Presented by Indigo Arts Alliance please join us at Mayo Street Arts with our current Artist-In-Residence, poet and writer, Arisa White for a work-in-progress libretto reading of Post Pardon: The Opera. With its concern for gendered and ecological violence, Post Pardon is the transgenerational apology needed to repair a Black woman’s soul.
Set between the material and spiritual worlds, where Elsa, The Bottle Tree, serves as the threshold, three females’ lives intersect because of a murder-suicide. From the afterlife, Rema returns to heal her relationship with two daughters: Willow who is living, and Isa, the child she killed. Willow is guided by The Sistas (Tulsi, Astra, and ShiShi), empowered by the eco-activist group Black Azaleas, and inspired by Rosa’s love as she embraces the multiplicities of death.
Adapted from Arisa White’s eponymous poetry chapbook, published by Mouthfeel Press in 2011, Post Pardon was inspired by poet Reetika Vazirani who killed her two-year-old son and then took her own life in the summer of 2003. Arisa was struck by these events, having met Vazirani and Jehan Komunyakaa a few weeks prior to their deaths. As a device to non-judgmentally enter the interior landscape of a woman who contemplates murder-suicide, Post Pardon: The Opera employs Caribbean mythologies and West African cosmologies to explore the concept of inherited sorrow.
For the reading of the text, Arisa White, featuring local artists and actors, will focus on the libretto as a poetic literary form and the inherent musicality of language to amplify the ritualistic, performative, and evocative nature of the lyric. A moderated discussion and Q&A will follow. This program is free, open to all ages (16+)
