Civilians’ R&D In Process: DROWN MY BOOK – Extended Play

I once asked an acting teacher, after a few months of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Durang, Shepard, and Kushner, whether it might be possible to introduce some works by writers who werent white men. She furrowed her brow in confusion, frowned, cocked her head, and, placing both hands palm down on her desk, responded: But Mattyoure not black.

And anyway, the class wasnt about all that, it was aboutgetting better at acting and engaging with text, and these writers were masterplaywrights. Their work was universal.

Ever since then I knew what all artists of color come toknow eventually: that our white counterparts are rarely required or expected tobe familiar with work by great artists of color who came before them (with afew exceptions), but developing artists of color must know all the same work astheir white counterparts even while taking it upon themselves to stretch beyondthat.

Though I wound up performing a Nilo Cruz monologue as theculminating project in that class tomake a point, I was nevertheless over the moon for Shakespeare.

Besides a short stint as a stegosaurus in a daycamp betweenfirst and second grade, my first real experience acting was in a Shakespeareplay. In my sophomore year of high school, I was cast in the schoolsproduction of As You Like It, where Iwas cast as Charles the wrestler and Corin the old shepherd, which set me offon the long theatrical path to eventually winding up part of the CiviliansR&D group. I worked at a Shakespeare theater two summers in a row, playedparts in Midsummer and Macbeth in college (and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, forgood measure). I loved understanding Elizabethan English or, where I didnt,researching it. I loved breaking apart towering sentences for their imagery,their antithesis, their double meanings. I loved scanning lines and beating outrhythms on the table or my thigh, each irregularity a treasure, a clue, amessage from Shakespeare himself.

I had read a bunch of the plays and sonnets in various Englishclasses, too, which always produced the weird feeling Im sure is common indiaspora kids of being in two camps at once: both ownership over the text assomething youre native to (The greatest writer in the English language!) anda simultaneous foreignness. I bristled every time a teacher assertedShakespeares universality, noting that a major reason everyone getsShakespeare is that the culture that produced him and that he in turn helpedproduced was imposed on people around the world at gunpoint. Its no wonder Iwas drawn to Shakespeares own outsiders, his rare depictions of racial or religiousminorities providing a weird window into Elizabethan conceptions of race andthe other. Othello and Shylock were particularly compelling (and continue tobe, as borne out by my play TheVenetians), as characters who are often monstrous racial stereotypes on theone hand while still rendered with surprisingly human moments on the other.Human enough that it made me want to salvage pieces of them. As activist andUniversity of Arizona professor Curtis Acosta said when we spoke, thosethings were really attractive to me as someone who was just figuring out whatit really meant to be a man of color I think I was just attracted to it because of all these things Irecognized in it.

Drown My Book began in 2012 when Id readthat the Tucson Unified School District had begun removing Mexican AmericanStudies texts from classrooms and boxing them up in storage facilities incompliance with a ruling that accused ethnic studies programs of, among otherthings, advocating for the overthrow of the US government. As horrible as allthis was, I wasnt expecting Shakespeare to be part of all of this, andcertainly not on the opposite side of the law. In a news release dated January17th, 2011, TUSD Director of Communications Cara Rene lists sevenremoved books (Critical Race Theory,by Richard Delgado; 500 Years of ChicanoHistory in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez; Message to AZTLAN, by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales; Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement, byArturo Rosales; Occupied America: AHistory of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuna; Pedagogyof the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; and RethinkingColumbus: The Next 500 Years by Bill Bigelow) and goes on to say:

Other books have also been falsely reported as being banned by TUSD. It has been incorrectly reported that William Shakespeares The Tempest is not allowed for instruction. Teachers may continue to use materials in their classrooms as appropriate for the course curriculum. The Tempest and other books approved for curriculum are still viable options for instructors.

When I spoke to Acosta, however, hetold me a different story. The Tempest isa difficult text to teach and discuss without touching on colonialism, slavery,and the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In fact, as RonaldTakaki points out in his essay, The Tempest in the Wilderness: TheRacialization of Savagery, The Tempest invitesus to view English expansion not only as imperialism but as a defining momentin the making of an English-American identity based on race. The characterCaliban the wizard Prosperos powerful, surly, supernatural, half-humanslave, born to rule the island but usurped when the Wizard arrived has beenrefigured by creators such as Aim Csaire and Jimmie Durham as a victim ofcolonization, struggling under the yoke of a foreign oppressor. In Acostashands, the inevitability of discussing these topics became a tool forillustrating certain failures of the law:

I found all my notes from all these horrible administrative meetings I had. We were trying to figure out what was legal and illegal, and I knew right away that the day of it was January 10th, I know all these dates now because I was just writing about it January 10th [] was the board meeting, and that night when we were suspended I leaned over to a colleague and said, Tomorrow Im getting Shakespeare banned. And so I went into that meeting with an agenda but also I knew that there was no other way it was gonna go because the law was so poorly written, and so obviously racist, discriminatory that if I just made the argument they would have to. Now this is the thing that changed: In the moment, the day after, there was still a shred of humanity in the administration I was dealing with at my site, and then after, they tried to cover their tracks and didnt know that we were going to release the audio. They went on full scale the district administration went on this full scale attack after I told reporter friends of mine, Yeah, I cant teach it. They told me I cant teach The Tempest. And so they went on this full scale attack all but calling me personally a liar. [] But we ended up being able to prove it because I did record it. That was the last meeting they allowed me to record. It wasnt the last meeting recorded, but it was the last meeting they allowed me to record. But thank God I did!

Caliban, like Othello and Shylock, has come tooccupy a special place in my relationship to Shakespeare, but what gripped meso much about what was happening in Tucson is that this play, part of a reveredWestern canon, found itself on the side of the marginalized, an emblem used topoint out the weaknesses in the structures and impulses it once served to helpprop up.

Theresa line in Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country (the title itself areference to Hamlet), where a Klingon character insists, Youve notexperienced Shakespeare until youve read him in the original Klingon. Its ajoke, and yet

I became taken (and still am taken, and so knewimmediately which project to propose to The Civilians) with the idea of a groupof Latin students grappling directly with these contradictions, takingShakespeares words and turning them on the authorities, using the schoolscurriculum against it.

InThe Tempest, Prosperos books of arcane knowledge are his most prizedpossession, which he guards jealously and devotes himself to entirely; inTucson, books had been torn from classrooms because of the ideas they held andhoarded away in warehouses. The title, Drown My Book, came to meimmediately, and Ive stuck with it. Its from Prosperos last speech, where hethrows away his magic staff and library, pledging never to use them again: Anddeeper than did ever plummet sound / Ill drown my book.

In her play UneTempte, Csaire turned Caliban into arevolutionary; the students in my play would use The Tempest as arevolutionary tool.

DurhamsCaliban Codex shows us a Calibanobsessed with trying to figure out what his own fact looks like, having neverseen a reflection and only knowing what Prospero tells him about himself; mycharacters, accustomed to not seeing themselves reflected in other parts of thesyllabus, would use a canonical text to fight to keep the one mirror theydbeen given.

Ratherthan bend and compartmentalize themselves, as so many young people are forcedto (as I was forced to in that acting class) the characters in my play wouldbend Shakespeare to serve them.

Maybethats what we should mean when we say that Shakespeare is universal: not anappeal to bland relatability, but instead that the sheer reach of Shakespearesinfluence over how we understand stories and the written word now means that hecan be enlisted by anyone to serve new purposes.

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Civilians' R&D In Process: DROWN MY BOOK - Extended Play