‘A Strange Loop’ Reminded Me of the Importance of Black Criticism

As I watched the Tony-winning musical, I wondered how the overwhelmingly white audience was thinking about regular Black people.

In 1926 two important essays on Black art were published. One, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Criteria of Negro Art, asserted that the Black artist must always write with the liberation of Black people in mind. Provocatively, Du Bois said that all Black art must be propaganda. The other, Langston Hughes’s The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, encouraged his fellow artists to embrace the idea of being “Negro artists” rather than seeking some elusive status of being simply artists. He claimed for his own generation a willingness to be their full selves rather than concerned about respectable assimilation.

I thought about both pieces after seeing Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop on Broadway two weeks ago. A Strange Loop won the Tony Award this year for Best Musical, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It has been widely acclaimed, and appropriately so; it is masterfully written. Usher, the lead, who is based on Jackson himself, is a 20-something Black gay man who works as an usher in a Broadway theater while working on his own play, the one we are seeing. (It is meta, as the kids say.) His fellow characters are, most of the time, the hypercritical voices that live in his head, though sometimes they morph into other people in his life: parents, colleagues, audience members, and lovers. This slippage is important to the play. We know that these other voices, when they’re coming from inside his head, are unreliable judges of Usher and his work. The homophobia of the world is distorting and destructive, and it overdetermines everything he tries to do and what he hears. Mean words echo. They live inside him. And he struggles to emancipate himself from them when they just keep coming.

One of the play’s conceits is Usher’s homophobic mother’s desire for him to write a play like one of Tyler Perry’s. There is an explicit critique in the musical of Perry’s corpus, its tendency to moralize, its melodrama, and Perry’s heavy reliance on conventional gender ideals. At one point the ancestors (including Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston) appear to encourage Usher to work for Tyler Perry. They are venomous, telling him that he is nothing and Tyler Perry is valuable. They reference Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as another “good” Black work. This choice struck me as odd, until I remembered that in fact these are not the ancestors themselves—they are a depiction in Usher’s head, created by his own self-doubt. He experiences a Black world through the prism of a conservative and hostile religious upbringing that is set against him.

The audience, overwhelmingly white, laughed raucously at the ancestors who zealously called him the N-word. I was uncomfortable. Did they know, I wondered, that The Color Purple was a groundbreaking Black queer text, like so much of Baldwin’s work? Did they understand that Neale Hurston, like Michael R. Jackson, had pursued innovations in form and pushed against respectable renderings of Black people in the service of artistry? Did they understand that these ancestors, as they existed in the real world, had made space for Michael R. Jackson to create? Part of me felt as though they were laughing at the kind of Black people who enjoy Tyler Perry’s work, i.e., regular Black folks. I thought of Hughes’s paragraph:

There are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear.

I wondered about regular Black people in the imagination of the Broadway audience, and about how the context might be giving them license to mockery. Their laughter felt taunting, even as I laughed as well. Because the people laughing might not know what I know: that the tastes of ordinary Black people run the gamut, and that the anxieties produced by Black corporate media can be as intense and confining as those produced by the demands of white gatekeepers.

I didn’t feel critical of Michael R. Jackson’s character’s engagement with that reality. Rather, I worried about how the art was being received. Unlike Du Bois, I’m not confident that those of us who are artists can maintain absolute control of the message of the art. In fact, I think it might very well be the case that Du Bois was less successful when he wrote creatively than when he wrote as a scholar, because he couldn’t let go of the desire to control how readers would take in his work. His literary prose was didactic and sometimes even wooden as a result.

But I did walk away from the theater with a renewed sense of why Black criticism is important. I believe that this marvelous piece of art has to stand on its own terms, but the critic is called to engage the question of what it means in the world. I think that Michael R. Jackson is highly aware of this dynamic. It’s part of the cleverness of the work. After all, Usher wears a T-shirt through the play that is an homage to the late cultural critic bell hooks. The words Imperialist, White Supremacist, Capitalist, and Patriarchy are crossed out, and below them is #bell hooks. Bell hooks was known for her sometimes controversial takes on popular Black art and artists; at times she argued that popular Black work was being subsumed into these crossed-out ideologies of domination, even unwittingly. It is a wink to the audience, an awareness that The Great White Way is a minefield for anyone trying to strike out against injustice, as entrenched as it is with wealth and exclusivity.

This was a lesson learned by another queer Black Broadway pioneer before Jackson:  Lorraine Hansberry, whose statue (made by Alison Saar and sponsored by the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative) was unveiled in Manhattan last week. Hansberry, who criticized the stereotypical slapstick of much of her contemporaries’ Black art, was frustrated by how her own work was read. She tried desperately, and at the time unsuccessfully, to correct the misreadings of her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun. Many read it—incorrectly, to her mind—as a play about the middle-class aspiration and assimilation of people who just happened to be Black, rather than a play about Black people, about the resistant dignity and dreams of poor Black folks. It has taken generations of critics (me included) to argue that the way the work was taken up by the mainstream reflected its ideologies rather than the play itself.

The point is, cultural criticism matters, but not because it tells people what to think. Rather, it opens windows into the various ways of experiencing a work in the world. In Oscar Wilde’s classic essay “The Critic as Artist,” he had one of his characters say:

The highest criticism really is the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.

Wilde was suggesting that the critic stands alongside the artist, as a peer more than a judge. In the case of the Black critic (of whom Wilde would likely have been dismissive, given how unabashedly racist he was), she stands alongside the artist to dislodge the persistent myth that the Black masses are of one undifferentiated sort.

I loved A Strange Loop. I loved Usher’s tender vulnerability, his intellect, his iconoclastic tastes, the clarity of his desires, and his anger at how difficult it is to find queer romance and softness in a full-figured Black man’s body, and his intellect. He asks us to consider what it means to try to create something free inside a system that is closed against us. And even if we can’t get free of it, we’d better call it out. As a critic turned artist, who remains a critic, I’m taking this lesson to heart.