karma chameleon

thinking of Fanon has me thinking of Dr. Esiaba Irobi, who was my first ever instructor in the history and study of theatre. I had the exceptional fortune to overlap my time at a little university with the time that he was an instructor there before he passed. my course schedule worked out such that he was my first actual elective class, fall quarter freshman year; after a rigorously monotonous morning of calculus and economics he taught us shakespeare (I only knew Hamlet and, of course, Romeo & Juliet at the time), and I directed a student version of The Tempest under his guidance; he taught us Arthur Miller, which I have to say bounced right off of my temperament. he introduced to our childish minds the ideals of the Bread and Puppet; he asked us questions that in time made me loathe nearly every production of the Tempest (including the mainstage one at our university that spring) moving forward, for its inability to truly consider Caliban. He once spent an hour teaching us the words and the importance of mise en scène, the every-frame-a-painting of live theatrical synthesis. He didn't mention Marx once aloud in all his lectures; he taught us James Baldwin, and called himself Biafran, with distinction. posthumously—he died very soon after—I learned about his own work, and that any discussion of his own work is always paired with Fanon; his plays, where they are known, are famous for their depiction of violence and paradox in marxist revolution.