Spirituality in Radio Golf
August Wilson now challenges the black middle class to engage in the battle for the black man’s soul in his play Radio Golf where he introduces the audience to the Old Testament of the past and his New Testament of the future. By selecting a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history , the playwright is eager to illustrate a ‘state of emergency’ which has been called , by Walter Benjamin in his Illuminations , as the rule rather than the exception for those who subscribe to the tradition of the oppressed.1The play marks the year 1997 which is considered to be the very critical moment of its extinction in the name of progress. A moment of danger has been created when Pittsburgh’s Hill District tries to rid itself of blight. The current demolition and desolation may lead either to a redevelopment of the African American culture or to the erasure of black memory and history , especially , when the Hill is found to face the appeal of material success and the American Dream has come true. Wilson presents the dilemma and leaves his audience contemplate the solution.
Both the black community and the American audience have to recognize and respect the role the African American culture has played in both an ethnic and a national historical context. Wilson is proud of his cultural identity and his American citizenship , he wants to support and celebrate both. To do so , he wisely chooses his neighborhood , the Hill District , to be the location for all what he calls for. Poverty , crime , and unemployment now walk in streets instead of people , thus , many hopeless blacks have resorted to become street gangs. The Hill District needs its cultural memory ; it is overriding , according to Pierre Nora’s term “lieu de memoire” , the setting :
where memory crystallizes and secretes itself at a particular
historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a
break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory
has been torn- but torn in such a way as to pose the problem
of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.2
The “most significant persona”3 , Aunt Ester , appears as the woman who saved her people in the Old Testament and as old as slavery itself. She signifies the African Americans’ presence in America and bears witness to the black man’s history and worth there. The destruction of her home serves as the catalyst for the dramatic action of the play. As for the stage setting , Radio Golf takes place in the Bedford Hills Redevelopment Company not Aunt Ester’s home. Concreteness , spirituality , visibility, and invisibility are tackled with pointing to the future and the connection to the past. The decoration shows posters of contemporary international golf champion Tiger Woods and the 1960s icon of the civil rights movement Martin Luther King , Jr. , presenting a site of memory which exists in the Hill District. The old building , a former Centre Avenue storefront belongs to Wilks Reality , the black business with a history reaches back to Caesar Wilks , the first black constable on the Hill and the man who invaded Aunt Ester’s sanctuary in 1918 ( Gem of the Ocean (2003) ). Wilson has made this location as the arena in which the spiritual struggle of the play ensues.
Just as the case is with Wilson’s other plays , the title Radio Golf is a key to understand this playwright’s drama. The title metaphorically shows the aspirations the black middle class has towards the accumulation of wealth and social status in America. Golf is an individual sport played by the upper class and Wilson purposefully chooses this professional sport to examine the survival of African American cultural values in the pursuit of success as defined by the dominant white society.4 The protagonist , Harmond Wilks , is the representative of the black middle class, who moved out of the Hill District to a more prosperous part of the city , Shadyside. He has become a real estate developer and wealthy owner of Wilks Realty. His wealth turns him to be a good potential mayoral candidate. His Cornell roommate and the antagonist of the play , Roosevelt Hicks , is a golfer and Mellon Bank Vice President. He is also a part owner of and golf talk show host on WBTZ radio. The two friends have played golf together and both have become partners in the new white world. The dramatist uses their shared interest in golf in order to contrast their ethics , their personal histories , their African American culture , and their relationship to this culture and their ancestors’ values.5 In his review of Radio Golf , Ben Brantley conveys Wilson’s view of these two characters as: ” They are people who’ve lost their natural voices. In Mr. Wilson’s world , that’s the same thing as losing their souls.”6 The two characters have assimilated their spirits with the white materialism.
References
1. Walter Benjamin , Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt , trans. Harry Zohn , New York: Schocken Books , 1969 , p. 263.
2. Pierre Nora , Les Lieux de Memoire ( Realms of Memory : Rethinking the French Past ) , ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman , trans. Arthur Goldhammer , New York : Columbia University Press , 1996 , vol. 1 , p. 284.
3. August Wilson , ‘ Aunt Ester’s Children: A Century On Stage ‘ , American Theatre 22: 9 . ( November 2005 ) , p. 26.
4. Margaret Booker , ‘ Radio Golf: The Courage of His Convictions – Survival , Success , and Spirituality ‘ , Bloom’s Modern Views: August Wilson , ed. Harold Bloom , Infobase Publishing ,2009 , p. 151.
5. Ibid.
6. Ben Brantley , ‘ Voices Warped by the Business Blues ‘ , New York Times , 30 April 2005 , p. B11.
Asst. Lect. Shaima N. Mohammad
Dept. of Hotel Management
