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Dilemma of Racial Identity in Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2017, 30(2), pp.143-168
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Hyun Ah Kim 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright who reproduces African-Americans’ painful past and history, memories and myths through her own avant-garde stage techniques. Her stage is a space for calling upon events that had been excluded in history recorded by whites, and creating a new history by discovering, restructuring, and transforming the past. In her latest work, Father Comes Home From the Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3(2015), Parks attempts to ‘rewrite the past’ and provide a different backdrop of the American Civil War. This drama shows a long journey of a black slave named Hero who follows his master who promises him, ‘Join the Confederate Army in the war and I’ll give you the freedom’, to the battlefield and finally returns home alone. Hero meets a biracial Union Army soldier, Smith, who is taken as a war prisoner by the master, and though Hero belongs to the Confederate Army, he releases Smith. During the journey in the battlefield, confused about his identity, Hero finally renames himself ‘Ulysses’ after the great general of the Union Army. His embarking on a journey back home reminds of the structure of Homer’s Odysseia. By showing an African-American journey grafted onto Greek tragedy, Parks de-constructs American history and rewrites Black history. And through this, multi-layered repressions of black people at that time are revealed, with the ambiguous position and identity of the black slave, who has no choice but to follow his master and join the Confederate Army that has to fight against the emancipation of the black slaves. To enhance the stage effect of the ironical message, Parks uses her unique stage techniques such as appearance of chorus, abundant use of music, colorful uniforms and costume change. Through this stage strategy, the playwright encourages the audience to keep a critical distance and to accept problems of conflict, war, and identity that penetrate through the history of the black. Hero’s split identity as a black slave is changed into that of an independent existence as he changes his name to Ulysses. However, at the end of his returning home, he does not show his fellow slaves the Emancipation Proclamation, but lets them leave for the freedom, and tries to have kids with a new wife instead of his own wife, Penny, who's been waiting for him. He acts like his white master, by showing to follow the customs of the white men, the ruling class. It is the paradoxical class order reconstruction where emancipated slaves try to repress and control other black people. Through this theatre, Parks represents not only the racial identity problems of American black slaves, but also the social dilemma that follows when the slaves are freed.

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