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Reading Mohammed ben Abdallah’s The Slaves and Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots as Re-Visionary Historical Dramas

Dannabang Kuwabong

Abstract

This paper is a comparative reading of Indigenous Canadian and Ghanaian drama as acts of faithful witnessing that function as resistance to colonial histories of erasures of colonized peoples in Ghana and North America. I contemplate that while Mojica’s play provides the ritual space to testify against multiple coloniality layered in the histories of slavery, genocide, land dispossession, and the cultural erasure committed against Indigenous peoples of Canada, Mohamed Ben Abdallah’s plays stage a recall of the traumatic history of the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Saharan slave trades, genocides, multiple dislocations, cultural deracination, and identity erasures that continue to haunt the people of West Africa. The study explores postcolonial dramaturgical and theatrical elements such as dance, storytelling, music, and rituals in Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots and The Slaves.

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1I first became interested in exploring ideological and historical commonalities and differences between Ghanaian and Native American literature after reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony in the 1990s. The poetic section, “Note on Bear People and Witches” (132-138) showed Silko’s phantasmagoric narrative witnessing to the traumatic colonial experience brought upon Native Americans by Europeans as founded on evil witchcraft. Silko refuses to blame the destructive history of European conquests across the world on white people. She blames her people’s suffering on a global alliance of evil witchcraft (132-133). Using traditional Native American storytelling traditions, Silko lets us know that the story originates from the three female creators of the universe, “T’sis’tsi’nako, Thought Woman,” “the spider” and her sisters “Nau’ts’ity and I’tcts’ity’I, but now remembered and retold by Betonie, the healer and memory keeper of the Navajo people. Betonie’s re-visionary history is designed to attest to the healing nature of ancestral stories. Silko’s poem is not isolated from the main narrative of Tayo’s search for healing from his trauma of war, cultural and land dislocation, and racial/ethnic confusion, among other psychoemotional fragmentations suffered by Native Americans in post-Columbian America. This narrative trajectory made me realize some historical, narrative, and cultural undercurrents between her novel, Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, and Abdallah’s The Witch of Mopti, The Alien King, Land of a Million Magicians, and The Fall of Kumbi.

2This essay is a comparative reading of Ghanaian dramatist Mohammed ben Abdallah’s The Slaves/The Slaves Revisited (1989) and Guna and Rappahannock playwright and artist Monique Mojica’s first play, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991). I argue that the two playwrights revisit the histories of the traumatic encounters of their peoples with Europeans since the 15th century. I demonstrate how the theme of genocide runs through the two plays. In The Slaves and Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, I argue that Abdallah and Mojica revisit the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocidal conquest of the Americas, respectively, both histories having been monumentalized by the numerous slave forts and castles dotting the coast of Ghana, and the Native Reservations set up by the European conquerors for surviving Native North Americans. I reveal how both plays expose and lament the lingering destructive psychosocial and economic effects of these events on Africans and Native North Americans, and contend that both Abdallah and Mojica engage this re-visionary stance to reveal these historical wounds and begin a journey to healing. Sheetala Bhat, in a recent review article, “Watching the (Re)calling of a Princess on Stage: On I Call myself Princess and Bearing Witness to Indigenous Histories through the Fantastic in Theatre” (47), poses the following questions: “Can theatre performances mediate cross-worldly efforts of bearing witness to Indigenous history? How does the fantastic in performance create an ethical space of engagement for non-Indigenous audience members?” (47). Bhat’s questions, though dealing with North American Native drama/theater, provide a launch pad for a reading of the two selected plays by Abdallah and Mojica. As Bhat claims, the engagement of “fantastic elements” as dramaturgic devices induces audience self-reflection, thereby creating an atmosphere of an “eternal present” (47) and evoking serious engagements “with Indigenous knowledge and history for [both local and] non-Indigenous audience members” (47). While the three plays (Mojica’s and the two versions of Abdallah’s) in this study differ in cultural, geographical, and historical locations, Bhat asserts that “the fantastic calls for a shift in the critical gaze away from the object of viewing to the viewers as they bear witness to the play. The fantastic in the play not only resists victimization and patronization of Indigenous artists but also becomes a locus of celebration of solidarity of Indigenous artists across nations, generations, time, and gender” (48), and this statement can be applied to the drama of Mohammed ben Abdallah. Abdallah is considered a leading dramatist of his country and his generation. His plays include The Trial of Malam Ilya (1987), The Verdict of the Cobra (1987), The Alien King (1987), The Slaves (1989), The Fall of Kumbi (1989), The Witch of Mopti (1989), Land of A Million Magicians (1993), Song of the Pharaoh (2022), and two children’s plays, Ananse and the Rain God (1989) and Ananse and the Golden Drum (1994). His vision for an “authentic African theatre” is of a pan-African theatrical aesthetic, but given impetus by indigenous traditions and culture as with Ghanaian drama produced by his compatriots including Efua Sutherland, Asiedu Yirenkyi, Joe de Graft, Ama Ata Aidoo, and other pioneering dramatists of Ghana (Gibbs 1344, Asiedu 367). Inspired by his membership of a drama group formed by James Gibbs called the Legon 7, which he joined in the late 1960s while teaching at the University of Ghana School of Music and Drama, Abdallah established the Legon Road Theatre. Both groups allowed room for experimenting with new theater and ideas on a national scene dominated by Shakespeare. He formed Abibigromma, originally a University of Ghana resident theater group which was later moved to the National Theatre built in the 1980s on his initiative.

3Similarly, Mojica’s passion for developing Indigenous theater in North America is reflected in her role as artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theater company from 1983-1985. She is currently the artistic director of Chocolate Woman Collective, which comprises Indigenous artists, artist/scholars and their collaborators. Along with Jani Lauzon and Michelle St. John, Mojica co-founded Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble which produced the plays The Scrubbing Project and The Tripple Truth. She is co-editor of Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English with Ric Knowles. Untiring in her efforts to promote Indigenous Canadian theater, she helped launch Canada’s National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre, appearing in its premiere play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, written by Metis-Dene playwright Marie Clements. Her published work includes Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991), Birdwoman and the Suffragettes (1991), and Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milkyway: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance (2023).

4Abdallah’s The Slaves and The Slaves Revisited (TS or TSR)) revisits the historical links between the traumatic histories of the encounters between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (PPBS) dramatizes the historical fragmentations and displacements of Native peoples caused by European colonization of North America. Though set in different locations, Ghana/West Africa/Africa and North and South Americas, the two plays share certain historical, gender, and social issues in their search for meaning to what happened since contact with European civilizations in the 1500s. The questions that arise in both plays are how Europe enslaved tribal peoples, whom to blame, and how they can liberate themselves from the shackles of colonialism. Both plays reveal unsettling facts that Africans and Native Americans were also involved in the tragedies of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Thus, a comparative reading of TS (1989) and/or TSR (2005) with PPBS (1991) becomes an act of witnessing the historical traumas and their lingering effects endured by both Africans and Native Americans. I demonstrate certain similarities and differences in the two playwrights’ approaches to these issues.

5In the preface to The Trial of Mallam Ilya and Other Plays, Mohammed ben Abdallah states that the collection “represents both my development as a playwright in philosophy, technique, and style; and influences that shaped and directed the course of this development” (i). The developing aesthetic as a playwright is located in the structural frames of “traditional story-telling and the technique of Africa's revered Griots ... a step forward in what for me is a search for an authentic `African Theatre'” (i). Abdallah’s position is echoed in Jesse Weaver Shipley’s assertion in Storyteller as Time-traveler in Mohammed ben Abdallah’s Song of the Pharaoh. Multimedia avant-garde theatre in Ghana” (The Routledge Companion to Scenography), that Abdallah engages the various African performance techniques by codifying “the improvisational aspects of storytelling and popular theatre traditions through spatial ordering, narration techniques, and embedding multiple genres in a performance” (Ch. 20). Abdallah, observes Shipley, subsequently generates “theatrical time-space shaped around a storytelling idiom” and “reflects debates about historical time” (Chap 20). Gibbs in his brief “History of Theatre in Ghana” has also asserted that “The (ever-changing) elements that have contributed to the development of a distinctive theatre tradition in Ghana include dances, rhetorical forms, symbols, and symbolic acts” (1344), all of which are guided and influenced by Ghanaian folklore and storytelling traditions. In the Ghanaian context as well as in other cultures in Africa, the archetypal figure represented in folk stories is an animal, an insect, a legendary human, or a spirit, sometimes imbued with certain values worthy of emulation by the community. For example, a predominant folklore character that fits this definition of a culture hero is the spider, popularly known as Kweku Anansi (in the southern part of Ghana) and Badare in the north west of Ghana. Other ethnicities have the hare or the turtle, among others, as their culture heroes. Gibbs’s conclusions could easily have been applied to Native American drama where the trickster figure plays dynamic roles in the cultural representation of Native American issues through theater.

6Likewise, Mojica, in a conversation with Amy Gotlieb, reveals how “in the early ’80s, there what was a gathering called The Indigenous Peoples Theatre Celebration ... it was quite a struggle for us to find interest, support—ways to create organic work. You know what these days is called “devised theatre” right, and we didn’t even use that term then. It was just that how do we tell those stories in an embodied and organic and physical way?” (“Transcript: Monique Mojica: reclaiming Indigenous history and culture through theatre”, 2018). Mojica reiterates: “I’ve always been about, yes our stories are—I’ve never been really interested in taking the same form and stylistics and dropping in Native content. It just – I think there are people who can do that if they want to do that; there should be all kinds of Indigenous theatre .... I’m excited about changing the grounding of the form” (2018). Both Abdallah and Mojica share a deep passion for indigenous Ghanaian and Native American ways of telling their histories.

So, I think our literary structures are different. Our story narratives are different. So looking at how do we tell a story; how do we stand, how do we walk, how do we dance, how do we sing? How do we stand to orate, how do we show respect? And it causes all kinds of complications in terms of how conventional theatre is produced because well, the first thing it causes is a big problem about duration. And if we are talking about things like taking story narratives from mound sites and earthworks, well duration we’re talking thousands of years. The two that are in—well one—one of the mounds that’s in Magwood Park here in Toronto is 8,000 years old. Seven or eight—give or take a thousand years—it’s been there a long time. (2018)

7There are parallel elements between Abdallah’s TS/TSR and Mojica’s PPBS in their dramatic representations of the historical trauma endured by Africans and Native Americans. These elements include music, dance, storytelling, audience participation, and politics that transcend ethnic and national boundaries. Unlike earlier Ghanaian dramatists, Abdallah’s plays transcend ethnic and national boundaries to dramatize the histories of Ghana and Africa (Gibbs 1344), probably drawing inspiration from his pan-West African and plural-cultural roots. Abdallah challenges the absence of the history of the slave trade in Ghanaian school curricula. When the subject is mentioned, the focus is on how powerful West African empires such as Asante, Mande, Yoruba, and Dahomey were, even though they participated fully in the slave trade, aided by a regular supply of firearms from the European forts to organize raids for slaves in weaker communities.

8Abdallah is touted for his excellence as a playwright, director, and visionary in Ghanaian theatre, [and] has been hailed as “A maestro in theatre arts and cultural renaissance” (Tigo 2023). His dramatic oeuvre for TS/TSR was opened by Amiri Baraka’s historical pageant, Slave Ship (1967) as stated by Perry (1997), and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa (1970). Anowa was the first to problematize the role of Ghanaians in the slave trade at the height of the Asante empire. But the play focuses on the struggle of a childless couple, and though they posit larger moral questions about the link of their wealth to the slave trade, they never question the Asante Kingdom’s involvement in it. Slave Ship evades any suggestion that Africans could have been involved in the slave trade. TS/TSR rejects this omission and challenges both African diaspora communities and Ghanaians to revisit the history. Other plays and drama productions similar to The Slaves were staged at the turn of the 20th century in Ghana. Nii Yartey’s Musu: The Saga of the Slaves (1997), Efo Kojo Mawugbe’s The Truth (1997) and Jackson Davis’s The Slaves of West Africa (1997) all focused on showcasing the horrors of the slave trade to Ghanaian audiences from less tilted perspectives that seek to exonerate Africans from any guilt. More recently, novels such as Manu Herbstein’s Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2000) and Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Hundred Wells of Salaga (2018) have drawn attention to the importance of including Ghana’s Northern savannah regions in the narrative of the slave trade in the country.

9Princess and The Slaves present what in Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins articulate as “anthropomorphic narratives” of the pre­ and post-intervention periods in Mesoamerica and West Africa (49-50). To Gilbert and Tompkins, such drama challenges and refutes “singular all-encompassing identities ... [to] dismantle the maelstrom of images that have defined the [African and] Indian” (49-50) through dominant Eurocentric epistemologies. Mojica challenges the negative perceptions of Native American women in Eurocentric and patriarchal historical narratives presented as symptomatic of all Native women. Such narratives evade the facts of how Native girls were often gifted as sex objects to European conquistadores by the local caciques (PPBS 22-23). This perspective aligns with revisionist history.

10Re-vision is the “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (Rich 1982). Re-visionary dramas by Mojica and Abdallah transcend theoretical and casual re-interpretations of cultural memory to unravel the dominant European-induced “assumptions in which [they] are drenched,” and function as “radical” and Native American and West African reappraisals of “ how [they] live, how [they] have been living, how [they] have been led to imagine [themselves], how language[s] [of European conquistadores] [have] trapped [them] ... how the very act of naming has been till now a male and [Eurocentric] prerogative, and how [Native American and West Africans] can begin to see, and name-and therefore live—afresh” toward self-knowing identities (Rich 1996).

11Thus, the re-visionary historical challenges staged in the plays are underpinned by Greg Dening’s assertion that “history is not so much fact as performance” (292). Likewise, Dening advocates for a re-visioning of history from multiple angles and not just through a tunnel vision. History must acknowledge not just “the past; [but recognize that] it is the consciousness of the past used for present purposes” (Dening 170). The enactments of the past in The Slaves and Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots demand complementary ritual spaces for the recuperation of haunting histories evoked in the two plays. But to realize the complexity of the haunting and fragmented memories of the past and realign them, it is necessary to create ritual spatial and temporal contact zones for meaningful interpretation of history.

12Though PPBS opens as a beauty pageant, it is conducted through Native ceremonial rituals of invocation and libation of corn. In pouring the libation of corn to the four corners of Mother Earth, and in inviting all the elements of creation to join in, a geomorphologic matrilocality is invoked as the foundation of the Americas on which the play is staged (PPBS 9), which also internationalizes and historicizes Mojica’s characters. Mojica engages what Paula Gunn Allen (31-47) calls the “folkloric techniques of transfigurations and transformations” to dissolve the borders between the worlds of human and nonhuman and intertwine the four worlds of Native American cosmology: spirits, plants, animals, and earth as reflected and refracted in the play’s quadripartite structure. This parallels the four directions of the compass from which Native peoples believe the “four major human races” originated. Mojica borrows this concept from Nahua cosmology which stipulates that the universe has four spheres: the surface earth, the sky, the ancestral world or the area beneath the earth’s surface, and the watery deeps in which live those who drown (Sandstrom 31).

13Abdallah has argued that the central strength of TS/TSR is not just in its theatricality or historical realism but also in the symbolic and ritual space offered by the Elmina Castle, one of Ghana’s most infamous slave forts. The play, he acknowledges, is meant “to provide a confrontation, a dialogue as it were, between the pain and angst of Africa at large, and the Big, White, Stone Monster by the sea ... the slave fort” (Abdallah iii). This dialogue, he admits, is with the silence of the big stone dungeon [The Castle] (iii). In using the slave dungeon as the theatrical space, Abdallah engages in an act of faithful witnessing. As understood by Yomara C Figueroa-Vazquez, faithful witnessing is the ability to perceive the complex relationship between colonial domination and anticolonial resistance, between the sociocultural and psychosomatic effects of the violence caused by European colonization of North America and Africa (69). Drama as faithful witnessing for Abdallah and Mojica transcends any simplistic creation of dramatic spaces for temporary catharsis, or closure of the wounds of colonization and slavery.

14Abdallah insists that TS/TSR does not seek to evade or cover up the unforgivable roles of Africans in the Arab and European trades in Africans, the trans-Saharan and the trans-Atlantic slave trades. He also rejects lazy arguments made by Africans to absolve African participation in European colonial projects in Africa and Africa’s current socioeconomic and political crisis. He stresses that Africans must reposition themselves to recognize and accept the realities of the destructive effects of the “twin abominations [of slavery and colonialism] that continue in new guises” (iv). His plays, he asserts, are crafted to function as the “searchlight on [these dual evils] and keep us reminded of what the African Holocaust has done and continues to do to generations of our people” (iv). By using the historical space of the Elmina Castle dungeon to stage TSR, Abdallah, Woodard claims, personifies the space and hence intensifies and resurrects those traumatic memories of slavery and colonialism. Abdallah compares Elmina Castle to a huge white stone monster by the sea, opening the traumatic memories of the system that terrorized and fractured families, clans, and tribes from the coastal plains, forest, and Sahel zones of West Africa (87).

15The revised play opened with drumming, singing, dancing, and oratorical deliveries, a more intense opening that reflects Ghanaian performance traditions. This invigorating introduction is different from the 1989 published script whose opening portrays a somber atmosphere with the enslaved taking out their bitterness on each other (The Fall of Kumbi and Other Plays 45). The only music in the earlier text is Tunde playing on a bamboo flute. The others are scattered listlessly in the cell, each nursing their traumatized minds “The Old Priest is mumbling to himself. The Man is standing below a high window, his back to the audience, lost in his own thoughts …. They are all chained in various ways; and they are all almost naked, starved and haggard” (45). The anthropomorphic opening shocks the audience to pay attention to the interrogation of the symbol of European power, the White Castle, and the slave trade. But the questions are also reflexive, as they not only direct anger at the Europeans, but also challenge the audience, most Ghanaians and African American visitors, to ponder on the roles of their African ancestors in the slave trade. An essay by Lisa Montgomery Perry (1997) on the audience reception of TS revealed that most Ghanaians’ reactions ranged between unease and outright rejection of the play’s position that Africans were not just victims of the slave trade, but active participants who raided each other and dragged their captives from the slave markets such as the one in Salaga to the forts for sale to white slave merchants.

16Following acrimonious arguments between the characters, the dialogue between The Priest and the Man touches briefly on the central theme of the play, the involvement of Africans in the slave trade, a truth often too painful to confront. Enslaved Africans and their descendants, still reeling from the ancestral trauma, must learn to join forces to liberate themselves from both visible and invisible chains. But before that, the “Seventh Voice” upbraids white people for destroying our religions and “the keepers of our sacred word / And the guardians of our ancient ways” (Ben-Abdallah 8). Man: “Look here, man ... and you, woman. Why do you spend so much of your little energy spitting hatred upon each other? Woman, he didn’t put those chains on your leg. And you, Margan, did she make you a slave?” (TS 57). Priest concurs: “You are right, my son .... The toubab catches you and puts you in the belly of the stone monster with chains around your neck, hands, and legs. Instead of breaking your chains and fighting the toubab, you want to tear each other into pieces” (57). Earlier in the revised version of the play in 2005, Fourth Voice questions why Africans sell their “warriors / To Strange white men from across the seas? (TSR 5). The response is by First Voice in this lamentation: “My people are no longer themselves. / Nations are fighting against nations / To gain your favours and to possess your guns. / Our children dare not go out by night / For fear of being kidnapped by their own kin” (TSR 7). Yet this knowledge is often kept silent in discourses on the trans-Atlantic or trans-Saharan slave trade, where the idea of African involvement is brushed aside.

17The play highlights the educational discussion between the Man and the Priest, Margan, and Segou. The Man asserts that even though the white men may be responsible for buying Africans in Africa, shipping them to the Americas, and selling them to other white people, they are “not guilty of in the first place” (56). This baffles the Priest and urges him to question why white people are not guilty. The conversation is educational in intent as the Man’s series of questions lead to Segou’s account of how he came to be enslaved. Segou starts by describing how the harmony in his village was permanently destroyed by slave raiders at night: “The village burnt down! Men, women, and children in chains. Old men and old women all killed. And the raiders, my brother, they were black men. Black men like you and me” (56). The Man continues educating the group as he delves further into the philosophy of slavery based on racism. The white people, he points out, want slaves, which black people readily supply from among their people. He criticizes how Africans, rather than put a stop to this, “sit here and bite each other, like captive dogs. Why must we not think of a way to free ourselves and stop the slave traffic?” (57). Margan’s response is typical of some African people’s short-sightedness. He believes that by attacking Tomas, the overseer, he will deal with the problem. However, the Man makes him realize that that would not solve the root problem of slavery. The Man says: “No my friends. The white man is not your man. Stop the slave trade at its source. Kill the black man who sells the slaves” (57).

18However, the presence of Ayanda in TSR, which premiered in 2005, complicates the 1989 version of the play. Ayanda expands the history of the slave trade in Africa by drawing attention to the trans-Saharan or Arab slave trade that predates the trans-Atlantic by several centuries. Thus, her contribution changes the debate on who to hold responsible for the slave trade: Africans, Europeans, Arabs, or all three. The Man and Priest temporarily and grudgingly agree with Ayanda, but ultimately silence that proposition and continue to place greater blame on white people for the slave trade. Woodard references James Gibbs’s review of the 2005 version of TS/TSR as a “tougher, more contemporary, political, and, appropriately, discomforting for white audiences because Margan and the Priest warn the battling adversaries, Margan and Naa, not to turn against one another, but to do battle with enslavers who chained them and cast them in the belly of the stone monster” (Woodard 92). That discomfort for white spectators may well stem from that tougher stance among those characters in the 2005 version who, unlike the former version, urge their comrades to battle with Europeans for conducting the Atlantic Slave Trade.

19Music, dance, and possession are used to accentuate the mimed sacrifice of Binta to Ogun, during which her imaginary blood is drunk to seal an oath of silence and serve as spiritual fortification for the Warrior Margan. The disruption of the plan echoes several slave narratives in the Americas in which women slaves often betrayed other slaves to the master. Though Abdallah portrays Naa “as a promiscuous traitor, and an Eve-as-temptress” (Ben-Abdallah iii), equally significant is that she is forced to commit the betrayal to save her life. Women like Ayanda existed during the struggle against slavery, yet many men also betrayed the liberation fronts and, strangely, Abdallah fails to address this issue. It should be recalled that Naa is brutally whipped into confessing the plot, but even in her pain, she is willing to offer her body to the Man. Abdallah’s unsympathetic statement about Naa is therefore unfortunate and appears to justify how, in the play, Naa is condemned and rejected by all. She has a miscarriage, bleeds profusely, collapses, and no one cares. The question is, is this really how a revolution is won? Naa’s misery and Ayanda’s death suggest the tenuous and unstable position African women occupied in slavery. Abdallah sets up untenable positions for women in the play. They must be sacrificial lambs like Binta, scapegoats like Naa, or dead heroines like Ayanda. Meanwhile, the real problem lies with people like the Man, the Old Priest, Segou, Dikko, and Tunde, whose acquiescence to slavery is often understudied.

20PPBS as indicated above, also opens with a pageant that sets the stage for the elimination of the 500 years-European-engendered and imposed negative images of Native American women. Interestingly, the type of music played as Princess-Buttered-On-Both-Sides reveals how, culturally, Native Americans have become artistically confused. She hands out the spiritual gift of corn to the audience while the music is described as a “mixture of Hollywood ‘tom-tom’, the ‘Indian Love Call’, ‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly’ and the ‘Mazola’ commercial” (18). The confusion of cultural directions is epitomized through Princess-Buttered-on-Both Sides, who is uncertain of the cardinal points. Princess-Buttered-On-Both-Sides mimics the distortions of Native dances in Hollywood. The mimicry imitates European mimicry of what they imagine to be Native American dances as portrayed in Hollywood films. She appropriates all the caricatures of Native Americans in Hollywood (19). The play stages Native American rituals of puberty rites that represent various stages in a woman’s life.

21Neumann writes that “the magical caldron or pot is always in the hands of the female Mana figures, the priestess” (288). Briffault corroborates this in his argument that women then are expected to use this gift and position to ensure the survival of the clan, not through dictatorship, but through transformative and regenerative use of that power (490, 513). Ana Castillo (108), among others, reveals the links between a woman’s fertility, potency, and divine power, which are symbolized in menstrual flow, pregnancy, childbirth, and nurturance. Mojica’s articulation of the idea of the woman's womb as an active, powerful, and transformative vessel, seems problematic in Abdallah’s TS, where it is seen as a symbol of betrayal that must be smashed at the end when Naa is seen standing and bleeding alone. Thus, in TS Abdallah, through Naa’s miscarriage, provides no room to contemplate a future for African race survival through miscegenation between white male slavers and African women. By contrast, in Mojica’s play Native Americans are under no threat of erasure caused by slavery, rather it was because Native Americans succumbed to European diseases such as smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, and influenza against which they had no immunity, in addition to the deliberate policies of destroying traditional Native American sources of food such as the buffalo and bison, resulting in widespread starvation and death. Thus, as I argue, Mojica’s play invites Native Americans to see their foremothers’ decision to actively engage in sexual liaisons with white settlers as a wise move that has ensured the survival of their people.

22In speaking about her role in creating Native theater, Mojica argued that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, “it is significant that the healers as artists are [women who are] in the vanguard of this critical time” to create the spaces for Native Americans healing from the lingering ravages of European colonization through cultural and historical recuperation (3). Maria Gonzalez has, however, pointed out why this may not be easy unless men change their views of women through the Madonna/ Whore dichotomy (156) and begin re-translating their veneration of mothers into a veneration of womanhood. In relating this to Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, I align with Sandra Messinger Cypress’s position that “one way to break the stranglehold of a [negative] pattern [of self or group perception] from the past is to repudiate the paradigm of behavior associated with the ... myth[s]” of racial/ethnic/gender/superiority (121).

23Using Native American ceremonial offering of corn to the four spheres of their cosmology: earth, sky, ocean deeps, and the underworld, in combination with the ritual of childbirth and mothering, Mojica demonstrates the historical and cultural roles North American Native women such as Pocahontas and Malinche played to both facilitate and resist the duplicity of early European settlers. Through the adoption of gynocritical feminist ideology, Mojica draws attention to the role played by Christian missionaries, European diseases, and racism to reveal their debilitating effects on Native men as they succumb to alcohol and lose their desire and ability to protect their people. Through the ritualized staging of the birthing process, Mojica revisits North American historical encounters with European settlers. She uses theater to critique the vilification of Native North American women, who often are portrayed as traitors to their people because they had sexual liaisons with European men. Mojica uses the ritual ceremonies of corn and childbirth as tools for matrilineage recovery. The theatricality of PPBS provides a panoramic and creative space and epic time to revisit, reformulate, reinterpret, and re-present the historical struggles of Native American women against erasure. Through PPBS, female historical figures such as Pocahontas and Doña Marina/Malinche, women often defined as La Chingada/Traitor/Whore, Mala Madre, Maldita Malinche, Cabrona, and La Puta, the Whore, or Santa Maria/Santa Marina/Santa Malinche/Dona Marina, La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, or La Virgen Morena to re-vision, educate, and re-present their collective identities and histories (Kuwabong 177).

24The geographical spread of these historical women spans North and South America suggests Mojica’s refusal to differentiate among the various Native American people's struggles for land rights and cultural regeneration. Thus, Helen Gilbert rightly argues that, in PPBS, “Mojica’s mode of historiographic inquiry is premised on a model of pan-Aboriginality that connects Canadian Indigenous rights campaigns and land disputes—expressed most famously by the 1990 Mohawk blockade during the Oka Crisis in Quebec—to the political resurgence of Indigenous groups in other parts of North and South America” (526-527). By implication, Mojica demands reparatory justice for Native Americans through land rights protests. There are similarities between TS/TSR and PPBS and how women are presented in both plays. Binta, Naa, and Ayanda in Abdallah’s play do not occupy very central positions, and in the first edition, Naa is treated the same way as Malinche in PPBS, as a traitor. According to Octavio Paz (86), Mexican perception of Malinche is negative as she is seen as a traitor to her people for being gifted together with nineteen other girls to Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano and his army that subsequently destroyed the Aztec empire. Mexicans refer to Malinche, therefore as, la “Puta, chingada, cabrona, India de miedra, hija de tu mala madre, maldita Malinche," who facilitated the occupation of her nation by opening “her legs to the whole conquering Spaniards” (PPBS 24). This scapegoating of Malinche generates repeated cries: "Malinche ... Malinche? MALINCHE" (22) as she goes on stage to defend herself. She projects herself as “an active, assertive, and mature woman, with a plan of action, in the world as well as a woman” (Cypress 118). Naa’s screams at the end of TS/TSR are heart-rending appeals to her people not to judge her wrongly or summarily condemn her to loneliness: “Tomas, oh! Tomas you promised that no one would be hurt .... He promised Baba. By the gods, I swear he promised” but the Priest also turns his back on her, a sign of spiritual rejection, and finally when all the other captives turn their backs on Naa, and nobody will help her, she loses her pregnancy in a sudden flow of blood (69). This cruel treatment of Naa questions the commitment of Africans to fight the slave trade. If they cannot forgive one another, and if they act rashly, as is the case with Margan, how can they ever succeed against the white man or his lackeys?

25Contrarily, in Princess Pocahontas, Malinche’s screams disturb the patriarchal templates of history aided by Native folk heroes such as Coyote and Grandmother Spider. Often associated with trickery, such characters echo Ghanaian/African folklore trickster heroes that early Ghanaian dramatists explored in their plays. Like Coyote, Malinche challenges her representation as a passive victim in historical narratives. Like Grandmother Spider, she “spins the thread of stories” out of herself to be “reborn into flight” (35). By defining herself as a slave, rebel, and mother, she becomes willful, free, creative, and insightful. Like NAA, she is a slave; she obeys her master yet is still brutalized by him physically and emotionally and abused by her own. Malinche’s womanhood is tied to her motherhood, through which Native drama becomes one of biological, cultural, and linguistic miscegenation, producing the mestizo/a world of Native Mexicans and Spaniards. Malinche’s in-betweenness shows she is neither a traitor to her people nor a whore of the Spaniards, but a strategist that ensured the survival of her Native genealogies.

26Naa is also seen as a traitor to Africans, though they know she was forced to sleep with Tomas, the overseer (TS 47-48). While Binta becomes a symbolic sacrifice to Ogun so that Margan and others can go to war against the African collaborators in the slave trade, and Ayanda dies in the struggle, the negative representation of Naa lingers and pollutes the overall perception of women in the two plays. In both cases, the female, whether as a sacrificial offering for bravery or as a scapegoat of collective rejection, helps ensure racial/ethnic continuities. Malinche in PPBS laments how she and other Aztec females were also given as a peace offering to the invading Spaniards, yet their descendants now denounce their involuntary roles, and thus she is compelled to ask for an explanation for their ignorance: “What is that they say about me? / That I opened my legs to the whole conquering Spanish army? They were already here. I was a gift. Passed on. Handed on. Like so many pounds of gold bullion, dragged out .... Stolen! Bound! Caught! Trapped!” (24). When they tried to escape, they were recaptured, and “it didn’t matter how brave the warriors nor how strong the weapons. [Yet] you say it was me betrayed my people, but it was they betrayed me” (24). Similarly, when PPBS is read against NAA’s treatment in TS/TSR, her scream becomes an echo of all the African women kidnapped and sold to white slavers by black men, as recounted in Segou’s reminisces. It should be asked whether the people Segou talks about include women. In what multiple ways were female captives sexually brutalized in the Castle at Elmina or Cape Coast? Were men whipped, dragged upstairs to the Governor’s room and raped? Or were men equally whipped and raped by overseers, as Naa is treated? How can she then be so cruelly cast aside as a traitor, when she had no protection from her own men?

27While in TS, enslaved African women, Binta, Naa, and Ayanda are all symbolically sacrificed, rejected or killed off in the imagined struggle against enslavement, in PPBS, Native women are centered as the leaders in the revolutionary struggle. Contemporary Woman #1 and #2 and their foremothers share sibling connections between Native men and women. For example, after Contemporary Woman #1 (Mojica 39)Moves to pot of paint upstage right and in one deliberate gesture, paints the center part in her hair,· returns downstage center;” she immediately proclaims that she can now “recognize my lifeline in your face when you bow your head in respect to hold a single kernel of corn in your hand” (39). So even though James Gibbs observes that the positive representation of women in Abdallah’s plays shows a recent awakening among male writers in Africa, this awakening is better developed in Verdict of The Cobra, The Alien King, and The Fall on Kumbi, where women are given greater agency in determining the lives and how such subjectivity would impact their communities.

28These observations should support the argument that Naa in TS, and Pocahontas in PPBS are not traitors against their people, but should be celebrated and venerated as mothers of subversive and radical social transformation against colonialism and sexism. There are vast differences, however, in the way European colonization negatively affected African and Native American communities. While in the case of Africa, colonization was not as genocidal despite the death toll from the slave trade, the genocide which almost erased the populations of Native Americans from the earth (88-89) necessitated new radical maneuvers for racial survival. The responsibility fell heavily on women. However, as Contemporary Woman #1 and #2 re-traverse the Americas seeking empowerment from the spirits and wisdom of their foremothers, they ignorantly, but not maliciously question the actions of these foremothers:Would a real Indian Princess betray her people? If so, how come she is said by male historians to have betrayed her “race/ through sex and / sexual politics” (PPBS 21). The evasive silence that follows from Princess-Buttered-On-Both-Sides invites a critical reexamination of the historical data from which Contemporary Woman #1 and #2 derive their knowledge about Pocahontas. It indicates the depths of the silencing, distortions, and exclusions of Native women's achievements in mainstream American history. In a similar vein, the voices of Naa, Binta, and Ayanda are often subdued in favor of male-dominated Eurocentric perspectives of the history of Ghana.

29Jordan Wheeler quotes Floyd Favel’s lament that just as Native American laughter in theater productions is often misunderstood, so are the silences during the performance. Favel stresses that “for the Aboriginal person, silence and stillness are as important as sound and action” (Wheeler 10). The silence is an attempt to reinvent and present the unrepresentable histories and present realities of dispossession, deprivation, degradation, and cultural alienation resulting in identity confusion. Thus, Mojica’s engagement of sound and silence at various stages in her play reflects Ana Castillo’s advocation for contemporary Native women to learn to “reconstruct ... history with what is left unsaid and not with what has been by those who have imposed their [narrative] authority on us” (111). The answer should not be spoken in anger. Rather, it lies in recuperative and restorative actions such as relearning how to make frybread, as asserted by Contemporary Woman #1. She insists she is not there to apportion any blame but to teach restorative culture in the making of frybread. Frybread, a Native American ceremonial food, becomes the material and symbolic tool of instruction and restitution in Native ways toward a rebirth. The art of making frybread is a ritual of new beginnings for contemporary Native women who seek to rediscover their ways and roles (21).

30Frybread in PBPS is both a Native American cultural sacrament of remembrance and physical nourishment: “It is emblematic of both the cosmic and physical retrieval and survival of the people. In the ritual of making frybread, cultural roots are regenerated. The ritual also establishes the ancient role of the Native woman as a healer, transformer, activist, teacher, provider, nurturer, wife, and mother” (Kuwabong 97). Learning how to make frybread will help Contemporary Woman #1 and #2 to regain insights into their cultural and spiritual roots. It will liberate them from the physical and ideological junk that surrounds them and beckons them to eat and enter into a world of amnesia. Fry bread-making is sacramental and helps to free them from the demons of colonialism. A comparative set of duets links the two plays. The duet between the English troubadour “Captain John Whiteman” and Pocahontas (PPBS 19) is comparable to the Voices in Abdalla’s The Slaves – Revised, which also features a duet with the white stone monster concerning the roles of Africans and Europeans in the slave trade. These duets are the vehicle for Abdallah’s Voices and Pocahontas to verbalize, vocalize, and personalize their plights. Thus at the end, the question that runs through the plays is how white people gained easy access to the lands and societies of Africans and Native Americans, enslaving them and imposing their worldviews on them to such an extent that even though Ghana has gained her political independence, Ghanaians, symbolic of other Africans, continue to live under the terrifying shadow of European powers epitomized by the monstrous edifices along the coast of Ghana. Abdallah’s words are instructive. He intones, “It is my hope and desire that every performance of this play will help to keep the searchlight on this ancient evil and keep us reminded of what the African Holocaust has done and continues to do to generations of our people” (TSR Manuscript iv).

31I have shown how both Abdallah in TS and TSR, and Mojica in PPBS use theater to revisit, re-vision, re-interpret, and re-present the traumatic encounters between Europeans on the one hand and Africans and Native Americans on the other hand. I showed how both playwrights combine Ghanaian and Native American performance styles, such as music, myth, storytelling, dance, ritual, and folkloric characters, to critique received histories without blaming only one side as often is done. I revealed the performative ways in which both Mojica and Abdallah challenge contemporary Africans and Native Americans to question these historical narratives and develop a broader, educated understanding of these histories of their traumatic encounters with Europeans. To both Abdallah and Mojica, theater should be not just entertainment but also a tool for positive change and progress through its ability to “reinvent the past and invent the future” (Boal 11) and, in the process, conscientize the people towards mental and cultural freedom from colonialism’s shackles.

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References

Electronic reference

Dannabang Kuwabong, Reading Mohammed ben Abdallah’s The Slaves and Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots as Re-Visionary Historical DramasEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-1 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 25 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/23467; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13qwj

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About the author

Dannabang Kuwabong

Dannabang Kuwabong, PhD, is a professor of English in African and African Diaspora Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. Kuwabong is an accomplished poet with several books. He has edited several academic books and published numerous book chapters, academic articles, and poetry in books and journals.

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