Insights From a Perpetual Outsider

Summer 1992.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, took me out to breakfast in New York City after seeing my play “Fires in the Mirror,” about riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in August 1991. Those riots were the consequence of a buildup of tensions between blacks and Jews, sparked by the death of a young black boy, Gavin Cato, and the murder of a young Hasidic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum.

Some would call the death of Cato a murder; others would call it an accident. Some would call it a reckless accident. Most people would consent that Rosenbaum was murdered. Some people would call what happened in Crown Heights a riot, others would say it was an occupied territory. There were Jews who called the events a pogrom.

How do you even begin to have a conversation when the terms themselves are a cause for dispute? And so they should be. After all, history is made by the way the stories are told, and particularly by whoever has the power to put the words in print, or some other form of dissemination. Being a student of language, I was intrigued to come to Los Angeles, and to work with Davidson and his theater to create a play about the riots in LA.

“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” was to be based on interviews, of which I would perform excerpts in a one-woman show. I was already aware that I could not start an interview by using the word “riot.” I would ask first to see how the interviewee labeled the “events.” It was variously called, at the time, a “riot,” “a “rebellion,” an “uprising,” a “revolution.” In political circles, where language tends to be most calculated, it was called the “events of April 29.”

Soon after my arrival, two Korean American graduate students at UCLA contacted me. My heart raced when the conversation began. “We heard what you are doing, and we are afraid you’re going to get it wrong.” Here we go again, I thought to myself.

I have cast myself as an outsider in my artistic life. Labeling my life’s work “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” it is my goal to try to tell stories from multiple points of view, which involves going out of my “place” to get a point of view other than my own. It is a passion that I have, born out of my own position as a girl growing up in segregation. I see the dangers of being relegated to a “place.” For me, the disaster of “placement” is an intellectual and spiritual disaster. Clearly there are other disasters--being put in your place can trap you in a social class, wind you up incarcerated by the blinders of poverty, or wealth for that matter.

I am used to being seen as the outsider who has no business telling a story that is not my own. But that morning, as I held my breath in my hotel room with my phone tight to my ear, the sentence did not end as I expected: “We are afraid you’re going to get it wrong, so we want to help you.” These students subsequently took me around L.A., showing me “their city,” sharing with me “their story,” and introducing me to people who never would have talked to me on their own. They translated stories; they sat with me across from interviewees, urging the stories out.

In a fractious society such as ours, who can speak for whom? Who can author the story? How in the world will we ever author the story that is big enough to include all of us, or are we only to be a string of little stories, are we left to be a niche culture? The fact is, we have to find partners to take us and move us around a variety of stories.

While in Los Angeles, I came to believe that some of us--not all of us, but some of us--need to come out of our safe houses of identity and meet each other in the crossroads of ambiguity. It’s not very safe out in the middle where you dare to cross the line, but it is creative, it is exciting.

It was Tennessee Williams who gave us the romantic idea of the “kindness of strangers.” In L.A., it was the brilliance of strangers that I found so compelling.

Twilight Bey is the person for whom “Twilight” is named. He is a former gang member. I was immediately interested in him because of the confidence of his stroll. I knew I needed to learn to walk like that, calmly, no sudden movements, easy, focused and yet light on my feet. His walk was alert, it was alive, it was awake. It needed to be. My plan was to walk where I did not belong, to unknown places, always with the possibility of crossing over a line I did not know existed. I went from a Beverly Hills real estate agent’s office, decorated down to the tiniest paper clip, to the gang-war torn gym at Nickerson Gardens. I knew that at any moment I could be crossing a line that was dangerous to cross. Yet the experience was rich beyond words.

I interviewed 288 people and performed 46 of those. I have learned so much by walking in their words over the last 10 years. I know the real tragedy of the riots, and yet it lives in me as a long poem, filled with sadness and loss, but nonetheless a long and beautiful poem, uttered by the residents of your city. The ability of each interviewee to bring words to what happened was extraordinary. Everyone was fluent. But does the city remember its fluency now?

Otis Chandler, former publisher of The Times, told me that the city would forget, that they had said the same thing in the ‘60s. So many people said to me in 1992, especially people with influence--politicians, movie executives: “We-must-not-let-this-happen-again. We-must-not-live-in-our-safe-little-worlds-separated-by-the-freeways. “ But, as Chandler warned, they have forgotten.

If the world is to progress, the commitment to do something other than living in safe little worlds needs to be rehearsed and realized. This is true whether those little worlds are physical neighborhoods, races, classes, religions. The riot should not be forgotten. It should be reviewed. It has valuable information on how to live in the world, not just in a city. The riot should not be repeated, but in that brief moment when people were stunned, consciousness was on the brink of being raised. Yet we are still not awake.

We should not erase the riots from our civic and cultural history. We should remember it, and wake up to its lessons and move those lessons into our worldview. We need it at this moment, when a more alert, wide-awake, aware walk is needed as we move about our lives and in the world. That should happen not only in schools, but anywhere that we presume to have influence. When we work in the world, are we doing so behind a barricade of freeways, classes, cultures, races, or are we testing the boundaries, taking another route, crossing over where we don’t belong to become more fluent and to bring more fluency into what we do?

A biologist once said to me that we have no proof that knowledge will save us, humans, from extinction. We are often satisfied that life is what we know, about ourselves, our businesses, our families. But is it possible that our well-being in our cities, in our world, demands constant exchange, constant movement, constant shifting, constant transformation.

I ended “Twilight” with the words of Twilight Bey: “In order for me to be a true human being, I can’t forever dwell in darkness, I can’t forever dwell in the idea of just identifying with people like me and understanding me and mine.” There are so many things we can do to get closer to becoming true human beings. It’s not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery, but it should be respected as such.

There are many echoes from the 288 people I interviewed. Last year, I completed a film version of the play for PBS. I wanted “Twilight” to be of use for schools after its life on the stage was over. It occurred to me that people who are about to go to college now, in the very early years of this century, would have been 8 years old at the time of the riot. I wanted them to know what happened in Los Angeles in 1992, and to be able to process it now that they are old enough to consider what they might like to do in the world. Perhaps a few among them will dedicate themselves to finding ways to encourage people to speak, where all conversation has collapsed, where there are no words, only gunshots.

“Twilight” was screened at USC Law School recently, and I did a question-and-answer session afterward. At the end, an 18-year-old and her friend came over to me and thanked me for the film, and said to me, “I was one of those people who was 8 years old when the riot happened.” It’s unrealistic to think that we should celebrate only the good stories. I could see in this student’s eyes that she was grateful to see this story, a tragic one, unfolded before her.

To have been here in Los Angeles and to have had the privilege of hearing your story, in the 288 different ways it was told, was a consciousness-raising experience for me, a profound one. The contribution of these words to me, a collector of words, was invaluable. It caused me to think differently not only about my own art, but about the art of my generation and generations to come. As an actress, as a writer, is my cause to have the audience look at me, merely me, or is my cause to have them see something in the world differently through me?

I would like to change the way we educate artists. I think they can be critical in this culture and in the world, and that we are a yet untapped resource. Can we as artists dare to come out of the safety of our studios, into civic life, to speak in a different language than politicians and activists? Do we dare ask the public to trust us to communicate to them about the issues that are serious in their lives? I have started the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue to ask that question. The institute ran for three summers at the end of the 1990s at Harvard, and many artists and some scholars worked with us, lived with us, dined with us, experimenting with new ways to connect to audiences and make art about social change.

In this ever-fractious world, artists have a bigger role to play, as those who not only mirror societies, but those who also bring things together in a different way. Metaphor is at the root of all art. Metaphors do just that--they bring together dissimilar entities and therefore suggest something about each entity. As artists, we are usually suggesting not so much that one thing is similar to the next, but that they resound against one another, shedding new light, the way the sun projects off a white wall.

I had a very special phone call 10 days ago. It was from Twilight, after whom the play is named. He told me that he felt as though he was an orphan of the civil rights movement. “Ten years after the riots, the orphans of the civil rights movement have been betrayed and lied to again. I expected investment in the community: community co-ops, community-based businesses and a true investment in the children. There is a lack of compassion and understanding by those who control resources. They passed more laws to oppress youth than to provide resources to build youth up.”

When Twilight met me, he had just come from meeting with a group of youths in a juvenile correctional facility. That morning he had given them a single word to respond to as a part of an exercise he does. The response was dramatic. The word elicited tears and a great deal of passion. I had visions of the room falling apart as he told me several anecdotes of how the youth responded. The word he had asked them to respond to was “father.”

I think of Twilight as my opposite. We come from entirely different backgrounds. I am an academic and an artist. He is an activist and former gang member. He has dark-brown skin, I have light skin. He is not so tall. I am very tall. And yet sometimes, my resonance with him makes me think of him more as a twin than as an opposite. As he talked about the word “father,” and how these young men, many of whom are unfortunately destined to be caught in the revolving door of the criminal justice system for some time, I wondered what would happen if Twilight were to come to a class of mine, in a university, and do his exercise with the educated and, in most cases, privileged students I teach. How would they respond to the word “father”?

It would be an education for them and an education for him. What I am proposing is a back and forth, expanding our realms, looking to make resonances as a first step toward that world where we save ourselves from our fractiousness. That’s a place where all of us can start, cross the lines, mix things up, do something to challenge the idea of what your place is and where you belong.

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Anna Deavere Smith, an actor and playwright, is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and NYU Law School. She has a recurring role on “The West Wing.”