Poet explores history of Othello, Robeson
What we learn as fact, as historical truth, passed down over time from cultures in power, is at times not so. Indigo Moor, playwright and poet laureate of Sacramento, knew as much in writing his new book, “In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers.”
The poem collection — each page a non-rhyming sonnet — explores the lives of singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson and Shakespeare’s fictional character Othello, two men whose lives were first presented to Moor in mangled forms.
Robeson: a star of the first half of the 20th century whose communist affiliation deemed him an un-American traitor. Othello: the African Moor of self-hatred, attempting desperately to be a part of the “dominant culture.”
“As an African American, I not only find that offensive, I find it wrong when it comes to the text,” Moor says. “The interpretation of who we are and why we do (what we do) is misrepresented in ways that are horrendous to anyone trying to find his own identity.”
The Othello of Shakespeare’s text was a proud man, Moor says, but often suffers misguided interpretations.
Robeson, despite his popularity as an entertainer, was blacklisted for his ideological leanings during Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare. “Every effort was made to reduce him to a footnote,” Moor says. “And at that time, a large segment of black America was also turning their backs on him because they didn’t want the type of divisiveness with the government that he seemed to carry in his wake.”
In Othello and Robeson, who famously played Shakespeare’s character on Broadway and on stages around the world for many years, Moor saw mirrored lives — in their racist, persecutive societies and the character assassination they each experienced.
“I was reading what I thought was a character study of what I thought was one of the men, and then by the end, found out it was a character study of the other man,” Moor says.
Moor’s book is structured around this parallel, split into two acts detailing each man’s world. The vividly imagined poems at times focus on other figures — McCarthy, W.E.B. Du Bois, actress Merle Oberon, lynching victim Sam Hose — stripping away traditional, cursory understanding of their often tragic inner lives.
“Nothing is two-dimensional,” Moor says. “These people have their own fears, their own worries, their own struggles with their own identity and struggles with the world around them. I call these broken sonnets because each of the people in these poems are broken in their way.”
This wrestling with history goes hand in hand with the theme of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s “Community Voices: Poets Speak” series, which will feature Moor on Thursday, July 27, reading new poems, along with sonnets from his book. Each edition of the weekly reading series presents a poet reflecting on the museum’s current exhibition, “The Ease of Fiction” — featuring work from four contemporary African artists based in the U.S. — whose title and theme derive from the often passive acceptance with which we treat records of history.
Moor refers to a proverbial notion — those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it — with a qualifier. “I don’t think we so much eschew history and not learn from it,” he says. “We just completely try to bury it.”
Moor and other poets in the series will attempt to dig out the truth.