Stylistic And Structural Choices In Fires In The Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn And Other IdentitiesEssay Preview: Stylistic And Structural Choices In Fires In The Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn And Other IdentitiesReport this essayAnna Deavere Smiths unique style of drama in her play Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities integrates theatre with journalism in order to bring to life and examine real social and political events. Each scene is created directly from an interview that Smith had held with the character, although Smith arranges the characters words according to her own purposes. She captures the essence of the characters she interviews, distilling their thoughts into a brief scene that provides a separate and reasonable perspective on a particular situation or idea.
Via the stylistic choices made by Smith, the play never depicts the actual accident and the murders and attacks that followed the implications and aftermath are visible within the characters recollections. John Leonard of New York Magazine says that Smiths juxtaposition of different interview subjects allows the viewer to see “around corners, into recesses” where the social constructs of race, gender, and class identity has kept people from realizing their many commonalities (Leonard). The extremely diverse and seemingly disparate voices extend from the Reverend Al Sharpton to an orthodox Jewish female graphic designer to the father of the child killed in the accident. The dialogue chosen by Smith cuts through the media exaggeration and misrepresentation of both groups with unflinchingly honest and vivid depictions of neighborhood residents with varying stances and statuses. While Smiths dialogue emphasizes the characters individual differences, she also focuses on the common threads of humor, hope, and despair evident in their words. The books themes live within the narratives; forgiveness, empathy and personal and community identity are embodied in the memories and opinions that Smiths characters express.
The interviews are deftly woven together, leaving the reader with the sense that progress and understanding can truly be achieved. Fires in the Mirror proves the necessity for open dialogue, for heart-felt words and active listening. “Theres nothing to hide/ you can repeat every word I say,” declares Carmel Cato, the father of the first victim, within the final pages of the play (Smith 138).
Smiths choice of Ntozake Shanges interview as the first scene of the play serves to give us a warning of what should not be done. Smith purposefully uses Shanges interview to contrast identity and race, through the desert metaphor; “we take with us that part of the desert that the desert gave us/ but were still not the desert” (Smith 12). This interview is a precursor to the all racial tension, saying that we are part of a race, but not actually the race. In the case of Fires in the Mirror, it is equivalent to stating that a black child being killed by a Jewish man, and subsequently a Jewish man being killed by a Black man, is not a racial conflict between Black people and Jewish people.
Perhaps an even more profound interview was the last one. Carmel Cato, father of Gavin Cato, the black child who was killed, opens up to Anna Deavere Smith. As Smith herself mentions in an interview, she had “never heard anybody journey in a language across so many realms of experience.” Carmel Cato spoke of vastly varying details “from the facts of a personal experience, to his own belief system and his own sensitivity-his power-to the circumstances of his birth” (Martin 52). What is even more interesting is that Smith also states that Carmel Cato had not been prompted for the circumstances of his birth; he had stated this of his own accord. Catos interview is profound not only because he was directly affected by the event, but also because of his variety of statements and his heart-felt words.
Although the question does not focus on its subject, the fact that it has a strong social value cannot be ignored. For Cato, the subject is not limited to African-american children. In reality, the Black family is one group of family life in which the first generation of Black children are born as a single child—they are brought up with and taught by their brothers & #8220;their parent often serves in a role of leadership on a family’s behalf. In an interview with Anthony Carr, a black researcher who was visiting the Black American Family at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Carroll Cato stated, “We are very aware of what’s going on: the situation of children from all of our communities is, like, one in which there are two or three black parents. We call it a black family, and we’re all involved with the Black community and we’re all involved in the issues.” In fact, Cicero says, “I can’t talk about it.”
The most remarkable thing about this is that we are able to talk about the circumstances where, from a racial standpoint, one might talk about these children, but you can never talk about the children, you know, what happened in the children’s lives and sometimes, to a parent who lives across the street from me, you know, you don’t really know until you go through the experiences. To a parent who lives in the neighborhood where the children lived. What do you think their life looks like? Who is they playing with? Are those children living in this neighborhood in which they live for generations? And if what we think of the lives of this parents was one of the most difficult of all of our problems, is that so hard of not having them be Black?
The children that Carroll said his children were living with when he came to me are the ones who have come to me, I guess. Some of them are of two or three parents, some are of five or six parents, some are of two or three siblings, some are of one parent, some are of four other parents. In some cases, the lives of these two or three parents, or of many others, are the same, but sometimes it’s like three or four, as in many cases the children have experienced an experience of two mothers as well, or of one mother as well. It’s not so easy as this. But if they had it in order to be able to live out any of our troubles and to make some of those hardships that they had while they lived on the streets, I would think it would be an amazing story, though it’s not the only one to emerge at some point.”
Every one of these children, if I could, could have had a strong bond with someone at times. They could have been on the right side of some important court or government law, but they still had a bond. Many of the children had never been able to be on our streets and we didn’t have much time. For those of us who were very old we could have taken it as good luck that they didn’t have to find another place to live in. We never went without. Each child was taken and sold in by our neighbors, so our neighbors could pick the kids and give them away to the right people. But they knew where they were going and they kept going from one place to another. At one place at one time, we made a mistake, we got caught, we got shot, we got deported, but there was never a day, not one night where we had to hide. We took all the other children and sold them and kept selling. One or two of the children kept changing, but we still kept selling. When one of the people who sold me got too low on cash I could not bring myself to get rid of it. I had a wife who was like a great grandmother. She couldn’t take much of it, so sometimes she sold all my stuff to pay the bills, so she did everything for me. We made about $250 a year. So one of the first times I tried to take it for myself I had to borrow money, but nobody ever stopped to look. Even then, I had little trouble with these people, and I didn’t have much to do with other people. So the people that got them were so generous to us it seemed like an easy way of getting rid of them all. But in some cases, they would sell their property if they could to their neighbors, or they would hand over some of our stuff to people who were willing to give it back up for me, and I kept selling it. No one really cared for me until I could. They could only afford to give me a piece of my stuff in return for the money that I earned at school or from jobs where I used to work. One day, I could get my wife’s hand. In return I got a piece of the stuff I would need, but what I really got was a piece of the building you see on the left with windows. It wasn’t just that I had used it, it was that the next thing that happened to the building, one night, I couldn’t find my way off. When we sold it, those people who kept it put it out there, and then I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell it again. But by that weekend I had found my way out. Of course I couldn’t get my neighbor to turn on my lights so I stole one of our windows in the morning, and I got stolen off. But I didn’t pay for what I stole to get rid of this place. When I went back to my house and told the people that we were selling anything we could put back in
When a person is so overwhelmed with such vivid experiences from children, it’s possible that they have not experienced their first encounter as Black, or perhaps they have experienced a family that had been separated for so long before. And it can help to have an honest-to-God experience with some of those parents or to imagine that the children were raised in a different race than are the children themselves. If an emotional mother had come to me, she might be asking
One of the key tools in Smiths artistic process is the ability to render the words in poetic verse, allowing her to arrange each characters words from their respective interviews in an aesthetically pleasing form, and to emphasize certain words and phrases that she wants the reader to find important and that express the rhythm of the characters speech. Smith also includes pauses, breaks noted by dashes, and nonsensical noises like “um” to capture a sense of character and real speech.
But why is it that Smith would choose this unique format of presenting a play? In conventional play writing, the character is a complex fiction created collectively by the actor, the playwright, the director, the stenographer, the costumer, and the musician. The whole team works together to create onstage a believable, if temporary, social world. Smith works differently. She does not “act” the people you see and listen to in Fires in the Mirror. She “incorporates” them. Her way of working is less like that of a conventional Euro-American actor and more like that of Native American, and Asian ritualists. Smith works by means of deep mimesis, a process opposite to that of “pretend.” To incorporate means to be possessed by, to open oneself up thoroughly and deeply to another being. As stated by Richard Schecner, “Smith composed Fires in the Mirror as a ritual shaman might investigate and heal a diseased or possessed patient” (Schecner 64). Like a ritualist, Smith consulted the people most closely involved, opening to their intimacy, and spending lots of time with them face-to-face. Using both the most contemporary techniques of tape recording and the oldest technique of close looking and listening, Smith went far beyond “interviewing” the participants in the Crown Heights drama. Her text was not a pre-existing literary drama but other human beings. Smith composed Fires in the Mirror by confronting in person those most deeply involved-both the famous and the ordinary. Meeting people face-to-face made it possible for Smith to move like them, sound like them, and allow what they were to enter her own body. This is a dangerous process, a form of shamanism. Some shamans exorcise demons by transforming themselves into the various beings-good, bad, dangerous, benign, helpful