By Ayva Strauss
Besides being the director of the Africana Studies department and teaching performance and activism at Susquehanna University, Monica Prince is also a prolific author. Her published work includes “How to Exterminate the Black Woman,” “Instructions for Temporary Survival,” “Letters from the Other Woman,” and most recently, “Roadmap.”
“Roadmap,” published earlier last year, follows the life of a young Black man, Dorian. But rather than begin with his birth or some formative experience of his, the story begins with his paternal grandmother, Belle.
“I wanted to start with her, instead of going further back because I think I wanted to call attention to the fact that many Black people in the United States can’t recall their family history beyond maybe three or four generations,” Prince said. She went on to describe that this is because of a variety of historical factors—from slavery itself to the separation of families during the Civil War and the period afterwards to migration and deaths in general.
This latest release is a choreopoem, meaning that the characters’ dialogue is written in verse, each with a title, including stage directions and choreography, too. In the opening acknowledgements, Prince writes, “The choreopoem structure and term comes from Ntozake Shange’s award-winning choreopoem, ‘for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975)’.”
“It’s a fabulous show, so necessary for the whole genre,” Prince said of Shange’s work. “It’s the first one that actually combined performance poetry with dance and music and utilized the costumes as a form of art.”
Even though it eventually became clear to Prince that Dorian’s story was meant to take this form, the story started as a biography of someone she knew personally. It was unlike anything she had ever written before, and the draft sat on the shelf for years before she decided to re-work it into “Roadmap.”
It was during her first year at Susquehanna University that she picked it back up, having been prompted by the reception of her show “How to Exterminate the Black Woman.” After the performance of that work, young men of color approached Prince, wanting a work that centered them.
Prince says she considered it for a long time. “When ‘for colored girls’ came out back in 1975, there was a lot of backlash from Black men and men in general because they considered the show itself to be man-hating.”
Prince goes on to describe that this reaction was not specific to Shange’s work, but, in fact, was a response from men every time a female author published a work that was on the whole unrelated to men or depicted them in an “unflattering light.”
Thinking of works like Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” or Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Prince added that in these works, men “didn’t appreciate the worst of them being called out for their bad behavior.”
Ultimately, she decided to take up writing a show that centered Dorian, a Black man who has his origins in “How to Exterminate a Black Woman,” although in that show, he is miscarried before his character gets to hit the stage. Thus, in “Roadmap,” the choreopoet places him in a new universe, with new parents, where he survives.
It made sense to Prince that this show had to be performed, instead of just being told as a story. “I thought it made more sense if you could visually see the struggle on stage rather than to talk about it. And it also gave me the opportunity to tell the story from multiple points of view because when it is only from the perspective of, in this case the winner, the protagonist, things get left out.”
Over the course of the show, Dorian and his ancestors face a breadth of experiences—love, sex work, relationships with God, interpersonal violence, questions about sexuality, and assumptions of what it means to be a Black man or Black woman. As Dorian’s life unfolds, there is also a troop of dancers that periodically use their voices to report real-world statistics or take part in chants from the audience.
“Sex work is real work,” they say in tandem on page 17, followed by, “Compared to other women in other professions, prostitution is the one in which women are most likely to be murdered. However, the vast majority of women who enter prostitution leave the trade alive,” on page 18. They are providing context to Belle’s life as a sex worker.
Throughout the rest of the show, they read off statistics about rates of suicide among Black youth or domestic violence as the characters encounter those scenarios. “And then there’s something to be said about hearing something beautiful and difficult and then it being immediately backed up with real evidence that demonstrates that whatever you just heard was true,” Prince said.
There is qualitative evidence of particular Black experiences, too. Dorian’s mother, Raven, for example, is introduced to us without the family tree that Dorian’s father has, and that was an intentional move, meant to showcase that Raven loses herself in her relationship.
“I wanted to paint Raven as the type of Black woman who sacrifices everything for the protection of Black men,” Prince said.
“Roadmap” is about Dorian and his family, and yet it is not. It is more so about “Dorian as a symbol within a society that seeks to destroy him,” she said. She emphasized that there are all of these factors swirling around that make it difficult for any Black person to make it to an old age, and this fact is confronted head-on in the show’s final moments, when we hear a gunshot ring out.
We hear the distinctive sound, but we have no idea what the bullet’s relationship is to Dorian—did it plant itself in his chest? Did he fire it? Is it totally unrelated to his life, just something that happened in the background? We don’t get an answer.
The ending was something Prince thought about frequently with her students while working on the show at Susquehanna in 2019: “What I liked about doing the show on campus is that it helped me workshop the show.”
All of her rehearsals start with asking the students how they are doing and what is on their mind, and then after the more typical rehearsal procedures, like running lines, they return to discussing a central question of the work.
“The question my students were trying to answer the whole time we were working on that show is, ‘What kills Dorian in the end?’” Prince said.
