Mirror of Violence: Charles Fuller’s Zooman and the Sign
It is a truth, widely recognized, that blue-blooded and
red-blooded Americans love violence. To
be sure, it is deemed unpatriotic to detest violence, which along with “race”
is a permanent fixture in the minds of Americans. Like esteemed works of ancient world
literature, contemporary American literature idolizes violence. Literary and cultural critics who condemn
violence in art and in life are naïve candidates for mental asylums, because
unquestioned embrace of violence is the sign of one’s 2lst century humanity. It
is a deeper truth, however, that Americans are ambivalent about disregard for
the sanctity of human life. They applaud
it until one of their children is killed by another person’s child. Tears of grief flow like waterfalls. Anti-violence protests sprout like mushrooms
and people wear costumes of solidarity, then disappear when the next episode of
violence begins on television, in sports stadiums and cinema, or goes viral on
the Internet. We are paragons of human contradiction.
That point is excellently depicted in Charles Fuller’s play Zooman and the Sign (1978). Zooman received
the 1981 Obie Award in Distinguished Playwriting. The next year, Fuller won a
Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier’s Play, which was later filmed
as A Soldier’s Story. Fuller’s reputation is secure, but Zooman is sometimes dismissed for
exposing “secrets” about black on black urban crime. It is puzzling how what gets reported daily
is in anyway “secret.” What is truly
secret about Zooman is its value as a
local mirror for American pathology and the universal banality of violence. We fail to appreciate that Zooman, the title
character, is an icon for adolescents who plot to kill their classmates and
teachers in Colorado and other states.
We fail to align him at the adult level
with George Zimmerman types (including policemen of any ethnicity ) who
experience orgasmic pleasure in murdering African Americans. The sign THE KILLERS OF [fill in this blank] ARE FREE ON THE STREETS BECAUSE OUR NEIGHBORS
WILL NOT IDENTIFY THEM! indicts neighbors everywhere who see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing. The sign indicts our very “normal” embrace of
violence, our casual “literary” acceptance of Zooman’s justification of a
child’s being killed by one of his stray bullets: “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time
--- how am I supposed to feel guilty over somethin’ like that? Shiiit, I don’t know the little bitch,
anyway.” The justification is a fine
example of military rhetoric.
The text of Zooman should be read through the grid provided
by Robin D. G. Kelley’s YO’ MAMA’S disFUNKtional!:
Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban American (1997). Kelley urges us to
“remain suspicious of liberal pluralism dressed up in postmodern garb, of
analyses that completely ignore history or questions of power, of narrow
identity politics that presumes people are the sum total of our academic
categories, of the tendency to limit our critiques of people’s actions to moral
chastisement” (179-180). Kelley’s advice enables us to see better what exactly
is reflected in the American mirror of violence.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. November 17,
2013
