'Passing Strange': Looking at travel narratives through a fresh lens
Maria Kopke
The theme of traveling and coming face to face with different places, peoples, and cultures is recurring in all forms of storytelling. Travel literature is a widely popular genre, but we also find countless travel narratives in cinema and on stage.
This genre has one thing in common with pretty much every other piece of content we consume: it is filled to the brim with white creators and/or white protagonists. And that factor is particularly blatant in travel narratives because those protagonists almost always have encounters with an “other”, a people and a culture different from themselves. The result is often a narrow and stereotypical outlook of non-white people through the eyes of white authors and characters.
And this is one of the many things that makes Passing Strange groundbreaking: written by Stew and with a pro-shot directed by Spike Lee, this musical checks all the boxes that make it a travel narrative, while simultaneously subverting all the stereotypes that can be found on most of the popular travel narratives, starting with the fact that it was written by a black author and performed by an all-black cast.
Passing Strange tells the story of a young black American musician who travels to Europe in search for what he calls “the real”, which, truly, is a search for his own identity. Already it’s a subversion of the usual ‘white man travels to some exotic third world country to have a spiritual experience’ storyline. Here, the protagonist, who we know as the Pilgrim, feels trapped in civilized L.A., where he finds it impossible to reconcile who he is with who he is expected to be as a middle-class educated black man. Europe is presented to him as a distant, almost magical place where “freaks” and “outsiders” feel welcome.
This aura of mystery and magic can be found in many travel narratives, but it is usually applied to the Eastern World, as is the case of Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk, which describes Japan as a place “at the end of the world”, full of “rituals and secrets which had reached mystic accuracy”.
When it comes to how the white traveler depicts the “other”, there are two major archetypes. One is the unruly evil beasts, often compared to animals, who need to be either tamed or destroyed. This idea is present in the 16th-century Portuguese epic The Lusiads, written by Luís de Camões, which describes a people in Africa as “bestial folk, wild and wicked”, and as having “horrid malice and rude intent” (“Canto V”, verse 34).
The other archetype is of the “the noble savage”, a notion explored by Rousseau, and which has become a recurring type of character in travel literature. The idea is that the noble savage is innocent, uncorrupted by society, inherently good, and often child-like – but, ultimately, someone who will be better off when civilized.
In Miss Saigon, both of these are present. When Kim is first introduced to the American soldiers, she fits perfectly into the “noble savage” archetype: an underage virgin with a “heart like the sea” and with a “million dreams” that, we later learn, could be fulfilled by Chris and the American Dream. Thuy, on the other hand, is a cruel man who tries to murder a child, and his hatred for The United States makes him so irredeemable that the only possible solution is for him to die.
Although neither of these archetypes can be perfectly applied to the European characters in Passing Strange, since they imply a world that precedes Western civilization, they are still present, in terms of behavior and of how the protagonist sees Europe. The twist is of course that they are being applied by a black traveler to the white natives.
When he arrives at The Headquarters Cafe in Amsterdam, the Pilgrim is immediately offered a cup of coffee by a stranger, amidst his surprise over the fact that “there’s hashish on the menu”. He then meets a number of Dutch characters, including Joop, who believes “everyone should be naked all the time”, because “clothes are chains from which we must break free”. This all fits into the “noble savage” archetype: in a place where “untamed spirits roam”, these characters seem to be inherently good, and even naïve, as they welcome the traveler without question.
In Berlin, things are different. The Pilgrim arrives in the middle of a riot, where he is pushed and yelled at, and the landscape is described as a “deep dark corner of a Berlin town”. Then we are introduced to performer artist Mr. Venus, who walks crouched and animal-like. Of course, as the story progresses, the Pilgrim gets to knowing, understanding, and relating to these characters, but the way they are introduced is not far from the “bestial folk” presented by Camões.
Something else that is common in travel narratives (likely because most authors are men, so the male gaze also comes into play) is the sexualization and infantilization of women. In On The Road, for example, Kerouac finds himself infatuated by a Mexican woman named Beatrice, and the first thing he writes about her is that “her breasts stuck out straight and true”, and that “her little flanks looked delicious”. Before he learns her name, he always refers to her as a girl, and never as a woman, and the addition of the word “little” before almost every adjective he uses to describe her – “her little shoulders”; “her simple and funny little mind”– only helps to infantilize this character.
The Pilgrim is guilty of this too. In Amsterdam, although he feels an emotional connection to Marianna, most of the descriptions we have of her in “The Keys” have sexual connotations, such as when the narrator notes that, in her apartment, “she had nude photos everywhere”, or that “all her girlfriends showered there”. In fact, it’s not just women who are sexualized, but the city itself, from Joop with his statement about naked bodies, to Christoph, a “part-time sex worker” who claims “I hook, therefore I am”, and the very landscape, with its “naked girls at breakfast tables”. So much so that, in “We Just Had Sex”, the protagonist ends up having sex with all the Dutch characters, and finishes the song by saying “I love how they’re so nonchalant about everything I want”, emphasizing the idea that all that we are seeing is a product of his idealization.
In Berlin, the very first words he says to Desi are an attempt at flirting (“what do you say after this riot we grab ourselves a little drink?”) and the other German female character, Sudabey, is a “post-modern pornographer”. And even when he is no longer sexualizing Desi, the Pirlgrim is still idealizing her, by conflating her with the city (“…he didn’t know where Desi ended and Berlin began”).
What’s different about this is that the characters resist his idealization. When he decides to leave Amsterdam, Marianna tells him that she hopes one day he will learn that the city is more than “hash bars and squatted houses”. He then says, “if Berlin sucks I can come back to you”, and she denies it, reminding him that she has a life outside of his wants and needs. In Berlin, when he dedicates a seven-hour long musical piece to Desi, she tells him, “I don’t want to be a song. I want to be loved.” She offers him a chance to really know her, he declines, and she leaves him for it.
Something else that stands out in this narrative is that the Pilgrim’s own otherness is not overlooked. He leaves L.A. in part for feeling that he doesn’t fit in, but, when he arrives in Amsterdam, the same stereotypes he dealt with back home are reinforced when Christoph and Joop ask him if he plays jazz or the blues. In Berlin, he at first is othered for not being enough anti-system. He earns his place at Nauhaus by pointing to his blackness as a reason for him to belong, but then he plays into the idea they have of black Americans and is othered as “The Black One”. Sudabey goes as far as to say, “we love you, like an anthropologist loves a tribe”.
Towards the end of the show, the narrator explains that “the real” sought out by the Pilgrim is nothing but a construct, and that he “is looking for something in life that can only be found in art”. He seems to come to terms with the fact that his outlook of the world and of himself are his own one-sided fabrications, but when, in his mother’s funeral, he pledges not to “lose faith in the only thing that can” bring her back – which is his music – he also seems to realize that those fabrications are important, to the world and to himself.
In the last song, the narrator sings that “the universe is a toy in the mind of a boy”, and that “life is a movie […] starring you”, reminding the audience that, try as it may, the world can never make you “other” in your own story.
Passing Strange is refreshing from the get-go because it is conceived and voiced by black artists in an industry dominated by white people (according to Playbill, “Caucasian playwrights wrote 86.8 percent of all shows produced in the 2016-17 season”, and “Caucasian directors were hired to work on 87.1 percent of those productions”; on Broadway, “95 percent of all plays and musicals were both written and directed by Caucasian artists”). It is refreshing because it’s a show where non-white characters aren’t reduced to stereotypes like they are in The Book of Mormon, and they also aren’t reduced to their trauma and tragedy, like they are in Miss Saigon.
And it is refreshing in the way it shows black audiences, and all people who have been consistently and systemically othered, that they can chase their dreams, they can go on their own soul-searching journeys and break free from the box they’ve been put into. They can dance to their own metronomes, and they can and should be the ones to tell the story, letting us see the world through their perspectives.
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