Kwame Kwei Armah On Black Voices Through Art

Kwame Kwei-Armah

OBE, Artistic Director of Young Vic, Playwright, Screenwriter, Director and Actor

What's the best thing that happened to you in the 80s?

Discovering the band Public Enemy; it changed my worldview. I had to find comfort in knowing that the music that I most adored gave discomfort to all of the artists that I loved at that time. For example, I loved Luther Vandross—like, I would die for him. And then Luther would write things about Public Enemy like saying that's not music. But it allowed me to understand in a very clear, direct way that you can use art as your politic in a way that we understand now, but back then people ran away from the union of the two.

What is the play that changed your life?

“Joe Turner's Come and Gone” by August Wilson. There was once a real disconnect between politics and art and authentic blackness and success. And those things seemed to be binaries that were opposite. When I saw “Joe Turner,” it spoke an authentic truth that I had not heard before on stage, and yet it was garnering all of these awards and successes. And that, for me, was revolutionary. It was, you can be true and survive.

Practicing the art of difference.

Do you have a writing ritual? Are you more of a John Lennon where lightning strikes and you better lay it down as fast as possible, or a Paul McCartney who just gets up and gets after it every day?

I'm closer to Paul. There are many days where I'm typing rather than writing. But I hope that when I read it back, even if it's five pages, there may be one germ in there that I go, "Oh, that's what I was trying to find." I just go and remember the blank page is your friend. I think I read once that the blank page is the thousand decisions that you have decided not to make. And I always find that empowers me. It makes me feel better. I go, "Okay, it's just my taste that's not allowing me to write today."

You staged a celebrated (and successful) revival of “Death of a Salesman” last year that reimagined Willy Loman as a Black man. What do you think that did for the story and how do you make a decision like that? 

You make a decision like that by saying, what would a playwright or any artist most want for their work after they've gone? They wanted to continually be relevant, not just consigned to the contemporaries. By casting a magnificent actor who was African American as Willy Loman-Wendell Pierce—it meant that we were not going, this is a Black version of Willy Loman. We were instead saying this is Willy Loman as if he were this African American and had been part of the great Exodus from the south, the west into the east, that we know occurred. 

But what was really wonderful was Willy's brother comes back in and speaks about the great exodus to Africa where he went in as a poor man and he came out a millionaire. And when you track it, we know that many African Americans at that time went to Liberia to find a new sense of being, and create a colony that could replicate the colony of America. So when you then see that coming out of the mouth of an African American saying, "I went to Africa and I came back." You went, "Oh my God." It has contemporaneous and historic relevance. It both deepened the play in a 21st century way in terms of accessibility, but it also lent itself to it. And that I think is one of the tricks of the trade right now. We are in this time where I believe in Black postmodernism, which means you can do anything and everything, anywhere, and your Blackness never has to leave. It just doesn't have to be the front and center of it. It can reside anywhere.

You've lived in both the US and the UK. What do you think we, in America, could learn about race relations from the UK and what do you think the UK could learn from us?

I say that America is in denial about class and the UK is in denial about race. What I really love about living in America and talking to the overwhelming majority of Caucasian Americans that I meet, is that they are fluent in the language of race. That's really comforting to someone like me. What's very uncomfortable in England, is that you have to dig at it in order to go, “See, that was about race.” By the time you've dug, you're exhausted. You can't even get to now, how do we solve it?  You only hear your president speak about the middle class, even though technically it’s what we would've called the working class. There is a myth that there is a meritocracy in America that simply doesn't hold up. And just because I've got the corner office and you may be the janitor, but because we both love football or baseball, that somehow we're all the same. I've often experienced it. They go, "Oh, Britain or Europe. It's still very class-oriented, isn't it?" And I go, "No America, you are." But what America often does in my humble opinion is conflate race and class.

You've worked in TV, theater and now your film “892” just took home a prize at Sundance, but what do you think theater still uniquely does? And I know you will say it is, but how is it still relevant in a world where location's been incredibly hard in real life? Has COVID changed it somehow or has it accelerated trends already happening? Tell us where that fits in kind of all the mediums you work in.

My mother and father were together, but my mother in particular worked three or four jobs to keep the family going. I remember that in her free time, she would go into a little cupboard and make crocheted mats and things. That was how she did her art. I'm blessed to be able to work in multiple mediums of art and go, "Oh, this is how I make a living; this is how I feed my soul." I'll wake up in the morning, and if an idea hits, the first thing I'll ask myself is, in what medium will this idea best sing? Is it theater? Television? A movie? A recording? Music? When an idea strikes me that says something can only live in theater, it’s when there’s a quality to its abstractness that the literal mediums will find difficult to serve.

So for me, theater is about leaving your literal boots at the door, because the moment you need to be literal in a theater space, you'll lose it. I can simply say in a black box, "I'm here in Paris,” and you do the work. In a movie, if I say I’m in Paris you need to see the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre behind me. It’s that quality of abstraction within a fully three-dimensional human experience that makes theater unique. The pandemic has made us yearn for this 21st century church, because that's what theater is. We gather to hear a message, to reflect upon it, and then take that message into the next week in the hope that it will make us better people. And other mediums can do it, but to see another human being in front of you do it, that's magnificent.

How do you think stories help to advance our understanding of others? Should we use stories more?

I actually think the lockdown has accelerated our reliance on stories to help get us through, so I don’t advocate for using them more. If anything, I think we have to be very careful to not find ourselves in conversations about what happens in novels and plays and TV series more than what happens to our real-life neighbor next door.

Ultimately what theater and art do is open our strongest and our valued muscle: empathy. It's there so that you go, "Oh, there's an antagonist who's beating on your protagonist and the protagonist doesn't deserve to be beaten." Empathy, bam. I believe art is to be a catalyst for debate about change. Art cannot change people, but art can ask the questions that make people want to change themselves.

How have you changed as an artist now that you're older and wiser?

Age has brought to me two things: an addiction to trying to innovate myself and then more doubt than I thought I would ever have in my life. I now know fundamentally there are more questions than answers, and I have to be at peace with knowing that there are just so many things that I'm not going to have the answer for.

I would also say that now, I'm beginning to question my absolutes. In my thirties, I was absolutely sure I was right about anything that I said and felt. I would look weirdly at others who didn't have that kind of absolutism. To put that in the here and now, I am absolutely sure that in 10 years or 20 years' time I may look back and go, "No, it wasn't true.” That reflection, introspection and I might call it doubt, is one of the pluses of getting older as an artist.

You're working in a movie about Marcus Garvey. What do people need to know about him or his philosophy?

Here's the thing you need to know about Marcus Garvey: He was the Elon Musk of his day in that he said to a community that had just gotten access to employment, "Here's a ship that I'm going to build, and I'm going to take you anywhere in the world first-class at second-class prices, and I'm going to trade. The Black world will trade with itself. Up you mighty race, be proud of yourself. Forget the 400 years of inferiority that's been placed in your mind. Stand and be proud." Without Marcus Garvey, you wouldn't have Malcolm X, you wouldn't have the civil rights movement in the way that we understand it today. That, for me, is tremendous. If I'm in a circle of people of my age, of my cultural background, then everybody knows Marcus Garvey. If I'm in the wider world, very few know him. Or they might have heard him if they listen to some reggae music of the 1970s where Black Uhuru sang about him, but actually knowing his story? Not many. Which is why it's so important for us to get it out.