Passing Down the Generations: Statement of Regret, interview with Dr Joy DeGruy Leary

Statement of Regret is the third part of Kwame Kwei-Armah‘s literary triptych of plays for the National Theatre set in the habitats of the African-Caribbean.  Elmina’s Kitchen, which later transferred to the West End’s Garrick Theatre – he was the first Black British playwright to have that honour – was followed by Fix Up.  Other plays include Blues Brother Soul Sister, Hold On and A Bitter Herb at the Bristol Old Vic and  Big Nose, his adaption of Cyrano De Bergerac with Chris Monks at The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.  He Recently made his directorial debut at Baltimore’s Centerstage directing the award-winning Naomi Wallace play Things of Dry hours.  Kwame Kwei-Armah is an associate of the National Theatre and Centerstage Baltimore USA.  His awards include the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright, a Screen Nation Award, an Olivier Award and a BAFTA.

Dr Joy DeGruy Leary, the American social scientist, is the author of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, one of the inspirations for Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play.  They met during rehearsals at the National Theatre.

What made you recognise Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and then want to find a way academically of proving it to be the case?

Largely it’s been by looking at black children.  I grew up in LA, in South Central, poor.  And I remember hearing statements about skin colour and light skin and how beautiful that was.  And parents were saying Don’t stay out in the sun too long, you’re black enough already.  When I started to realise that we’re still hearing those same things now that I’m 50, that’s when I realised this was an intra-cultural phenomenon. Why are these negative attributions being passed along within African culture?

What really kicked it over the top was when I went to Africa.  I went really spiritually open and wanting to connect and the reception I got gave me almost a feeling of nobility, because I wasn’t The Other any more.  I experienced normalcy as a Black person for the first time in my life.  You don’t realise until you’re in that environment how much you thirst for it.  Everyone greets you extensively.  I talk in the book about the greeting which is translated into “I see you”.  During slavery it wasn’t always safe to say anything to another person, so the slaves found a way – whether it was with drums or eye contact or a gentle nod of the head (a phenomenon we still experience) – to continue that tradition of “I see you”.  The moment I got back into Portland airport, it started immediately, this being a non-person.  And it’s an assault on your soul and your heart, especially having spent six weeks in Africa, bathed in normalcy.  One day my daughter ran in, really upset that there was a boy outside that wanted to hurt Nadim, her brother.  I went outside.  There’s a little circle of boys surrounding my son, nobody over ten years old.  I could tell he was scared to death, but he was trying to hold his own.  So I walk over to the boy that seems to be the ringleader and I ask him “Has my son done something I need to know about?” And he says, “I want to  know if he got some kind of eyeball problem  What he staring at?” So I asked “you want to beat up my son because he’s staring at you?” A flood of pictures came back, of the villagers, of children, of people saying “I see you”.  The contrast was really different: “I see you” was what Africa said to me, and African-Americans were saying “What you looking at?”  I saw the injury, That’s when it was born, in that moment.

If we’re talking about inter-generational transmission of this trauma, why do you think it has not stopped throughout the generations?

It has not stopped, because the trauma has not stopped.  It has been relentless even though it has changed the way it looks.  If you look at the overt forms of slavery, where people were beaten, whipped and chained; then share-cropping, which was just another form of slavery; then convict leasing; the Jim Crow laws of segregation; now the prison industrial complex which is full of black and brown people, you see it’s the same thing.  We’ve never been able to heal because the onslaught has never dissipated.  A myth has been perpetuated which actually creates an even worse problem: you have people asking, What’s wrong with us?  You see people now in an inordinate amount of shame and feelings of guilt and inferiority.  People don’t understand that the lynchings occurred after slavery, not during: a vigilante gang came into existence just to terrorise us.  The US government admitted this in 2005 and made an apology that said it was domestic terrorism against us.  Even then, some senators wouldn’t sign it.  And when things like Hurricane Katrina happened, it’s like everybody’s amazed.  Why?  Nothing ever stopped.

What kind of resistance did you get from the Black community, telling them we are still suffering from the trauma of slavery?

Actually I got very little resistance.  But I think there was fear that we don’t want to give another tool for white people to oppress us.  That it’s a blaming thing, that we’re whining, complaining, trying excuses.

No matter what level of organisation, socio-economics or education, I ask audiences, What did your parents tell about how hard you’d have to work to get even?  Immediately, simultaneously, the response is, Twice as hard.  It’s like a choir.  And yet our greatest fear is being perceived as lazy.  When you look a the reality we literally built the country.  I was struck by what was discovered in the slave cemetery in New York: black men had injuries where the muscle had detached itself from the bone as a result of exertion.  That’s how hard our people worked, and yet we were perceived as lazy.  I close my book with a soliloquy from thomas Jefferson who says ‘…Of those masters, none can be seen to labour who can have another labour for him in the heat of the sun.’

What do the academic establishments think?

Interestingly enough, I work for an essentially all-white institution.  And more than anything else, their response is, Wow, that’s an interesting notion.  I’ve never really been fought about it academically and I think that is because the notion of historical trauma is not new.  We’ve looked at the holocaust and we continue to look at it.

How does the injury manifest in our community?  What are the symptoms?

There’s a statement that says ‘I am not who you think I am, I am not who you think I am – I am who you think that I think that I am.’  If you are surrounded by people that believe themselves to be less, inevitably you have to feel yourselves to be less.  It’s that pervasive secret that lies in the background: no matter what I do I’m never going to be enough, I’m never going to be worthy, I’m never going to be loved.  And that is something that the world says constantly – you’re not enough, you’re underachieving, you’re testing lower.  It’s called Learned Helplessness: after a point, people say it doesn’t matter what I do.  So I’m stuck in this condition.

As you know this is the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade – which most people mix up with the abolition of slavery.  In this year when we’ve been speaking about our genocide and our holocaust, one of the things people say is, But that was years ago – why haven’t you got over it?  There is an element of truth in that question.  Why haven’t we found the mechanism to supersede the circumstance?

I don’t think there’s another group you can look at that has had such systematic dehumanisation for so long.  Carter G Woodson made the famous statement that if you want to control a man, you control his thinking.  Then you no longer have to say go hither or go tither, he will go back without being asked.  You do not have to say to him go to the back door, he will go.  And if there’s no back door, he will cut one out.  There is a level of conditioning where the door is there and we make up reasons why we can’t open it.

The reason why they’re talking about the end of the slave trade is because we did something far more insidious than any people who were enslaved.  We bred slaves!  That’s so twisted I can’t even wrap my head around that.  These are things that really created an experience that was profoundly different from any other people in the world.  And one where again, we have been relentlessly, constantly told we’re not the same.  We’ve got to figure out why those people during Hurricane Katrina were corralled like animals.  Or why they couldn’t give them water.  What did the media do?  They said, they’re rapists and looters, they’re not good people.  We ask ourselves, did any one zero in on the tsunami?  It happened in the centre of child pornography.  Did they zero in on that?

The good news is we’re an incredible people.  Give us just a little bit of information and we can heal.  What I started to realise was my book had a way of really impacting people in terms of efficacy.  Those who have efficacy are inspired to do even more not just educationally, but with a sense of themselves.  Those who don’t have efficacy, in the sense that they’re struggling at the bottom rung of life, they read my book and they’re inspired, but they don’t know what to do.  So I realised I needed to create an opportunity for people with less efficacy to reach for even efficacy.  I have no tools, no resources, what can I do?  How do I begin that process of healing me, with nobody else in the room?  So I’ve produced a study guide to the book in which I talk about ‘mentors and models – consider the source’.  We have all these rules we have created to survive, and we perpetuate these things out of a fear of losing love, out of honour.  That’s twisted, we need to stop it.  Ignorantly we pass along those rules through our families and they become edicts, as though they’re absolutes.

I wrote an article in March this year in which I spoke about similar things being passed down in our family.  My father’s favourite food is the feet of pigs.  A lot of what we’re told is good food was actually passed down as slave food, master’s throw offs – the last part of the animal that you’d eat and season.  That is passed down eight generations later.  We’re saying this is good home food, but actually it’s bad for you.  One has to challenge the mentor source.

There’s nothing in your experience that asks you to question it.  And certainly nobody white can question it or I’m gonna do more of it!  You have to understand what’s killing us is hypertension, obesity, diabetes.  Research suggests that the hypertension is directly related to the Middle Passage.  Our ancestors that survived had to retain salt because of the nature of the trip and how we were treated and this is where the beginnings of hypertension came from.

I usually say to people that eating pig entrails is not cuisine.  We learned how to make a meal out of what was thrown away.  It’s 2007.  Someone tells you that the entrails of the pig is now your soul food, you’ll buy it.  Hike up the prices and tell you it’s a delicacy.  In addition, they’re not even going to clean it.  They’re going to freeze it, put it in a bucket and sell it.  Slavery is over but you’ll buy it.  Shame on you.  Your ancestors would roll in the ground if they knew you deliberately ate what they had to eat.

If you ask someone to let go of something, you’ve got to give them something else.  That’s what Post-Traumatic seeks to do.  Not just take away behaviour that is harmful, but to replace it with behaviours that are positive and show your nobility as a human being.

You spoke about your surprise at the diasporic resonance of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.  Have you given that any more thought?

I have.  Especially having spent more time in the UK.  I was in a meeting yesterday and had an opportunity to speak to the Department of Health.  These are people who are really committed to healing.  In order for the healing to have an impact, it requires certain levels of involvement.  We had segregation, an official apartheid in the US.  In the UK you have the illusion of inclusion –

– My Parents’ generation came here from the Caribbean in the 50s, had what was literally a legal colour bar in the Caribbean before they came here and brought that with them.  Even though a lot of people say it’s not the same in this country as in America, technically with colonialism, we are running in direct parallel –

– But the country prides itself on saying we didn’t have an official segregation.  The reality is segregation is here: it’s almost a caste system.  My experience, from the brief time that I’ve been here, is that everybody knows their place and if you step out of it you are immediately reminded.  So there’s this illusion of inclusion which is harder and worse, because you begin to believe yourself to be all-English.  At the same time there’s no foundation in terms of economic security – much less than in the US where there’s really ownership.  Nobody of African descent here owns too much of anything.  What I recognise in terms of the diaspora is that economics is a huge part of the piece.

We were all taught that you can be anything you want to be; God gave you all these gifts.  And you just go out there and run smack bang into a system that does not allow you to.  So the resentment builds.  This is something that I see is happening throughout the diaspora as it relates to people of African descent.

The most important thing consistent across the diaspora is the inability to come together.  One of the most devastating aspects about Post Traumatic is that we don’t trust each other enough.  If we can have unity, there is nothing that can stop us, nothing.

© National Theatre 2007

Dr Joy Degruy Leary is the author of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Uptone Press, 2005 .