First published in 2020 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Copyright Jamal Gerald, 2020
Foreword copyright Selina Thompson, 2020
Jamal Gerald is hereby identified as author of this play in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Jamal Gerald, c/o Oberon Books (). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the authors prior written consent.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 9781786828590
E ISBN: 9781786828583
Cover image: The Other Richard
Cover design: Rabbit Hole
Printed and bound in the UK
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Foreword
It is only right that I juxtapose my reflections on Jamal Geralds remarkable Idol with the gospel of an idol of my own.
Black skin,
When the second wave feminists declared that the personal was political, they took a triangle, and claimed it consisted of two sides only.
black braids,
But they missed a trick. Always, the personal and political are joined by the spiritual: and all three are channelled through the body.
Black waves,
At their most compelling, transformative and powerful, spiritual practices demand that we grow as people, that we bring the best of all we have into the world, and offer it to the ecosystems and communities of which we are a part. We simultaneously root ourselves in the body and the earth and transcend such concerns.
black days,
When correctly applied, the spiritual demands justice of the political, and gives the personal a resonance beyond death. The political grounds the spiritual in reality and holds the personal accountable. The personal turns the spiritual into tangible ritual, and troubles the political with our fragility and our failures.
Black baes,
You need all three, and they must be embodied.
black days
The last performance of Jamals that I experienced was FADoubleGOT.
What I am most struck by as I sit in Idol is that such growth has taken place since then.
Spiritual growth, political growth, artistic growth. Growth in how he positions himself, and how he speaks about his relationship with his mother. Desires obscured in the earlier show are now agonisingly frank in this one. Hesitant movement has blossomed into full on routines, with the expertise that comes from growing up with rhythm, recreating dance moves you learn in the club and mimicking music videos in the living room while your mums at work. Hip hop is delivered with a dexterity that is unmistakeable to those of us that learnt how to rap from CDs, tapes and illegally downloaded mp3s. A stark DIY aesthetic is fully realised now, transformed into an all-encompassing space of ritual, teetering on the edge of being an installation.
These are black-owned things
Idol oscillates between the sacred and the profane.
We are cleansing ourselves in holy water and day dreaming orgies in the church
We are bickering in the school playground and stanning on the internet
We are making offerings to our gods and scrubbing homes in ammonia
We are disrupting award ceremonies and singing along to pop music about heartbreak.
This contrast is perhaps at its most beautiful when we end the show in the domestic space. The ritual of a parent doing a childs hair, and the dreams of an elder brother for his younger sibling are one of the foundational images of the beauty of blackness, of the safe spaces we create for ourselves away from the white gaze.
This same contrast is at its most delicious: truffle rich, velvet decadent and lemon fresh when he swan dives into blasphemy. Jamals twitter bio announces that he likes to cause trouble, and in Idol he delivers on that promise to thrilling effect.
Black faith
What were the routes of religion? What was it feeding?
Jamal refuses to leave his spiritual health in the hands of White Jesus.
When Jamal positions internalised anti-blackness as a curse placed on him by those that want to harm his family, he elevates the slick, dubious realm of the psychic. Its associations with public access TV, early 90s Whoopi Goldberg and neon lights shifts into the realm of the political. Ancestral political legacy becomes personal spite becomes hex.
still cant be washed away
What are the roots of stan culture? What do we need that it gives to us?
Jamal does not easily leave his political agency with black capitalists either, as he traces the real baulk of their wealth back to white men.
This lingers in his personal too, as he traces the old lovers who turn away from his caught feelings back to white men, and white wealth also. In her autobiography Were Going to Need More Wine Gabrielle Union reminds her readers that you cannot self-esteem your way out of how the world treats you. It is an aching truth, and one that reappears frequently in Jamals work.
Not even in that Florida water
Idol lives in the messy realities of real life. It is constrained by practicalities, and the limits of freedom in a world riddled with violence and unhealed wounds. Beyonc cant set him free any more than street evangelists can: but the first offers him pleasure, and that is a power in and of itself.
Not even in that Florida water
But it is not only Jamal who has grown in the interim between FADoubleGOT and Idol. He has gone one better and demanded that spirituality or at least our diasporic understanding of it also grows, and that what we consider sacred broadens out. It is a lover that brings Jamal to the rituals that weave Idol together. Jamal has been searching for someone who will see themselves in him, in who he will see himself. That the two of them might see the spiritual in each other and love, ecstatically.
In that Florida water
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shanges 1976 masterpiece, ends in ecstasy:
i found god in myself / & i loved her / I loved her fiercely
