SOURCE: Plunka, Gene A. “Victor Turner and Jean Genet—Rites of Passage in Les Nègres.” Theatre Annual 45 (1992): 65-88.

[In the following essay, Plunka describes Genet's use of ethnological rites of passage in Les Nègres.]

In Jean Genet's oeuvre, the single element that unites all of his works and provides identity for his risk-taking outcasts is the rite of passage from one mode of living to another. In particular, Genet presents metamorphosis, an apotheosis for his outcasts, who move form [sic] game playing (the world of illusion) to a renewed sense of Being. Genet's protagonists, willfully degraded, begin their self-imposed exile by imitating, in a ceremony or in some sort of role-playing capacity, those who have power over others. The characters soon realize that game playing only produces negative results. Eventually, the game playing ceases, and the protagonists refuse to become a reflection of the Other. The apotheosis is achieved through a distinct act of conscious revolt designed to condemn the risk taker to a degraded life of solitude totally distinct from society's norms and values.

To understand Genet's use of ritualistic rites of passage, one must examine the interplay between drama and anthropology. Hubert Fichte asked Genet if his theatrical rituals were similar to initiation rites of various African sects. Genet candidly replied, “Yes, well I know nothing, nothing at all, about anthropology. What you are describing are transition rites.”¹ Although Genet does not profess to have and academic understanding of anthropology, his plays are structured as rites of passage. Anthropologist Victor Turner's work in ethnography allows us to appreciate how rites of passage work in Genet's Les Nègres (The Blacks).

During the early part of the twentieth century (1908), Arnold van Gennep used the term “rites de passage” in reference to rites that accompany a change of place, state, social position, or age.² In a rite of passage, the individual moves from one social position to another through the life cycle. Van Gennep stated that all rites of passage include three phases: separation, margin or liminality, and aggregation. The separation stage is characterized by the isolation or segregation of the individual or group from the social structure, legal status, rank, role, or profession. During the second phase of transition, or liminality, the subject passes through a period of limbo that has few of the social attributes of the previous or future status. The third phase, called incorporation or aggregation, reflects the return of the subject to his or her new, relatively stable, well-defined position in society. Although the most common rites of passage are designed to return the individual to customary norms and values, van Gennep has shown that transitional rites may also initiate entry into a newly achieved status, club, or secret society. Barbara Myerhoff has extended van Gennep's study and notes that rites of passage announce our separateness and individuality to us.³ Such rites are especially significant for marginal individuals, deviants, madmen, intellectuals, artists, and skeptics (Genet's outcasts who are risk takers) who have failed to assimilate into society. Genet's plays focus primarily on the liminal phase of the rite of passage, and it is this stage that has been intensively investigated by Victor Turner.⁴

Turner's research in ethnography is the result of nearly three years of field work studying social stratification rites among the Ndembu, Lamba, Kosa, and Gisu tribes in Zamba (northern Rhodesia). Inheriting a strong interest in theater from his mother, who had been a founding member of, and an actress in, the Scottish National Theater, and with encouragement from Richard Schechner, professor in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and editor of The Drama Review, Turner has applied his ethnographic research to theater studies. In particular, Turner's study of liminality will help us understand Genet's rites of passage.

Turner has identified the liminal persona as invisible (“untouchable” would be closer to Genet's terminology). As marginal individuals isolated from others in this phase of the ritual, these “neophytes” are associated with death, decomposition, and dissolution.⁵ They are allowed to be filthy, and like the “dead” among the living, they may be stained black, masked and humiliated, or forced to undergo hazing or mock burial. The secluded individuals in this stage of the rite of passage are outside the mainstream of the social order. Degradation is the means by which these outcasts reaffirm their subsequent elitism. Turner compares this necessary debasement to a prince sending his son, the heir apparent, to a bush school in Australia to learn how to “rough it”; he who is high and mighty must experience what it is like to be lowly.⁶ The social (and sometimes physical) separation between the celebrant in the liminal state and the preliminal social structure eventually creates an affirmation of a new order of awareness for the neophyte.

Those individuals undergoing the liminal state of transition may experience communitas, a spontaneous, immediate, and concrete bond between people that is not shaped by norms or institutionalized behavior. According to Turner, societal structure holds people apart, defines their differences, and constrains their actions.⁷ Turner states that “Communitas does not merge identities; it liberates them from conformity to general norms, though this is necessarily a transient condition if society is to continue in an orderly fashion.”⁸ The liminal group, if more than one person is involved in the rite of passage, develops into comraderie that transcends societal distinctions of age, rank, sex, or kinship position. Individuals in this stage can be themselves because they are not acting out predefined or institutionalized roles. In most rites of passage, neophytes are released from roles into communities and then are returned to the social structure revitalized by the newly acquired experience.

Liminality is the means of stripping the individual of all ties to society through a period of intense isolation, degradation, and self-abasement. Barbara Myerhoff notes that

when an initiate is stripped of all that he/she knows and understands—the sources of knowledge of self and society—he/she is likely to develop a freer, deeper understanding of the system from which he/she has been removed. Then the moral order is seen from a different perspective and the result may be alienation, social change, and/or individual self-awareness.⁹

The self-immolation may be painful and life threatening, but the results are usually worthwhile. The actual separation from society and subsequent degradation forces the initiate to assess man's relationship to institutionalized behavior, roles, and norms. As Turner suggests, “Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection.”¹⁰

In some societies, the liminality stage is marked by derisory actions or sociodramatic charades designed to reveal the hypocrisy of roles, caste or class structures, or institutionalized behavior. In an abrogation of the normative system, the initiates exaggerate rule into caricature and violate traditional and accepted standards. Turner compares such rites to children's games or Halloween, where the celebrants work fantastic or capricious tricks on the authority-holding group.¹¹ Masks can be used to obtain anonymity in the midst of increased hostility against the forces of order. By identifying with the powers that threaten them and by mocking, mimicking, or degrading their superiors, the initiates enhance their own power and self-esteem. Outcasts can thus elevate their status through a cathartic assessment of a society that threatens their individuality.

Rites of passage involve a certain element of risk as the initiate moves to a new state of awareness. Turner states that liminality, fantasy rejection of societal roles, and the liberation of creativity, cognition, and volition may initially be a surprising, and often painful, experience.¹² The ritual is taken seriously, for the result is usually irreversible: the celebrant cannot undo the liberating effects of the rite of passage. This element of risk makes the rite of passage even more attractive to Genet, the thief who, throughout his career, admired tightrope walkers, daredevils, criminals, acrobats, race-car drivers, traitors, and artists as supreme risk takers.

On the surface level only, The Blacks is a sociological study of black-white relations. In “L'Art et le refuge …,” Genet stated that “This play is not written for blacks but against whites.”¹³ Genet's starting point is similar to the ideas expressed in Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). Fanon's thesis was that blacks define their identities in relationship to whites and act differently in the presence of whites. For the dialectic to be effective onstage, whites must be present in the theater. Genet's determination to use an all-black cast therefore necessitates a white audience (the masked Court is actually black and will not suffice). In Genet's other plays, the outcast and the corresponding mirror image were seen onstage: Lefranc/Green Eyes; the maids/Madame; Roger/the Chief of Police; Arabs/colonists; in The Blacks, the mirror image for the blacks onstage is the white audience. In order to liberate themselves from their servile condition, the blacks must establish their own identity through the simultaneous defilement and destruction of the dominant class, their mirror images. Blacks, as Fanon suggested, typically define their identities through whites. Whites therefore must exist in order for the blacks to expel the Other, their oppressors. In the preface to the play, Genet specifies that The Blacks will not work with an all-black audience, for at least one white must be present:

This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the his seat, preferably in the front row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance. But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy by used.¹⁴

In October 1961, a Warsaw theater director asked Genet's permission to stage the play. Genet wrote to co-translator Jerzy Lisowski, denying the request because, just as the play would not work without a white audience, The Blacks would lose potency without a black cast: “Except for miners, there are no Negroes in Poland. But this is not a play about miners.”¹⁵ As Richard C. Webb notes, the play is equally effective as a liberation for the blacks on stage as it is as a condemnation of the white audience, their oppressors.¹⁶ If only one white person is in the audience, Genet insists that a spotlight focus on the spectator as if some sort of interrogation of the guilty party were being conducted. The white spectator is forced to participate in the play as a judge as well as the judged. As Archibald states to the audience in his opening remarks as master of ceremonies: “You are white. And spectators. This evening we shall perform for you. …”(10). The whites, synonymous with the dominant culture, the purity and integrity of Western civilization, will judge the blacks, the outcasts, the guilt-ridden blighters of society. Simultaneously, the exorcism on stage will also serve as an indictment of white society.

The Blacks can be divided into three discrete segments: the illusory charade played before the white audience, including the play-within-the-play (blacks performing before the white Court) and the play-within-the-play-within-the-play (Village's murder of Marie, the white woman); the offstage trial of a black traitor; and the Village-Virtue love affair. The illusory charade is continually interrupted by the black actors stepping out of character because of tension created by the real action, which is the trial taking place offstage. The play-within-the-play theoretically is to be improvised, so it is difficult to ascertain exactly what is part of the scripted scenario and what is impromptu dialogue among the black performers. After the Court unmasks near the end of the charade, the dialogue becomes real; several interruptions by Newport News also prompt the performers to step out of character and comment on the real events occurring offstage. Actually, the play performed for the audience is a deception that masks the underlying motive of the blacks onstage: a ritualistic self-immolation and subsequent exorcism of white values, producing a rite of passage to a new identity. The apotheosis includes a lengthy liminality phase that culminates in a new status for the blacks as they pursue their won destiny by judging a traitor offstage while deceiving whites, the former creators of their identities.¹⁷

The blacks perform a ceremony both to purge themselves of white autonomy and, at the same time, to establish their own sense of Being. The blacks exist only in relationship to their mirror image, the whites; in order to recognize their own identities, they must exorcise the spirit of whiteness, just as Claire and Solange in The Maids purged themselves of “Madameness” and Roger's self-immolation was symbolically meant to destroy his mirror image, the Chief of Police in The Balcony. The ritual will enable the blacks to transcend their servile condition and define their own identities free from external control. The play-within-the-play, called a “clown show” by Genet, is merely an illusion, charade, game or diversion, a ceremony designed to lull a white audience into passivity while the blacks deceive the whites by engaging in a rite of passage. The stage directions indicate that the blacks “bow ceremoniously” (9,23,96) and perform ceremoniously (55). Archibald refers to the performance as a rite (15) or ceremony/ceremonial (18,56,85,124); Newport News, the Queen, and Felicity each use “rite” to define the charade (85,103,105), while Diouf, Village, Bobo, and Felicity, respectively, regard the clown show to be a “ceremony” (31,38,40,106).

In order for the blacks to achieve their apotheosis with full compliance from their masters, the white audience, the blacks engage in a ceremony of subterfuge designed subliminally to make the whites initially feel at ease. Eight blacks, including four men (Archibald, Village, Newport News, and Diouf) and four women (Snow, Bobo, Felicity, and Virtue), dance a minuet around a catafalque to the music of Mozart. They are wearing formal attire—white ties and tuxedos for the gentlemen, evening gowns for the ladies. Only Newport News, who is not part of the ceremony and soon departs for the real world, is wearing street clothes and is barefoot. Many whites in the audience will be at ease to see blacks imitating white culture. The blacks even bow to the audience, paying the requisite respect. To soothe the fears of the audience, Archibald addresses the spectators directly. Archibald introduces the cast, reminding the audience that the play is a benign performance whose purpose is “to serve you” (10). When Snow expresses her radicalism by refusing to bow (her name suggests the duplicity of a black falsely imitating whites), Archibald says: “I'm asking you, madam, to bow—it's a performance” (10). Snow complies, and Archibald kowtows to the whites, assuring them that no threats exist: “We embellish ourselves so as to please you” (10). As he introduces the cast, Archibald convinces the audience that the performers are, like the spectators, also members of respectable bourgeois society—cooks, medical students, curates, etc. Except for Diouf, the blacks have assimilated Frence and English names. Archibald infers a nonthreatening environment: “When we leave this stage, we are involved in your life” (14). The blacks will speak the “fine language” (14) of white society, not slang or colloquialisms of the ghetto. Their formal language is also reflected in their preference to use “vous” rather than “tu” when talking to each other. Thus, Archibald puts the whites at ease to watch the illusory enactment of Village's murder of a white woman. As Homer D. Swander so aptly realizes, Genet uses the Negro as a performer for whites, as the clown show, with a tradition that extends from minstrelsy to the Harlem Globetrotters and Lena Horne, functions as a diversionary facade that masks the true intentions of the blacks.¹⁸ The whites see the blacks as actors who play roles, just as Madame sees Claire and Solange as maids rather than individuals; the whites are therefore lulled into accepting the charade as nonthreatening stereotypical behavior of blacks who literally dance for whites.

During their daily existences, blacks may use acting and pretense as a tactic to cope with white society. Daily life therefore would become a clown show to them. The masquerade depicted before the white audience is therefore not atypical for blacks who see themselves as continually performing for whites. To make the white audience feel at ease so the blacks can disguise their real motives, the performers personify stereotypical black behavior. They dance for whites (7) and ride in Cadillacs (22); they are malodorous (25,47), depicted as primitives who hunt with spears (25), sexually promiscuous (80), and considered “fond of trial and theological discussions” (98). Derogatory clichés describe their blackness: the night is “as dark here as up a nigger's ass-hole” (63). The blacks are associated with the white nineteenth-century colonialist view of Africa as a savage, primitive world of “… warriors, diseases, alligators, amazons, straw huts, cataracts, hunts, cotton, even leprosy …” (65). The white Court associates the blacks with “swamp, quag-mires, arrows, felines,” and sounds of the forest (92) or jungle (93). As Rose Zimbardo asserts, even the individual black performers personify clichéd behavior: Diouf (Uncle Tom), Felicity (the Earth Mother), Virtue (the prostitute), and Snow (the black woman jealous of white females).¹⁹ During most of the performance, these stereotypes are subliminally reinforced by Village's murder of a white woman who was initially sexually attracted to the virile, primitive black stud. The stereotypes are also visually evident throughout the play as the revolver and the shoeshine box, two props that typify the perceptions whites share about the black man, maintain center stage at the foot of the catafalque. In essence, as Joseph H. McMahon states, the success of the ceremony is based on the white man's stereotyped view that blacks are inferior, incapable of being clever enough to deceive a white audience.²⁰

Throughout the play-within-the-play, the blacks encourage the white audience to lose themselves in the charade and accept the blacks as harmless children playing before their mentors. Archibald says that “We're being watched” (29) and “We're being observed by spectators” (33) to make the audience feel as if they are attending a performance. Archibald assuages the fears in the audience by adopting a nonthreatening demeanor that he attributes to the blacks:

They tell us that we're grown-up children. In that case, what's left for us? The theater! We'll play at being reflected in it, and we'll see ourselves—big black narcissists—slowly disappearing into its waters.

(38-39)

Archibald's sedation of a nervous Village also serves to pacify an agitated white audience: “Don't be afraid. It's only play-acting” (87). Archibald, the onstage manager or master of ceremonies, reminds the audience, “We are actors and organized an evening's entertainment for you” (99). He consoles the spectators with Brechtian alienation effects to assist the audience in distinguishing illusion from reality: “This is the theater, not the street” (58). A member of the audience even willingly engages in the ceremony by volunteering to hold Diouf-Marie's knitting as part of the performance.

Ostensibly, the presence of the white Court also decreases the tension between the black performers and the white audience. The Court, played by blacks in white masks, represents white society or at least a stereotyped black view of what white society represents.²¹ As the outcasts or colonized, the blacks are on the lowest tier; the Court is literally above black society. As symbols of authority, the Court is elevated, much like Lefranc atop his basin, Solange on her balcony, and the Three Figures who yearned to be larger than life. To the blacks, the Court is pure power: political (the Governor), judicial (the Judge), religious (the Missionary), titular (the Queen), and their emissary (the Valet).²² The authoritarian figures in the Balcony (the Judge, General, Bishop, Queen, and Envoy) are now replaced by the white Court. The Court represents the power of the colonists; throughout the play, they are more interested in the stock market exchange rates of their investments (rubber, coffee, and tobacco) in colonial territories than they are in the welfare of what they consider to be primitive people. The Court is synonymous with white tradition, culture, purity, power, and sanctity; the blacks represent the colonized or what the Queen refers to as “foreign possessions” (91), savage outcasts trying to imitate their masters. The Queen rallies the Court around this ideal representation of white culture and tradition: “To the rescue, angel of the flaming sword, virgins of the Parthenon, stained-glass of Chartes, Lord Byron, Choplin, French cooking, the Unknown Soldier, Tyrolean songs, Aristotelian principles, heroic couplets, poppies, sunflowers, a touch of coquetry, vicarage gardens …” (47). As the icon of white society, the Court will be exalted and then destroyed as part of the ritual, just as Claire and Solange require Madames' symbolic presence in order to dethrone Madame from her authoritarian reign. The Court therefore, serves a dual purpose: relieving the audience of immediate guilt so the blacks can further engage in deception and acting as a fully compliant scapegoat for the blacks so that the “performers” can purge themselves of their oppressors.

Much of the diversion created by the blacks focuses on Village's murder of Marie, the white woman.²³ The murder was precipitated by Village's sexual prowess in luring an innocent white woman away from her normally stable environment.²⁴ The white audience is assured that the Court will make the proper judgment in sentencing a promiscuous black male who raped and murdered an innocent white woman. The blacks are seen throughout much of the play as irresponsible children, and thus Village is merely continuing to play the role of a guilty child-criminal before his white judges. The black man's sexuality is on trial, and the white audience intuitively understands that the white Court will make justice prevail. Although the catafalque constantly remains on stage to remind the audience of the death of the white woman, the fact that the story continually changes—Village originally meandered along the docks with Mr. Herod Adventure, killing an old homeless tramp who later becomes a wealthy buxom woman enticed by Villages' sexuality and who is finally transformed into a shy adolescent preoccupied with her knitting—suggests a tale presented as an illusory masquerade, not a real murder. Village, whose real emotions are expressed in his love for Virtue, has very little desire to play the murderer, again assuring the white audience that the crime is a half-hearted effort to imitate reality. Furthermore, during the reenactment of the murder of the white woman, the black performers constantly forget their lines, another alienation effect to remind the audience that the theater is not reality.

Samba Graham Diouf is the ideal choice to assume the role of the white murder victim, Marie. Diouf's first name suggests “sambo”, an Uncle Tom, while his last name implies an African heritage. He is the spirit of ambivalence, the compromiser preaching humanistic benevolence. Richard N. Coe acknowledges that Diouf's middle name implies religious connotations, and he is referred to as a vicar, curate, or “his reverence” throughout the play.²⁵ To the white audience, Diouf is a modicum of “bon sens” tempering the hostility of black performers. He is more closely associated with the white Court than with the other blacks on stage, and Archibald conveniently omits him when the cast is introduced (10). Archibald views Diouf as a paternalistic arbiter between blacks and whites: “We know your argument. You're going to urge us to be reasonable, to be conciliatory” (29). Diouf seeks to intervene on behalf of the Court: “All the same, let me try to come to an understanding with them, to propose some kind of agreement …” (30). Diouf opposes the blacks' litany of hatred and is the only performer concerned that the reaction of the white audience might be negative. He proposes that the audience see only the beauty of the performance: “… and I would like to recognize us in that beauty which disposes them to love” (31). Diouf's presence pacifies the white audience by assuaging their fears that they are being threatened without chance of egress.²⁶ Genet, however, actually despises Diouf and probably considered him to be like closet homosexual Lieutenant Seblon, the naval officer in Querelle, whose life was controlled by timidity rather than by risk taking. Diouf is considered to be a half-man, as his name “Samba” implies, and is despised and belittled more so than anyone else in the play.

As we have seen, the black performers engage in a ceremony that, for the white audience, disguises the reality occurring onstage—a rite of passage from game-playing children (how whites often perceive blacks) to a self-imposed identity free from white subjugation. The stereotypical behavior of the blacks, the calming effects of Diouf and the white Court, and the meta-theatrical techniques that designate the ritual as merely performance all serve to function as a smokescreen to provide the blacks with the opportunity to appease the whites, degrade themselves, and then exorcise white culture from their lives. The scenic design and costuming suggest pervasive black-white dichotomy: the black curtains contrast with the white catafalque; the coffin itself is white rather than black, the color typically reserved for funerals; the costumes are formal wear, tuxedos of black and white; the white masks of the Court cover black faces. The omnipresent, nonthreatening shoeshine box lies side-by-side with the revolver, suggesting potential turmoil. The evening clothes imitate white dress, yet, at the same time, “… suggest fake elegance, the very height of bad taste” (8). The vulgar combination of cheap dress and tan shoes present an image that is incongruous with good taste, implying that something is awry.

During the first part of the ceremony, when the audience is beginning to feel comfortable with the charade, there are hints that the scenario may not be performed as planned. Snow refuses to bow when the cast is introduced, suggesting antipathy towards the white audience. The Governor remarks, “And we know that we've come to attend our own funeral rites” (13), an ominous warning to the spectators, who identify with the white Court. This image is reinforced as the focus of the ceremony extends to the catafalque in the center of the stage. Archibald hints that the ceremony is pure deception and that his introductions of the cast members have been duplicitous: “Liars that we are, the names I have mentioned to you are false” (14). Archibald is not lying when he states that the performance will “make communication impossible” (12). The blacks on stage create distance and communicate nothing because the ruse is reduced to a clown show, a diversion masking a significant apotheosis for the blacks.

The blacks engage in a ritual that begins with the premise that blacks live in pretense, a world of appearance defined by whites. As Jeannette L. Savona astutely notes, the blacks are confined to play acting, a colonial status.²⁷ Unable to change their color, blacks are destined to be restricted to servile roles by whites who refuse to see blacks as individuals behind their skin color. They do not have identities; instead, they are merely black. Skin color becomes synonymous with a role, which cannot be transcended as if one had social mobility. For blacks to play roles determined by whites is self-destructive and static, negating risk and metamorphosis. As puppets for whites, blacks will always play in a clown show replete with costume and role.

In order for the blacks to transcend their servile condition, they must invent, take risks; the rite of passage enables them to do so. First, to transcend their role-playing statuses, the blacks must negrify themselves, master their servile condition, and accept it on their own terms without white input. In the liminality phase of the ritual, they must purge themselves of white values of love, kindness, and pity in order to become the very image that whites have of them: savage, cruel, vile, and primitive. The blacks engage in self-immolation and humiliation. As Victor Turner has discussed, the celebrant can be born anew only through degradation, hatred, and shame. The blacks learn to relish stereotyped attitudes that whites have of them and become childish, violent, primitive murderers succumbing to an overwhelming sex drive.²⁸ Thus, the blacks want to be judged by the white Court, which will deem them to be criminals, thereby accentuating their negritude. By sharing their guilt, the black performers develop communitas, which provides the impetus for the next phase of the ritual, the violation of traditional norms. The blacks subsequently degrade, mock, then finally annihilate the white Court and all remnants of the dominant order; this is similar to the mock trial and murder of “Madameness' performed by Claire and Solange. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the blacks move out of liminality to aggregation where they develop their own sense of Being. Dispossessing themselves from white authority and power, the blacks establish their own identities and begin to make their own judgments, which are manifested by the offstage trial of a black traitor. With their mirror image destroyed, the blacks now judge themselves in the midst of whites who have been duped by the blacks newly acquired cunning, ingenious, and intelligent resourcefulness.

While the white audience is being conditioned to seeing a harmless clown show performed by blacks engaged in stereotypical behavior, the rite of passage continues simultaneously with the game playing. As we have seen, the first segment of the play lulls the audience into a false sense of security by making the spectators think that the blacks are performing a nonthreatening scenario meant to entertain whites. The motif of the Negro as performer assuages white prejudices. This part of the ritual is equivalent to the game playing of Claire and Solange or of the brothel patron in The Balcony; however, to achieve an identity of their own, the game players must transcend the charades through liminality. The black performers gradually substitute royalty for clownery. The ceremony becomes lyrical; the language is sacred. As in many tribal ceremonies, masks are used as a unifying device, increasing the sense of communitas. Objects such as the revolver and the shoeshine box acquire nobility. The costumes befit royalty. Thus, right before the audience's eyes, preparations are being made for the blacks ascension in the class structure.

The whites do not recognize that the catafalque is the altar where the Black Mass is to be performed. As the blacks enact the death of Marie, the white woman, they begin to move from game playing to liminality through an extended degradation process.²⁹ Archibald urges the troupe to blacken themselves which is, as Turner noted, a common practice during various African rituals in which the celebrants stain their skins black to become filthy, the “dead” among the living. Prior to the ritualistic murder of Marie, Archibald exhorts the blacks to negrify themselves, increasing their humiliation before the whites: “The tragedy will lie in the color black! It's that that you'll cherish, that you'll attain, and deserve. It's that that must be earned.” (17). Village asks his comrades in the ritual, “Do you want a detailed description of the humiliations she made me feel?” (18), and the response is a unanimous “Yes!” (18). Bobo incites the blacks to increase the negrification process by inundating the stage with the malodorous scent of blacks: “Does the stench frighten you now? That's what rises from my African soil. I, Bobo, want to draw my train over its thick waves! May I be wafted by an odor of carrion!” (20). To increase the degradation of being immersed in their own scents, a white stereotypical view of blacks who smell bad, the celebrants smoke cigarettes to drown out the white presence, personified by the catafalque.³⁰

The reconstruction of the death of Marie plunges the blacks into degradation. The Judge initiates the rite: “You promised us a re-enactment of the crime so as to desire your condemnation” (25). Archibald agrees with his cohort: “Bear one thing in mind: we must deserve their reprobation and get them to deliver the judgment that will condemn us” (30). Archibald leads the troupe into its ascension as “dead” outcasts, secluded pariahs, untouchables: “Invent—if not words, then phrases that cut you off rather than bind you. Invent, not love, but hatred, and thereby make poetry, since that's the only domain in which we're allowed to operate” (26). Snow helps Archibald to maintain the degradation process by eliminating white emotions of love and tenderness, which would taint the ritual. She wants to be reassured that Village murdered the white woman as a result of hatred rather than out of sexual desire, which would only serve to interfere with the self-immolation. Snow hopes that Village ascends to a degraded status as “… a scarred, smelly, thick-lipped, snub-nosed Negro, an eater and guzzler of Whites and all other colors, a drooling, sweating, belching, spitting, coughing, farting, goat-fucker, a licker of white boots, a good-for-nothing, sick, oozing oil and sweat, limp and submissive …” (27). Bobo applies black shoe polish to Village's face to heighten his negritude. Like Snow, and later Felicity, Bobo is the maternal spirit urging the males to release their primitive instincts: “What we need is hatred. Our ideas will spring from hatred” (33). Archibald also tries to wean Village away from his love for Virtue, for such tenderness will corrupt the ceremony. Archibald pleads with Village to strive for communitas:

You think you love her. You're a Negro and a performer. Neither of whom will know love. Now, this evening—but this evening only—we cease to be performers since we are Negroes. On this stage, we're like guilty prisoners who play at being guilty.

(39)

Village, hesitant to be ostracized as a rapist and murderer in the eyes of his sweetheart, Virtue, must eventually be instructed by Archibald with regard to the significance of the degradation process:

I order you to be black to your very veins. Pump black blood through them. Let Africa circulate in them. Let Negroes negrify themselves. Let them persist to the point of madness in what they're condemned to be, in their ebony, in their odor, in their yellow eyes, in their cannibal tastes.

(52)

Diouf, the great mediator, dons a wig and mask to become Marie, the scapegoat for white civilization. The blacks continue to insult themselves as they recite a “Litany of the Livid”; this is similar to the self-immolation of Claire and Solange and is also equivalent to Roger's castration or the Tramp's masochistic humiliation in The Balcony. Diouf, as Marie, gives birth to five dolls representing the white Court. In short, Village's murder of the white woman signifies the murder of the white race because Marie is its surrogate mother. Anne C. Murch compares the birth to a parody of the Immaculate Conception.³¹ Certainly, the tension between blacks and whites is heightened by the fact that Diouf-Marie's birth of the white dolls occurs while a white spectator is onstage holding Diouf-Marie's knitting. Snow cajoles Village to consummate the murder of Diouf-Marie: “Pour forth torrents. First, showers of sperm and then streams of her blood” (75). However, Village's most influential motivator is Felicity, the earth Mother.³² Felicity's gesture of shrouding the catafalque in corn (50) literally sows the seeds for the ritualistic death of white society. She is the black Joan of Arc, inspiring the blacks to increase their humiliation and enhance their negritude: “Dahomey! Dahomey! To my rescue, Negroes, all of you! … Tribes covered with gold and mud, rise up from my body, emerge!” (76). The Judgment Day is at hand, and Village is spurred on by the background accompaniment of the “Dies Irae.” Village's murder of Marie is a symbolic act of sympathetic magic corresponding to the death of the white race. Allan Francovitch has described this part of the ritual as a type of voodoo where the blacks, some masked, chant, blaspheme, and negrify themselves to exorcise the spirit of whiteness.³³ Diouf, a pale imitation of the black spirit, is exempt from the degradation process and moves across the stage where he will remain, now masked, with the social group with which he is most comfortable—the white Court.

With Diouf, the outsider, removed from the ritual, the celebrants become more unified and develop a stronger sense of communitas. Gradually exorcising white authority, the blacks begin to feel more comfortable about their negritude. The humiliating self-abasement isolates the blacks from society, but they rise together like the phoenix and exhibit renewed strength and pride. The liminality phase of the ritual has been painful and arduous, yet it has also allowed for self-reflection and introspection. Coming to terms with negritude has led to a deeper sense of communitas and a stronger respect of self.

In the last phase of the apotheosis, the blacks are face to face with their accusers, white society. The white Court has descended to its colonial empire, a primitive society inundated with dust, jungle animals, and African rhythms. Felicity notes, “It's dawn!” (95), and a cock crows, suggesting that a new day is dawning for the blacks, and change is imminent. The Court now bows to the blacks (97). The Court made the journey to try the blacks for the murder of the white woman. Instead, the encounter evolves into a racial confrontation between blacks and whites represented respectively by Felicity and the Queen. The Queen speaks of the eternal beauty of white society while Felicity exalts the spirit of darkness and of primitives who belong to the jungle. Felicity's revolt is a call for the changing of the guard: “Whatever is gentle and kind and good and tender will be black. Milk will be black, sugar, rice, the sky, doves, hope, will be black” (106). The members of the Court step forward one at a time to be executed, and each death is followed by the symbolic crowing of the cock. Turner mentioned that the degradation phase of liminality is also marked by a rite that mocks and mimics the social order being dethroned. This hazing occurs as the blacks ridicule members of the white Court, who present speeches before their mock deaths. When Snow and Felicity lead the Queen off the stage, the whites are finally expelled to Hell in whimsical fashion reminiscent of the farcical massacre of the nobles in Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi.³⁴ This phase of the ritual reinforces the pride and identity of the celebrants who, as outcasts, have now dethroned the ruling class. In essence, the blacks, by ritualistically mocking and then destroying the whites, their mirror images, have eliminated their dependence on the Other, much like Claire and Solange who vanquish the spirit of “Madameness.”

Throughout the ceremony, Newport News, the only actor dressed in street clothes, not in a costume, has continually interrupted the solemn ritual with news of an offstage trial of a black traitor. Again, whether the celebrants engage in illusory charades or continue the apotheosis and face serious risks associated with the sublime rites, intrusions from the real world will be omnipresent.³⁵ Whenever Newport News enters, the clown show is halted, and the discussion becomes serious as the blacks drop all pretense of acting in front of the white audience and talk frankly about the trial. Newport News distinguishes blacks acting for whites in contrast to establishing their own identities: “But though we can put on an act in front of them (pointing to the audience), we've got to stop acting when we're among ourselves. We'll have to get used to taking responsibility for blood—our own” (82). At the conclusion of the ritual, Newport News enters to reveal the death of the black traitor and the elevation of a new Messiah to lead the masses. Newport News announces the changing of the times: “He has paid. We shall have to get used to the responsibility of executing our own traitors” (111). The Court removes its masks to reveal five blacks who have participated in the rite of passage to dupe the white audience while the real action occurred offstage. Making their own decisions free from white society, the blacks enter the final phase of the ritual, the aggregation stage, and assume their own sense of identity. By judging and ultimately convicting then executing a member of their own race, the blacks undermine white authority and begin to assume responsibility for their own lives and make their own judgments free from external control. Thus, the white Court is symbolically destroyed because the blacks are no longer dependent on whites for their identity. The blacks no longer require a mirror image to define roles for them; their sense of Being will be self-imposed. The concept of whiteness is destroyed within themselves. As Richard C. Webb observes, the omnipresent catafalque in the center of the stage becomes an omen for the destiny of the white race.³⁶

Moreover, through their brilliant subterfuge, the blacks have demonstrated to the white audience the extent of their cunning and resourceful capabilities. As the masks are removed, the actor playing the Valet remarks about the white audience, “Thanks to us, they've sensed nothing of what's going on elsewhere” (112). The catafalque is uncovered to reveal two chairs, the ones that the Valet and the Missionary were looking for earlier in the play. The play-within-the-play was merely a diversion, a clown show, for there is no corpse of a white woman and obviously no murderer either. The blacks are not performers; they are, instead, revolutionaries with a well-organized political agenda. In effect, the blacks have duped the white audience, undermining their intelligence and powers of judgment. During the denouement, the whites look foolish attempting to condemn the blacks for a nonexistent crime. Actually, the whites became the victims of their own stereotyped views of blacks. Assuming that blacks are primitive, naive, lackadaisical, lazy, and stupid, several whites in the audience will be taken by surprise to find out that they have been lulled into a false sense of security by blacks who are actually well organized, cunning, disciplined, and clever. In addition to the frustration of being deceived in a clown show, the audience also realizes, as Susan Taubes was first to note, that they have been unwitting accomplices to a real murder that occurred offstage.³⁷

The remaining discrete segment of the play that is not part of the ritual is the love affair between Village and Virtue, the harlot sarcastically named.³⁸ As they try to express their love, and Virtue is the only female to reveal such sentiments in the play, Village and Virtue represent threats to the ritual. Throughout the play, Archibald, the leader of the troupe, denied Village the chance to make love to Virtue because love, as a product of white society, would taint the negrification rite. Archibald reminds Village that “You're a Negro and a performer. Neither of whom will know love” (39). At one point, Village, disturbed that he must refrain from loving Virtue, disobeys Archibald and seeks to abandon the ceremony by joining the white audience (41). Archibald explains that love is not the salvific means to establish their identities free from the gaze of whites. When Village and Virtue engage in their first discussion about love, we learn that Archibald was correct: “… nine or ten white masks suddenly appear about the Court” (41). Village and Virtue cannot express love, for the whites, depicted by the masks, crowd the stage, literally interfering with “virtue”. As blacks, Village and Virtue cannot express their natural sentiments as long as they exist as a distorted image in the eyes of white society. Virtue admits, “Whether in excellent health, pink and gleaming, or consumed with languor, I am white” (44). Virtue is beautiful and expresses love only when she steals the white Queen's voice (46). In short, Village and Virtue cannot be themselves if they continue to rely on white society.

Village and Virtue will be free to love only if they participate in the degradation process, share in communitas, and expel the Other from their lives. As Virtue says to Village, the blacks must invent, not imitate (128). With the symbolic destruction of white society and the concomitant elevation of a black Messiah, the blacks, at the end of the play, have taken responsibility for themselves: they invent rather than imitate. The love expressed by Village and Virtue signifies the success of the rite of passage, for they are no longer dependent on white society and are therefore able to discover the authentic meaning of love. Jeannette Laillou Savona asserts that one of the significant therapeutic functions of the ritual is to liberate Village from any sexual attraction to whites.³⁹ Virtue confirms the effectiveness of the exorcism: “At least, there's one sure thing: you won't be able to wind your fingers in my long golden hair …” (128). Village and Virtue have attained the freedom to Be and are therefore able literally to turn their backs on the white audience—the last gesture of the play (128).

Several critics have argued that The Blacks is circular because the protagonists, through their apotheoses, will merely replace the dominant class and become just like the whites. The basis for this belief is the Queen's statement at the end of the play before the Court is expunged: “We're going, we're going, but keep in mind that we should lie torpid in the earth like larvae or moles, and if some day … ten thousand years hence …” (126). Although the whites have been vanquished, they may rise again one day. Furthermore, the blacks, who began the ceremony by dancing to Mozart, dance the minuet from Don Giovanni at the end of the play, suggesting that time is cyclical. In Roger Blin's 1959 production, the blacks danced to an African rhythm, which changed suddenly to Mozart. Newport News entered, carrying the catafalque. He placed the coffin as it was at the start of the ceremony and glared insolently at the audience. Mozart continued to play. In “Pour jouer Les Nègres,” Genet said he preferred Blin's version of the ending to his own.⁴⁰ This juxtaposition of Mozart and African rhythms also indicates circularity. A circular ending suggesting that whites and blacks may exchange roles in the future would be alarming if Genet were primarily interested in politics. However, The Blacks is not solely a political play, and Genet has no didactic political agenda in mind. Genet probably believes that blacks, if they gaze upon the Other like whites do to blacks, will become whites. Domination and power are often cyclical in historical context. Whether or not the play is circular is a moot point and involves endless speculation because the play supersedes a simplistic black-white dialectic.

Genet is primarily concerned with revolt rather than with a well-defined political agenda. As is true for all of Genet's plays, The Blacks focuses on an apotheosis that produces a proud affirmation of a renewed sense of Being. The ending of the play confirms that change has taken place despite the fact that blacks and whites may exchange roles in the future. The revolt is successful; where it may lead in the future is speculative. Rose Zimbardo argues that the Black mass in the play does not produce liberation because the ritual must be perpetual.⁴¹ This writer does not know of any such limitations on successful rituals such as the Mass, and neither Turner nor the Cambridge Anthropologists have included this as criterion for consummation of the rite of passage. Instead, critics would do well to note the changes that have occurred by the end of the play. Village and Virtue will now be able to love independently of outside influence. The white Court has been symbolically banished and then stands unmasked around the catafalque. The flowers are noticeably in disarray. The white dolls that Diouf produced, inanimate objects, are the only reminders of white civilization. The actor-audience relationship is also quite different at the end of the ritual than it was at the beginning. Most importantly, at the end of the play, the blacks are no longer performing for others; instead, at the conclusion of the ceremony, they are the masters of their destiny. The play, therefore, is cyclical only to the extent that history may repeat itself. However, Genet's drama transcends simplistic political or historical dogma. In essence, Turner's research in anthropology helps us unravel The Blacks as a universally appreciated rite of passage rather than merely as a somewhat limiting didactic political statement.

Notes

1. Hubert Fichte, “Jean Genet Talks to Hubert Fichte,” trans. Patrick McCarthy, The New Review 4 (1977):16.

2. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), passim.

3. Barbara Myerhof, “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox,” in Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, ed. Victor Turner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 115.

4. For a more thorough examination of Turner's work on liminality, see The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93-111; The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 94-130; Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 231-271; and From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 20-60.

5. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 96.

6. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 97.

7. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 232.

8. Ibid.

9. Myerhoff, “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox,” 117.

10. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 105.

11. Ibid., 172.

12. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 44.

13. This is my translation of “Cette pièce est écrite non pour les Noir, mais contre les Blancs.” See Jean Genet, “L'Art et le refuge …,” in Les Nègres au Port de la Lune: Genet et les différences, ed. Jean-Bernard Moraly (Bordeaux: Éditions de la Différence, 1988), 100.

14. Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show, trans. Benard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1960), unpaginated preface. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text.

15. Jean Genet, “To a Would-Be Producer,” trans. Bernard Frechtman, Tulane Drama Review 7 (1963): 81.

16. Richard C. Webb, “Ritual, Theatre, and Jean Genet's The Blacks,” Theatre Journal 31 (1979): 457.

17. Benard F. Dukore views Genet's drama—particularly The Blacks—as a theater of hate. He argues that the theatricality of The Blacks masks hatred, Genet's real intention. Hatred is manifested through Snow's refusal to bow to the white audience and the humiliation accorded the white volunteer from the audience who appears on stage to hold Marie's knitting. Dukore admits that Genet portrays the outcast as seeking to become the victimizer, yet Dukore does little with this idea. See Dukore, “The Blacks—The Rite of Revenge and the Reality o the Double Negative,” Western Speech 27 (1963): 133-141.

18. Homer D. Swander, “Shakespeare and the Harlem Clowns: Illusion and Comic Form in Genet's The Blacks,” The Yale Review 55 (1965): 209-226.

19. R. A. Zimbardo, “Genet's Black Mass,” Modern Drama 8 (1965): 256.

20. Joseph H. McMahon, The Imagination of Jean Genet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 186.

21. Michèle Piemme disagrees, stating that for the audience, the performance is a spectacle, yet for the white Court, Village's murder is to be judged as a crime. Piemme therefore sees a fundamental difference between the white audience and the Court. Actually, Piemme is technically correct, for the perception of the white Court (as blacks) is quite different from the viewpoint of the audience. However, the Court, like the audience, reflects the biased view of blacks towards whites depicted as authority figures. See Piemme, “Les Espaces scéniques et dramatiques dans Les Nègres de Jean Genet,” Marche Romane 20 (1970): 42-43.

22. Jean Decock makes a rather feeble attempt to compare the male members of the Court with the black male performers in the trial of the white woman. Thus, Diouf, the curate, is compared to the Missionary; Archibald, as master of ceremonies, has the authority of the Governor; Villlage is similar to the Valet, who is an intellectual, poet, and pederast; Newport News is taciturn and serious like the Judge. Unfortunately, the members of the Court do not convey distinct enough personalities for one to make such comparisons. Although intriguing, such similarities are too simplistic and offer little in the way of furthering one's critical examination of the play. See Decock, “Les Nègres aux USA,” Obliques 2 (1972): 49.

23. Village first appears in Genet's work as a black murderer in Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet associates him with a primitive “born at a time of a famine, of the death of three jaguars, of the flowering of the almond trees. …” See Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Benard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 166.

24. The notion that black men seek to become acculturated in white society by attracting white women is also discussed by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks.

25. Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968), 294.

26. Ionesco was not amused and walked out of the theater. Like many whites, Ionesco felt that the play was a hostile and irritating black-white confrontation, which made him feel personally threatened.

27. Jeannette L. Savona, Jean Genet, Grove Press Modern Dramatists Series (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 108.

28. In a fascinating article on the play, Graham Dunstan Martin argues that Genet is perhaps working with the Jungian concept of “shadow” whereby whites attribute to blacks the unconscious fears that they repress in themselves. Thus, the stereotyped behavior of blacks as lust-filled, violent yet naive murderers is a type of cathartic release for a white audience seeing its unconscious fears realized on stage. See Martin, “Racism in Genet's Les Nègres,” The Modern Language Review 70 (1975): 517-525.

29. In her seminal article on The Blacks, Rose Zimbardo refers to this phase of the ritual as the elevation stage, the process of humiliation and degradation. She sees the rite, or the Black Mass, occurring in three stages: elevation, consecration, and communion. The consecration involves impregnating the whites with the rape-murder, followed by communion, the death of the white Court. See Zimbardo, “Genet's Black Mass,” 247-258.

30. Jeannette Laillou Savona has compared this part of the ceremony to the censing of the altar at the beginning of the Mass. See Savona, “The Blacks by Jean Genet: A Dimensional Approach,” Australian Journal of French Studies 10 (1973): 208.

31. Anne C. Murch, “Je Mime Donc Je Suis—Les Nègres de Jean Genet,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 150 (April-June 1973): 253.

32. Lewis T. Cetta, “Myth, Magic and Play in Genet's The Blacks,” Contemporary Literature 11 (1975): 518.

33. Allan Francovitch, “Genet's Theatre of Possession,” The Drama Review 14 (1969): 32.

34. Jeannette Laillou Savona and Pierre Brunel previously noted the similarities between the execution of the Court and the mock massacre in Ubu roi. See Brunel, “Tentation et refus de l'opéra: Les Nègres de Jean Genet,” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 18 (1980): 242, and Savona, “The Blacks by Jean Genet: A Dimensional Approach,” 216.

35. This seemingly unconscious fear extends for Genet back to the Mettray reformatory when the nightly rites were constantly interrputed by paternalistic intrusions. The interrupted rite becomes a motif seen in each of Genet's plays.

36. Webb, “Ritual, Theatre, and Jean Genet's The Blacks,” 457.

37. Susan Taubes, “The White Mask Falls,” Tulane Drama Review 7 (1963): 85.

38. Genet's women are still seen as strong-willed revolutionaries or whores, and as was true of Chantal in The Balcony, the two portraits are often synonymous. As her name implies, Felicity Trollop Pardon is the personification of the Earth Mother-prostitute. Virtue is a whore, while Snow and Bobo are strong-willed precursors of the Arab women in The Screens.

39. Savona, “The Blacks by Jean Genet: A Dimensional Approach,” 219.

40. Genet, “Pour jouer Les Nègres,” unpaginated.

41. Zimbardo, “Genet's Black Mass,” 255.