Five years ago, two friends proposed that we get tickets to
a show about one of the founding fathers when we were in New York for the
annual Psychoanalytic convention. We
often go to plays,
operas
or musical performances when we are there, and their suggestion that we plan
ahead seemed to be a good one. Boy was
it ever. I
read a text about Hamilton (not the Chernow text the play was based on –
that would come later), but refused to listen to the soundtrack or read the
libretto – I wanted to experience the musical without preconception. We bought the tickets at face value – they
were incredibly expensive. By the time
the show rolled around, they were selling for five to ten times face value –
the show was HOT! But what was
surprising was that it
was actually better than the hype.
We went to dinner with our two friends afterwards and talked
about it – and all four of us were stunned at what we had just seen. It was a musical – yes, but it was unlike any
musical we had ever seen. It was truly
great theater. We were moved by the story,
by the singing, by the emotional tone – the first act was about the excitement
of engaging in something new and the second act was about the unimaginable
losses that can occur to a tragic character – but also about how that character
can be rehabilitated – including by the very musical that was celebrating
him. It was a tour de force.
In any case, I returned from this sojourn energized by the
play and excited about its possibilities.
I started using the soundtrack as the lead assignment in my
history of psychology class – requiring students to listen to the music
(with libretto in hand – there are more words in this musical than in all but
the longest Shakespearean plays) of Act I before the second class and Act II
before the third class. I then had them
write about the ways that forming a country might be like forming a new science
– and about the ways in which hubris (pride) in our accomplishments and what we
might accomplish might interfere with being able to realize what we hoped for
in whichever endeavor (founding a country or founding a science – or maybe
starting a business, or forming a committee) we might undertake.
This might not have been the best idea. I got comments, along with the papers, that
said things like, “Best assignment ever!”
I let the class know that not all of the assignments for the course
would be that inspiring, well written, or earth shattering, but people did seem
to get excited about history in ways that I had not seen them do before. Not everyone did – some people wanted to
return to 1776 as the musical record of the founding of the country. These were a small minority of students – and
these students also tended to have difficulty with the later parts of the class
that dealt with the inclusion of women and people of color in the science. And with the information that the Clark’s
Doll Studies papers were the first ever social science papers cited in a Supreme
Court decision – and not just any decision, the landmark decision of Brown vs.
Board of Education, arguably the most important case of the twentieth century.
So, watching Hamilton again on Friday night was both a
return to a wonderful night, and a very different experience than seeing it the
first time. Not only did I now know
every word, but the world has been, in the words of the musical,
turned upside down since we saw it then.
Though the casting of the play and the references to slavery
in it helped set the stage for the multicultural portion of the history class –
I did not see the musical as primarily or even secondarily a play about
institutional racism. We had a black
president at the time. I (super) naively
thought that the power of the play was that it was a post-racist play – and further that we could, inclusively, use a
black vernacular (hip hop) to celebrate a founding of a country that we all
embraced as an ideal.
Watching the musical now, in Trump’s America as Black
Lives Matters has evolved from a marginal protest against police brutality
to a shared awakening to the depth of entrenchment that institutional racism
continues to exercise, this becomes a very different piece of art, even though
Lin Manuel-Miranda, in the accompanying interview claims it is not.
My
experience of the musical initially was a kind of pride – as if Lin
Manuel-Miranda was, strangely, my son.
It was as if he and I and the cast were all one – sharing in this
tremendous love festival about this amazing city and this amazing country and
gosh wasn’t it great that we all have a part in it. I experienced that as an identification – as a
narcissistic owning of the play.
What becomes clearer at this moment, and this is very
uncomfortable, is that I was appropriating the play – making it mine through
the identification with the author and lead actor and, by extension, with the
rest of the cast. It was appropriation
and not identification because it is, as Manuel-Miranda says, the same play now
as it was then. Manuel-Miranda explains
that it is a play about flawed people working together to create a flawed
system whose ideals – ideals that are not yet realized – are worthy ideals.
The play is, then an attempt on the part of African
Americans and immigrants to appropriate those ideals as their own – not to have
to disown them as Frederick Douglas did in his 1852 oratorical What
to the Slave is the Fourth of July? when he said, “This Fourth [of] July is
yours, not mine.” This musical, released
on the Fourth of July weekend – is an attempt to claim for the African American,
but also for the immigrant – and for all who have been marginalized - the
Fourth of July celebration – as their own.
They want to make this country ours – a shared ours – not the
ours that I enjoy as a “white” man. Their
appropriation of “my” holiday and the ideals articulated in the Declaration
of Independence as I believe it should read for all people – realizing that
we have not yet achieved that, but continue to work towards it – I welcome this
– because the document is not mine and never should have been – it should have
been ours – though, of course it wasn’t, and we are still working to make it ours. So they cannot appropriate but, should they choose, identify.
I must admit that it is hard for me to identify with this
nation – though not its ideals. Would
that my appropriation had been an identification. I hope that such an identification, when it
can be legitimate, will be welcomed. In the
meantime, I hope that my appropriation, intended as an identification, would be received as I hope it will in a time when that will be possible.
My apology is that I did not see how much work we have yet to do to be
able to achieve something that resembles the state that is outlined in the Declaration.
In that sense, I suppose, the second act of Hamilton – a downer
after the first triumphant one – is, perhaps, the road to sharing our
heritage. It suggests that mourning –
together – both the transgressor – Hamilton who publicly wrote about his affair
without consulting with his wife and he was also the person who caused his own son to die in
a duel – needs to mourn these things - the violation of his wife not once but twice - and the violation of himself - failing to be the man his son needed him to be – to feel the loneliness of what his ambition
brought him – to truly feel remorse – a terribly evasive feeling – but one
that, when it comes home to roost, actually sits quite comfortably in the
chest. It is not a bad feeling – it is a
heavy and powerful one. One that fills
us with a sense of something greater – with an awareness of the impact of our
actions – and with a sense of what those actions have caused in another human
being – they help us bridge the gap between us and actually expose the feelings
of love that generally lie latent within us.
Perhaps it is only loss that allows us to most fully feel our feelings
of connection with each other – to realize how essential we are in each other’s
lives.
The downer act – filled with the losses that Hamilton brings on himself
and then onto Eliza, his wife, humanize him.
They bring him back into her good graces and it is she who lives to tell
his story. As Lin Manuel Miranda reminds
us in the conversation accompanying the musical – the white population will not
be the majority for long. Those who live
to tell our story will paint it based on our actions – not just what we have
done in the past, but what we do from here forward. Will we come to terms with ourselves and
therefore with each other?
For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter, John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
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