This play loves Black women and nonbinary people boundlessly. It takes for granted their complexity and worthiness. This colonial English language cannot hold the fullness of Black queerness, with its many tenors and shades of ways of being. But I name queerness here to say: This play loves ancestors that were before and outside colonial ideas of gender, sexuality, and the body. This play loves ancestors who were robbed of language to hold their full selves, who were marked down as “men” and “women,” with both of those words meaning “property.” This play loves Black people, and specifically Black women and Black queer folk and Black nonbinary people, right here and right now. This play loves people who are yet to come, who will have ways of naming and being that we cannot yet say or imagine. This play imagines that the gestures, rhythms, and kinships that today are identified as Black and queer came before and will last beyond the need for those labels. As scholar Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley writes, “Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity... but as a praxis of resistance... loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist.”1
This play is not for Yale. It dreams beyond every plantation, every jail, every stifling container, and Yale is one. So doing it here is, in a way, a rehearsal. But it is also an action. We have carved out a time and place where we commit to conjuring freedom. Not as an endpoint but as action, openness, possibility, flux. To do this conjuring requires care, patience, and love. It has been a deep honor to join in this work. This play asks us to break the plantations inside ourselves, so that we might reach for each other and make contact towards a shared future. I can speak only as myself, a light-skinned, nonBlack Latinx woman with many white ancestors, who has lived and worked in supremacist academia for a long time. There is no question that my love is imperfect, that I have hurt and will continue to hurt, simply through the saturation of living in a profoundly anti-Black society. But I can say that In my time with this extraordinary company, I was called closer to myself every day. I hope to keep the spirit of the work our company has done together reverberating through my work for the rest of my life. We will have to make freedom again and again. love i awethu further names the deep unfreedom of our now, as it challenges us to meet and exceed its love. There is a place for everyone in revolution, and in love, if we are willing. So let this be the beginning of our loving further.
love i awethu further
—Emma Pernudi-Moon, Production Dramaturg
1 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage. GLQ 1 June 2008; 14 (2-3): 191–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-030
LANGSTON HUGHES FESTIVAL OF NEW WORK | 2021–22 SEASON