“My dreadlocks are my cosmic antennae,†says Iyaba Ibo Mandingo at one point during his one-man show unFRAMED, and flashes a smile at the audience.
And yet the bearded Antigua-born poet and painter is no flower child. Although the playbill for his ambitious but ultimately disappointing one-man show at the New Ohio Theater promised that Mandingo would share “his rage, determination, and his hope†as he paints his self-portrait and reflects upon his experience as a U.S. immigrant, the end result was more heavily weighted on rage.
And no wonder. Using poetry, painting, spoken word and song, Mandingo’s narrative spans the slave trade to Jim Crow South, genocide in sub-Saharan Africa, racial profiling, and the curtailment of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.
He also delves into his personal tribulations: his father’s abandonment, the 12-hour shifts his undocumented mother spent packaging batteries when she first arrived in the U.S., the two-bedroom apartment that 16 people shared, his arrest on charges of raping his white girlfriend that were later dismissed, and the humiliation of being strip searched, jailed and threatened with deportation in the weeks after 9/11.
If there is nuance in unFRAMED, it is not the author’s analysis of historical events, but in his personal recollections. As a “third world boy†growing up in the West Indies, Mandingo recalls splashing all day in the ocean’s clear waters, plucking guava and mango from the trees, and drinking the hot cocoa his grandmother would brew when she was not administering weekly purges of cod liver oil. Mandingo speaks of the conflict of fathering a half-white child, and notes that he relived the “sins of the fathers†when he struggled to commit to the mother of his five other children. He recalls visiting a plantation in Jackson, Mississippi in 2001, where a plaque commemorates the contribution of a slave owner to the Confederate cause – the same slave owner who had executed his slaves on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Poignant though this subject matter is, as is often the case in ambitious mixed media pieces, the delivery itself was uneven. While Mandingo’s presence on stage is raw and powerful, the primary merit of the muddy self-portrait – which did not resemble the one in the promotional material – is as a plot-framing device. His poetry is delivered in the form of rhyming couplets, all of it moving and none of it strikingly original. Only the occasional bursts of song – delivered in an unexpectedly lyrical, honey-toned voice – provide a welcome relief.
Mandingo conveys outrage as he flings paint upon an emerging self-portrait that nearly topples over under the assault, but little subtlety. He does not dwell on the ambiguity of belonging to two worlds – and perhaps not fully to either – that is so brilliantly captured by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and by contemporary Pan African writers such as Edwidge Danticat. Rather, he writes about police that appear to form daily firing squads that gun down innocent, unarmed black children who hold their hands up in surrender – an act he pantomimes with tears in his eyes. He decries the bloodshed in Africa, but does not comment on the tragedy of a once colonized people turning on their own mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers as the international community failed to take action.
If there is a glimmer of hope in the oppressive world of Mandingo recreation, it does not arrive until the final moments of the performance. The hope does not spring from the fact that that author has reconciled his two homes and forgiven those who infringed on his liberty – he describes his Rasta lifestyle as a “rejection of western civilization†and its false promises – but rather from self-acceptance.
“Are we ever going to try love?†he sings sweetly, and then shouts. “I did – some self-love!â€
The small, rapt audience leapt to its feet.
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