New Writing

An excerpt from Waiting for Giovanni a play in two acts by Jewelle Gomez, in collaboration with Harry Waters, Jr.

The first reading of the play took place at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco on March 19, 2008. Thank you to the theatre professionals who gave their time to that moment: Cedric Brown, David Jacobs, Lynn Johnson and CKelly Wright. As well as to Deborah Cullinan and to Sean San Jose for laughing in the dark.

The play takes place in the mind of the author, James Baldwin, just before the publication of his groundbreaking novel of ‘homosexual’ love and betrayal, Giovanni’s Room (1956). Although he’s been told the book will ruin his career as a writer and his influence as a Black activist Baldwin sees the book through to completion with his own trepidations about how it will be received. The advent of this momentous publication is seen through the eyes of the writer who could believe in his brilliance but not his own beauty.

End of Act 1 Scene 8

Jimmy, restless and saddened by his lover, Luc’s angry departure, moves to touch his stacks of books and abandoned typewriter. Then he turns to audience.

Jimmy: (angry) Of these matters, they say I write with unusual candor!
‘Of these matters!’ What way is that to talk about love….desire? I
suppose it’s no surprise that some can’t speak of these matters with or
without candor.

Somewhere in the muck and mire, before we rose up to stand on our
hind legs, desire devolved from a bright rose capable of lighting the dense
night and became a deep wound to be hidden behind Venetian blinds.
It’s not just my desire---but mine does stand in for them all. For yours. For that unspeakable desire between your parents! (he laughs) That bud growing within your own child. Too fearsome to speak of, certainly!

Desire is bright and dark, slickly slippery and aridly hot.
When I look at Luc what do I see? The bright and the dark. In
my hands he feels like a pulsing sun, his life moves through me like
photosynthesis. A complex chemical reaction that sharpens my soul,
brings me into focus.

Then he’s like a sweet butter, soft and intimate, making me want to slather
him on crusty bread. I suppose that makes me a baguette.

I’m not fooled by his softness. He is as resolute as the walls of his family
fortress. He insists I won’t be let in. I’m determined I won’t be left on the
far side of the moat. I could turn away but…

(He gazes toward the place where Luc exited)

Nobody knows why these things happen as they do, so why do
some insist they can codify and legitimize something that is meant to be
unwieldy. Desire is a mystery.

Just as nobody knows why men like….my other brothers
insist on their right to stifle that pulsing life I treasure. I can’t be sure if
it’s simply that they must protest in that Shakespearean way…too much.
Or have their senses been perverted by the way their manhood was
brutalized. Slavery, Jim Crow, night shift jobs.

But haven’t I too been beside them---bent, almost broken? Apparently
not. I must have missed that century and arrived a fully formed flower of
desire, disconnected from their struggle, from my manhood. If they are to
be believed. And Luc inflames them even further. (slyly) Perhaps it’s that
he speaks French.

With others, the young dark men I meet in bars and cafes, I
wonder who they represent…other than the obvious…the overtly
sexual…the simplification of life’s energy to its most raw form.
They don’t fight me as Luc does, or as do the Brother/men.
When I look into their eyes, when I talk to them like a book,
what am I seeing? Myself? Am I loving myself when I feel
their sweat mingle with my own?

I’m not an expert on desire, Black or any other type, but I do know that
one legacy of slavery is a deep fear of desire. The death of Emmett Till
should tell us that if nothing lese. So frightened were those white men
that a mere boy might dare to express sexual desire for a white woman,
they had to torture and murder him. So afraid of life…they had to crush
it in a most awful way.

This is what the Brother/men wish would happen with me I think. Beaten to a pulpy mass, flesh torn by barbed wire and weighted in the mud of a dark river, hidden from sight.

But it’s them who are in a dark river. They are in over their heads…afraid of…life. Of my life!

When his hand touches me, that dark boy, when his eyes meet mine,
sweat pours forth and floods those dry river beds of desire.
How dare anyone try to keep us from the water!

***