WW: How did news of this masquerader become a play – was he really killed?

EL: I had gone to see my first production of Antigone with a childhood friend, and painter/poet, Hugh Burton. We saw a remarkable actor in New York named Arthur Burkhardt, best known for his portrayal of Frederick Douglass. What left an indelible impression on me was Creon’s choices. Weeks after, when I was confronted with the purported death of my favorite childhood masquerader, I felt a thread had been broken. I was desperate to record his life - as my cultural life. Many years later, after writing the play, I learned that it was another masquerader, Pharoah, who had been set on fire! That’s the version of the play now under production. Several other masqueraders were set afire over the years, and in several islands, the tradition was suspended over these tragic events.

WW: So, the term, "killing"- as supposed to, "the death of " –is pretty discriminating in the title of your play.

EL: Absolutely! At first, imagining how this masquerader had been killed, caused a sharp pain of separation and finality. But, something else was signified beyond the fact that a great tradition of my childhood had been desecrated. A paradox had occurred: it occurred to me that his death was not as haunting as was the meaning of his life: until his death, the gradual marginality of his life’s work had been accepted as inevitable. Set aflame, the faster he ran, the faster he was consumed.

So I felt that underscoring the killing, the slow process of this masquerader’s marginality, of this man’s presence - this dying tradition – particularly as I then felt it, being cut off from my own indigenous cultural pageants – that play was my statement. But, too, the frustration of learning of his demise, someone so vital, through word-of-mouth accounts; his death was something overheard at functions, gatherings – these shards of one’s past, one’s identity were, I realized, a terrible confrontation for which no one had prepared me.

On another level, Arthur Sixteen’s legacy: roaming from village to village, from village to town represents an internal exile, within a country and within oneself. Just as swiftly as we had been tutored to run off, Arthur Sixteen’s stewardship had been consumed by our narcissism for "a better life".

I began to understand this in my own life, my own circumstances, and in my own region’s literature, and the collective history and literature of my hemisphere. So, the exiled "I" one hears portrayed in the play’s verse, contrasted with the story-tellers’ prose of the masquerader’s ‘deep’ cultural life, is a struggle between the first person "I" and the Second Person plural "You". [I have posted a more critical paper, Bulls and Allusions: Text and Performance in the play: The Killing of Arthur Sixteen]. 

WW: How does an artist gestate so complex a series of events?

EL: Well, you are inevitably prepared for it, really. Your particular circumstances, your privileges, your opportunities, your failures, your misfortunes sensitizes your existence. This loss of Arthur Sixteen, has embodied all my losses; it is true. Then, however, given my growing awareness about my heritage, it also underscored my prideful identity. So, I wrote the play as part of a trilogy, Three for the Homeland.

WW: Is this earlier version of the play - the same one that you are producing?

EL: More or less. Visiting the cemetery in Antigua some fifteen years after I wrote the original play, on what I perceived was a meaningful pilgrimage, I learned from the cemetery workers that Arthur Sixteen was still alive. They assured me that this mistaken identity was a typical experience among immigrants who had left for some time. But, the original play, written in Harlem, was undoubtedly shaped by the social and political life of Antigua of the 1970s. I was also living the political consciousness of the African Americans’ struggle, coupled with the emergence of Caribbean Nationalism. It was a tempest I can only now decipher.

For instance, I remember meeting an African American female sculptor, Valerie Maynard, my first day in Harlem. The Studio Museum of Harlem was just starting its Artist Residence program. She introduced me to Leroi Clarke from Trinidad. Later, Valerie became the first curator of the African sculptural arts collection at The Reichhold Center for the Performing Arts. During that first residence in Harlem, I also met a Studio Museum of Harlem intern, the late Crucian artist Charles Abramson. He was a beautiful mentor: father, teacher, sculptor, painter, actor, priest. [There is a line in my play for him: "When we heard of your death, we believed it! For, we see in it the hope of another."]

Continue>