New Haven Independent

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“Our kids in New Haven are fighting and dying over sneakers and cell phones. This anger over material things is killing them because, in part, they don’t understand where it comes from. This behavior can be understood in part as a residue of the slave experience, and it can be overcome if the kids re-experience some of this history and realize they are also the descendents of kings.”

The speaker is Veronica Douglas, director of special projects and a well-known personality on WTNH (to the left in the photo, with her niece Dannieka Wiggins). She was speaking as the impassioned volunteer director of public relations for MAAFA, (pronounced, MA-A-FA, with the accent on the middle syllable), which is the Swahili word used to evoke the horrors of the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing during which huge and unknown numbers of Africans suffered and died.

MAAFA, with its important subtitle, “Evoking the Pain of the Past. Building A Strong and Powerful Future,” is the name of a unique historical psychodrama — part transformative educational theater, music, drumming, and spiritual audience-involving exercise — which is being presented in four performances on Oct. 29 and Nov. 3 and 4 at the Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport. For a gallery of powerful pictures from the 2005 performance, reflective of what’s in store in the current edition of MAAFA, click here.

Because MAAFA has become a focal point for a larger movement in the Elm City and beyond on the emotional emancipation of black people, the production has a strong New Haven component. Douglas and Wiggins, a fifteen-year-old tenth grader at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities high school, who is in her second year performing in MAAFA, spoke about it the other day just before they went off for dress rehearsal in Bridgeport.

NHI: Just what is the New Haven involvement?
VD: First of all, more than 200 New Haven families regularly worship at Mount Aery. Members of at least three of our churches here, Christian Tabernacle, Shiloh Tabernacle, and St. Luke’s, will be sending hundreds of members to the performances. Dr. Reginald Mayo also sees the importance of MAAFA for the kids of the city, so on Nov. 2, more than 200 New Haven public school kids will be going to see the performance, from Roberto Clemente, Fair Haven Middle School, Troup, and Nathan Hale. And that’s only the beginning.

NHI: Meaning?
VD: I’ve just learned, for example, that on Oct. 29, the day of the first performance, the Amistad will be sailing to Bridgeport. Its crew is going to meet with the cast, and something powerful is going to happen. It’s free and open to the public, starting at 3:30. Also here in town, MAAFA staff have been working with the New Haven kids and teachers beforehand, preparing them for lots of the powerful material, like evocations of the brutality to slaves and lynchings. After the performances, there will be lots of follow up, including workbooks distributed to the schools.

NHI: Dannieka, you’re a tenth grader. Tell me how you got involved.
DW: Through my aunt Veronica. I was having, you know, some problems at home with my parents when I was 12, and I actually ran away. She took me in and we started talking and I told her a lot of stuff, of course, but also that I didn’t see any positive black people anywhere in my community.
VD: I was really shocked. That was in 2004, and I was just experiencing MAAFA for the first time (Editor’s Note: the original edition of MAAFA was created in East New York ten years ago at St. Paul’s Community Baptist Church, under the leadership of Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood. His protégé, Anthony L.Bennett, pastor at Mount Aery, first brought MAAFA to Bridgeport in 2004; in each locale, the material is locally adapted so the a production remains both universal and particular.) I took this young lady down there, introduced her to some of those remarkable people, and, in part, because she has such beautiful skin and such African nobility of looks, they ended up saying she should audition.
DW: So the next year I auditioned and got parts. This year I have three parts.

NHI: Tell me about them.
DW: In one part I play a slave who is beaten for trying to read. But I think my favorite is in the section called “Africa DNA,” which is in the finale of the show. We’re dressed in modern clothes and, it’s hard to explain, we channel and celebrate heroes. We kind of evoke them, bring them to life. The ones I get in touch with are Gwendolyn Johnson, founder of one of the first boys’ choirs in Connecticut and Almeter Russell, the first African-American to become a real estate broker in the state.
VD: Slaves and real estate brokers. That tells it. The point of this is to change lives through re-experiencing all that pain in a way that brings us together so that we open up a channel to appreciate our present and future.

NHI: So, Dannieka, how would you say you’ve changed as a result, and what do other kids in your circle think of MAAFA?
DW: Well, first of all, my parents came to the performance and thought I was terrific. There’s so much. Before and during rehearsals, for example, we do these meditation exercises. We try to get in touch with the ancestors and feel what they went through. I feel sad for teenagers I see at school who don’t have this experience.

VD: When a young black man is harassed by cops today, and he reacts the way he does, that’s a re-enactment in a way of the slave experience. If the kid understands this, it might make a huge difference in terms of the anger he can control. It save lives. But there’s something that has to come through here that is hard to get unless you see a performance.
The production values are really remarkable, I mean Broadway quality of singing and choreography, and so forth. But MAAFA is always held in a church because it has at base spiritual roots. And its drama, psychodrama, for the sake of profound connection. Can I give you an example?

NHI: Please.
VD: Although I’m not an actor or singer, I’m part of the crew, everyone who’s there, for example, recently was asked by the director to come together in a small group. Closer together, closer, she kept saying. Lets try to channel our ancestors who were crushed together on the slave ships. Closer. You got this? Now, down at Mount Aery, there are by now 100 of us very very close, breathing each other’s breath. Lights, calls the director, and the lights go out, and we’re in the hold of the ship. The belly. You smell urine, she says. Now you smell feces. You can’t move. As terrifying as that was, it was also, oddly comforting, and I began to cry. Lots of us did. I wanted it to end, but at the same time, I put my head on the shoulder of the person next to me, and I felt deep connection and comfort. It made be able to forgive a lot to. So later I actually got in touch with my father who had abandoned me when I was child. I forgave him, we talked. I learned that he was diabetic, and that made me decide to lose weight, exercise, change my life. It would not have happened without MAAFA. So when I say it changes lives and saves lives, we mean exactly that. That’s what it’s all about: the show, but also all these experiences for all of us pre and post show and behind the scenes and ongoing, it’s community rescuing in the best sense.

DW: Can I tell you my favorite part of MAAFA?

NHI: Now you’d better.
DW: Well, there’s actually two. I love the section toward the end. It’s called “The Children’s Plea,” and kids in the show reenter the sanctuary from the sides, and go up to people in the audience, right up to them, sometimes tap them on the shoulder and they say, Now please, what’s your story? Please tell me your story? Even more powerful than that, however, is the very last thing we’re going to do. It’ll be on November 5th, I think, and it’s called the Send Off Ceremony. All of us in the cast, anybody who’s been involved, the whole community goes down to Seaside Beach in Bridgeport. And we’re carrying roses or carnations. Each flower represents an ancestor that we have been channeling. Each one is a symbol for their life that we never knew but from which we are getting comfort or courage, whatever each of us got out of it. And we thank them for it, and then we release them, and let them go into the water.
VD: And that’s part of healing that’s so important, and there’s so much pain out there — I hear it all the time in my travels around the state, especially with kids who more than anything want people to talk to them deeply — and this does.

Those in New Haven interested in purchasing tickets for MAAFA on October 29th, November 3rd and 4th in Bridgeport, can buy them at Beauty Plus, at 827 Chapel St., where owner Mel Hylton and her colleague Liz Sylvia say the sales are brisk. “I’ve been in business eleven years, and I remember Veronica when she herself was a kid in high school,” said Hylton. “We sell lots of tickets here for concerts and all kinds of things, but MAAFA’s different: I haven’t seen the show — I hope to — but I know there’s something in it for all of us.” For further information, contact Mtaerbaptist.org, and those interested in school programs related to MAAFA can contact Willie Freeman here.

(Note: Veronica Douglas’s many volunteer civic roles include a seat on the Board of Directors of the Online Journalism Project, which publishes this web site.)