New Haven Independent

This theater piece, which lifts the veil on how slavery’s patterns in both thought and deed are still to be contended with today, is having its fifth local production Friday. For many local African-Americans, adults as well as kids, the experience can be a life-changer. Click here for such powerful testimony in the Independent’s coverage from last year’s edition.

If past predicts the future — and that’s actually the very premise of the piece — there should be large, rapt crowds, especially among area African-Americans. The production, whose local version originated at the Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport — at which many New Haveners are members — has been circulating among African-American communities throughout the country.

“Maafa.” As Shakespeare knew when he wondered about roses, when it comes, especially perhaps to the non-rose aspects of human life — calamities, cruelties, and disasters — language matters a great deal in how subsequent generations relate to the fires through which their ancestors passed. The Jewish community’s original word for the holocaust of European Jewry in World Ward II, for example, was “shoah,” a technical Hebrew term referring to one of many types of animal sacrifices. What made a shoah unique at the ancient temple was that it was burned in its entirety.

“Maafa” is a Kiswahili word that is variously translated — as holocaust, or relating specifically to the sustained horrors over many generations of the Middle Passage in the slave trade. Increasingly it is the word African-Americans are using to denote the ongoing struggle to educate itself, and others, about the deep reach of slavery, including with perhaps its an emphasis on its psychological resonance today.

Composed variously of music, dance, thrilling drumming, and psychodrama, but with a conclusion that is also hopeful and cathartic, The MAAFA Influence Production is having one performance, at 7:30 Friday. Tickets are $20 and up. The Shubert box office can be reached at: 562-5666.