On writing about oppression

There is a conversation happening in the storytelling community about pain, which is a fascinating one.  There is an argument that suggests that writers should not write about pain and oppression as it feeds off society’s sick appetite to view suffering, especially black suffering.  Write about black joy instead!  While I agree that joy can often be missing from black narratives, and society does indeed have a historical fascination with black pain – I just can’t get on board with the black joy train.  It’s not a bad thing to write about oppression, pain, suffering and struggle – in fact, it’s a good thing.  One should show the world as it really is.  For me drama, a good story, is about how we fight the hard things and become fuller human beings by doing so.  Plays can and should be lighthearted – but I find myself personally attracted to understanding how people overcome, evolve, rise up. But I will admit that writing about these subjects can often have pitfalls that are easy to stumble into.  Writing about oppression can replicate the oppression that one is attempting to unpack.  There are many manifestations of this:

A play about misogyny where the female characters have half as many lines as the male ones. 

A story about slavery that shows such intense violence against black bodies that it retraumatizes black audiences.

A piece about the queer community where the writers want to show authentic behavior but end up centering stereotypes and killing gay lovers.

There are a couple reasons why this happens.  Noble reasons such as not wanting to make history better than it was.  Or perhaps you don’t want to give audiences an easy happy endings that lets them off the hook.  There’s a long history of the usefulness of showing suffering on stage as a way to stir the audience to realization.  But there are non-noble reasons this happens as well.  The most mundane reasons are inexperience and ignorance – simply meaning that the creative team doesn’t have anyone on it who has the actual identity being explored/suffering.  Don’t clutch your pearls, ladies and gentlemen – this is often the norm in the theater world.  A play about disability with NO disabled people working on the project.  A play about trans people, with zero trans representation.  Thus, we gather together a group of people giving educated guesses at the boarders and textures of oppression.  This problems is easily fixed, but typically not addressed.  This dives into the waters of who has ownership over what story, which is a more complicated question the more one explores it. 

But perhaps the worst reason this might occur is that one has creators or producers salaciously desire pain. Cause pain is sexy and pain is moving and pain sells.  There is a sickening feeling when we can sense that we are experiencing the pain of othered groups, because the creators simply wanted to make us gasp.  There is no point, there is no revelation, there is no benefit.  There is a perverse desire to witness the obscene, and this work exploits that desire.  Obscene comes from the Greek, meaning “off scene” or “off stage”. The word describes violence in a play  which always occurred off the stage in ancient Greek theater tradition.  But what happens when you show the obscene?  The mouth salivates.  There is no fixing this impulse.  Just as cheap tabloids write clickbait to get the highest number of views, this kind of unethical work simply is what it is. 

So how do you write about oppression and accurately show oppression without recreating the oppression you are trying to dissect?  How does one ethically show suffering?  If you can answer these questions honestly to yourself, you can make you way though: First, why are you writing about it?  Second, what’s your skin in the game?  Third, what is the dramatic reason for showing the oppression – is it grounded in story?  Is it grounded in character?  Is it grounded in plot?  What assumptions about these oppressed people is skewing your point of view on them?  Who are they without their pain?  Do you know?  Who is your audience and what is their relationship to oppression?  How do you think they will react to seeing this oppression?  Playwright Dominique Morisseau recently addressed this subject and in her statement she spoke about her need to write about liberation, unpoliced by allies and critics alike. So in her spirit, I pose this question to you: Does the oppression you are writing about point to liberation?  Start here, and go forward.