II "I knew Lazarus – his name would have been given to him in a moment of innocent hope. His mother would have that such a name, rich and powerful as it was worth with divine chance, would somehow protect him from a living death that was his actual life," –Jamaica Kincaid (The Autobiography of My Mother) MASKING AS PROLOGUE My prologue is posited in the conditional tense, much like Kincaid’s profile of the very same griot, Lazarus. In fact, several props signify this: First, Lazarus’ leather bag (strips of leather in muted Garvey colors) is filled with "coins" and an oversized double rattle with narratives carved on its surface. He scatters the "coins" (flattened soft drink bottle-stoppers), to punctuate his soliloquy. The giant rattle illuminates his overture about "words as cloth", and drives back the bush like a machete, crafting beauty through aural emphasis. Yet, it is all conditional on the oral transmission of others to rightfully bear out the legacy of Arthur Sixteen. A smoke gun provides the early morning mist, and is the temporal cliff upon which the griot, his prophecy and the play stand between the past and the future. This last – the past/future paradigm – fits Lazarus’ speech like a mask, and like the mist, cannot be separated from the performance, nor the character the actor has accepted; neither the musical rattle supporting him, nor the costume to which he has been assigned. |
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