The Just and the Blind

How does a black boy become an American man in the US? How does he learn to play his role? And what if part of this role consists of him keeping a low profile, because someone somewhere might

mistake him for a monster in the dark? The Just and the Blind takes on these and other pressing questions, that are deeply rooted in the institutionalised racism of the United States. Spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph uses powerful, autobiographically tinged poetry to address, among other people, his sixteen-year-old son. At the core is a heart-breaking message: come home safe, boy!

The fruitful collaboration between Marc Bamuthi Joseph and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain has generated a number of remarkable and acclaimed productions. Both have Haitian-American backgrounds, and for both of them social activism is inextricably bound up with their artistic work. Both are also fathers, and in The Just and the Blind, they focus sharply on racial profiling as something which every black boy will experience from puberty, when ‘all the traces of little-black-boy cuteness have disappeared’. Inevitably, over their heads hangs the hard statistical fact that one in four black men goes to prison.

The Just and the Blind plays out against a background of black-and-white images of civil-rights protests and heavy-handed police intervention and colour photos of fathers and children. In this multimedia work, spoken word, music and projections go hand in hand with dance and song. Drew Dollaz, a pioneer in the streetdance genre known as flexing, adds his own dimension and interpretation to Bamuthi’s words with his amazing language of movement. Shishani, who is Namibian and Belgian from origin, but grew up mainly in the Netherlands, will present songs by Roumain, based on Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Every part of this work shows a different side of a contradictory situation with which Bamuthi is also struggling. He talks about his own experiences with racial profiling, but also catches himself feeling uneasy one evening when he encounters three of those young men – men like his son, like he was once – on the street. It is the ineradicable self-hatred of an adult black man who is scared of the shadow of his youth. At the same time, every fibre of his being is focused on navigating his son safely through the American judicial system. In The Just and the Blind this aim is sometimes expressed through music, sometimes through movement, but more often a combination of all the elements. This joint effort is a compelling portrait of black parenthood and American justice. The New York Times described the performance as ‘the raw, cry from the soul new work.‘