Pilgrimage.
Before we visited Atlas Theatre to watch Pilgrims, Musa & Sheri, I hadn’t heard the word “pilgrimage” in some years. My last memory of the word being used was during elementary school during historically inaccurate lessons surrounding Thanksgiving. Let’s just say I needed to refresh my memory.
By definition, a pilgrimage is “any long journey, especially one undertaken as a quest or for a votive purpose, as to pay homage.” As I type this blog, this one being the third in my series for the trip, we are nineteen days into the trip. We’ve walked countless miles, had long-lasting arts discussions with countless organizations, and have consumed art in ways and forms that I was not expecting, but was pleasantly surprised with. With the unfolding of events, as I begin to look back on the class that flew by, I am realizing that we’ve journeyed on our own pilgrimage. However, it was the distinctly contrasting ways that my classmates and I interpreted the play that made me fully realize this.
The day started off with a tour of Atlas Theatre – the epicenter of Black Broadway before the D.C. Riots. The building was recently revamped into a beautiful and modern space which attempts to incorporate some of the buildings’ original aesthetics. For example, the buildings’ original grandly designed air conditioning grates were ornamented along the walls in one of the building’s many hallways. Why? Partially because the original Atlas Theatre was the first theatre to have modern airconditioning way back when it first opened. Similarly, there were countless stories that one could tell about the building. What made the experience even more unique were the stories told inside the building. For example, Pilgrims in the New World – Sheri & Musa, the play that my class and I had the privilege of watching.
In this play, there are a couple different story arcs going on. The first being the love triangle that Musa foolishly and manipulatively handled. From the start of the play the audience become privy to the fact that Musa is new to America and is here while his partner is elsewhere in the world. This becomes more complicated when he invites an American woman up to his apartment in what results in sex. The chemistry between them leads to a relationship which blossoms until the point when Musa’s fiancé finds Musa’s new American girlfriend in bed. As you could guess, conflict ensues and feelings are broken. The two women fight for him in self degrading and culturally offensive manners that showcase the ways their identities impact their poor decision making.The matters become more complicated when Musa reveals his act of becoming engaged to his fellow Muslim fiancee was an act of obligation, one that made him feel trapped in a setting where he now feels free. His fiance agrees, expressing a shared doubt in their arrangement and similar feelings of conflict between her identity, her obligations, and the conflicting sense of values she finds herself to have in this new land compared with the ones back home. In the end, the playwright suggests that Musa’s fiance finds some sort of peace as Musa goes on a road-trip with his American girlfriend, consequence free after she chooses to forgive him.
I instantly viewed the play as creatively nuanced because of some of the dialogue that Musa expressed where he beautifully explained the conflicts that occur internally when your inherited cultures and traditions exist in conflict with those of the environments in which you find yourself a part of for some reason or another. Meanwhile, tackling the fetishization of “the other” in Western Society. Conflicts that are personal to me because of how I’ve struggled with them because of my identity as “the other” abroad the same as on campus. Yes, his character was morally corrupt and I was extremely disappointed with the decisions that he made. However, the play was so much bigger than that. It was a unique tale of immigration and nuanced understandings of identity. The majority of my classmates did not see it as such. The next 24 hours felt tense before we began to try to understand each others’ reasons for our respective interpretation.
Our conclusion? Great question! While aspects of identity such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation impact the way we perceive art and countless other aspects of life, we must constantly strive to engage with art more critically especially when our interpretations are conflicting. I can not sit here and tell you that my classmates interpretation of the play as merely “problematic” for its display of toxic relationships was wrong but I can tell you how they got to the interpretation and the causes for their oversight. In the end, I can not convince anyone of the value that I found in the play but that does not make what I took away from this experience any less meaningful. Art is tricky, complex, and sometimes messy. I’m grateful for the pilgrimage that we have had as a class where we can now understand how we engage with these forms of art differently and for the connections I’ve built with people here who genuinely care to explore how and why we all interpret art differently.