Content area
Full Text
Colorism (skin color prejudice) among African Americans is an insidious remnant of the traumas of American slavery. To possess bodily features that have been reviled in the past and continue to be denigrated in the present poses enormous challenges to the self-identity of African Americans. Playwright Dael Orlandersmith (1959) tackled this painful, repressed psychological blight in the African American community in her play Yellowman, which was first produced in 2002 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. Even as the play elevated Orlandersmith from a solo writer/performer to the rank of Pulitzer Prize playwright finalist, Yellowman opened deeply debilitating wounds within some African American audience members as she vibrantly portrayed the effects of color, body, and hair prejudice through the identity of a young African American woman and man growing up in South Carolina in the 1960s.
Although Orlandersmith herself was born and raised in East Harlem, her mother's family was from South Carolina. It was during summer visits there that she became aware of a local family "that used to interbreed to keep the light skin going." She insisted, however, that Yellowman is only "very, very loosely based" upon that family (Orlandersmith, "A Voice"). Indeed, in writing Yellowman, Orlandersmith's goal certainly was not to create a treatise on the sociological effects of colorism. Instead, using color prejudice as a dramatic device, she, "wanted to write a Greek tragedy of sorts, a tale in which patricide is nearly inevitable" (Miller 29). While patricide is, indeed, the final outcome of this two-actor tragedy, the wrenching intraracial prejudice, particularly colorism, is more than a backdrop; it is a pervasive driving engine. As theatre scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood states: "Yellowman is a poetic meditation on how color and vision are wedded to memory and trauma through a colorist paradigm of black self-loathing" (83). In this essay, I contend that through her drama, Orlandersmith not only poignantly documents the deep-seated existence of color prejudice among African Americans, but she also foregrounds the manner in which this intraracial racism/classism, with its concomitant and ongoing trauma, has effectively undermined the African American community and its long-held dream of solidarity.
Yellowman is a coming-of-age tragedy about a young full-bodied darker-skinned girl, Alma, and her lean, light-skinned companion and future lover, Eugene...