"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and the Wilson Shift

Last night, my partner and I watched “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Netflix, adapted by Ruben Santiago Hudson from the iconic August Wilson play and directed by legendary theater director and playwright, George C. Wolfe. Having settled in to our seats, early into viewing the film, we felt a gear engage. We could call this “The Wilson Shift.” This is when the dialogue in an August Wilson play crystallizes inside you and you enter into a kind of hungry trance. A trance - because you find yourself subsumed into the emotional trajectory, from joy to despair of the characters and the life and death stakes that the principal characters face. The hunger is born of the fact that the tones, rhythm, colors, and rising and fallings of the language ricocheting around the scenes is so urgently beautiful that you just want to go on hearing more, more, more of it! I’ve experienced a similar hunger borne of the sheer cascading beauty of something upon listening to Bach.

Had I been born in 1500, I would likely experience the hungry trance more often while watching to a Shakespeare play. Alas, early Modern English is sufficiently different from 21st century American English that the daring aesthetic liberties and poeticization that Shakespeare imparts to the everyday language of his time can go past the tipping point for me and form too many gaps for my mind to fill in. Fortunately, with August Wilson, the 20th-century African American English that he uses is familiar enough to me that I can take it all in and savor the beauty of the dialogue… even as the traumas and terror of being Black in 20th century America reveal themselves more and more as the drama pushes on.

I remember hearing an American Shakespearean actor remark that many contemporary theater goers can feel frustrated by the Bard’s refusal to use simple, direct language to say something simple. In the opening scene of Hamlet, for example, the night guard Marcellus says the following as he recounts the sighting of the ghost of Hamlet’s father from the previous night:

“When yond same star that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns”

I’m pretty sure Marcellus is just saying, “At this time last night…” But that is not the point! declares the Shakespearean actor. Invoking the movement of the stars across the heavens and speaking of how they “illume” and “burn” is as much the purpose of the lines as is their prosaic meaning to indicate the time of the incident. US Americans, in particular, can get so accustomed to and invested in using language only to communicate practical things around business and work or to voice gripes or anger that we can forget that language is as capable of conjuring rapture and beauty as is a trumpet or a painter’s brush in the hand of a master.

And this is one of the many gifts that August Wilson, in his series of 10 plays (one for each decade of the African American 20thcentury) offers to us: the chance to bask in the extraordinary evocative power and poetic potency of Black American English. Yet, he does this somewhat stealthily. I remember hearing an actor say about Wilson’s dialogue that before you really tune in, it just sounds like regular folks shooting the breeze. Indeed, it does. But then the poetic gear engages and the “Wilson Shift” occurs and the heightening tension takes off together with the rhapsodic language.

This higher level of language that Wilson deploys so arrestingly was driven home for me this morning upon reading a quote by the French writer Edgar Morin which my friend, the poet and performance artist Ricardo Aleixo, posted on Facebook. My translation of the passage is below.

“Poetry, which is part of literature and, at the same time is more than literature, brings us into the poetic dimension of human existence. It reveals to us that we live on Earth, not merely prosaically – in utilitarian and functional ways - but also poetically, destined for wonder, love and ecstasy. Through the power of language, poetry puts us into communication with the mystery that is found beyond what can be said.”