Program Notes
Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator.
Whenever he senses that the time has come to start an important new project, Hannibal Lokumbe heads out to the piney woods of Rosanky near his home in Smithville, Texas (in the greater Austin area). It was here — equipped with just a tent, water, and a small lantern — that he received the life-changing revelation leading to The Jonah People: A Legacy of Struggle and Triumph. The composer and jazz icon recalls being awakened by the star-flooded sky and peering into the Milky Way: it seemed so clear and close that he imagined being able to reach out and touch the galaxy.
“When I go to the forest, I pray and I ask the Creator to give me what it is that will be worthy of the people to experience,” Lokumbe says. To “the Creator of us all” he addressed the question: “Who do you say that we are?” The issue of identity is central to The Jonah People. The opera traverses centuries of the African diaspora, from the harmony of tribal life in Africa through its brutal disruption by the trans-Atlantic slave trade up to the present.
In the process, Lokumbe emphasizes that one of the most powerful tools of subjugation was to steal and destroy the identities of the people who were enslaved by forcing new ones on them. “With my whip, I will own his body and with my name and my god, I will own his soul,” as Monsieur Dauphin icily proclaims upon concluding his purchase in a scene depicting a slave auction.
Reclaiming Lost Identities
A central message of The Jonah People is the healing power of reclaiming these lost identities. And so Lokumbe dramatizes his forest encounter with the Creator at the opera’s climax in the second-to-last scene, where the response to his question — “Who do you say that we are?”— is given as follows: “Like Jonah you are. In the womb of a ship, he like you, wrestled with both his faith and his fate. His ship was followed by seagulls. Your ship was followed by sharks. And you are to never forget that those and the descendants of those whose ships were followed by sharks are born of three wombs; the womb of me, the womb of a mother, and the womb of a ship.”
“The Jonah People,” in other words, is Lokumbe’s image not only for the countless Africans stolen from their homeland but for all their descendants through the generations up to the present day. It signifies a bond extending beyond the United States and including those who ended up wherever the colonizers enslaved people throughout the New World.
The opera’s geography thus relocates some of the historical events that are shown — the aforementioned auction takes place in Port au Prince, Haiti, for example, instead of Charleston, South Carolina — so as “to pay homage to those who had that happen to them in other countries,” Lokumbe explains. “There is no difference between us: our struggle is the same.” The message is reinforced by the opera’s final words: “The sky is not big enough to hold the suffering of our people, and it could never be big enough to hold my love for you.”
The opera’s time frame is similarly expansive. Instead of tracing a merely linear narrative, Lokumbe seamlessly shifts from the time-bound constraints of the real world to the spiritual realm where ancestral memories and guidance are eternally present. The main symbol he devised for The Jonah People illustrates this all-embracing aspect of his vision: two graphic lines which intersect an image of a boat. As Lokumbe explains, the lines connect “those who were lost in the Middle Passage [represented by the lines below the boat image] with those who survived [the lines above the boat image].
Synopsis
Lokumbe uses the term “veils” in lieu of “acts” to describe the larger units of his musical-dramatic structure. The word choice, he explains “has to do with our spiritual development. Sometimes in life, and in our understanding, we can move one step forward and then digress 15 steps behind. But when the
Creator lifts the veil from our consciousness, we never go back to where we were before that veil of understanding was lifted from our minds.”
Unfolding in four such “veils,” The Jonah People begins with an Overture in which the orchestra and chorus participate while, onstage, chalk-colored “Spirit” actors — a female and a male child representing the undying spirit of the Jonah People, who appear at pivotal points throughout the opera. They bless the audience and space with the sound of their rattles created by renowned New Orleans sculptor, Martin Payton.
Costume illustrations courtesy of, Christelle Matou, costume designer
Veil One “Ilé” — the Yoruba word for “home” portrays the life of the ancestral homeland in an African village before the arrival of colonizing slave traders and missionaries. Scene One (“Atonement” or “Knowing”) introduces the Griot player, who changes from the “garment of my captor” to “a garment woven of Kente, indigo and the memories of home.” Scene Two (“The Griot”) shows images of life as it was in Africa unfolding to the Griot’s recitation — a combination song and prayer. In Scene Three (“Harvest”), the festivity represented by the troupe of dancers is suddenly cut short by the appearance of a Portuguese slave trader, a Jesuit priest and an African Chief. Their inhuman transaction brings the music and dancing to an abrupt halt.
Veil Two “They Swallowed The Ocean For Me" dramatizes the horror of the Middle Passage in the “womb” of the slave ship. Captain George C. Stevens writes a letter to his wife in which, with no remorse, he justifies the brutality over which he presides. The enslaved African Boukman recalls how his village was raided, and a marabout (a Muslim holy man) prophesies the future of the Jonah People.
Veil Three “Searching”–“Na Lelakole” is the longest of the four veils. Scene One (“Atonement”) takes place during the slave auction at Port-au-Prince. First Boukman and then his daughter Asase are sold. To keep her two sons from being taken from her, Asase crawls on her belly to beg the bidder, Monsieur Henri Dauphin. She is whipped until he relents and purchases her sons as well. In Scene Two (“Red Coffee”), Asase discovers the power of music to help the enslaved workers endure their labor in the sugarcane fields.
After an intermission, Scene Three (“The Last Supper”) takes place a year later: Asase decides to run away in order to escape the temptation of mercy killing her children “to end the terror of their bondage.” She instructs Silas to cherish his true heritage as the descendent of his nation’s chief musician. We learn in Scene Four (“Wind and Bones”) what befell Asase: she is captured and lynched. In Scene Five (“Reunion”) her father, Boukman is guided by the ancestors and escapes the plantation to search for her. Discovering her lifeless body, he proclaims: “Even death could not keep you from the warmth of my arms.” Scene Six (“Bois Caiman”—“Alligator Forest”) depicts a Voudoun ceremony that inspires the enslaved Haitians to revolt. As Lokumbe points out, the Haitian Revolution “was the first successful armed rebellion against European domination in the world.”
Veil Four “The New Being” focuses on the triumph of the Jonah People. Scene One (“So Many Fields, So Many Fortunes, So Many Souls”) again illustrates the spiritual power of music to liberate. The theme is continued in Scene Two (“Minton’s Playhouse, 1950s”), which celebrates the art form of jazz as practiced at one of the most famous clubs in Harlem. Lokumbe’s encounter in the forest is reenacted in Scene Three (“Prophecy”): a seer is visited by a Native American shaman woman and then receives directly from the Creator a revelation of the identity of the Jonah People — and of his mission to transform these “kindred souls” through the power of art.
Scene Four (“Healing”) shifts to the Old Plateau Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama (also known as the Africatown Graveyard), which was founded by freed survivors of the last slave ship documented to reach the United States from Africa (the Clotilda). It is here, in a space that links the generations, that the opera culminates in a dramatic representation of “the moment of healing for the Tribe of Jonah” as the two spirit children together touch the marker of Cudjoe “Kazoola” Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Clotilda.
Eric Waters, 2020