***

The Rumpus: On your latest album “Mean Ones,” I especially like the track “Fall Back.” Most Bay Area hip hop fans know you from HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and are familiar with your style of “bustin’” where you rap really fast on tracks like “BAY.” But on each of your last few albums, you’ve released one or two tracks like “Giant” where you sing. Do you see yourself singing on more albums?

Rafael Casal: I think it’s been present since the beginning. There were at least two singing songs on each project. A lot of my hooks are melodic, singing hooks. I do a lot of song writing for other people and a lot of that is singing stuff. While I think it’s harder for people following me musically [to understand], I try to not exclude that part of my artistry from these projects that I put out.

I enjoy it, and writing for singing comes a lot more naturally to me than writing for rapping. It’s what makes me feel I’m not just some other rapper. After a while, writing 16-bar songs that’re about yourself and bragging gets old. The way I get some creativity in there is to start messin’ with the melodies and playin’ with the hooks, backgrounds, harmonies—these’re the things that take it a notch above just being a decent rapper in the studio.

Rumpus: “Dreamer,” the first track on “Mean Ones,” features a hook where you Auto Tune your voice. What are your thoughts are on Auto Tune? There are artists like T-Pain who use it in a pop kind of way, but also artists like Kanye West, who similar to you, use it to enhance their songs by using Auto Tune in an artistic manner.

Casal: If you think about all the tools that’re used in the studio, there’s this negative stigma about Auto Tune. But Auto Tune’s been used for years on everyone’s favorite records. Stylistically, I think that it’s a sound we’re embracing now in hip hop. So for me, the beef with Auto Tune people have is not a beef with the tool, but a beef with people who can’t sing, pretending as if they can.

When I’m listening to somebody’s record, I listen to see if that effect’s being used to be contemporary and to achieve a sound that we enjoy. Or if it’s being used to compensate for a lack of talent or skill. Or if it’s being used to convey something they couldn’t convey otherwise, which is what Kanye West did on his “808s & Heartbreak” record. He’s not a great singer, but he had something that he really wanted to express, and he used the tool in the same way reverb has been used for years and compression, EQ, and any tool that makes you sound better in the studio, to get the overall point.

Now, anything overused sounds terrible, and I think my alarm only goes off for certain effects when they’re used incorrectly. That’s where I draw the line. With things like Auto Tune and pitch correct and other things people are using now, [my question is,] “Why is it being used?”

Rumpus: The album was originally titled “Whoville,” and now it’s called “Mean Ones.” In the final track, you talk about being a “Grinch in a pinch analyzing his Whoville.” Could you explain why you chose the Dr. Seuss theme for this album and why you’ve referenced the Grinch in your earlier albums as well?

Casal: In leaving the Bay when I was young and starting to travel and tour around [age] 18 and 19, the visibility of the Bay Area was so much less than it is even today, and it’s still low in comparison to [other] music meccas.

For me, the more I traveled and tried to explain culturally where I come from and have gotten to the point I am now, it just paralleled such a Seuss-like portrait.

Growing up in Berkeley and Oakland, we got such a strange, eclectic compiling of characters that’re everyday to us, and very strange to the rest of the country. We have the hippies with their organic everything, running their cars on vegetable oil, the people at the Ashby flea market selling bootleg Jordans—there’s just all these interesting characters. In telling stories to people [when traveling outside the Bay], people would be like “There’s nothing like that here.”

I think that’s because the Bay Area’s such a melting pot for people from all over the world, and if you grow up there, you grow up in the bubble of that kind of eclecticness. I would read Seuss books, and there’s all these different creatures that’re unique to the world that Seuss lives, and they’re normal to everyone there, but they’re strange to anyone reading.

And the Whoville thing came up because I felt like I was living on a spec that was a grand world to me, and very irrelevant to the other major cities I was in. And saying I’m from California, people immediately assume I’m from Los Angeles. It’s only now you can say the Bay Area and actually mean something.

And the second tier to that is I’ve been in the Bay my whole life, and I feel very jaded by certain things that I grew up around and saw there, about the certain liberalness of the Bay Area, and yet our drop out rates, poverty rates, and gap between the rich and poor is still as dramatic as ever and growing. The public education system in the Bay is shit. And I know because I worked in it. I went through it and dropped out.

And so I got Grinch-like. I was pro the Bay when I wasn’t in the Bay, but anti-Bay when I was at home. I felt that’s how a lot of people from the Bay act sometimes. I felt there was a relationship between the world Seuss was painting and how I could describe my reality. When I would talk to other people about [the Bay Area], I would compare it to Dr. Seuss. That started a trend with imagery I reference in my writing and led to me titling things and naming things as such.

Rumpus: What are your thoughts on Occupy Oakland?

Casal: [Lets out a long sigh before answering] I have a lot of different feelings about Occupy Oakland, in the same way I have feelings about protests in general. I’m torn because I believe that breaking windows and flipping over cop cars is not helpful. The nonviolent approach is what I’d hope would work. I also know that it was the destruction that gained Occupy Oakland its national attention because nobody was talking about it until the police started shooting at people, that soldier got fatally wounded, and shit was on fire.

And unfortunately, the way this country responds to outcry from the population is if it gets newsworthy. I wish that didn’t have to happen.

I think it’s great that we’ve changed the conversation on the news and in the mouths and minds of politicians because we’ve made certain things unacceptable to say.

As a language is created around “99%,” politicians know that there’s no more of this “We just need to tough it out for a little bit longer.” That type of language has been squashed because we’ve acknowledged it’s unacceptable to come [from] people who aren’t part of the economic classes of the majority of the population. We’ve managed to change that conversation, and there’s an acknowledgment that things are not how they should be.

Because I’m a Berkeley kid and was raised by people who spent a big part of their young lives in protest in very clear, direct, and strategic ways, I have a hard time knowing why or how to get involved. [With Occupy Oakland,] I’m not sure that the person next to me is angry about the same things I am, and I need that kind of cohesiveness to be onboard.

I think it’s still in its infancy. Clarification of why people are upset is still formulating. It won’t be until I see those ideas evolve [that I will] rally with folks in anything more than just collective anger.

Occupy has done what it was meant to do, and now hopefully it will be a word to unite the people part of the 99%, and many other movements can come from it.

Rumpus: The Bay Area is known as a place of culture creation, but at the same time, many of the most talented San Francisco and Oakland artists from our generation (including Chinaka Hodge, George Watsky, Dave Smallen, and Darren Criss) have moved to LA to get national exposure and to make a living. What are your thoughts on this, and has this influenced your move to LA?

Casal: It’s very easy to see where the top of the ladder is in the Bay, ‘cause it’s not that high. And for those who have larger aspirations, it’s not a satisfying climb. And the industry in the Bay makes it unnecessarily difficult to climb, considering how short it is.

As big as our pond can feel from inside of it, Los Angeles and New York are hubs for the world. I love the Bay. I make that clear in all my art. But even back home in the year I came back, after being Midwest for a couple years, I started approaching the top of the ladder and was really unsatisfied. I realized that you can have a good run in the Bay, but it’s hard to have a career in the arts without leaving. And the folks who’ve been the most successful left.

Our industry in the Bay Area is guerrilla-style, grassroots, alternative, and anti-industry, and that’s very counter-productive to me. I feel like it’s a very Bay mentality to do things in the most grassroots way, and I respect that—that hustle is inherent in how we are raised. But I don’t think you have to apply that to everything you do.

The music industry is thoroughly fucked across the board, but I don’t think you’re going to fix it in the Bay. It’s broken in LA and New York, and now’s a good time to go and sit down in those places and get in on the rebuilding.

The real reason I came to LA is I’m trying to be a writer and director down here. I’ve been working in film and writing for a long time. The reason we came down to Los Angeles is to be around folks who are pursuing the same industries and have the tools and resources to make happen what is much harder to make happen up North.

Related Posts:

• Drake’s East African Girl
• Putting Tracks on the Map
• Straight Outta Stratford
• Word Count
• The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup

Ise recently wrapped up a 6-week run of his play “Pistols and Prayers” packed with sold-out shows in Downtown Oakland. The play features Ise performing a series of poems, short stories, and vignettes about perceptions of race and the challenges of life in Oakland.

He often has a witty comparison or insight—observations that shift one’s perspective and reframe the debate in a humorous, but profound way. He incorporates a variety of voices into his descriptions of Oakland. Topics covered in the interview include Ise’s white grandmother using the N-word, could Michelle Obama rock an Afro?, hipsters gentrifying Oakland, and Ise’s reaction to the sentencing of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle who killed Oscar Grant.

***

The Rumpus: In your book, your longest story is the autobiographical piece My grandmother died today. I was wondering if you could talk about the turning point in this story, where your white grandmother is afraid that your sisters going to the beach will make them tan and come back too black, and looking like the N-word.

Ise Lyfe: This is one of the heaviest pieces for me in the book. It’s the piece that draws up the most conversation. It’s the piece that no interviewer has been brave enough to ask me about, so I appreciate you for asking about it.

Putting the piece in a book to be interpreted and for people to read it and know that about me—even for me as an artist, a man who stands up and advocates for black folks, most people don’t know that my grandmother is white. This brings a whole ‘nother conversation in the realm, and all these other assumptions that come.

I had someone in the Q&A ask me after the play once, “So, would you say the catalyst for your disdain; the fuel for what keeps you going is this moment in the kitchen where your grandmother calls you a nigger?” What she was doing in asking her question is minimizing everything I was saying, and saying that I’m just hung up on some issue from when I was a kid.

And that’s the real vulnerability. Because that was asinine, but you’re putting yourself out there like that. As an author, you have to be selfless and understand that you’re writing something and understand that the reason you’re putting it out isn’t for people to think that you’re so cool, or be impressed with what a good writer you are, but it’s more so from the hope that someone will see what you’re writing and grow from it, and connect with it.

And it also brought a sense of closure to the piece. Those were the words I should’ve had with her. And that opportunity is gone, and I hope that people can read that and apply it to a variety of different types of situations and know that you gotta get that outta yourself, ‘coz 30,000 people have read that, but not the one person that needed to.

Rumpus: Do you think what she said was expressing a long-harbored feeling, or [was it] just something she said flippantly, and then later regretted?

Lyfe: And did she see me as a nigger? Historically, a nigger is a black person. She said, “They’re going to come back looking like little niggers.” My sisters are clearly brown-skinned, nappy-headed girls. They’re black. [Up until that point, did my grandmother] not see us as black children?

I’m black, but I’m not Black, though. Obama was elected by white people—hands down. If he was three shades blacker, his hair was a little coarser. Or, if he was that color, but claimed no white heritage, [would Obama have been elected?] We saw when his daughters went to Europe, and they had their hair in twists, and there was this big uproar about the representation of the first family.

Could his wife not have her hair permed to a T every time you see her? Could one day could she kinda rock a ‘lil afro? Would that be acceptable? No. Hell no.

That’s another thing that I think that my grandma, and people in general [subscribe to]. There’s the type of black people that we feel comfortable with, and then there’s Black people. If you go on university campuses, and if they’re tall, black, and strong, they better be on a basketball team or football team, or else, no one’s comfortable around them. They’re threatened by them. And that’s another layer on top of this story.

But this conversation that we’re having now and the one in my book is what I wish I had with my grandmother. [The question for white folks is] would I be able to fully embrace, fully love and be comfortable with my children if they were black? And I think that my grandmother, who probably feels like, “Shit, I got a black husband. I live in the ghetto in East Oakland—I’m not racist.” But clearly, look at what she said.

And remember in the story, my mother’s there. That’s a key piece. Her silence was a co-sign—that’s Dr. King. And she didn’t say anything. It was a great healing moment, to be honest about what our comfort levels are, and what they are not. That’s what I hope can come out of this.

Rumpus: What’s your reaction to the Johannes Mehserle verdict and sentencing? We talked on my radio show back in 2009, not long after the unarmed Oscar Grant was killed by the BART Police officer. I’ve read your Note from a County Courthouse that touches on this incident and listened to your song Hard in the Paint. But I was wondering what role do you think YouTube played in shedding light on this homicide?

Lyfe: YouTube cuts out the chicken shit. YouTube is like, do you care about this? There it is: bam.

People always see police brutality in inner-city communities, and just look at it. Stand around and watch it, but just feel powerless, like there’s nothing that we can do about this. But we don’t stand powerless around violence in general. Take the police officer out of the situation, and lets say Oscar Grant was on the platform and some kids his age got off BART and started swinging on him, beating him up. A riot would break out. People would get up and a fight would break out because people aren’t going to sit by and watch that.

But there’s this wall, like it’s a transparent iron curtain that falls when a police officer is doing anything that may not be in the best light. People don’t know how to engage it—not just physically engage it, but after the fact. Where do I go report this? Who do I go talk to this about? When this thing happened and it was on video tape, I think it forced everyone to react. However, when do you put the camera down, and come in front of it and act?

What stood out to me is that when Mehserle killed Oscar Grant, he was 27 and Oscar Grant was 23. What that tells me is that 10 years before, both of these kids were sitting in high school classrooms, in totally different communities. And how could the fate of both of these men be changed if they had institutional education around police brutality, gun violence, and—this would be hard to push, but white supremacy.

We hear “white supremacy,” and we hear “the Klan or Nazis.” No. It’s the idea that white people are better than everybody else.

I don’t think Mehserle pulled Oscar Grant off that train and thought, “I’m going to pull out my gun and kill you.” I think that to the average white person walking around anywhere, the average black man is a monster. They’re terrified of black people.

I’ve seen it in me. There’s nothing I think outright threatening about me, but I’ve seen my 160 pound stature terrify white people. Just my presence.

That’s what the whole “He reached in his pocket.” Or, “He raised his voice, or he flinched at me.” All of that is being terrified of black people. Because Mehserle’s only real contact with black people is in this job where you’re coming into contact with people in a hostile way all the time. And, when you come home, and you’re only 27 and a white kid from Napa, you’re playing video games like Grand Theft Auto. And you see rap videos, you hear the language that these kids are using, and you don’t understand it.

Rumpus: What do you think is the best way to address this disconnect? More diversity training, conflict resolution courses, to promote understanding between the many cultures in our communities?

Lyfe: It has to be an institutional conversation. Diversity shouldn’t always be we need to keep our numbers even. But it should be because in order for the world to be better, we need to be interacting with each other more.

On the flipside, let’s say that something happened and your parents couldn’t afford to pay for private school anymore, and your parents dropped your ass off at Castlemont, which is around the corner from Bishop O’Dowd [the private Catholic high school the interviewer attended in East Oakland]—literally, a 3-minute drive, but it’s a whole different reality. Those kids would try to eat you alive. Because they don’t understand you. They’d have all these assumptions about you. And that’s what’s dangerous, man. Because at some point we have to intersect.

Rumpus: The 2010 Census reports that a large percentage of African Americans have left Oakland between 2000 and 2010. When I was born in Oakland in 1984, the city was almost 50% African American. In 2000, the city was 36% black. These latest census results show that 33,000 black residents (25% of the total black population) left Oakland in the last decade, and that blacks now only make up 27% of Oakland’s population. Why you think this is happening?

Lyfe: I think it’s an interesting word choice they use, when they say 25% have left. No, no. 25% have been pushed out, gentrified, tricked out: “Did you know that your house is worth $200,000?” So some grandmother who bought her house for $40,000, goes, “Whoa, really? What could I do with that kind of cash?” And then takes $200,000 and moves to Antioch, and they come and demolish her home, build an apartment complex. And it’s worth $2 million, like that [Ise snaps his fingers].

I think that it also speaks to a lack of ownership and a lack of community within the black community. Everything can’t be for sale. There has to be some stuff, where we go “We won’t sell this, and this is important to us, and this is why.”

There’s also this very trampling, inconsiderate attitude of the new people that’re moving into Oakland, where Oakland’s for the taking. There’s this very inconsiderate “We’re here now”—this new, young white business energy in Oakland that’s really building on top of black people in Oakland. And they’re invited by and courted by former Mayor Jerry Brown, who’s now governor. He got that ball rolling.

In my opinion, former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums was kinda like this statue that was in Oakland for 4 years, which allowed this system and this machine that had been built by Jerry Brown to be put in place. It’s not just a loss of black home ownership— [almost] all the black clubs in Oakland have been shut down. While now white club and business owners have been offered opportunities to apply for special permits where their businesses can be open until 4 o’clock in the morning.

The East Bay Express just printed an article about unjust raids, where they’re coming and checking for liquor licenses and cabaret licenses at 12:30 in the morning, when the clubs are packed—those few black establishments that’re left—with 10 police officers. When you bring 10 police officers to a black establishment, everyone’s leaving. We have a different relationship with the police.

Rumpus: Back to the black population in Oakland declining, I was wondering what’re your thoughts about white hipsters moving into the flats of Oakland? In Pistols and Prayers you ask, is having a white child the cue for these white couples to “leave their exhibition in the ghetto?”

Lyfe: I wonder, will we see white people raising their children in Oakland? The defining issue on that’s gonna be: What’s the black number in West Oakland for me, if I’m going to raise my kids here? Even though Oakland is getting white, there ain’t a rise in white kids in the schools. In fact, where the fuck are these kids going to school at?

These kids’re living in West Oakland. They’re not going to these black schools. Have you even set foot in Cole Middle School to know that it’s terrifying? So what do you do? You do what my mom did. She got a fake address so that I could go to Skyline. Or you’re putting your kids in private school.

There has to be a desire and an organized front of black people who care about staying in Oakland—not to box other people out, but to build and continue our legacy in Oakland. What happens when there’s this huge exodus? Where they’re going to is: Antioch, Pittsburgh, Modesto, coffins, the penitentiary, and hospitals.

There was white flight in the 1950s and 1960s when white people moved out of Oakland, running away from black home ownership, and they moved to the suburbs. But now their grandchildren are coming back, and now they don’t give a fuck about black and brown folk in Oakland—particularly black folks in Oakland.

And we’re not equipped. Our vote doesn’t matter as much. We definitely don’t have businesses that we patronize as much. So we’re not equipped to keep a stronghold in Oakland, and I hope it’s something we can all rise to the occasion to.

Rumpus: However, many in the white community in Oakland see Jerry Brown’s projects as revitalizing Oakland’s downtown.

Lyfe: The Uptown?

Rumpus: Yes, the Uptown, and the restoration of the Fox Theater.

Lyfe: The Fox Theater, dead-smack in the middle of Oakland, ten blocks from West Oakland, brings no artists to that theater that anyone black gives a fuck about: Girl Talk, Modest Mouse. How do you do that? Can I go out to Napa and open a fuckin’ hyphy joint? So how do you come to Oakland… it’s ridiculous. It’s so crazy.

Personally, I’m opening an art bar on 14^th and Broadway, and I’m doing what I can to represent. And not represent in a way where “this is only for black people,” but anyone can come in and experience a black culture experience in Oakland, from a black perspective.

Ise Lyfe will be touring universities across the U.S. this fall performing Pistols and Prayers and Is Everybody Stupid? For more about Ise, see http://www.iselyfeonline.com/.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

The shooting of Oscar Grant showed that Oakland is in serious need of a discussion on race. The poet and playwright Chinaka Hodge provided such a discussion in her groundbreaking play

I sat down with Chinaka Hodge at Panchitas Restaurant at 16^th and Valencia in the Mission District, San Francisco in April 2010.  –Matt Werner

The Rumpus: How did navigating society between growing up both in the Oakland Hills and West Oakland influence your writing?

Chinaka Hodge: I would spend half the week with my dad and half the week with my mom until I was twelve, and so I would go from being one of the more affluent kids in a poorer neighborhood to being one of the working class/middle class kids in a richer neighborhood. I got a perspective on both ends on a daily basis. We would move from my dad’s house where the hustle was going on outside to being in my mom’s house, where deer were in the neighborhood.

I think that’s the dynamic kind of existence that most folks who grew up in Oakland have. And I think it’s rare that we get to talk about both sides of the table. And I think that I’m really privileged to be able to pinpoint exactly when and where I saw a deer eating from my mom’s lemon tree, in the same week that I learned how to play craps with my friend on the block.

Rumpus: How did moving away from Oakland to study at NYU help inform and shape this play? Some writers call it the James Joyce dynamic, where it’s not until you leave the place you’re from and encounter people from different backgrounds, with different ideas, that you really start to process.

Hodge: While I think that New York is a bastion of culture, and a mixing ground for lots of ethnicities, I’d never lived in a place that was so racially polarized. We don’t have any places that are “black neighborhoods” in the Bay Area. We have neighborhoods where it’s predominantly black, but in New York, they talk about a Jewish neighborhood, and I can’t think of a neighborhood in the Bay that’s like that.

You go to specific neighborhoods in New York to consume certain types of food, and that’s not the same in the Bay Area either. I guess the Mission to some extent, and parts of East Oakland, but for the most part, ours is a different kind of mélange. And I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other, but there’s just different nuances between the coasts, and the more time I spend in New York, the more appreciative I was of my time in the Bay Area.

I also had the good fortune of having a two-month-hiatus to write, and so I moved to New York for two months at the start of this writing process. I think that my time in Brooklyn really changed the way I saw Oakland as well, and changed the way that I thought about community and family.

Rumpus: Chinaka, back in 2007, my sister Gretchen stage-managed an early draft of what became Mirrors in Every Corner. How did that piece end up being reformed and reshaped into the full-length piece that it is today?

Specifically, how did the director Marc Bamuthi Joseph help put form and action to your writing?

Chinaka Hodge

Hodge: When your sister stage-managed the piece back in 2007, we did an 8-page excerpt—the first scene in the play that you saw and then two other scenes. And those scenes stayed fairly stagnant in terms of writing, not much changed from 2007 ‘til now. And so it was kind of the skeleton of the piece, and then we built other scenes around those, and used those as the basic framework for the piece.

And Marc Bamuthi Joseph and I have been working together on a number of stage plays since early 2000, when we did our first piece Decipher. And so we have what he calls a really nice shorthand in terms of collaboration. I’ll raise and eyebrow, and he’ll go “Gotcha,” or he’ll give me a look, and I’ll be like, “Yeah, exactly.”

And really he kept bringing me back, he was my anchor in this, asking: “Is the story clear?” “Are the characters well developed?” “Not everybody understands time in the way that you understand time, Chinaka. You look at a room and see everything that’s ever happened, but everyone doesn’t think that way, so what are the ins for your audience?”

So between him and Sean San Jose, the director who came from Intersection for the Arts, I wouldn’t have gotten through it without them. So I’m very thankful for their involvement.

Rumpus: Your play, like many good works of literature, eludes easy categorization. I could sense an uneasiness with the audience such as with an audience watching Buried Child or Ibsen’s Ghosts. You really made them uncomfortable—but it was uncomfortable in a good way.

In a recent audience exchange, Margo Hall who did an excellent job playing Willie and Random, said that the play is about “privilege”: how whites take the privileges they have in U.S. society for granted. And while I think that is an important point, I think that the play delves into much deeper issues of exploring race as a construct.

Some of the audience members thought that you had Random as “passing,” meaning that she was light-skinned African American, light enough to pass as Caucasian. But you clarified during the Q & A that Random is in fact a white girl born into an African American family.

What I thought you were doing, was that you were challenging society’s current construct of race by introducing this fantastic character that defies easy categorization and shows how arbitrarily racial boundaries are drawn. This play challenges our questions of “How black is black? How white is white?” It shows how ludicrous those questions were that came out around the election: “Is Obama black enough?” “Is Michelle Obama too black?”

Hodge: Right. I would say that the character of Random—she’s a wild card. She’s a character that represents what we have yet to see in terms of race discussion. And I think you’re right. I think we do hit on this question of “What is black? How black is black?” How can you tell if one is black if skin tone belies history? And I think that with Random—her privilege rests in her skin tone, but her conundrum rests in her heritage, and I think that that’s true for a lot of folks I know, but none of them would identify as being a biologically white descendent of a black family.

And so, for me it calls into question what race is. How productive race is now that we’re trying to move past a eugenecist society. What difference does it make how Random came to be the skin color that she is? And yet, it’s something that everyone fixates on. It’s the touchstone trope in the play—that she’s one of the first characters we’ve seen like this.

I just like messing with people, and I like messing with what our notions of “is” is. I think Random is just as troubled as everyone else in terms of defining herself.

I think if she had to fill out the census today, she’d be really troubled. I think that the more we populate the Bay Area, the more we get to play with notions of race and love and gender and class. I think that our ideas of privilege will change.

And, I don’t know—it’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to think about, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers about it. And I think that the play is my flustered response to my experience in race:

In that I’m a light-skinned black girl from a family of mixed tones;

That I had the opportunity to move between these two neighborhoods;

That I was “the whitest girl” in my black circles, and often the only black girl in my honors and AP tracks at school;

That I’m a dramatic writer, and so my classes at NYU in dramatic writing were for the most part white men. And so I often felt “othered,” and didn’t feel like any of the characters I see on TV really reflect that.

Random is the character that’s closest to me on stage. While all the characters are some part of me, Random’s conundrums are the conundrums that I experience, even though I’m not white—not entirely white. And I love this question because I do have Irish ancestry. And how black do I need to be to be considered full black? And is anybody full black? And why is that even a question that we continue to ask each other? What difference does it make at this point—except for the fact that it does make a difference. And so I guess the question that Random answers is “what is the difference?”

Rumpus: One way of viewing the play is that it could be a postmodern take on Invisible Man, set in Oakland.

Hodge: We see that Daveed Diggs’s character, Watts, is reading the canon over the course of the play. If we were to see Watts’s character on any given day during the twenty years of the show, he definitely would’ve been reading Invisible Man. He definitely would’ve read Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith, [and] the Susan Lori Parks canon. Because the play ends in 2008, he’s got the entire canon of black literature to work with.

The folks that experienced black/white relations pre-Invisible Man didn’t have that kind of reference, in the same way as folks who have read the book do. That’s what I wanted to address with the piece as well. This is the next step of the conversation. We’re not post-race yet—I don’t buy that, but we are in some ways past where our parents were. And these are things people our age have to contend with.

The play is really about location. It’s about growing up “othered” in the Bay Area, in the time that we grew up. And the ways in which events like Rodney King, and the [1989] earthquake polarized the Bay Area.

There is something specific to growing up in West Oakland, and there’s a reason that there’s mostly black and poor brown folks living there. There’s a lot of invisible men and women who will grow up in West Oakland, and I want to tell bits of their story as well—and not just the sad parts, also the jubilant parts, and I think that Random gets to experience both sides of that game.

Rumpus: Could you explain the crescendo scene, where you have Random being lynched by a black ancestor within her?

Hodge: Joy Leary wrote this book called Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. And it’s about the ways in which black folks living in the United States carry some amount of trauma, whether or not they experienced slavery first-hand, but by virtue of being descendents of folks who were enslaved. And, there’s also the other side of the game that’s like, “It’s 2010, when do we get over these wounds?” And I think that it’s a really easy thing to say: “Get over it.”

But, my father pulled out a book today [by Hubert Harrison]. There’s a picture in the book of four black men being hung from a tree. And it’s one of those images that after a certain point, after years in Diasporic Studies or African American Studies, you kind of get used to the idea of a lynching, and I think that’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that we can brush over and gloss over those images. So that scene is about the tactile nature of a lynching; the disregard for human life that one must have.

If you knew that your grandfather was lynched from a tree, that would be a hard wound to get over. It would be a trauma that you would pass onto your kids, unless you had a way to process it, and I don’t think we’ve begun to process it yet.

So Random’s character experiences a lynching of an ancestor. And there’s later in the play where her sister says she was lynched by a black person inside her, but it’s really this memory Random has of a black ancestor being lynched by white folks in the South.

I don’t think any of us have real-life memories of those instances, but I think that trauma comes back and it hits you in the middle of the night. You dream odd things about it. You see it in the interactions on the street. At least, I do. And I think that that kind of haunting is something that doesn’t get exercised in silence.

And also, the more we begin to talk about it, the more we can have honest conversation about race…. and identify the violent moments that stick with the assaulted.

And so Random’s gotta experience that in order to really understand her own blackness. It’s the first moment that she understands what it feels like to be traumatized and haunted and confused about it all. Her question more than anything else in the play is this “Why?” And she’s trying to figure out why she has to sound a certain way in order to be understood by the black community. Why she has to feel these things in order to be accepted. And if I were to encounter Random, I would not be able to answer her frankly on the “Why?” but I can tell her, “Yes, we all experience these things.”

Rumpus: In the play, you reference the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You even work in this quote by Rumsfeld about “known knowns and known unknowns,” which actually ties in thematically with issues of race and gender in the play.

Hodge: Very well. I think it’s impossible to discuss race without discussing time. And I think that the key issues that we bring up in the piece are the key things folks my age have to contend with. We don’t necessarily talk about South Asian folks or Middle Eastern folks and the ways in which they’ve been profiled since 2001. I think talking about the war and the ways in which folks here in the states have distance from folks that we’re killing overseas says something about race and privilege. And says something about the privilege that black folks experience with that distance as well.

The same thing with this queer folk on stage. That part is written to be played by a woman, and in that case, the character is transgendered female to male, or to be played by a male actor, in which case, the character is an out gay male. Both things are issues that are difficult to talk about in the black community for a number of reasons, and if we’re going to talk honestly about race, then lets challenge ourselves black folks as well. So I think it’s all good to point fingers at other folks, but unless you’re willing to really self-examine, then the conversation is pretty stagnant.

Rumpus: The voice that you use in the play is very ‘Oakland.’ In the audience exchange, someone commented that this was the first time she’d seen a play where “they spoke how I speak.” I’m curious to see what the reception of the play would be outside of California.

Hodge: I’m really nervous about it. I’m curious as to how Bay Area dialect reads to folks who haven’t experienced it.

That said, the dialogue moves between the way in which I hear people speak naturally, and there’s verse. [It’s interesting that people respond] ‘these people talk how I talk’ because nobody talks how some of the folks talk onstage. And in other scenes, it’s very clear that this is how folks talk.

My first way of interacting with the world has always been language. And so, wanting to be true in some ways to how my block sounds and wanting to be true as well to what my experience has been, and that’s been everything from the block to the Louvre. And so the characters have that gamut as well.

Rumpus: In your dialogue there’s a lot of lyrical worldplay. On your Facebook profile, you have “I like peas, pears, pearls, and wordplay”

Hodge: [laughs] I do in fact.

Rumpus: I bring this up because you have this character Watts who introduces himself saying, ‘It’s Watts like the riots, or Watts like the lightbulb.’ How do you navigate wanting to challenge people with verse and wordplay, while trying to make the dialogue sound like real Oakland people talking?

Hodge: I try to strike a good balance, and some nights it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And I also think that on a night like tonight, where we have a group of 30 young people who are visiting from Oakland Tech, it’s going to read in a different way when it reads on Saturday nights when it’s a traditional theater crowd. I think in a lot of ways they’re captivated by the language, but don’t understand it entirely.

I go to the opera. I don’t understand everything, but I’m touched in some way, and I hope to reach that kind of point. I don’t think I’ve arrived at a climax with my writing with Mirrors, but it’s my first baby steps into understanding language and the ways in which I can challenge the audience around language without losing them.

Related Posts:

• Help Keep Art in Oakland Alive
• ZYZZYVA: The Winter Issue Release Party!
• Alden Van Buskirk
• Oakland In Popular Memory
• Remembering Black Panther History

Introducing the Rumpus—now in audio!

What is your pun threshold?

Are you ready for a pun battle between K.Flay and the International Pun Champion, Joe Sabia? Tune in at the 20-minute mark in the interview.

Topics also discussed by San Francisco hip hop artist K.Flay and Rumpus Radio host Matt Werner include MC Lars, K.Flay’s Mashed Potatoes Mix Tape, K.Flay’s songs, “Guinevere,” “No Ignorance” (remix of Paramore’s “Ignorance”), K.Flay staying straight-edge after her father’s passing, and her Do-It-Yourself ethic in music production. The podcast also features an exclusive acoustic version of “Bye, Bye Illinois” recorded by Rumpus Radio.

Pun battle excerpt:

What do you call it when Sarah Palin gets high?

Baked Alaska.

Enjoy.

For more on the artist K.Flay, check out kflay.com. And for more on Matt Werner’s podcasts, check out mattswriting.com.

Related Posts:

• A Word With the Kinane
• Antonia Crane on Rumpus Radio
• Alex Mar interviewed on Rumpus Radio
• New Rumpus Radio episode