Church bringing emotional 'Maafa Suite' to area
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They call it Maafa, a Kiswahili word meaning "catastrophe" - a term gaining new resonance as a reflection of the African-American slavery experience.
Now, a production at the forefront of that movement is coming to Seattle. The "Maafa Suite" - a performance that includes prayer, dance and music - examines a people's roots in nearly 400 years of trans-Atlantic slave trade, when tens of millions of Africans were torn from their land and culture and forced into bondage.
Millions never survived the harrowing voyage, their bodies thrown overboard.
The collective trauma of the experience is the soul of the production, part of a two-week commemoration pioneered in 1994 by Brooklyn's St. Paul Community Baptist Church.
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Tonight, efforts surrounding the production's first foray into the Northwest kick off with a meeting at Seattle's Mt. Zion Baptist Church, featuring a video with excerpts of the performance that will come to Mt. Zion on July 13-14.
"It really gives great context to what this is all about," says Vivian Phillips, a consultant helping to publicize the event. "I cried when I saw it, because it just stirred up so many things that, as an African American, I have really forgotten about my ancestry. Not only am I the descendant of slaves, I'm the descendant of free kings and queens who were captured and taken as slaves."
Phillips says the commemoration is necessary since few outlets exist to formally recognize the experience. "Without recognition," she says, "we can't reach conciliation." Or, as St. Paul's Pastor, Johnny Ray Youngblood, told a New York-based TV news show last year: "In order to get well, you have to go back through what made you sick in the first place."
The video also includes reflections of scholars like Cornel West and Marimba Ani, the African Studies instructor at New York's Hunter College who is credited with applying the term Maafa to an experience that an increasing number of people point to as the root of the nation's social ills.
"We think part of racism is not having an understanding of the whole equation," says Monica Walker, executive organizer of St. Paul's Maafa Commemoration.
The Brooklyn event is now a two-week conference ending with a sunrise service on the shores of the Atlantic, where white-clad participants let balloons and flowers loose in emotional recognition of their ancestors.
The church hopes to incite other churches nationwide to conduct their own events, something Walker says is occurring in about two dozen cities so far.
The performance itself starts with prayer, followed by drumming and dancing and then the re-enactment, as described last year in Essence magazine, of a culture's kidnapping from its homeland - people herded like animals, crammed into ships and carted to a foreign land. Centuries of history are covered in three hours culminating in uplifting gospel.
An experience once buried in repression and shame has been revived in a yearning for healing.
"It's painful to see it," Phillips says. "But once I felt the pain, it was a reawakening: That's who I am - I am a survivor. And we're hoping it's something the entire community can put their arms around."
Marc Ramirez can be reached at 206-464-8102.