VIEWPOINT:MY GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT by far, since arriving in Ireland in 1996, is coming up with the idea for the new version of The Playboy of the Western World, persuading Irish writer Roddy Doyle to co-write it with me, getting my company Arambe Productions to commission its writing with an Arts Council grant and enabling the Abbey Theatre to produce its premiere, precisely 100 years after the production of the original masterpiece which was written by JM Synge, writes Bisi Adigun
However, a lot of Irish people still wonder how it was possible for Roddy and I to co-write the new version. In fact, some people have asked me: "Bisi, what bits of the play did you write and what bits did Roddy Doyle write?" Usually, I respond by showing them the picture of my beautiful daughter that I have on my keyholder and ask if they could tell me whether it is my wife or I who is responsible for her good looks.
I am married to an Irish woman; our daughter was five in September. She is half-Irish and half-Nigerian, but in this part of the world, where everything is in "black and white", she will always be perceived and treated as black even though her mother is white. But, thank goodness, if you ask my daughter what colour she is, she would confidently say: "I am brown because my dad is black and my mum is white."
The question is: is the zebra a white-skinned animal with black stripes or a black-skinned one with white stripes? Next time you visit Dublin Zoo, you can solve that puzzle. However, you do not need to see Barack Obama in the flesh to know that it is a fallacy to refer to him as a black man. To me, it is like saying that the bat is unquestionably a bird because it has wings and flies like a bird. If we must compartmentalise people into their pigmentations, then Obama is brown.
Let us call a spade a spade. If Obama were really a black man, I doubt it very much that he would have been able to sleep deep enough to dream of occupying the White House, let alone have the audacity to work towards realising that dream. It is because Obama's father is from the Luo tribe of Kenya and his mother is a Caucasian woman from Kansas that he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries to become what a political commentator has aptly described as "this amazing political phenomenon". But Obama is not only a political phenomenon; he is also the personification of the intercultural phenomenon that I have termed "wow".
I propounded the "wow" theory a couple of months ago when I was invited to Belfast to partake in a panel discussion on an exhibition entitled 2Move. It is a series of video-art installations exploring the universality of migratory culture. Although I found most of the work exhibited engaging, I was not particularly surprised that not a single one of the 30-odd pieces on display was created by a black video artist. Meanwhile black people featured prominently in all the pieces, especially those that focus on the issues of asylum-seeking or the harrowing life of an immigrant in a foreign country. I remember one installation in particular about a black man mopping the floor endlessly, as we listen to a voiceover of his inner thoughts.
I responded to the exhibition by arguing that it was high time that black people were given the opportunity to be creators and not to perpetually be the objects of artistic creations. I opined that until a black man is positioned behind the camera, instead of in front of it, western audiences will continually be presented with one subjective point of view. I said, as a theatre practitioner living and working in Ireland, I cannot but be intercultural in my work. Whatever I produce has to appeal to Irish people as well as non-Irish people, especially African immigrants, living in Ireland. Having realised that when an Occident is asking "why", an African is thinking "how", I have learned how to initiate "wow" projects by facilitating a creative collaboration between artists from the why and how cultural backgrounds (why + how = wow).
To buttress my argument, I cited our new version of The Playboy of the Western Worldas the epitome of a genuine interculturalism in creative writing. The play finally got premiered on the Abbey stage last October after being rejected at first, in December 2006. In my opinion, this play is a perfect synergy of creativity rooted in two distinct cultures and would definitely not have been such a unique play if it was written by either myself or Roddy Doyle single-handedly.
Similarly, it would have been a real shame if the Abbey had stuck to its original decision not to produce the new version; theatre-goers who were wowed by the production would have been denied a phenomenal theatre experience. So until Irish theatre companies encourage more of such creative interactions, on equal terms, between "why" and "how" peoples, "wow" ideas like the new version of The Playboywill be few and far between.
If Arambe's new version of The Playboy, an artistic creation, perfectly epitomises the "wow" theory, Obama is its human embodiment. He has managed to do what Colin Powell, despite his military and political experience, could not do because he is quintessentially "wow". Of course, I know Powell is of mixed-race background, too, but Obama's father is not an African-American but from the Luo tribe of Kenya. It is from his white, American mother that Obama has learned to be flighty, calculating and individualistic, and, most importantly, how to ask "why"; it is by having a native Kenyan father that he has been blessed with being earthy, visceral, spiritual and communal, and, above all, with knowing how to ask "how".
When you locate all of these invaluable attributes in one single individual, he is bound to be, to borrow from Jimmy Murphy's play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, "no ordinary man" but "a force of nature". A force of nature like the bat that is a mammal because it suckles its young but can still fly like a bird. So Obama ain't black; he ain't white either. He is brown and if he is elected the president of the United States of America in three days' time, life will be imitating art. For in the movie Deep Impact and the TV series 24, Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert play the part of US presidents respectively. Also in Irving Wallace's 1964 novel The Man, a black man assumes the post of the US president upon the death of the vice-president and the speaker of the house.
Of course, I know these are all fictional characters but, as the African-American writer Ralph Ellison has pointed out in his book Invisible Man, "fiction may be a form of symbolic action, a mere game of 'as if', but therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change". Could you have imagined a Nigerian Playboy on the Abbey stage and Barack Obama occupying the White House two years ago? Wow! Who says "May you live in interesting times" is a curse?
Bisi Adigun is the artistic director and founder of Arambe Productions. See www.arambeproductions.com