Wanted

Introduction

Fucking A (FA), ² bursting onto American stage in 2000, is one of the twins of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Red Letter Plays. As an example of Brechtian epic theater (Geis, 2008; Woodworth, 2007), FA possesses the attributes of revenge tragedies and has intertextual connections with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (Dietrick, 2010), while representing the blurred borderline between nurturing love and murderous rage in a mother (Foster, 2007).

In her book, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah R. Geis (2008) writes, “No postmodern artist, though, has taken on quite the same creative remapping of The Scarlet Letter as Suzan-Lori Parks does in her . . . Fucking A” (p. 127). She then gives a synopsis of the play as follows:

In Fucking A, which includes both Brechtian-style songs and moments of an invented language called TALK, Hester earns her meager living as an abortionist in a dystopian, sci-fi society, and is trying desperately to see her jailed son, Monster, again. (p. 127)

In this essay, I approach FA from the perspectives of postmodern drama. I show how the discourse of postmodernism enables Parks to make intertextual links with some other literary works in order to reinvent the past and address a number of social ills and historical scars that have afflicted African Americans in their personal and social lives. Additionally, I explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics that contribute to the creation of indeterminacies in this play and argue how the creation of indeterminacies enables the playwright to increase incredulity toward a number of dominant metanarratives—manifesting themselves in the form of ruling economic, social, cultural, and political systems. Furthermore, I show how Parks raises the issue of African American history and imprints it from a fresh perspective to reshape identities for African Americans in her neo-slave narrative.

Intertextuality: Repetition and Revision

In his Alternate Worlds, John Kuehl (1989) writes that in metafiction, authors “make intertextual references” and borrow “characters from one’s own and others’ work,” and then they “frequently recycle [the borrowed] characters” (pp. 62-63). In Parks’s play, there are several intertextual references to both Parks’s own and others’ literary works such as the use of characters with intertextual names. For instance, Hester is a contemporary version of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Like Hawthorne’s Hester, Parks’s Hester has to wear the scarlet letter A above her left breast, which “weeps as a fresh wound would” (Parks, 2001, p. 125), simply because, like demarcated cattle, her A is “deeply branded into her skin” (p. 117). Law dictates that it must be visible, and so in Scene 5 when Hunters want Hester to cover up her A, she replies, “I can’t it’s against the law” (p. 146). Christine Woodworth (2007) notes that the letter A signifies adultery in Hawthorne’s novel, while it signifies abortion in Parks’s play.

Parks seems to suggest that the letter A always exists, but its forms differ. As Hester says in the play, “The A looks so fresh, like they branded me just yesterday” (Parks, 2001, p. 125). Her observation indicates that oppression and injustice, exploitation and sexploitation, abduction and abjection have not ceased, and they have merely been transformed through the passage of time. In other words, Parks’s revision of Hawthorne’s theme shows that even the passage of time has not healed the sorrows of oppressed members of society, reasserting the agonies of African American women whose daily lives are marked by experiences of inequality.

From another perspective, the intertextual reference to The Scarlet Letter is an example of “reinvention,” which, according to Madelyn Jablon (1997), “is central not only to the African American aesthetic but also, of course, to the postmodern aesthetics, where it allows escape from the literature of exhaustion by providing a door to the recreation of old forms” (p. 133). I argue that Parks reinvents the past to depict the hardships of African American women at present time. Her reinvention of The Scarlet Letter evidences the destructive forces of racism and sexism on African American women, and invites readers or audiences to compare and contrast the miseries of the Black and the White Hesters. Parks’s version illustrates how the ostracism that Hester as an African American woman experiences in the contemporary era is much harder than those experienced by the White Hester at the hands of her White, Puritanical male oppressors in the 17th century. In addition, Parks shows how poverty in modern capitalist societies, including the United States, is as mortal as adultery in the Puritan age.

Admittedly, the intertextual reference to Hawthorne’s novel helps Parks critique the dominant patriarchal and hierarchal systems in which men hold hegemonic power and accordingly predominate in roles of political and social leadership and control of properties, to which I hereafter refer as “malestream.” By replacing the White Hester and her child with a Black Hester and her child, the play satirizes the contemporary American malestream culture. Compared to the White Hester, the Black Hester as a social outcast is under harsher oppression. For that reason, by the end of the novel, the White Hester as an educated woman is treated as a saint and survives with dignity, and Pearl, her daughter, prospers. They are warmly embraced by the society and play a key role in giving comfort to other women in trouble. The Black illiterate Hester, on the contrary, due to race, class, and gender prejudices, experiences a tragic denouement and is forced to slit the throat of her child.

As a double intertextual character, Hester also signifies upon Hester, La Negrita, who is the main character of Parks’s (1998) In the Blood. In the Blood tells the story of Hester and her five illegitimate children. Being homeless, illiterate, and notorious as a “slut,” she attempts to receive help from her children’s fathers. She has hopes that at least one of them, probably Reverend D, would help her to improve her own and her children’s lives, but it is a forlorn hope. She then out of anger kills her eldest son, Jabber, for calling her “slut.” By the end of the play, Hester, La Negrita, is imprisoned and can no longer help her children. In FA and In the Blood, both Hesters are illiterate and poor, and they both kill their own sons. According to Verna A. Foster (2007), “[b]oth Hesters attempt to conform to the conventional model of ‘good mother’ [but] [t]he strain of doing so without any support contributes to their fatal actions” (p. 77). Arguably, Hesters’ murderous acts create a shockwave, which can awake readers or audiences and open their eyes to the appalling injustices and oppression befallen them as the weak members of society. Similarly, many of Parks’s characters in FA and In the Blood are corrupted but not remorseful, and accordingly they never desire to stop and repent. On the contrary, day by day, they get deeper down into crime and corruption. I argue that like Hesters, all the characters in both these plays have a branded A, but unlike Hesters’, their “As” are invisible. Apart from an image of a corrupt society, the sexual abuse of Hesters, Canary, and the female characters who seek an abortion signifies instantaneity. Male characters abuse women in these plays for their instant material satisfaction and pleasure. In FA, The Mayor, on one hand, exploits his wife to take over her wealth and, on the other, sexploits Canary for pleasure, and in In the Blood, Hester is abused repeatedly for ephemeral or transitory unilateral satisfaction. In addition, due to the presence of abundant bloody images, it can be said that FA occurs “in the blood.” Hester’s and Butcher’s aprons and tools are in the blood. Likewise, Hester’s A is branded on her body, and it bleeds. Additionally, in the final scene when Hester slits her own son’s throat, she is drenched with his blood. The amount of blood along with the recurrence of sexual abuse and death in these plays represents a dark dystopian world.

Parks makes intertextual links with some other literary works, including Tony Morrison’s (1987) novel Beloved, Charles Dickens’s (1854) novel Hard Times, Ntozake Shange’s (1975) play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, and O. Henry’s (1905) short story “After 20 Years,” which all contribute to the hybrid fabric in FA. For instance, in the final scene, Hester chooses to kill her own son before Hunters arrest him. As Geis (2008) writes, “Hester’s decision to ‘save’ Monster by killing him herself conjures up slave narratives in which the mother chooses to end child’s life rather than give the child up to slavery” (p. 138). This scene resonates with Morrison’s Beloved, wherein Sethe, a female runaway former slave, chooses to kill her own daughter and attempts to kill her other children to prevent them from being captured and returned to slavery. Like Sethe, Hester and Monster consider death to be preferable to a despised life. In a similar way to Sethe’s, Hester’s violent rage is against the defective ruling social, economic, political, and cultural systems that have deformed Boy(s) to Monster(s). According to Foster (2007), “Her action is . . . a blow against the oppressive and unjust society that has imposed constraints upon her as if she were a slave, that imprisoned her child and required her to ‘buy’ his ‘freedom’” (p. 82). Sethe and Hester are cast as unsupported characters who do not wish their children to be crucified by the brutality of society and kill them rather than hand them over to the persecutors. ³

Another feature that links these two neo-slave narratives is the mark on Hester’s and Sethe’s bodies. Sethe retells Beloved and Denver that her mother had a mark on her rib in the form of a circle and a cross burned right in the skin. As Sethe says, one day, her mother carried her behind the smokehouse,

opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed under it. Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin. She said, “This is your ma’am. This,” and she pointed. “I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead.”

At this stage, Sethe begs her mother to mark her, too, so that her mother could know her (Morrison, 1987). In Parks’s play, Hester also marks her own body and her son’s. She creates bite marks on her own and her Boy’s arms. These marks are Hester’s attempt to fix their identity; however, at that stage she is unaware that what matters is not the physical identification.

In addition to intertextual connections with The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, I argue that the play shares some of the attributes of Dickens’s Hard Times. In Scene 18, three Freshly Freed Prisoners unanimously sing a song titled “Hard Times”:

Hard Times Hard Times

Hard Times Hard Times

Hard Times, if ya followed me this far,

I’ll just lay down and die. (Parks, 2001, p. 204)

Hard Times highlights the social and economic pressures on underclass members of society and depicts the divide between the capitalist mill owners as upper class and laborers as underclass members of society during the Victorian era. The novel, which exposes a dystopian society, attacks the harsh conditions of life in England’s industrial towns wherein enormous wealth was produced for owners, while the working hands lived in misery. These are also some of Parks’s concerns in her play, indicating that oppressions exist today, and they have “followed” us “this far.”

Parks draws attention to the hard times for underclass in a number of songs that she has written for this play. For instance, Canary and Hester sing “Working Womans Song” as follows:

Its not that we love

What we do

But we do it

We look at the day

We just gotta get through it.

We dig our ditch with no complaining

Work in hot sun, or even when its raining

And when the long day finally comes to an end

We’ll say:

“Here is a woman

Who does all she can.” (p. 123; emphasis added)

As the song shows, Hester and Canary describe the jobs they are forced to do every day and under harsh conditions—heat and rain—while they do not enjoy doing them and “just gotta get through [them].” They also speak about their potential, which is not used in a proper way; however, they hold that they do what they can to support themselves. It is noteworthy that a great number of characters have their own songs that ironically and polemically question the social trends or reveal the characters’ thoughts. Thus, the songs give voice to characters, regardless of their race, class, and gender, and create pluralism, multivoicedness, and heterogeneity. Furthermore, they help decrease emotional tensions in the play and act as Brechtian reminders for readers or audiences that what they read or watch is a play.

Arguably, the songs make an intertextual connection between FA and Shange’s for colored girls, which deals with the stories of seven nameless African American women who have suffered from different types of oppression in a racist and sexist society. The women are identified by seven colors, and they are meant to stand for both the women who make up the rainbow and the women of color. They are called Ladies in Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, Brown, and Purple. Like Shange, Parks in her play refers to red and yellow dresses. For instance, Hester addresses Canary as saying, “Me in my bloody apron. You in yr yellow dress” (p. 121), and then they call themselves “babykiller” and “whore” (p. 122). The image of babykiller recalls the abortionist in Shange’s play, who used to abort “unfit” infants illicitly with the least instruments and in the least hygienic condition in her house. Likewise, the image of Parks’s whore evokes Shange’s prostitute. Additionally, like Shange’s choreopoems, the songs in FA deal with love, prostitution, abandonment, rape, liberation, infidelity, and abortion, embodied in each character’s story.

Parks also offers a new reading of O. Henry’s short story “After 20 Years” in order to signal the crucial social and cultural downfall that society has experienced in the last century. O. Henry’s story deals with two staunch teenage friends who had been like two brothers, but one of them has to move along with his family to another state. They pledge to meet each other after 20 years from that date at 10 o’clock at Big Joe Brandy’s in New York. The story reveals that after 20 years, one of them, named Bob, has become a hardened rich criminal or lawbreaker, whereas the other, named Jimmy, has turned into a police officer or a man of law.

Like Bob and Jimmy, Hester throughout the play has high hopes to have a picnic with her son “After 30 years” (Parks, 2001, p. 158). I argue that in such a corrupt society, the ones who are to meet as mother and son both have turned into lawbreakers so much so that the mother abhors her son’s deeds and vice versa, and they attempt to hide their own identities. Right after escaping from prison, Monster breaks into Hester’s house to rob her but leaves unidentified as soon as he finds that Hester is his mother. Likewise, Hester declares, “The dead Boys dead mother works for herself now. Shes an aborter. Don’t hang yr head shes not yr mom. My fucking A. He woulda hated what his mother has become” (p. 207). Furthermore, both FA and “After 20 Years” pose the question of which factors are responsible to make one a lawbreaker. As Monster sings in his song, “The Making of a Monster,” it is easy for a society to make a horrible social monster:

Youd think itd be hard

To make something horrid

Its easy.

Youd think it would take

So much work to create

The Devil Incarnate

Its easy.

The smallest seed grows to a tree

A grain of sand pearls in an oyster

A small bit of hate in a heart will inflate

And that’s more so much more than enough

To make you a Monster. (p. 218)

There are also some intertextual connections between Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and FA as in both plays Parks lays her emphasis on African Americans’ literacy and writing and attempts to motivate African Americans to write down their own histories/stories as a means to transcend their own identities. Literacy and writing pave the way for their self-definition, creating the grounds for African Americans to emanate from within rather than without. Parks shows the exigency for literacy in FA through employing Scribe who pens letters for illiterate underclass people. As Scribe remembers, his father has forced him to acquire literacy, and thus, he has learned reading and writing at the age of 3. He says that “[d]ad wanted me to make something of myself. So he stood over me with a stick. I still got the welts, well, the scars of the welts” (p. 140). Scribe has many customers, and in one case when he intends to close his shop, Butcher says, “Theres lots of people want writing done and yr shops closed. That’s bad business” (p. 140). This comment manifests the high number of illiterates in the community. Hester is one of Scribe’s regular customers and praises his handwriting, wishing to be literate herself. She says to Butcher, “[Scribe] makes the nicest looking letters. Even when he’s sloshed. Such pretty shapes, straight bold lines and gentle curls. Makes me wish I could read. And write too” (p. 159). These words are double ended: On one hand, Parks revisits the history of African Americans wherein they were banned to acquire literacy and, on the other, she finds the possibility to criticize the passivity of some of African Americans who refuse to acquire it.

In Scene 6, however, illiterate Hester surprisingly reads Scribe’s freshly written letter, which is equivocal. This event shows that—like Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, who followed the advice of Black Man With Watermelon and succeeded to write down their own mininarratives—Hester as a result of Butcher’s motivation, advice, and help has acquired literacy. In a similar manner to Black Man With Watermelon, who addresses his wife and repeats, “You should write it down” (Parks, 1995, p. 104), Butcher addresses Hester and says, “You should learn” (Parks, 2001, p. 148). Parks observes that illiteracy is one of the roots of evils and has destructive effects on African American women’s lives and minds moving them toward exclusion and enticing them to take improper jobs. Thus, in both plays, Parks advises African Americans to acquire literacy, read and write down their histories/stories.

Parks also establishes a link between the news in FA and the news on TV in The Death of the Last Black Man, wherein through exaggeration African Americans are introduced as hardened habitual criminals whose presence offends and destroys the community. After receiving the newspaper with wanted notice, looking for Monster dead or alive, Third Hunter reads out the information on Monster and his crimes as follows: “Murder, necrophilia, sodomy, bestiality, pedophilia, armed robbery, petty theft, embezzlement, diddling in public, cannibalism—” (p. 143). The enumeration of these crimes makes Hunters sick, whereas the description of the ways they mutilate the convicts and their dogs—for instance, cut the convicts’ fingers or testicles—entertains them. Their double dealing reveals their hypocritical characters. In critical reading, the long list of crimes ascribed to Monster raises the question that how a boy who has passed all these years in prison and has been under surveillance has been able to commit such crimes? In both plays, through representing a simulation of media, Parks shows how media—controlled by the ruling economic, social, cultural, and political systems—uses exaggeration to contaminate people’s minds about African Americans, and thus she creates incredulity toward what they transmit to their readers, listeners, or viewers.

Parks repeats and revises the literary works studied above and builds her play upon them. Signifying upon both Black and White authors makes FA “double-voiced” with both Black and White literary antecedents (Gates, 1988, p. xxiii). In a similar vein, the wide range of intertexts in the play also recalls the idea of “cultural mulattos,” dubbed by Trey Ellis. As Ellis (1989) notes,

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world. (p. 235)

Thus, Parks navigates in the White and Black world, so as to reform the monolithic trend of representing African American experiences and “explode the old definitions of blackness” (p. 237). Additionally, signifying upon these works creates “plurality of voices as well as a multiplicity of discourses” (Wall, 1989, p. 7), while helping Parks to remake the old and offer a new reading of those works.

Resisting Interpretation: Is “A” What We Think?

Through the employment of several techniques, including dislocation, time distortion, absence of character descriptions, generic character names, two-column dialogue arrangement, wordplay, and the invented language TALK, Parks challenges the univocity of meaning and engenders indeterminacies in FA. Indeterminacies start right from the title: FA. The letter “A” refuses to articulate distinctly the notion(s) it signifies, and this refusal creates various interpretations and significations for letter A. “A” may suggest Abjection, Abortion, Absolutism, Adultery, Agony, Alien/nation, Alterity, Ambivalence, Ambition, Anomie, Antebellum, Annals of history, Atonement, Atrocity, Authenticity, Authoritarianism, and even America. Admittedly, the long list of possible notions for letter A leaves readers or audiences in an indeterminate state. The list might be extended indefinitely. However, I would argue that letter A stands for the long history of oppression and discrimination of any type imposed on disempowered people of any race, class, nation, and creed. To support my argument, I refer to Parks describing her play as “An otherworldly tale” (Parks, 2001, p. 113), indicating that the play is not confined to a particular location. Foster (2007) notes that “Fucking A is an ‘otherworldly tale’, set in a kind of futuristic alternate universe that grotesquely incorporates and exaggerates some of the worst features of both Antebellum and contemporary America” (p. 78). Foster’s note limits the scope of this “otherworldly tale” to America covering a number of problems in Antebellum and contemporary times; however, I argue that FA is a social critique of any society, including America, suffering from “As” that I listed above, and it is unlimited in place.

Thus, owing to dislocation, a number of scenes in the play lack setting, while other scenes are set in indefinite settings, which make the play’s setting as a whole multi-perspectival, or in Ihab Hassan’s terms “provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space)” (Hassan, 1993, p. 154). For instance, according to The First Lady, the play is set in “a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere” (Parks, 2001, p. 129), while Scenes 4 and 8 are described to be located in a park “in the middle of nowhere overlooking the sea” (pp. 136, 154). The use of multi-perspectival and provisional settings not only creates nonlinearity and a sense of disintegration but also raises indeterminacies.

Likewise, to make the play indefinite in time, no specific time frame has been set for the play, and this creates time distortion. Admittedly, the use of time distortion creates fluidity and involves readers or audiences in the ebb and flow of atemporality. The existence of time distortion helps further to blur the demarcation line between past and present. For instance, in lieu of police forces or detectives, Parks deploys three Hunters who track down and catch runaway prisoners or convicts with their dogs and torture and mutilate them mercilessly, which calls into mind a number of slave narratives. To manifest time distortion, Parks uses the representation of Hunters next to Hester, who works illegally as an abortionist and brings to fore the contemporary problems of women. Thus, the play oscillates between past and present, between what was and what is, implying that time and place make no difference if people in every society refuse to change their perceptions and conditions.

I here argue that the employment of Hunters enables Parks to revisit and recontextualize the history of escaped African American slaves. As Parks notes in an interview,

History is not “was,” history is “is.” It’s present, so if you believe that history is in the present, you can also believe that the present is in the past . . . so you can fill in the blanks. You can do it now by inserting yourself into the present. You can do it for back then, too. (Jiggetts, 1996, p. 316)

Thus, Parks recontextualizes history in order to question continuity, absolutism, closure, and wholeness of history. Here, like in The Death of the Last Black Man, Parks cannot close her eyes to the history of oppression, which has affected the lives of African Americans, and accordingly she raises the issue of history as counterhistory and imprints it once again but from a fresh perspective. I argue that in this neo-slave narrative, she represents history from the bottom–up perspective wherein the grassroots and the disempowered members of society (Black, poor, female, working class) are focused, and their mininarratives are recounted as annals of history.

In addition, the employment of doubling and generic names enhances indeterminacies. The play consists of 18 characters, six female and 12 male, but as “the play calls for eleven performers with some doubling” (Parks, 2001, p. 115), seven performers are cast in double parts. However, the play and its stage directions do not determine the characters that should be cast in double parts. Moreover, the use of generic names, embodied in The Mayor, The First Lady, Butcher, Freedom Fund Lady, Scribe, three Hunters, Guard, two Waiting Women, Jailbait, Boy/Monster, and three Freshly Freed Prisoners, can be seen as an attempt to transform readers or audiences from passive receivers to active participants in meaning production. Accordingly, readers or audiences can adapt these characters with the social and political systems in their own contexts. The use of definite article “The” before the names of two characters, that is, The Mayor and The First Lady, directs readers or audiences to both individualize and generalize these characters through establishing them as prototypes. In this light, The Mayor, for instance, is more than a character in charge of a town; he stands for the ruling malestream with great political, economic, and social power, which enables him to fulfill his sensual desires.

To enhance indeterminacies, Parks also uses an innovative form of two-column dialogue arrangement:

  Hester               Butcher

Would you like to see      Ive brought you a present

my gold coin?

Hester

Butcher

Hester                Butcher

Before I give it to the Fund  Its not much. Just meat. But

lemmie show you.       it’s a good cut. (p. 163)

Such idiosyncratic arrangement creates indeterminacies, since it is uncertain whether these should be read vertically, horizontally, or simultaneously. According to W. B. Worthen (2010), “The pages of Parks’s plays urgently defamiliarize the conventions of printed drama, and so the conventional expectations of agency of words in performance” (pp. 163, 164; emphasis in original). I argue that defamiliarizing the conventions of printed drama provides readers and performers with optionality, since they can read and perform the dialogue vertically, horizontally, or even both, one at a time; however, either read vertically, horizontally, or both, the dialogue is fragmented and boosts nonlinearity.

The use of wordplay as another source of undecidability creates a sense of lexical and structural ambivalence, mainly because the words and phrases, in cases fortified with changes in their spellings, bring to fore unexpected undertones laced with multiple meanings. Wordplay illustrates the fluidity of language as a productive living organism, and examples of lexical and structural ambivalence abound in the play. As an intriguing example, Canary uses “Hizzoner” to refer to The First Lady’s husband, The Mayor (Parks, 2001, p. 123). The term that is a humorous version of “His Honor” has been traditionally used as a title for the man holding the office of mayor in some countries, including the United States. The term also suggests either “His owner” or perhaps “He’s on her.” Readers may also read it as “He’s won her,” simply because the play reveals that The Mayor, who represents the malestream, has sexual relationship with her wife and Canary, recalling ownership status in the slavery system in which White men owned their wives and mistresses, while he intends to usurp his wife’s wealth.

Apart from the use of wordplay, Parks creates the invented feminine language TALK. The innovation of TALK is double ended: On one hand, it adds ambivalence as it is solely encoded and decoded by women in the play. On the other hand, as a nonmimetic language, this creative way to use the power of language casts light on the dimmed identities of female characters, regardless of their race and class, and creates a tie between them and raises the opportunity for women to resist the existing hierarchies, free themselves from their dependence on the dominant discourse, and revive their neglected or marginalized discourses. To put it differently, TALK augments the level of undecidability and brings down the privileged language and higher discourse of the malestream, validating women’s identities. I argue that Parks avoids mimicking the malestream language as the official language to uncover both the power of women in creating their own language and the power of language in voicing women’s neglected discourses, which leads to the innovation of a language of equality. Needless to say that the knowledge of more than one language provides the speakers with several options, and optionality can equip them with a discourse of power.

From another perspective, the innovation of TALK may stand for linguistic bricolage, defined as the juxtaposition of different languages, which can both create syntactical breaks and blur boundaries between high and low cultures and discourses. TALK challenges the dominant discourse as a political tool of resistance against the linguistic hegemony of the dominant culture, and it recalls women of their identities and common roots in order to resist and disrupt the dominant discourse, introduced as prevailing by the dominant group. Parks’s dramatic idea of using a language incomprehensible to men is effective for conveying her critical message: Women need to have power to create their own discourse in order to challenge the malestream discourse. In other words, TALK, as a counterhegemonic discourse, disturbs the establishment and maintenance of a center within the playscript, because it contests the central position already preoccupied by the formal dominant language and provides a ground for the expression of women’s voices and knowledge. The use of TALK can eliminate the fallacy of assuming formal English as the authentic version of language and the language of power and dominance through inserting the voice of alterity and alien/nation, which also creates stylistic and linguistic diversity, heterogeneity, and polyphony and breaks up the unification.

Furthermore, TALK is the language of privacy and secrecy for women. It is used when women talk about their private and feminine concerns and issues. Gates (1989) quotes George Steiner who says that “each living person draws . . . on two sources of linguistic supply”: The current social usage that corresponds to his or her “level of literacy” and “a private thesaurus,” and it is this private thesaurus that is “inextricably a part of subconscious, of memories so far as they may be verbalized” (pp. 171, 172). He further renames the private thesaurus “cultural or ethnic privacy,” and says that “this element of privacy makes it possible for a culture to use language to mask its meanings from all but its own initiates” (p. 172). Accordingly, Parks offers translations of TALK sentences at the end of her playscript, which functions both as paratext and as metalanguage. In her stage directions, she suggests, “The production should present a nonaudible simultaneous English translation” (Parks, 2001, p. 115). The use of TALK and its translation reminds me of Raymond Federman, who once dreamed of

writing a book in which two languages would merge into one another. On the cover of this book (if such a book were ever to be published), it would say, TRANSLATED BY THE AUTHOR, but without specifying from which language. (Federman, 1993, p. 83; capital letters in original)

According to Federman, bilingualism includes an element of playfulness. The two languages can play with each other “not only in the sense of game but also in the sense of looseness” (pp. 83, 84). Moreover, referring readers to visit the translations of the phrases and sentences as well as the presentation of simultaneous translation in the performances as required in the stage directions both work to distract readers’ and audiences’ attention from the play’s events and to denote the play’s nonrealistic theatricality.

These features, which create indeterminacies, altogether help distinguish FA from the “absolute drama” that, according to Peter Szondi, is characterized by

the dominance of dialogue and interpersonal communication; the exclusion of anything external to the dramatic world (including the dramatist and the spectators, who are condemned to silent observation); the unfolding of time as a linear sequence in the present; and the adherence to the three unities of time, place and action. (Quoted in Lehmann, 2006, p. 3)

Additionally, the creation of indeterminacies in FA distances readers or audiences from “efferent” reading and makes them resort to “aesthetic” reading, wherein “the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 25; emphasis in original). Consequently, the presence of these features makes FA, in Barthes’s term, a writerly text that should be read aesthetically. I argue that these indeterminate features work to keep FA as an open process or production rather than a total finished product, mainly because the play provides the grounds for each and every reader and performer as a self-appointed coauthor to rework it with their own creative imaginations and backgrounds.

Write “Paradox,” Read “dɐɹɐpox”

FA is a dystopian representation of capitalist world wherein money talks and its power articulates the socioeconomic class, human relationships, and even social justice. The play criticizes the patriarchal and hierarchal capitalist society, especially the United States, wherein millions of African Americans are now in jail for trivial crimes, and imprisonment transforms them from Boy to Monster and Jailbait. I argue that Parks questions “Capitalism”—as a metanarrative that promises peace and prosperity—and malestream, which bring about the exploitation and sexploitation of women. As a result, The Mayor, cast as an arrogant and voluptuous character, due to his wealth and power enjoys a dominant status. He, who should focus on relieving the sufferings of people and pay heed to elevating their living standards, engages himself in constituting some formalities like “rubbing shoulders with people” (Parks, 2001, p. 130).

The Mayor also engages himself in increasing his profit and power. Here, Parks unmasks The Mayor and reveals his real hypocritical nature, and shows how he plots to kill his wife so as to usurp her wealth. As he says to Canary, “Planning a murder takes a lot of thought. Shes got to be wiped out just right so that the blame falls on some nobody and not at all on me or my office” (p. 151). He then continues,

My wife will die a tragic death. I will stand like the soldier that I am as they put her in the deep dark ground. My chest will heave in sadness but no tears will fall. I am their soldier-Mayor. Not a tear will fall. She will have left me all her money. I will hang my head and the people will want me to lift my head up. The people will demand that I remarry.

(Rest)

They will demand that I remarry a woman of a—of a certain background. My heart will be split in two. Each night with my new wife I will dream of you. (p. 151)

He then discloses that he plans to breach his promise to marry Canary, too. The Mayor emphasizes this when he later says to Canary, “‘Wife’, ‘Mistress’, what does it matter? Take the gold. Buy something nice” (p. 153). However, a while before he had claimed that as civil servant he never breaches his promise and that he sacrifices his pleasure for the sake of people. As an allegorical character, he abuses his power to satisfy his desires through his sexual relationship with Canary. Parks depicts a society in which a child who steals some bread is severely punished, whereas The Mayor’s abuse of power—due to his position, power, and wealth—remains unpunished. Michel Foucault (1977) refers to such a discrepancy in his Discipline and Punish as follows:

Are you not afraid that the poor man put into the dock for snatching a piece of bread from a baker’s stall will not, one day, become so enraged that stone by stone he will demolish the Stock Exchange, a wild den where the treasure of the state and the fortune of families are stolen with impurity? (pp. 287, 288)

Thus, Parks not only focuses on the double standards but also exposes and targets the corruption of the ruling class.

Throughout the play, The Mayor repeatedly claims that he has been elected,

And those people elected me to lead for the rest of my life and when they elected me they expected me to produce a son and they elected and expected that son to lead for the rest of his life and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and—. (Parks, 2001, p. 127)

The Mayor’s statement shows that he intends to rule throughout his life time and then transfer the power to his son. This statement, which contradicts the idea of democracy, is an indication of autocracy and nepotism, an accusation, especially in politics, that the relatives of an influential and powerful figure without the required qualifications ascend to similar power. Thus, The First Lady should conceive, but due to her infertility and inability to produce an heir, which is later proven to be untrue, she is not suitable to be The First Lady. It is worth mentioning that autocracy favors continuity, absolutism, linearity, and closure, which are in discrepancy with the nature of democracy as well as postmodernism. Parks attempts to show that autocracy, even if gilded with election and democracy, results in corruption and double standards. In this climate, an individual with despotic tendencies and practices finds the right to rule over a society according to his own desires and claim legitimacy. The Mayor is that absolute authoritative individual who follows his personal desires and sensual pleasures under the pretext of benefitting the society.

In addition to critiquing autocracy gilded with election and democracy, the play rebukes common people and folks supporting autocracy. This is revealed in The Mayor’s words when he says, “My weekly errands. The Mayor rubs shoulders with the people. After all these years they still like it” (p. 130). In this regard, Baudrillard (1994) remarks,

One can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psycho-analyst? the analyst can well reply: You. (p. 41)

Baudrillard’s remark manifests that it is the people who play a crucial role in maintaining monarchy and autocracy, the systems of power that are not God given, and Parks criticizes the roles of people in the maintenance and continuation of such systems of power. Thus, people in every society can pave the way for either democracy with their wisdom or autocracy with their own folly. I argue that Parks approaches autocracy with postmodern eyes, which due to its questioning nature and insistence on discontinuity, tries to call into question their legitimacy and continuity.

“Gilded Cage,” a song sung by Canary, points out the heavy price of gaining freedom. The song shows a lioness in “a gorgeous gilded cage” made of gold, and its “bars shone like sunshine” (Parks, 2001, p. 153). The song also reveals that “[s]he’d gone in there all on her own” and “[n]o one had forced her” (p. 153). The song continues,

“Freedom,” she said, “aint free at all.

Its price: a heavy wage

And when you find how much your freedom costs

You just may give it up

For a gorgeous gilded cage.” (p. 153)

The price of freedom is so heavy that it makes some people cease resistance and choose to remain in their cage. As a metaphoric expression, “Gilded Cage” denotes the people who are trapped in such systems of power and have no freedom but might have a seemingly comfortable life if they do not struggle to release themselves from their gilded cage; otherwise, they would pay high price for freedom.

The expression “Gilded Cage” also recalls “Gilded Age,” which as described in Encyclopedia Britannica Online (2015) refers to “a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in US history” that spanned the last three decades of the 19th century, though some date the end of the era to the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. The term was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873) in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, satirizing what they believed to be an era of serious social ills and corruption covered by a thin glittering layer of gold. During this era, the industrial economy of the United States boomed and created great opportunities for some people to build great fortunes, while leaving many farmers and workers struggling merely for survival (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2015). Thus, while a few people wore diamonds and lived in luxury, many people wore rags and lived in slums. Parks satirizes the contemporary era of serious social problems, among them race, class, and gender inequalities, hidden under the coated layers of Capitalism.

As already discussed, the play centers on Hester’s love for her son, showing how she devotes her life to free him. It also speaks of The First Lady’s efforts to conceive and give birth to a son, and how both Hester and The First Lady spare no efforts to attain their ends. However, the play does not tell why every night a great number of women apply for abortion. Do they not have any affection toward their babies? Women are coming into Hester’s place—which can be seen as a “heterotopia” of that society—to abort their babies, in contrast with Hester, who is ready to die for her son, and The Mayor and The First Lady, who dream to have a son. This is revealed when The Mayor informs Butcher of his wife’s pregnancy. Butcher then tells Hester, “They finally got lucky” (Parks, 2001, p. 200). The question is then raised how a child is imagined to bring happiness to The Mayor’s and The First Lady’s lives but brings agony to a great number of women who apply for abortion every night.

From an opposing perspective, perhaps those women apply for abortion due to their excessive love toward their babies as they do not want their babies to step into the world of abjection. In this climate, Hester who is an idealist mother at first sacrifices her own needs and desires to liberate her son from prison, assuming that his liberation releases them both from devaluation and repression. However, as the play proceeds, she learns that his liberation from those shackles that she has harbored in her dreams never comes true, since they dwell in a corrupted society that is itself a larger prison. To put it differently, Hester spares no efforts to free Boy/Monster from prison, but paradoxically she is incapable to free him from a prison-within-a-prison, and thus at the end she prefers to kill him. Her strong affection toward Monster is the only factor that enables her to kill him in order to save him from more drastic pains. On this account, she shares the same excessive love toward her son that her woman clients might have had toward their aborted babies.

Hester, who has been thrown into destitution to free her son, refuses to believe that her son in prison has changed into a criminal, and accordingly she insists that her son is an angle. For instance, when Freedom Fund Lady comments that “[h]es committed a few crimes since yr last payment,” Hester retorts, “Must be a mistake. Hes a very good boy” (p. 133). Freedom Fund Lady argues further that Monster is “a hardened criminal,” but Hester firmly believes that her son is an angel (p. 134). In Scene 9 and right after Butcher enlists his daughter’s crimes, Hester still claims that “my Boys an angel who had a little bad luck” (p. 161). Later, when she hears the escaped convict has a mark similar to hers, she still refuses to admit him to be her son (p. 196). This is an attempt to label him with fixed or univocal identity.

Likewise, considering that Jailbait is her own son and noticing his negative behaviors with her own eyes, Hester repeats, “You were never bad. They tell me yr bad but I don’t believe them. You shouldn’t believe them either” (p. 181). She resists accepting these standpoints, claiming that her Boy is still Boy and innocent, an angel rather than a Monster. However, in Scene 19, Hester begins to gradually accept that her son has changed and that he is not an angel any more. First, she states, “My mark looks like a heart. His looked horrid. Like a gash” (p. 209), implicitly claiming that she has preserved her identity, while her son has failed to do so, although a while before she had said, “He woulda hated what his mother has become” (p. 207). Then, she becomes hesitant to believe that her Boy has become Monster. She says, “Hes not. He couldn’t be. But what if he is. Monster. He isn’t. But he could be. Although hes not” (p. 216). Since Hester’s idea has been grounded on physical identification, it is hard for her to understand that people have fluid identities, and that different factors can work to change them at different stages of their lives. However, she eventually realizes this, which leads her to rebuke her son by saying, “You used to be so good. What happened?” (p. 218). Here, we can see a transition from her initial idea of a fixed absolute identity to a perception of fluid identities.

Furthermore, the ironic use of Freedom Fund organization criticizes the existing disorder in the prison system. This is revealed in Freedom Fund Lady’s words: “His files here somewhere. Not to worry. We never lose anything. Of course you could just make a payment get a receipt and I could enter it all into his file at a later time” (p. 131). When Freedom Fund Lady finds that Hester is to pay extra money, she continues, “Paying extra! Wonderful. ‘Freedom Aint Free!’ Glad you understand our motto, Mrs. Smith” (p. 131). The motto “Freedom Aint Free” is one of the paradoxes that FA highlights. In a number of capitalist societies and in some cases, convicts have the option to either go to jail or pay fine in exchange for their imprisonment term, and accordingly the convicts who have the financial means pay the fine as compensation and buy their imprisonment rather than being jailed. This encourages the haves to commit crimes, while the have-nots have to stay in prisons even for trivial crimes. The “Freedom Fund” as an ironic phrase signifies that prisoners need to pay for their freedom, and if they are unable to pay for their freedom, they have to endure imprisonment. As soon as Freedom Fund Lady finds that Hester is ready to pay extra, she calls Hester Mrs. Smith instead of “babykiller.” However, when Hester asks to meet with her son or in her terms “to picnic” with him, she responds, “Picnic. Picnic. Picnic. Yr son won’t be up for a picnic any time soon. His picnic price has doubled” (p. 134). This short exchange indicates how money can improve someone’s position in a capitalist society.

Like the Freedom Fund organization, Hunters spare no efforts to chase and seize the runaway convicts for their own interests. They revisit their history of brutality and retell how they unleash their trained dogs to catch the convicts and bite them for special prizes. They depict how they put hot coals on the convicts’ chests and joyfully describe how the convicts scream. In Scene 11, for example, Hunters describe one of their inhumane and cruel techniques, called “runthrough,” which creates a lot of fun for them as follows:

Third Hunter

The best thing to do to a convict when you catch him. It gets the loudest screams.

First Hunter

You get a hot iron rod and run it up his bottom and out his throat.

Third Hunter

Then you stick the rod in the ground and let him wiggle on the stick. (p. 173)

Hunters’ attitude in treating runaway convicts is ruthless and inhumane, and as the play reveals, even Butcher refuses to treat cattle in such an inhumane manner, and as he claims, he reads some anatomy books to acquire knowledge about animals in order to learn some techniques to reduce the suffering of cattle at the time of slaughter.

The way Hunters describe their past experiences sicken and traumatize readers or audiences. Hunters’ attitude is so merciless that Monster prefers to die rather than be hunted by them. As Monster says to his mother,

When they catch me they’ll hurt me. Run me through and plant me in yr front yard so you can hear me scream [. . .] I heard once how they cut one guys balls off and let him watch the dogs eat them and then they cut his fingers off and the dogs ate those and he had to watch. His fingers and then his toes then his feet then his hands. (pp. 218, 219)

These words make Hester undecidable, and after a long Spell, she finally slits her son’s throat. This is a paradoxical scene, since Hester’s dream has been to free her son or at least have a “picnic” with him. Meanwhile, readers or audiences are not relieved when they see that Hunters claim Monster’s still-warm dead body. As they say, “Hes still warm. Hes ours by rights, gal. Give him up” (p. 220). Hunters think of themselves as exclusive owners of runaway prisoners. It is paradoxical that Hunters accuse Hester for being a “babykiller,” while they regard their violent tortures of runaway prisoners as justified. Parks’s play directs attention to the worn-out morality and double standards that have concentrated on trivial issues, while leaving out the major issues that have moved the societies toward immorality and injustice.

Concluding Remarks

In FA, Parks builds upon the foundation of a number of literary works to recall the long history of oppression and critique a number of social, political, cultural, and economic problems that have afflicted the lives of fragile members of society, especially African American women. The invention of an “otherworldly” setting along with the idea of fluid race as well as the employment of a number of postmodern techniques, as discussed, helps the playwright to expand the domain of her play and provide it with an infinite and indefinite nature. These features work to make the play a prism that represents multiple different perspectives, while creating incredulity toward the patriarchal and hierarchal capitalist societies and their dominant ideologies that have repressed their disempowered members.

Furthermore, the play mixes story and history with each other to refashion African American histories and to deal with some of the concerns of African Americans through contesting the social, economic, and political constructions of the dominant systems. Likewise, the play mixes horror and humor together in order to open readers’ and audiences’ eyes to social ills—unseen under the gilded layers of the dominant systems. This is an attempt to liberate these marginalized people from the shackles of the past and the dogmas of the present.

Parks also stresses the high value of education and literacy as a main way to elevate the position of African Americans. Moreover, the creation of TALK can be considered as an attempt to unify and empower women around the axis of gender, so as to challenge the dominant discourse. TALK reminds women of their identities and common roots in order to resist and disrupt the dominant discourse. Parks’s dramatic strategy of inventing a particular language for women emphasizes her critical message: Women have power to create a language and discourse of their own so as to challenge the discourse of malestream.

The playful title of this chapter, followed by a quotation from Lorraine Hansberry, signifies that money is the backbone of Capitalism. It determines the positions of people and contributes to enhance the power of haves and improve their welfare. In contrast, due to their poverty, have-nots suffer from social and class inequalities, and as seen in FA, even a petty mistake may result in their punishment, which can then be compensated with money. However, since the have-nots do not have the required means to pay for their freedom, like Monster and Hester, they are in debt, and if they are alive, they should spend their life in prison. But if one day they decide to release themselves from the Debt/Alive bond, they are wanted, and thus death is cast on them.