FELIX (FIL) FRASER, C.M.
The best known song from the musical Show Boat, "Old Man River," has a line which everybody knows:
Tote that barge
Lift that bale
Get a little drunk
and you land in jail
When I read the title, Showing Grit: Show Boating North of the 44th Parallel, I imagined Paul Robeson singing the song as
Show a little grit
and you land in jail.
Even before I came to Philip's reference to the fact that, in his famous recording, Robeson had done exactly that. I heard the recording, of course, in my long ago youth. But I had forgotten why it had raised such powerful waves of pride and defiance. Showing Grit, published by Poui Publications of Toronto, is the second, and updated, edition of M. Nourbese Philip's book attacking the mounting of the musical Show Boat in Metropolitan Toronto.
The book is a full frontal attack on the production as "an example writ large of cultural appropriation and theft." Show Boat will, argues Nourbese Philip, exacerbate the pain and suffering for African Canadians who are still struggling to overcome stereotypes so deeply embedded in things like Show Boat that they remain invisible to many observers.
Nourbese Philip is one of those aggressive, in-your-face, commentators who make too many waves for many people. She was among the leaders of a movement which attacked the Royal Ontario Museum's Into the Heart of Africa exhibit. Her 1992 book, Frontiers, is a forceful attack on racism in all of its guises.
She spits at racism like a verbal AK-47. There is, for her, no middle ground. She can outrage and frustrate those who seek compromise for its own sake, because her arguments are so penetrating, her logic so unshakable, that it is impossible to dismiss her.
Her analysis of the racism inherent in Show Boat is based on insights that will startle some readers.
First, and central to both the ROM and Show Boat disputes, in Nourbese Philip's words, is "the issue of who had the power to make images." She argues that Show Boat, throughout its long history, has portrayed Blacks as exotic creatures at the same time as it has demeaned them.
Her insight, often nearly carried away by her passion, is, at other times, almost surgical. The unraveling of the stereotypical image is always discomforting for the mainstream, and so the dominant culture fights back. It fights back by resisting social changes such as employment equity; it fights back by raising the spectre of political correctness and so trivializing the very real pain of people struggling to redefine themselves; it fights back by bringing to the fore and rearticulating the very stereotypes that have been used to manage groups like Blacks; it fights back by saying these representations are "historically accurate" and therefore true.
The author makes the point that Show Boat has always been intended for a white audience, never for Blacks. It uses Blacks as "ethnic flavour; as makers of entertainment and pleasure; [so] that they [the white audiences] need not concern themselves with the real and root causes of injustices Blacks face in Canadian society." For her, "Show Boat is intended to make whites feel good about themselves; those who are lulled by this must bear some responsibility for the outcome of this disastrous exercise in insensitivity and racism, because the wave of change, the heartfelt and deep urge to live lives of dignity will not die."
Rage drives this book. And yet Nourbese Philip's anger is legitimate. The pain that she and many others feel is real-all the more so because it's impossible to alter its root cause; the arrogant inhumanity that allowed Europeans and Americans of the day to convince themselves that trading in the flesh of Black Africans could be justified. In all of history no people have been so massively ripped from their roots, so brutally transplanted into alien soil. Showing Grit's accounting of how Blacks came to the Americas is required reading for anyone who wants to discuss the issue seriously.
We can't blame people for what their ancestors have done, can we? But we do have to deal with the still all too present residue of the behaviour and attitudes that created the African Diaspora. And, for people like Nourbese Philip, it is imperative to attack the modem symbols of the relegation of Africans to less-than-fully-human status-symbols like Into the Heart of Darkness and Show Boat.
It is as a symbol of still festering wounds that Showing Grit rails against Show Boat; wounds that are being opened up again in multicultural Toronto, where, for Blacks, the fight for dignity is still far from having been won.
We cannot change the past. And there is no rational room here, as Nelson Mandela understands, for getting even, for extracting a pound of flesh. His call is for reconciliation, not revenge. But, at the end of the day, reconciliation demands the acknowledgement of past horrors.
It should not be too much to acknowledge that for many Canadians Show Boat is not a glorious musical about a time that no longer exists, but a painful reminder of echoes which still reverberate, and wounds which have not yet healed.
Showing Grit will be a difficult book for many readers. But its discussion represents an essential bench mark in the dialogue of reconciliation.