You can go home again but, as Carlyle Brown tells us, journey's end may be a different destination than you'd expected.
With his backpack and hardcover suitcase, in his cargo pants and tee shirt, barefoot Brown recounts his 1980s journey to find his African roots. A large screen at his back, earth-and-sand speckled matting at his feet, he uses only an oaken table and chair to one side of the stage, two stools on the other side to recreate stops through West Africa.
Starting in Senegal, he confronted his dual identity. At Goree Island, he felt at one with ancestors who'd surely been packed in one of its prison cells (painted over him by Mike Wangen's wonderful lighting), but he didn't know any of their other descendants' languages. Not the originals, not a French patois. A hustler who did speak English became his first guide and friend. A business card given him by a politico from Sierra Leone turned out to be an introduction and passport of sorts there and, beforehand, in countries along the way.
At first, the Africans he "wanted to be a part of" objectified him as American. They expected him (rightly) not to share their Islamic faith and (wrongly) to be mainly another foreign, steadfast consumer -- of Coke and cigarettes. He was berated for "forgetting who you are" but welcomed after he discovered which now-lost tribe he'd come from. Instead of "American Carl" he became known -- spread by the African grapevine wherever he went -- as "The Fula from America."
Echoes of the Gullah he'd heard as a child came to him in native speech. They drowned out the sounds (effectively reproduced) of Tarzan, the movie apeman, that he'd always associated with Africa and struggled to get out of his head. He learned about his people from those whose families survived the destruction of Fula history and culture. These they embodied more than they verbalized.
Of course, adventures -- including danger from robbers -- came to Carlyle Brown. Borders weren't easy to cross. He didn't take to all the people or their customs. He rejected the "gift" of a young girl. He deplored poverty and the spread of AIDS. But people did welcome and celebrate him. At a theater, after seeing a poignant play about a woman who'd been left alone (in Africa, a dreadful fate) and without property, he found out how the slowness of the bureaucracy sometimes defeats its intent to censor.
One particular local author's plays conveyed well the realities of audiences' lives. Many questions came to him about Western theater and its freedom. Then quickly liberal theater -- like labor unions -- changed. The American Fula witnessed shootings, jailings, people wanting to get out on too few planes. Could he be among them? What a problem that turned out to be! Well, obviously, Carlyle Brown had a home to go to. Ironically, America...where he'd often be asked what it was like to be in the motherland. Can you guess his explanation? The Fula from America!
