rjpen

[rjpen]

My father came to me in a dream in New York City one day. 

I was walking down a busy street at the time, so it was something of an inconvenience; but I hadn’t seen him in years, so I kept calm and carried on. I kept the rhythm of my steps, and I continued to avoid the fast moving obstacles of people and traffic. I began to hum to myself. It’s a thing I do to manage stress, or distress - which is an odd thing to identify upon re-uniting with your own dad, but it was present none the less - we hadn’t seen each other in over 15 years, and this was a waking dream after all. 

I hum to myself in the dentist’s chair when they get the drill out. Or anything else that buzzes menacingly, but they told me they don’t mind, and I think they and the assistants are quite amused by it. It beats screams.

Though he did not buzz menacingly, I hummed to my father, there on 2nd Avenue, and he hummed back. He kind of resonated. Words rang out with great eloquence, but the consonants never formed. The words simply vibrated, and I tried to find harmony with them. Sometimes perfect 5ths, sometimes clashing 7ths and 4ths - sometimes in a uniform lockstep beat, in time with my heart or the steady pulse of unrelenting Empire State footsteps - ever forward and constant; other times in challenging cross rhythms and alternate timings that teeter on the brink of chaos, the very edge of loosing all apparent form before suddenly completing their cycle and resolving again into a perfect fractal image.

In this way, we talked.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, and I wouldn’t, it was a private conversation after all - but he left me with a song.

****

Soon after, a close friend, Jack Brown, had just gotten married, and text me a series of tender chords he’d strummed out on his honeymoon (he apologized for his playing in the voice note, explaining that he was unaccustomed to the ring on his finger, and it was making him stumble over the frets. I thought that was just about the most adorable thing I’d ever heard.) He wondered if I could do something unexpected with them.

I kept humming around the streets of New York.

******

A month before the death of George Floyd, I was in London and I reached out to an old colleague, Lanre Malaolu suggesting we finally got round to connecting in the way we’d put off for years and collaborate while I was grounded on a rare trip back in the UK. I had just finished this complicated sort of anthemic lullaby about love, legacy, loss - and how men particularly, deal with such vulnerabilities - with my brother (together we go by the musical pseudonym ‘TUNYA’). Lanre’s recent work exploring tenderness within Black masculinity seemed a perfect, unexpected, and exciting match to explore the themes of the music visually.

By the time of filming in August, the world had been brought to a screaming halt by the rawest, largest, and most powerful display of Black community, pain and activism since the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. A palpable sense of communal grief had dominated every conversation, on a global scale, magnified and brought to boil by the losses and fear of a world brought to its knees by COVID-19. John Lewis had died. Colston was dumped in the sea, and confederate monuments were armed battle grounds - defended by white militias and conquered by Black ballerinas. Chadwick Boseman died. I missed my dad. A world full of uncertainty lacked leadership and compassion, and each new week brought new, unresolvable heartbreak. The core team involved in the film had been privately trying to learn how to be grieving, vulnerable, Black and publicly on display for months, and the piece grew to reflect that. The responsibility as artists to share what light and answers we’d found and contribute that back into a community fractured and isolated by social distance, thrust not only a sense of purpose on the project, but a guiding momentum. It could now only be this.

Joshua Nash is an extraordinarily sensitive performer, and his unique blend of abrasive power and overwhelming vulnerability guides the piece through a physical embodiment of his own personal journey through a universal grief. The battle for control and suppression, the desire to tidy away a past too painful to confront, and the ultimate realisation that the only escape from the trappings of an eternal fight - is to allow oneself to feel it. To accept the pain of past battles, honour it, and through that knowledge, gain the peace necessary to thrive and progress beyond it.

To a world seemingly divided into two camps, both struggling to address a painful history, a cancerous personal and public legacy, I hope the piece’s foreword (unpublished in the end, written late one night between rehearsals, trying to pin down our direction) offers a guiding light toward its redemptive resolution:

“Those who fell before you fought,

For you

Not to be bound in mourning

But to free your life’s celebration”

In the end, like them all, Don’t Wait is simply a love song. It is about finding the path through life’s necessary, good trouble, to life’s intrinsic celebration.

More love, always

R

x

Watch the video here

(Photographs by Helen Murray)

————

DON’T WAIT

Sweet, sweet sun

Shine!

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To hold you in these arms

I couldn’t wait

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To keep you

Quite as warm,

Warm as I would have liked

But I’ll soft speak

On the wind

And I

Won’t let you fall apart

If you hold me

Inside

Sweet sweet sun

Please

Shine

The first time I met you

I felt that I could fall into the sun

And still feel the light

Of your eyes

To guide me home

The first time.

The first time I met you

I felt like my life had just begun

Born again,

A better man, a better man

For you

And I’ll be around

On the wind

And I’ll guide you through the night

If you

You call me out

I will hold your hand

I never meant for you to

Stumble

Stumble

and fall

Without me

Oh, there’s a song in you

All that I never taught

I never thought

I’d have to

I wish I could

More than anything

I want to hear

Oh,

What a song you are

And don’t sing

Like you let me down

You couldn’t

Let me down

And don’t feel

Like you let me down

You could never

Let me down

Don’t ever feel

Like a fool

In those blessed moments

When you fall into the truth

Sweet sweet sun

Of mine

Shine.

[rjpen]

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." - Marcus Garvey

We desperately need to tell our own history.

For a whole bunch of reasons including:

(I'm just going to curate and let some of my heroes take the mic for a minute on this one. They are far more eloquent, entertaining and hilarious than I could ever be, and they lay down some incredible wisdom in these videos.)

Trevor Noah

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ADQCeC0tF0o?t=14s

Muhammed Ali

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rtxfTEyJZg4

Femi Kuti

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HRSURHasqE8

In conclusion: fair to say the history taught to you by the system that oppressed and exploited you for centuries is biased and revisionist and always has been. Big surprise.

—

So, onto re-telling ROOTS in particular.

'What the hell are they thinking re-making ROOTS?!' is really not an uncommon reaction.

Even among my own close friends who are excitedly congratulating me for being a part of doing just that. And I think it's a sentiment that it's unfair (and rude) to simply ignore. So as no more than simply a young actor who took on a job, this is an offering of some of my own honest and quite possibly flawed thoughts that I developed through the process.

——

“I've been asking people what they remember from the original... and chances are they don’t really remember ROOTS. They just remember seeing some black people suffering. We remember ‘Your name is Toby’, and the lash and the pain... and we’re still too traumatised to receive the infinitely more important story and people that Roots exists to give us. These are in fact a map to surviving that very trauma."

----

A lot of people will call this a ‘slave drama’. I won’t. It’s a period drama.

It’s about people. Living through a certain period of history. But we’re reticent to continuously explore and re-explore characters of colour in this - much loved - era, with the same love and attention and nuance as we do Mr Darcy, or even Oliver Twist.

We tend to find them in ever so slightly more problematic settings I suppose.

And to be fair, there are less stories as well known and treasured on the same scale as Pride and Prejudice and War and Peace, with us as the focus in the western canon.

But there is one.

A lot of people, myself and my family included, are very protective of ROOTS. Adults sat me down in front of it as a child because it was good for me. Like eating my greens. I was terrified to mess with it as an adult. It's one of our sacred documents. A bit like the constitution. And much like the constitution, I would argue: it’s a great start, but as time passes, and we learn more about ourselves... amendments can help.

Now if, as we've established, we need to start telling our own history from our own perspective, and you’re like: 'ROOTS? But we already told this story!’ (which was my first reaction btw) - I would reply: how happy would you be to be still teaching your children anything from text books put together in the 1970’s? Never mind racially sensitive history from the 70's.

Watch the original - as in, actually do so right now, not just your memory of it - and tell me it’s an entirely unproblematic, accurate representation of African and American people and that history.

(For starters, I grew up in Zimbabwe, and let me tell you in Africa we often appreciate the effort, but always smile wryly at the American portrayal of us in the media, and especially of village life…)

Tell me there is honestly no better way we could represent that story and those people on television right now to a new, 21st century audience.

Better yet, try sitting down and watching it with your kids, and tell me how far they get.

While we were filming in Baton Rouge, I met a local kid on set. About 17 or 18, Louisiana born and raised. He was one of the background artists and he was super excited to see the new show. He told me he’d always been aware of and wanted to see ROOTS and know the story and what it was about, especially because of his African heritage, and in fact, he’d sat down to watch it last week, “…but” (and I quote) “… the graphics man. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t man. It’s so old."

We’re now talking to a generation so fluent in the language of modern screen story telling that our bored 10 year olds make their own youtube videos with editing techniques and production values effortlessly more advanced than most 70’s television.

We have moved on leaps and bounds in our language, our culture, our research and just about every aspect of television story telling in the last 40 years. Largely off the back of fantastic, ambitious work like the original ROOTS.

This one will do something different.

Most importantly for me as an actor, we’ve gotten a lot better at character driven story telling on screen, (particularly on television, and particularly recently) - and I think (and hope, and pray!) crucially, that this will be a show more about people.

Rich, complicated, people of color and their lives arcing through a period of history where we are woefully under represented, and frequently mis-represented as nothing more than generic ‘noble suffering slaves’.

And on that point.

Yes we need to tell other stories. We need that too. We need a much richer landscape for this show to inhabit. We need Nat Turner (yes!), we need the untold rebellions where we, the intelligent, handsome, beautiful strong black heroes, over threw the genocidal, invading European sadist slavers and sailed off into the sunset (yes, that DID happen.), we need stories of the powerful, glamorous black nobility in Europe (yes, they existed!)

Hell, we really need a few stories with absolutely nothing to do with Europeans, their descendants and their(our/my) ever present colonial footprint and culture - because despite every TV show and movie, and despite the evidence printed in ALL the history books I was ever taught from, the world doesn’t actually revolve around them(/us/me)!

We DESPERATELY need those stories told!

But we do also need to tell the human story of how so many of us endured. With dignity, and sorrow, and pain and joy and hate and love and invention and ecstacy - and every goddamn human emotion and nuance. Despite every effort to squash those qualities, and ultimately de-humanise us by our captors... they never succeeded and we never gave up. We fought to keep telling our story and not have it wiped out, or simplified or sanitised. To remember where we came from, what happened to us, and how we became who we are now. To preserve our sense of SELF.

****

(Recently I got to enjoy that knowing this story as I do, has given me an incredibly rich context for the sheer joy of things like this meeting:

I mean, this lady literally grew up picking cotton in South Carolina. I can barely fit this moment in my head. But my God, it makes my soul sing. Now imagine for a second that your grandmother tried to tell you that story for the second or third time and you were like: ‘Grandma come-ON! I’m so BORED of hearing about your suffering. I'm OVER it now. We’ve moved on. I don’t want to know. Tell me a NICE story or GTFO.’

Alex Haley even addressed this explicitly in the original ROOTS book:

“Oh Maw, I wish you’d stop all that old times slavery stuff, it’s entirely embarrassing.

Grandma would snap right back “If you don’t care who and where you came from, I does!”)

***

To preserve our sense of self.

The struggle we went through to retain ourself. Our family history. That’s an important story. That’s Roots. Roots is the struggle to retain identity.

Roots is a story that is designed specifically to be repeated and re-told and re-invented, over and over again - that’s kind of the whole point and theme of Roots. And if we don’t remember that, then we really don’t remember ROOTS, we just remember seeing some black people suffering.

We remember ‘Your name is Toby’, and the lash and the pain... and we’re still too traumatised to take in the infinitely more important story and people that Roots exists to give us. These are in fact the map to surviving that very trauma.

(This is not 12 years. This story does not leave Paksie behind.)

We have forgotten and ignored the stories of those extraordinary people. Not slaves. People. Who each in their own individual, complex ways, lived through and survived a particularly horrific period of history. They are so much more than suffering. THAT’S the point. And that is exactly why I would suggest there’s a need for those stories to be told and explored and honored again. And again. And again.

Because we, all of us, need our history to be passed on in order to know who we are.

We need to tell, and re-tell our family stories.

And we need to get better each time.

(and hold ourselves to account each time in order to do so.)

Till we get as good at telling the truth, as they were at telling us lies.

x

http://captioned-vines.tumblr.com/post/115507345709/deehenn-for-everyone-that-wanted-to-hear-the --------------------------- *Further reading: a very personal example I've written about before that very much influences my perspective on the ROOTS story - http://jt-rjp-ar.tumblr.com/post/99062445478/my-name

[rjpen]

Patchwork. (A stream of consciousness stitch.)

Stories and culture and media are all ways of reaching out and telling someone, other people that they’re not alone.

They’re like the Wikipedia of the soul. Reaching out and offering, as you try to map, to figure out or simplify or translate this equation of being a person and what it all means, knowing you offer your contribution to your audience - who are your collaborators - knowing that they will take your advancement, your contribution, your offering and run with it, and deconstruct it and build on it and improve it and correct it’s inaccuracies, or just use it for spare parts - to find just the right part they needed, that was missing until you found it and offered it - to finish building THEIR contribution, THEIR next step in this crowd sourced equation, problem, thesis, this... patchwork quilt. And through culture we all go on sharing and building ourselves a home in this fashion. 

Through a shared destruction and creation. All sewing and repairing and maintaining (and destroying and re-building) our own little patch of the shared project quilt that is humanity, all the while swapping needles and threads and stories and tips and techniques as we go to help each other out - to build this thing together that will ultimately keep us all warm at night. Even the bits way over on the other side that we will never see for ourselves. That will shelter us and keep us warm together, hold and protect our precious, vital body heat, by the shared practical work of our hands and hearts.

x

[rjpen]

Steppin'.

A friend and I were discussing how hard it is to defeat your own insecurities to get creative work out and pursue it seriously. 

I tried to figure out how I get past that,

and pretty much ended up writing a letter to myself from my subconscious.

So I guess this is how I get through.

----------

...I guess the thing is just doing it and realising you don't have to be moving particularly quickly. 

I've been performing 'proffesionally' for over 10 years now and I still don't feel like I've ever 'gotten' anywhere near where I want to be, nor have I lost the insecurity or fear every time I offer something (or the crushing, crushing disappointment every time I fail). 

And I know we're all meant to be endlessly aspirational and goal-oriented (in this brave New American Century!), but sometimes if you take your eyes off conquering the horizon for a while, put your head down and enjoy the little bit your doing every day, you give your nerves and insecurities time to grow with you, and the movement/progress tends to take care of itself in the background. 

And occasionally you get to look up and be surprised when you realise you moved further than you thought. Or someone else sees your work and gives you a bit of context and encouragement when you can't see the forest for the trees anymore. A bit of validation always feels great, but even that brings itself about eventually simply from the work, and working, and Doing the Thing.

But more importantly, eventually, hopefully, if we're doing it right: all of that becomes irrelevant.

Because you're just quietly doing your thing, step by step, and your feet take you where they take you. You get better at stepping, and stepping and stepping, step by step, and eventually you're just dancing and having a great time, and sure, the scenery rolls by and changes and sometimes it's beautiful and some times it's tough, but all you're doing is stepping. And when it rains you keep stepping, maybe slow and heavy and steady, under your sopping wet jumper and jacket, and when the sun's up again you get to throw it all off, spin into a couple of glorious naked pirouettes, shake it off...

and just keep steppin'.

[rjpen]

My name.

At 5 years old, my mother was blackmailed by British catholic missionaries.

True story.

But we’ll get to that. I want to give a quick bit of… air to this recurring moment in my life:

Rege.

Is that your real name?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

Is that what it says on your passport?

…

(What I don’t say: Who the fuck are you to ask me that? For official proof - from the British Government - that I’m not lying - to you - about my name. What the British government think’s my name is has very little to do with what my name is anyway. What you get to call me. Name me.

At 5 years old, my mother was blackmailed by British, catholic missionaries.

True story.

They said she could not come to school. Their school. Theirs were the only schools for literally 100 miles - and she walked 7 miles to their nearest school, bare foot, from the village anyway. Because school was really, really important. They said she could not come to school and get an education unless she forgot her heathen African name and took on a Christian saint’s name. A name they knew and understood. A name they chose. She was to go home and pick a saint, then never speak her first name to them again.

I think they called this charity.

I think they call this a virtue.

I’m pretty sure I heard it called liberation.

Her first name, to this day is a secret. Unused, even by her family. Even by me. Unappearing on any official document, Zimbabwean or British. It is not on her passport.

You. You get to call me, what I tell you to call me. I name me, not you. It is my name, not yours. It’s mine. My name. Is Wohdeipha Daphuque Ayseyidis.)

…Yes. That’s what’s on my passport. It’s not spelt like the music though.