Colby Hosts a World Premiere
Arisa White’s Post Pardon: The Opera will be presented in concert at the Gordon Center
In the summer of 2003, Arisa White met Reetika Vazirani and her 2-year-old son, Jehan Komunyakaa, at a Cave Canem retreat in Pittsburgh for Black poets. “I was in the Black joy of poets of Black kind, and everyone was in the glow of that joy,” she recalled. A few weeks later, White read in the Washington Post that Vazirani had killed Jehan by stabbing him multiple times, and then fatally stabbed herself.
“It left me gobsmacked,” said White, an associate professor of English. “I just kept asking why. Then all of these other questions, around mortality, and life, and the value of life, came up as well. And given that Jehan was a Black boy, and Reetika a Brown woman, I also thought about race, and the ways that marginalized bodies are considered excess, and are attached to a kind of death image in our culture. And in a culture where you fear for the life of your child because they are Black, what does it mean when you then take their life?
“All of this came up for me. And I think it started to really take over my body in its own haunting.”
At 7 p.m. June 7 at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, Colby will present the world premiere of Post Pardon: The Opera, White’s compelling opera created in response to that horrifying and heartbreaking event. Commissioned by Colby Arts and funded by a Haynesville Project grant that White received with tenure at Colby, the work features a score by experimental jazz composer Jessica Jones and will be presented in concert format rather than as a staged production as originally planned. At 5:30 p.m. prior to the performance, White and the creative team will host an artist talk in Studio 1 of the Gordon Center.
‘The page felt inadequate’
Post Pardon: The Opera began as a poetry chapbook of the same name that explores many of the questions White wrestled with following the deaths of Vazirani and Komunyakaa. In graduate school at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst at the time of the murder-suicide, White was taking a class on Irish female poets and was fascinated by the way many of the writers employed mythology “to articulate the unsayable, the difficult thing to bring into utterance. I wanted to try that strategy, poetically, with this particular event that was haunting me. So I created a character who was grappling with her own life, and the life of her own child, and asking the question, ‘Is it worth living?’”
The mythology White’s poetic protagonist turns to for guidance is Caribbean, specifically Guyanese, stemming from research White had begun on her own family history. “I didn’t grow up with my father,” she explained. “And he’s from Guyana. So I was researching mythology there, and reading poets, and just trying to find a way into the culture, because I didn’t have the upbringing.”
Post Pardon was published in 2011. But the work didn’t exorcise White’s haunting. “The page felt inadequate,” she says. “It wasn’t making the noise I needed it to make. As innovative as one can get on the page without making it full of exclamation marks, which starts to feel like a kind of textual minstrelsy, it couldn’t scream. And that’s when I realized that I needed bodies and voices. I needed another form.”
In 2013 White was awarded a Cultural Funding grant from the City of Oakland, where she was living at the time, to create the initial libretto and score for Post Pardon: The Opera. She immediately reached out to Jones, a musician she first met in 2001 while both were teaching at a creative arts camp in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and with whom she had already collaborated on several projects. In 2014 they presented a concert of their early draft of the opera.
“We got feedback from the vocalists and musicians we worked with, as well as the audience,” said White. “A lot of it was, ‘Who are the characters? Where are we? What’s the narrative?’ Even at that early stage, the audience was looking for the story.”
A long work in progress
Like the story that inspired it, Post Pardon continued to haunt White for years. “It was a project I just kept returning to,” she said. But it took nearly a decade and a move to the opposite coast before White returned fully to the project, further developing the characters and story during her 2022 sabbatical as well as taking a lyric-writing class at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
With the progression of the libretto came a thematic shift: instead of the mother as protagonist, as in her chapbook, the story began to take shape around the child as hero. In this new narrative, Willow, a queer Black activist, confronts the ghost of her estranged mother, Rema, who abandoned her as an infant, and then committed suicide.
“It took on a whole other life,” White explained. “And then it’s like, okay, what does this new life feel like and sound like? And that’s when the workshopping process came in.”
Reconnecting with Jones, and engaging Ellen Sebastian Chang to direct the staging and offer dramaturgy, Post Pardon: The Opera was workshopped at the Greene Block + Studios in downtown Waterville and previewed to audiences as a work-in-progress.
“Each time we workshopped, we were coming with new insights from what we were learning as individual artists, what we learned collectively, and then also thinking about what we were working toward to ultimately present to the public,” said White.
Democratizing a ‘highbrow’ art form
What struck White as she studied this new medium of opera was how inseparable libretti often seemed to be from their scores. “A libretto is such a very direct conversation between the librettist and the composer, but it doesn’t extend itself to the audience,” she said. “We will read a script for a film, or read a play. Why don’t we read a libretto?”
White’s hope was that creating a libretto that could be read as a standalone work would help to democratize what is considered a highbrow art form. “There are these cultural conversations,” she said, “that opera is elitist and it’s not really of the times—that there are all of these gatekeepers. One of the things that I felt could make it more available to the populace, like its traditional roots, is to activate the libretto more for the reader, so that it is a poetic reading experience: from the stage direction, to the way that it’s organized, to the lyrics themselves.”
To that end, White researched other poets who had written libretti, particularly African-American poets, “trying to bring the poetry back to the libretto, back to the lyrics.” The subject interested her so much that White designed a Colby course called A Black American Opera Lab: The Poet’s Libretto to “extend our definition of the lyric to consider its roots in poetry.”
Although White may not have found answers to all of the haunting existential questions that first prompted her to write Post Pardon, through the work’s deeply eloquent and emotional exploration of subjects such as generational suffering and societal oppression, she lays bare powerful universal truths about what it means to be human.
“Ultimately, what it comes down to is that we all want to live, and want to feel like our lives are worth living,” she said. “We want to have the right relationship with our environment, and with each other. And we want to heal across generations, and heal within our moment right now, so that we can go from being a victim to a self-actualized, self-determined life force.
“All of those themes are necessary. They’re vital. It’s what we’re all hungry for.”
