Playwright reclaims, reimagines story of Uncle Remus

Like a lot of people in a lot of families, playwright Aaron Coleman grew up hearing the stories of Brer Rabbit, the cunning character from African folklore who outsmarted his animal adversaries. These stories survived the Middle Passage through the oral tradition of enslaved Africans here in America. In 1880, the stories were published in a compilation written in dialect by a White author, Joel Chandler Harris, who created the fictional Uncle Remus character. Uncle Remus is a kindly, old Black man who shares the stories with the young son of a slave owner, and was notoriously brought to life on screen by Disney in the 1946 film, “Song of the South.”

For decades, there has been a rejection of this portrayal of Uncle Remus as a stand-in for Black people, who appears as this twodimensional character, blissfully entertaining White people with Black culture without a care toward our own oppressive circumstances. Coleman seeks to reclaim and give new voice to the man in his play, “Uncle Remus, His Life and Times, as Told to Aaron Coleman,” which is part of The Old Globe's Powers New Voices Festival this year, and will be featured in a free reading at 7:30 p.m. today.

“It's taking these very classic and, perhaps, now controversial stories and repositioning them in a way to reintroduce them, or look at them anew, for today's audience,” he says.

Coleman, who grew up in Los Angeles and lives in New York, writes works that re-examine what it means to be a person of color in America today by subverting theatrical or narrative forms in unexpected ways. He took some time to talk about “Uncle Remus” and the experiences of being a Black storyteller in America, and the responsibility he understands that comes with that. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/ sdut-lisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q:

Can you talk a bit about who Uncle Remus is, and his significance, particularly as it relates to storytelling?

A:

Uncle Remus is the fictional narrator of the Brer Rabbit folktales, created in the late 1800s by a White man named Joel Chandler Harris. In the later part of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, Remus became this very popular character amongst children's literature as this storyteller who appealed to children, but the character became problematic because the character is a former slave, created by a White man, whose sole purpose in life is to entertain young, White children. Also, I have to say that, in the scope of this, there were many Black writers who took Uncle Remus and made agreements of their own within the history of Black storytelling, also. Although that has largely faded away, thanks to things like the Disney film, “Song of the South,” which very much promoted Uncle Remus as a storyteller for White children. That was the end-all-be-all of his existence, so naturally, where we are today in the 21st century, this sort of figure is frowned upon.

I think that there is value to looking at the character of Uncle Remus through today's lens. I think that, if we are able to create this figure that comes from us as Black people, telling these stories to Black people, we can once again embrace what the character should ideally represent — the handing down of an oral tradition that came from Africa, kept alive through the enslaved, and then passed down to today. Because the character of Uncle Remus has been, more or less, controlled by non-black people, there's a sense that we have to erase that, we can't look at that, we have to turn that away. What if we took the character and gave him a fuller life and began to understand what are the reasons why this character was telling these stories? What are the modes of survival that these stories represented, and how can we look at these stories within the context of what they meant to the enslaved people in the South, throughout the history of slavery? And how can they still resonate with us today?

Q:

What was the inspiration for this play?

A:

I was introduced to the Uncle Remus/brer Rabbit stories as a child through my father, who comes from the South (Shreveport, La.), so I always had an affinity for these stories. I love the fact that they were even written in a dialect. The dialect is now considered problematic because it seems as if it's making a mockery of the speech of the Uncle Remus character and the Black characters at the time, but I believe that the dialogue was at least intended, at the time, to be an homage to a particular speech pattern that is very real. In reading it, there is definitely a flavor and a cadence and a life to it, that I believe would be lost if it were written in a standard English, so I think there's a way that we can begin to embrace this. So, I was enchanted by this as a young child. These were my foray into Black storytelling because, as a kid, there's still not the ability to understand that this is within the construct of a White perspective on this. It is hearing somebody who comes directly from the South, telling tales that come from the Black psyche. The tales themselves are the actual tales that were told, Joel Chandler Harris just, essentially, transcribed them. So, I've known these tales my entire life.

Then, a few years ago, I purchased a book called “Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives” and it's the transcriptions of the slave narratives. I was reading these, and it just sort of shocked me that I never was introduced to this throughout my entire education and that I had to find it on my own. I read the book weeping the entire time. It's a lot to get through, and it completely humanizes an experience that can feel very distant to us because it feels like they're in front of you, talking. What I was struck by were the similarities between the presentation of the slave narratives and the presentation of the Uncle Remus tales. I was also very struck by the similarities in themes that came up in outsmarting the White slaveholders, the running from the paddyrollers (what they called the police), the wishing and hoping for better places. Also, the sense of oral tradition, the sense that the slave narratives were spoken from the mouths of the enslaved, versus a third-person distance. Similar with the construct of the Uncle Remus stories, it is like we are sitting down and being told something directly from our ancestors, so I began to see a similarity there.

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com

Aaron Coleman