Hyperventilating or Suffocating or both?
“When a Trumpet Cries”; a show teaching me about breath.
How do I remain breathing? How do I remain standing? How do I embrace and not fold under the weight? Questions I’ve never asked myself. PLEASE go check out my blog posts “Doubts” and “Exhale”. This would allow you to have a full picture of what I am about to share.
The opportunity presented is a show. This show, titled “When a Trumpet Cries” is a production about a black woman playwright and her struggle to write a show about a woman named Abba who was enslaved on Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown, Virginia, between 1769-1840. You see the conversation unfold between this black playwright and her dramaturg, a white woman, and historian. You hear and see the silent truths said out loud. This show is the hardest show I have ever done.
This show, and its difficulty, have been with me for months. This show was commissioned to be written, and the playwright who wrote it is someone I have known since I was in middle school. When she first shared with me that she was commissioned to write this show, I knew it would be breathtaking, and I could feel the weight of this show before it was written. 6 weeks later, she said, “It’s from the perspective of the playwright, will you be the playwright?” And I trusted, and said, “Challenge accepted”. Not truly knowing the challenge. I knew she asked me because there was something she saw in me that I had not yet seen, and therefore, I accepted. The moment I read the script, I immediately knew that my trust and faith would have to guide me because whew chile, is this show a challenge!!
I started writing this post originally two days ago. But today, as I opened up to do final edits, it hit me the significance of discussing breath on a day in which five years ago a man was suffocated in broad daylight. The story of the enslaved, the story of being black in America, and the story of breath all intersect in historical and significant ways. I sat in my car and cried, truly feeling without judgment the truth of breath and all its implications in life.
This blog post is named Hyperventilating or Suffocating or both? because that’s what “When a Trumpet Cries” is for me. It’s an opportunity to stop and embrace the radical truth that all too often, black women are hyperventilating, or suffocating, or doing both. It’s a painful reminder of how ancestral trauma haunts our beings. For me personally, I have trouble with always holding my breath. But furthermore, I have found that I forget to exhale altogether, suffocating when in the depths of stress and grief. Suffocating on a day such as today, when we remember how violence and oppression take lives. I am consistently forgetting how to engage my diaphragm and take the moment to breathe deeply.
This show is forcing me to reckon with my breath. How can I be on stage, feel the depth of this show, be within the story, present with the character, and not pass out? This show has me physically feeling the depths of the journey black women experience daily on an amplified level, and eventually in front of an audience. And the question that has kept coming up for me is how many of us have forgotten how to breathe? How many of us are holding our breaths? How many of us are hyperventilating? How many of us are missing the depth of the exhale? Being robbed of a basic part of being human in the generational trauma of suffocation and hyperventilation.
My dear black woman, are you breathing? How deeply are you breathing? I want you to stop right now, take in a deep, belly breath, and release that breath for at a minimum of 6 counts. No, but seriously, do it. How do you feel after? Can you feel the ache in your back? Can you feel your shoulders relax? Where in your body do you feel different after that breath?
It’s time we relearn how to breathe. It is time we begin to focus on healing, not just from the mental but from the physical implications of racism. It’s time we go down to the granular, such as something as simple as our breath. We deserve this. We deserve freedom from suffocation and hyperventilation. We deserve to breathe deeply, taking up the full capacity of our lungs, in order to physically embody the power we are called to step into. Here’s to taking up space, with power, and breath, and most importantly, standing rooted in truth.
If you’d like to come see this show, check it out here: https://www.selahtheatreproject.org/season
Sidenote: This is the first show to be featured and plugged on my blog. I would love to have as many people experience this show as possible. It’s a story, and an experience close to my heart, close to my healing, and close to my soul. This project is one of those heart projects, not done necessarily with eyes open, but more so with an open heart. Hoping the blind are led into the light.