions in today’s money in 1833, not to the slaves but to British (slave) masters who `lost’ their property to the emancipation.”
One thing is for sure: Before the damage can even be repaired, it has to be acknowledged.
Some UN member states, mainly Commonwealth countries, are going full steam ahead with bicentenary activities marking the 200th anniversary of abolition of the slave trade.
In Canada, the City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario have recognized the bicentenary and now involved in commemorative activities.
These Canadian jurisdictions must be applauded for their leadership. However, there is still no word from the federal government about official recognition.
Afua Cooper is an historian and author. Her book “The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal” (HarperCollins 2006 and L’Editions De L’Homme 2007) is a national bestseller.
Interview:
Jeremy
O. Harris & Tonya Pinkins
‘Slave Play’: Racism Doesn’t Have a Safe Word
Jeremy O. Harris talks about the sexual politics of white supremacy, and about how he finds humor in horror (and vice versa).
From American Theatre
In Jeremy O. Harris’s provocative Slave Play (the complete text of which is published in our July/August 2019 print edition, and which is slated for a Broadway transfer this fall), the MacGregor plantation becomes a site for three couples to work through, process, and exorcise the historical and emotional traumas of the past and their presents. This approach not only fails to heal their rifts, it exposes fresh layers of personal conflict, though some understandings are ultimately reached. Harris—whose play “Daddy” premiered in New York just months after Slave Play’s debut at New York Theatre Workshop—spoke with Tonya Pinkins, the Tony-winning star of Caroline, or Change, about the play and about the intense controversy it stirred. (Caution: There may be spoilers ahead if you haven’t read or seen the play.)
TONYA PINKINS: Can you tell me about the joke that set this play in motion?
JEREMY O. Harris: So I was at a party with my friends, and this very liberal man was talking about the pleasure he was getting from a woman who demanded the roughest sex he’d ever engaged in. Everyone was just talking about it casually, and I was like: This is so weird. I was like, “I want to play this thought experiment with you. You identify as a male feminist, right?” And he was like, “Yes.” And I was like, “Great. Now if she was Black, would you feel as comfortable telling all of us about this in this way?” And the entire energy in the room changed immediately and he was like, “Uh…” And I was like, “What if she asked you to call her the N-word? Would you still tell us about that?” And he was like, “Uh…uh…” And everyone was like, “Well, that’s different.” And I said, “How? Is consent different when that consent intersects with the politics you perform in life? Because the consent to do this rough sex is also in opposition to the politics you perform in life, and yet that’s allowed for a sort of casual, drunken, discursive dissection.” That’s what started the thing.
TP: Wow.
JOH: That’s a Tonya Pinkins exclusive! No one else has got it out of me.
TP: I love it! So you were intrigued by an energy change in the room and you decided to explore it as a writer.
JOH: Yes. Because there was only one other person of color in this conversation, and we were laughing at the discomfort that all the white people had at what for us was a very casual question. I was like: This is theatre. This is what theatre should do: Untangle responses like this. So that started it.
TP: When I came to the show, I’d heard many things about it—mixed things. But one thing I heard that set me up to experience it in a different way was that I was told it was not about slavery. So when I came in and I saw the scenario, I knew that we were not watching a satire of a real event. That’s the way I entered the play. Did you have any say or feeling about how you wanted the audience to enter the play?
JOH: I didn’t want anyone to know anything about it. I feel as though I’ve been asked to enter into a lot of experiences and have been told too much about them, you know? I feel like we live in a time that robs theatre of its chance to actually do that thing that happens at a party where someone says something that changes the energy in the room immediately, right? If everyone already knew that I was going to say that to the person I said it to in that moment, it wouldn’t have landed the same way, because everyone would have been prepared. And I think that not having preparation is a good thing for the theatrical moment. These new demands we have on the way we talk about a play before we see it, where people are like, “I should have known that before I saw it,” are really complicated for me, because that robs me personally of the thing I like most in theatre, which is why I don’t tend to read reviews until I see a play.
TP: Debbie Tucker Green who just did a play in London, allowed no press about it at all.
JOH: Oh, that’s amazing!
TP: She wanted people to just come in; there was no pre-sentence, nothing. It was just: You’re coming to see a play by Debbie Tucker Green.
JOH: I wonder if that’s also something that Black artists might be feeling more often now—that we have to explain so much about ourselves. Like, why don’t you experience the world with the same sort of discomfort of not knowing how the world will respond to you that we do? Does that make sense?
TP: Absolutely. When I saw the play I wanted to write an essay called “White Supremacy 101.”
JOH: Why was that?
TP: I felt that the play captured a very specific dynamic of what supremacy is. Because you had white people and Black people, it was white supremacy. Look, we’re going to go into some BDSM talk now: The dominant person in a BDSM scenario is actually the sub. The sub has all the control. The sub has the ability to say “more” or “less” or “stop.” And in a supremacist relationship, the supremacist wants to have the agency to decide when they’re sub and when they’re dom, and the other party doesn’t get to choose at all; they must just respond to what the other person is doing. So in that sense, the supremacist is always a sub pretending to be a dominant, but always requiring the other person to meet their needs, whether it’s the need to look up to me as if I’m the person in control, or the need to console and guide me. I felt that the play really captured that.
JOH: Thank you. That rocks me in my stomach, because I felt like that was a major conversation that was being missed. People think we’re in a really sex-positive moment right now, and yet we 100 percent are not. A lot of the response to the play, good or bad, seemed to immediately delete the sexual dynamics from the discourse outside of either saying it was “provocative” or “salacious.” No one talked about the fact that sexual dynamics can actually be really illuminating about dynamics that we have all the time, you know?
TP: Yeah!
JOH: Also, this shouldn’t be that provocative to an audience who all have incognito windows up on their phone at different hours of the day. If you look at Pornhub’s demographics in New York, one of the most popular porn categories is “ebony” porn. And porn about sexual violence is really popular. So if people are allowing that to exist in their private fantasy life, why is it so weird that someone would put that in a theatre and have you process that communally?
TP: Well, that’s the American Puritanism. So let’s talk about the sex.
JOH: Yeah! Let’s do it!
TP: I felt like the character Kaneisha was living my life. You have these white men who run the world, but when they come home, they want someone to run them, boss them around. She was saying, “No, I actually want you to sub me. I need you to do this to me.” What made him supremacist was that he could not even, for her sexual pleasure, do that thing she asked of him because it messed with his sense of who he was. Is that true? Is that what you wrote?
JOH: I think that’s at the core of all three couples: the inability to listen to a Black person. I grew up as one of the only Black kids at the school I went to, and
then I went to a theatre conservatory where I was one of the four Black men that they let into a 52-person class, at a school where Black students every year for as long as Black students have been going to DePaul University had been asking to do more work that looked like them, and every year they weren’t listened to. So I think that part of the energy of this play was looking at something like BDSM dynamics as not even liberatory but just illuminating about the dynamic that I felt I’d seen in my life from every type of white person I interacted with, and dynamics I’ve seen in other people’s lives consistently. Because as anyone who is at all familiar with how any type of BDSM work knows, listening is the No. 1 thing. You have to be listening or you won’t hear the safe word. So I wanted to put listening at the core of the dramaturgy of this play.
TP: Right, and that’s what I saw. The dom is the servant, and the dom must listen, look, see, and do whatever the sub requires. The white people in this play were not very good doms.
JOH: No, they’re not.
TP: Even though in the world they are doms. They are the doms in the world; they could not dom in their relationship.
JOH: Exactly. Or, if they do listen, like Alana, they listen wrong, you know? They’re listening to the wrong cues, which also informs another type of macro- and microaggression to the Black body in our country, right? And that entanglement is something I think, in a sort of post-Obama liberal space, a lot of people thought we had escaped. We thought, “Oh, now we listen to Black people. We had to listen to one for eight years as president.” And I was seeing that their ability to listen to the leader of our country wrong for eight years was another really great example of the need for white people to always dom every situation they’re ever in.
TP: So I need to ask you this. A lot of Black women felt really, really hurt by this place. Has any Black woman expressed to you what hurt them about seeing Kaneisha in this situation? And what is your response?
JOH: I heard disparate things, and it was really difficult to navigate how one responds to a work of the imagination, and to its ability to hurt, when there are other people who said that it had healed them in some way or made them feel something they felt they had never had an ability to feel publicly. When we did the show at Yale the first thing I said was that we couldn’t do the show unless we got an intimacy director, a female intimacy director. And my director and I, with the help of the administration, got Claire Warren and Alicia Rodis to come to the Yale School of Drama to make sure that everyone was taken care of. That’s an action the school hadn’t done professionally before, to teach how one builds sex scenes like the ones in Slave Play, and to do them with care for the psychologies
of the people who are performing them. Another thing I said at New York Theatre Workshop was, “I would really like to have some facilitated talkbacks afterward so people can process however they’re feeling about the play.” Because we couldn’t have a talkback every night, we decided to have two facilitators come in every night. We put up trigger warnings as well.
TP: But the two intimacy directors you brought in are white women, so that’s a challenge for Black women to once again have their behavior, their feelings, be policed by the person who is the oppressor.
JOH: 100 percent. Intimacy direction is so new that there are only a certain amount of people who are trained to do it, but one thing they did is that one of the assistants inside their company who is working to become the next Alicia and Claire is a Black woman, Teniece Divya Johnson, and she was an assistant on both productions, and so there was care and rigor around trying to position Black women in and around that space of how we staged the sex.
TP: The other piece is that Kaneisha has the most profound monologue about whiteness: She deconstructs whiteness, she deconstructs the therapy, and then she’s positioned as the protagonist by opening and closing the play. But I think the end for her feels like a settling.
JOH: A settling?
TP: In my mind, she settled for something less than she was worthy of.
JOH: I hate flattening out people’s understanding of the ending by telling them what I think, because then that becomes the law of the ending. But one of the things I always say to people who interact with me about the ending, specifically the last line, is that there’s a lot of weight in a “thank you.” A “thank you” can be an invitation, a “thank you” can be a hello, a “thank you” can be a goodbye. A “thank you” can be a “thank you too”—a “thank you” is, for me, a very weighted thing.
TP: So for you that is open-ended?
JOH: Yes. There’s a lot of complexity to that, and the stage direction that the actor has before that says, “The actress playing Kaneisha does whatever she feels is best.” It doesn’t say “Kaneisha does,” it says “the actress playing Kaneisha,” which is a moment of deep meta-theatricality to me that opens that world up to be a litany of things.
TP: I like that. I like knowing that, because I feel like that could go a long way toward—I mean, if you’re uncomfortable from the first moment, I don’t know if you’re going to make it to the end, to have this actress give you that catharsis. But to know that the actress does have that ability to shape that is helpful.
JOH: Yeah, and that was there from the very first draft of the play.
TP: So I have a question about the word “Negress.” Why “Negress?” To me “Negress” is a pretty word, and I think all enslaved people were niggers. Was that your choice or was that something put upon you by the institutions? Why “Negress?”
JOH: I feel like “Negress” is a more violent word because it was so specific, right? There’s a non-specificity to “nigger” which makes it, for me, a less violent word because it’s been so normalized to our ear. If you listen to pop music now, the pop music of our country is hip-hop, and different versions of “nigger” are said in every rap song, ostensibly. So for me a word like “Negress” holds this historical weight that’s so raw that we haven’t even processed what misogynoir still looks like in our country, because that’s a word that’s secreted in the back of our minds and we haven’t even dissected.
TP: Also, in the script that I have, the end scene is a little more violent than it was in the actual production. Can you tell me why that was the case?
JOH: Well, I’m a very flowery writer, and so I write a lot of things that sometimes can happen and sometimes can’t. I have a cinematic mind, and I think that when I was thinking about this play, and also thinking about that violence, I was thinking a lot about textures as well as color. And I think that the blood that I was imagining coming out of his skin in that scene was something that was really important for the page, but I think would have become too difficult to achieve in an interesting way onstage. It would have confused the moment a different way.
TP: So if some director decided to do that, would you be not for that?
JOH: No, I’d be totally for it. I want everyone to try everything. I’m still waiting to hear the shutters of the window fly open with the wind, things like that. We couldn’t do hay—I didn’t know that you can’t have hay in a theatre because of lice. I’m still waiting for someone to do it in a theatre where they can have hay.
TP: Do you feel heard now?
JOH: I almost feel heard. A lot of people are listening, and I’m still hoping that they’re listening to me when I say I want them to be listening to all of us, because I think there are a lot of people who are saying a lot of exciting things right now. I feel like the drum I beat the most is that there is no such thing as a singular Black thought leader. We are all bringing so much diverse, complicated, and exciting things to the table. And sometimes I fear that because of the way capitalism works and the way magazines work that people will only want to listen to the ones they’ve seen photographed a lot. And if you’re actually listening to what most of
us are saying, most of us are saying, “Also look over here,” because we wouldn’t be writing if it wasn’t for Adrienne Kennedy or Alice Childress or Suzan-Lori Parks or Lorraine Hansberry or fucking Lynn Nottage, you know what I mean? I know for a fact I wouldn’t be writing as well as I was writing if I hadn’t been at a table with Aleshea Harris a week before I went to grad school and promising that I was going to come to New York and finally write a play that I think could match the majesty of the scrap of Is God Is that she had given me. Things like that are important for people to be listening to, and sometimes those are the things I don’t feel heard about.
TP: You mentioned Adrienne Kennedy, and I very much felt that “Daddy” was a Funnyhouse of a Negro kind of thing. And then I went back and thought about Slave Play. Would it be accurate to say that you are working out psychological things going on in your life in the plays that you write?
JOH: Yeah. For me early on, my therapy was writing, and it was a secret therapy because I was an actor. But I also was always such a reader that the people I was drawn to the most were the people who were also trying to process their psychologies in these abstract ways or these emotionally volatile ways. When you read Funnyhouse of a Negro and you’re hearing her talk about pulling out her hair and how her hair’s falling out, and you see Jesus falling across the stage, you see someone who has a complicated internal life, who also has this weird sense of humor about how complicated their internal life is. I think that I was always drawn to those types of people. When I would sit in my therapist’s chair, my big thing when I was 12 was trying to get my therapist to laugh at really dark things that were happening in my life.
There’s a really important thing that I think, especially for Black artists, is missing in our necessity for representation. Abstraction is not the thing that we champion in our community as much. And I understand that, because abstraction makes it more difficult for people to say that they see themselves inside a story; if someone’s seeing themselves slapping themselves, you’re like, “Well, that’s not what I want to see. Who wants to see that?” I think that I want to create work for the other people who sit in their therapist’s chair and try to get them to laugh at the dark parts of being Black, or the dark parts of being queer, or the dark parts of just being tall and awkward-looking, and not just like show the good parts of my life, or the happy parts of my life, or the mundane parts of my life. I’m not as interested in that right now. Maybe I will be someday.
TP: James Baldwin said that the American is “the most uneducated person in the world,” and “that is because education requires you to be able
to think. You have to teach someone to think, and in order to think, you have to be able to think about everything. And Americans are not allowed to think about what they did to the indigenous people, or what they did to the African people.” I’m specifically asking you about this in terms of Black outrage with the play. Are we as Black people not able to actually think about sexuality that was abusive or coercive, because that makes us complicit in it in our history?
JOH: I don’t know that it was about that so much. For me the outrage was really interesting and informative about the new landscape we’re in culturally, where if a thing can become a meme, you don’t have to engage with it, but you do get to respond to it. And there’s something really exciting about the fact that a play engendered a lot of big responses and some of the responses to that engendered thinking or thoughts. The thing I’m excited about is, if this play has another life, what type of thoughts can happen now that the memes have died down?
Because I think that in our country, the thing that people that have to process the most are Black people. That’s one of the reasons why Black Twitter is so attracted to memes, because memes distill complex thoughts into a thing you can respond to immediately, and I think the complex thought about what I was doing is, “Who does this boy think he is playing with our history in front of white people?” And I think that was a really good question for people to ask me and for me to have to think about. My response is: I think I’m Jeremy O. Harris, and I think that what’s important for me, Jeremy O. Harris, is to have a conversation in my place of work, right? And my place of work in New York inside of a history of literary theatre is going to be in conversation with white people. And I’m excited about the fact that now I get to think even more completely about what the conversations I’m having in public might feel like to other people.
The biggest thing I’ve been on a real kick about and wondering is: What is it that stopped me from doing Slave Play in an urban theatre setting first? Urban theatre was the theatre I grew up with. Like, the first play that I ever saw live was a Tyler Perry play in a college theatre, and I’m sure he was making more money than I made at New York Theatre Workshop.
TP: Well, you know, that’s some Christian theatre now!
JOH: It is Christian theatre, but my mom’s a Christian and my mom saw Slave Play and loved it. She actually felt that she wanted the third act to have more sex in it, to go into another place with the sex, which I found really curious and interesting! So an interesting thing for me to be thinking about post-Slave Play is like, what would my plays look like inside of an urban theatre space?
TP: Here’s my last question. You’re from Virginia, right?
JOH: I am.
TP: So Louis Hughes, who wrote Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, was quoted as saying, “Virginia was the mother of slavery.” Once the Americans won the war of independence, and the importing of Africans was banned, Virginia became this place where they would literally treat human beings as if they were animals and breed them. In fact, one woman who’d been bought for raping was sentenced to be hung because she killed someone, but because she was pregnant they kept her alive until “the issue” came out, because the issue was property. We were not children, we were not humans, Black women couldn’t be raped. You grew up in that world. How does that inform you as a writer?
JOH: I mean, it informs me implicitly. That was the other thing I had a feeling about when I was engaging with some of the responses. I was just like, “I wonder how many of these people actually grew up with a plantation down the street,” because I did. A plantation does have the historical weight, obviously, that it does, but it was also literally in my backyard. It was where we had our graduation party. So again, this is what I was saying: I had to embody a sense of humor about it. One my friend’s dad would whistle “Dixie” when he drove us in carpools!
TP: Oh God!
JOH: So I wouldn’t have survived if I was traumatized by the idea of the history of chattel slavery every day of my childhood, because the history of chattel slavery was in the history around me all over. My grandparents were sharecroppers, literally living close to the tobacco field that they had picked tobacco on their entire life, until they started working at the factory. They shared stories with my mom about getting a couple of cents for picking tobacco when she was little, and it’s crazy to me, because that was in the ’70s! So being a Virginian, and a Virginian who grew up in a factory town that was highly segregated, that proudly carries its history as a Confederate state everywhere around it, is part of the reason I look at the world the way I do. Because a lot of the Black people in and around me had to look at the world differently. And we saw it clearly.
I will say this as well: One of the craziest things for me growing up and coming to the North and going to this drama school in Chicago was realizing that there was something actively different about a world that was able to live without the recognition that plantations are in the soil and right down the street. In Virginia all my friends were always like, if they said a microaggression or a macroaggression, “Yeah, I said it.
Then what?” Or, “Oh my God! Well, you know how it is. My parents are racist, I’m racist.” Then I came to Chicago and people would say the most heinous things to me, or about other Black people, and I’d be like, “Yo, what’s that?” And they’d go, “What are you talking about? I’m not a racist. I can’t be a racist.” Something I figured out at 18 was that white people in the North were able to imagine that they were free from this history because they didn’t have to see it all the time, and I grew up around people who didn’t even have an interest in pretending like they didn’t know that history, because it was their dad’s history or their mom’s history or their grandparent’s history, and it was the history of the land they were living on. I think that was probably the most informative thing about me writing Slave Play
TP: I’m sorry, I know I said that was the last question but I have one more. I heard you say something about this once, so I want to ask: How have you digested and synthesized growing up hearing all the time, “You’re not like most Black people?”
JOH: At first I thought it was a compliment, because when you’re little, you take any sort of nicety as a compliment. The older I got, the more I saw how deeply violent that was, and how that was like a tactic, a separating tactic. It was a way of keeping me alone and keeping me there. That tactic is indebted to chattel slavery as well: The minute you can get one of them to sit in your house and be the different one is the minute you own them, you know?
TP: Yes.
JOH: I think that there were times I was owned by that idea, and I freed myself from it because around the first semester of drama school—again, I was in a drama school with 52 people, there were 4 Black boys and 4 Black girls—they told us there was going to be a cut and that usually the Black people were the first to get cut. So I had to realize I wasn’t like everyone else, that I wasn’t just going to be a Black person there, you know? And I forged a strong friendship with all the Black girls in my year, all the Black boys in my year, and we made a lot of promises to each other that we wouldn’t let them make us competitive with each other. And they’re all still my friends. One of them is still my very, very best friend, and she was a Black girl who grew up in a very different space from me, in Decatur, Ga. And my conversations with her were some of the conversations that taught me that my Black ass was just as Black as everybody else, no matter how many ends of my consonants I put on, or how straight I stood. That was special. It was important.
#consentsowhite: On the Erotics of Slave Play in Slave Play
Avgi Saketopoulou explores the charged interconnections between racism and sexuality in Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play. (Excerpts)
LIKE MANY NEW YORKERS, I have followed in the past few months the surge of responses to Jeremy O. Harris’s celebrated Slave Play. As a psychoanalyst who works with trauma, and who treats individuals of various sexualities and of different racial backgrounds, I find it notable that, while fruitful conversations have been generated around racial identity and interracial relationships by the play, few commentaries take up the specific erotics of interracial desire or the play’s implication that racism can carry an erotic charge. I am also interested in consent, by far the least attended to aspect of the play, which we encounter in the especially difficult junction between sexuality and trauma. At this strained intersection, consent is revealed at its most impotent, impossible to help clearly adjudicate desire. For Harris, neither the white characters’ “No” nor the black characters’ “Yes” can be taken at face value. Both have ties to antebellum slavery and, thus, both have to be probed further, leading to the conclusion that the dominant discourse around sexual consent may itself be whitewashed and in need of revision.
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If some theatergoers get up and leave during the first act though, it is not because Slave Play holds whiteness to account (though, predictably, that kind of resentment has also been voiced). No, those who go to some length to broadcast their displeasure by gathering their belongings as if in slow motion before heading for the exit; those who comment on social media that they felt traumatized by the play/disrespected by Harris’s depictions of black women; those who ragefully object that it trivializes the history of slavery; and those who initiated a petition demanding Slave Play’s cancellation last year (themselves mostly black) are protesting something else. They are protesting the racialized stereotypes that drive the charged sexual scenes. These scenes seem to touch on something that still lingers in us, something disavowed and hard to pin down.
The combination of sex, trauma, and degradation played out through racial tropes is not an easy one to bear. But if you are coming to see a play that calls itself Slave Play, O’Hara explains, “it should cost [you] something to watch it and to experience it. […] I don’t think anyone should leave unscathed…” This echoes Harris’s stage directions that no one should work to “make the audience comfortable.” If the title Slave Play entices you to the
Golden, you will not be allowed to squirm out of noticing your voyeurism or your vicarious identifications. Being called out for coming to watch would be discomfiting enough. Things become exponentially more so when we find out in the second act that what we have been watching so far was day four of a therapy dubbed “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” (not a real term or practice — it shouldn’t need to be said but, as a psychoanalyst, I’d better have). These sexual scenes, scripted and consented to in advance by all parties, intend to address the lack of sexual desire that affects the black partners.
To those familiar with kink communities, these scenes reference race play, a controversial and well-established sexual practice (see here, here, and here), though surely not everyone in the audience is aware of this citation. The this-was-scripted-and-part-of-therapy reassurance offered by the second act has a calming effect on the audience.
The transition from the first act’s pornodrama to the second act’s jargonfilled metalevel makes the audience feel relieved, and this further speaks to the playwright’s talent. By seemingly transposing the focus from the erotics of degradation to the troubling realities of white supremacy, Slave Play shifts from racist iconography to interrogating race relations. The implication that what occurred in the first act was a consensual, sexually inflected reenactment of the past permits Harris to move away from directly addressing the black partners’ vexed desires. It is by means of this seductive sideways move that Harris accomplishes what he really intends to do: bring upon us the full force of the present, since the darker set of desires enacted in the sexual fantasy marks how the then is conducted into the now. To say it would be flat-footed to confuse the as-if quality of the slave play with reality misunderstands Slave Play’s central point: the play draws its sexual charge from the fact of these historical violences — from their very “materiality,” as Teá and Patricia would say. It is on this very thin strip between past violations and present violations that the slave play in Slave Play ricochets.
One of the (less talked about) issues that Slave Play, therefore, confronts is the erotic life of racism. This, of course, is not really new news. One need only reflect on the sexual undercurrents subtending the history of lynching in America. It is precisely this not-me quality of rapturous racist desire, we might say, that enabled lynch mobs to virtuously participate in sexualized-crimesturned-into-spectacles. The erotics of racism, Slave Play insists however, are not erotics of the past; they are, also, erotics of the present.
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Still, Slave Play would be saying little that’s new if sexual excitement was grafted only onto the white, and white-passing, characters. What remains controversial in act two is that the racialized erotic indignations that initiated the racial fetishization were solicited by the black partners. With few
exceptions (see here and here), most commentary takes the out offered by the second act. And yet, the play’s force resides in the fact that the solicited and volitional scenes of racial debasement mimic the atrocious history of chattel slavery in the past fueling spectacularly complicated intimacies in the present. This further presses the point that, in the context of antebellum history, past and present are neither in chronological order nor in linear relation, which is another way of saying that trauma scrambles psychic time. Slave Play, thus, offers not just incisive commentary on race relations but also an extended visitation, if not a vertiginous descent, into taboo and forbidden sexual appetites. Here are desires “capable of stressing nearly every boundary required for the order of ‘civilized society’ to hold.” This is not to say that Kaneisha’s desire to be called a “nasty negress” is universal to all, or even many, black women. Slave Play makes no such homogenizing move. That the desires portrayed do actually exist (here, here, and here) merely speaks to how these singular events draw on universal conditions.
Why would anyone voluntarily orchestrate a replay of their own trauma? This is a question that psychoanalysts have been reflecting on for over a century — and that those of us working therapeutically encounter regularly in our consulting rooms. Freud called this phenomenon repetition compulsion, and proposed that such acts are gnarled forms of memory that occur when traumatic events have been too overwhelming for the ego to process. Second-wave feminism struggled with a form of this question as well, heatedly debating in the 1980s desires that involved one’s own sexual subjugation.... Still, this does not diminish how woefully shameful such desires may feel to those who experience them, even if shame, or traumatic antecedents, are not always a factor. Erotic desire visits us against our consent, indifferent to our politics, unconcerned with what’s just or right. In the domain of the sexual, there is often a gap between what is fair libidinal game and what actually turns us on.
On these challenging matters, Harris is undeterred, turning the heat even higher. The black partners have not only requested these racial denigrations, they have been deeply and uniquely pleasured by them.
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It is against such whitewashing that Mollena Williams, a black woman who lives as a submissive in a 24/7 arrangement with a white man, says: “It’s a struggle to say, ‘This is genuinely who I am […] [but to] say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist.’” The mingling of erotics and trauma is never easy and, in this case especially, one may be tempted to suspect a kind of estranged collusion with whiteness. But what Williams’s words permit us to see is that such sexual possibilities may extend beyond a pure recycling of the past, that for some subjects agentic sexual desire may open up to something even as paradoxical as a scene of racist
play (just like for some survivors of sexual abuse, agentic desire is refracted through staged scenes of intimate violation [here, here and here]). To a great degree, freedom and subjecthood pertain to being able to define oneself in one’s own terms, which often pivots arounds acts of creativity — not only in acts of resistance — and, for various reasons, sexuality is a particularly suitable medium toward such creative acts.
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The play’s third act shows us that engaging such complex dynamics can be a roaring success or an overwhelming failure, perhaps both at the same time. These dynamics, the not-rape rape scene of the third act suggests, are not easily worked out. Engaging these forces courts risk. These dynamics do not dissolve in our cultural holy grail of recognizing the other, of offering empathic witnessing of the other’s trauma, or even of deep listening. The play ends with Kaneisha thanking Jim for listening to her. On the surface, she references his willingness to enact her wishes; more deeply, she thanks him for finally being willing to acknowledge his own racialized desire. Even so, the closing act offers no answers or resolutions, leaving us confused as to what we’ve watched, disturbed by the intensity of the affect, and unclear as to what happens next. This is an offering of great integrity that only art and real life can muster: trauma, bodies, power, and sex produce the inconsistencies and incoherencies of messy origins and uncertain futures.
Slave Play hints at how, in the midst of the trauma of having a body entangled with ghastly histories, projects of emancipation may take unexpected paths. The idea that the woundedness of the flesh can recruit the spasms of desire to move a person through a traumatic past may feel counterintuitive. So, too, might the proposition that a desire for intimate subjugation may open up emancipatory possibilities. But the matter of how traumatized bodies can make bids to release themselves from history is that urgent. It is in response to this urgency that Jeremy O. Harris offers us the open wound that is Slave Play
To read the full article visit: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ consentsowhite-on-the-erotics-of-slave-play-in-slave-play/
Glossary of Terms
Affirmative Consent
An explicit, voluntary, and enthusiastic agreement to engage in specific sexual activity. Often summarized as ‘yes means yes,’ it requires active communication rather than the absence of a ‘no.’
Alexithymia
A psychological condition characterized by a person’s difficulty in identifying and expressing their emotions. Individuals with alexithymia often struggle to describe their feelings or distinguish between emotional and bodily sensations.
Anhedonia
A symptom often associated with depression, characterized by the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable, such as eating, socializing, or engaging in hobbies.
Chattel Slavery
A form of slavery in which individuals are treated as personal property (chattel) to be bought, sold, and inherited, and historically used to describe the transatlantic slave trade, where enslaved Africans and their descendants were legally owned.
Cognitive Psychology
A branch of psychology that focuses on the study of internal mental processes, including perception, memory, language, problem-solving, and thinking. It examines how people understand, diagnose, and respond to the world around them.
Consent
An agreement between participants to engage in a specific activity. In legal and ethical contexts, consent must be informed, freely given, and can be withdrawn at any time.
Cucking Fantasy
A sexual fantasy or fetish involving arousal from watching one’s partner engage in sexual activity with another person, often involving elements of humiliation, taboo, or power dynamics. Also referred to as ‘cuckolding’ in some contexts.
Dialectic
A method of argument or reasoning that involves the dialogue between two or more perspectives, often to resolve contradictions or arrive at a higher understanding. Originating in ancient Greek philosophy, it was used in Marxist and Hegelian traditions.
Epigenetics
The study of changes in gene expression that do not involve alterations to the DNA sequence. These changes can be influenced by environmental factors, experiences, and lifestyle, and can sometimes be inherited.
Fetish
A form of sexual fixation where a person experiences intense sexual arousal from a specific object, body part, or scenario not typically viewed as sexual. Fetishes can vary widely in form and intensity.
Hermeneutic
The theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of texts. In philosophy, it refers to the process of understanding and making meaning, often within historical or cultural contexts.
Indentured Servitude
A historical labor system in which individuals agreed to work for a certain number of years in exchange for passage to a new country, lodging, or other benefits. Though different from slavery, it often involved harsh conditions and exploitation.
Limit Consent
A form of conditional agreement where a person consents to certain acts but sets specific boundaries or limits. Common in BDSM and negotiated relationships.
Music-Obsession Disorder
Not formally recognized as a clinical diagnosis, this term may refer to a compulsive preoccupation with music to the extent that it interferes with daily functioning, social life, or mental health. May overlap with obsessivecompulsive behaviours.
OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder)
A mental health disorder characterized by persistent, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) performed to alleviate distress or prevent a feared event.
Racialized Inhibiting Disorder
A non-clinical term possibly used to describe psychological inhibition or internal conflict rooted in experiences of racial trauma, oppression, or systemic racism. Not officially recognized, but may reflect sociocultural impacts on mental health.
Traumatophobia
An intense fear of experiencing or witnessing trauma, injury, or psychological harm. This phobia may cause individuals to avoid risky or emotionally triggering situations altogether.
Traumatophilia
A psychological or sexual attraction to trauma or traumatic experiences. This may involve a fascination with danger, harm, or suffering, often linked to deeper psychological dynamics or unresolved trauma.
Trigger
A stimulus—such as a smell, sound, word, or situation—that causes an emotional reaction, often associated with trauma or past distressing experiences. Triggers can provoke flashbacks, panic, or strong emotional responses
Reflecting on the Experience
• What moments stayed with you, either emotionally, intellectually, or physically? Why?
• Did you notice any moments when you felt defensive, confused, or triggered?
• What might those reactions be revealing?
• What conversations or silences did the play expose, for the characters and perhaps in yourself?
• How does the play disrupt traditional narratives about race, sex, or relationships?
• Did it challenge your expectations of what theatre is “supposed to be”?
• What responsibilities do artists and audiences carry when engaging in work about trauma?
• How did the play use power dynamics, both on stage and between performers and the audience?
• How did this affect your sense of agency or complicity?
• What is one question you’re still sitting with?
• What will you do with that question after leaving the theatre?
Want to Go Deeper?
Books Jeremy O. Harris was reading while writing Slave Play
1. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe, 2008.
2. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”.
3. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility.
4. José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down”.
5. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013.
6. Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, 2014.
7. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, 2010.
8. Mireille Miller-Young, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography.
9. Aishah Shahidah Simmons (ed.), How We Fight for Our Lives: The Olympics of Critical Pedagogy, 2011.
10. L.H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures.
For
more information on these subjects we recommend visiting:
The Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage Collection
The Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage Collection at the Toronto Public Library stands as one of Canada’s most significant cultural archives, boasting nearly 20,000 books, DVDs, CDs, newspapers, and magazines that center on Black and Caribbean histories and experiences, particularly those tied to Canada’s diverse communities.
Originating in 1973 at the Parkdale branch as the “Black Heritage and West Indian Resource Collection,” it was rebranded in 1998 and later renamed in 2006 in honour of Dr. Rita Cox, the Trinidad-born librarian and storyteller who spearheaded its development. Available at four TPL locations (Parkdale, Malvern, Maria A. Shchuka, and York Woods), the collection is an invaluable resource for those interested in African diasporic culture, literature, and social history.
Beyond its vast holdings, the collection actively fosters cultural engagement through programming, such as Caribbean literature showcases and Black History events, all supported by the Rita Cox Endowment Fund to ensure its continued growth.
We would like to extend special thanks to Jashree Naipaul, the Adult Materials Selector for the Collection, for her assistance.
