“Love trumps grief.. May mothers love be awakening and love trumps grief…” Love Balm for My SpiritChild
I sat in the darkness at the Brava theatre watching the play Love Balm for My SpiritChild holding parts of my heart in my hand. My first reaction to the poetry, art and talk-story of mamas who have lost their children to police terror like Oscar Grant and Kenneth Harding Jr was to cry and then to scream and then to run, but then finally, to just be silent.
Ray of sunshine so we don’t fear the night…Love Balm for My SpiritChild
I realized I didn’t need to scream or cry or run because the play was a beautiful poem of prayers, screams and voices that collectively held the unheard memories and unfelt tears and un-known stories of thousands of mamaz like me and my sister comrades at POOR Magazine who have lost their babies to the wite-supremacist lie of security and state-sponsored violence we are all taught to follow in amerikkka.
“I began thinking of this production when I went to Rawanda and witnessed their way of dealing with the genocide,” The visionary creator of the production Arielle Brown spoke to the audience along with the cast and the amazing Uncle Bobby (Cephus Johnson-Oscar Grant’s Uncle) at a post-production talk-back with the audience.
When Arielle spoke about the indigenous practices implemented in Rawanda when the country realized they needed to move outside the standard colonial court system to process the brutal genocide of the mid-1990’s when an estimated million peoples were killed, it was a flash for me. All of us police terrorized, incarcerated, bordered, profiled and criminalized family members who make up POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE instituted a no Po’Lice calls mandate since our inception in 1996 and our model for this was the same ancient community justice implemented in Rawanda because we knew that the kangaroo kkkourt system of no-justice and police abuse was one of the systems us poor and landless peoples were trying to move off of.
The play which has been work-shopped under the fine directorial leadership of Edriss Cooper Anifowoshe since its original version is tight, fast and smooth like a prose poem with dance or what they call a choreo-play, with the beautiful element of spiritchild-dance by Dawon Davis, choregraphed by the mad skills having choreagrapher Jose Navarette. Every move by Davis was a prayer, a whisper, a painting, a poem worked in tandem with the mamaz All the actors are seamless, walking through the play with the power that mama revolutionaries like Ayodele Nzinga and Cat Brooks carry into protests everyday against the murder of our children.
There is so much revolutionary, urgently needed medicine in this play. It was as much about healing through story-telling, healing through screaming, healing through voice-bringing, healing through consciousness building not only for all the mamaz, daddies, uncles, aunties, friends and communities who have lost their babies to war, violence, po’lice violence but to all the peoples who don’t think they have to care, who have long ago given up and responsibility for their collective role in this violence.
Every year POOR Magazine re-ports and sup-ports alongside destraught families and revolutionary mamaz and daddyz like Mesha Irizarry, Denika Chatman, Anita Willis and Uncle Bobby to fight, give voice to and scream for justice for their children. This play is a collective response of power beyond anything we could ever do and should be witnessed by all families who have lost their children, but also by teachers who call security guards on our black, brown and poor children, by people who institute racist neighborhood watch programs and politricksters who create legislations like gang injunctions and stop and frisk, by judges who ajudicate against our poor, back and brown bodies, by war-mongering peoples who think bombing anywhere in the world is ok and finally, even the gangsters in blue (police) themselves who have long ago become machines for the state and lost their humanity/logic in the great vortex of amerikkkan in-justice
And like Ayodele Nzinga said in the talk-back which spoke volumes about the resistance of this play, “Don’t let the powers invested in our destruction win.” Ase!
Love Balm for My SpiritChild plays at the Brava theatre through July 20th – Run, don’t walk to see this medicine. To purchase tickets on-line go to this link