Honoring Elders in Diasporic Community
A response by Michael Reyes Salas to We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo

The cultural practice of honoring our elders requires a heightened sensibility capable of attending to the multi-faceted personalities of persons weathered by a lifetime of experience, persons who possess an epic sense of memory. Playwright Zainabu Jallo, author of We Take Care of Our Own, skillfully captures this universal element of the human condition. Set in a posh European senior care home, the play offers us a glimpse into the life-stories of three ageing men who share a playful friendship. Having chosen to migrate from their homes and families, and now inhabiting a diasporic condition, they reside in an assisted-living facility while dealing with delicate mental and physical health issues. Consequently, they find themselves pondering existential questions.

The entirety of the play’s action unfolds in a single setting: the senior home. And appropriate mise-en-scene elements situate us fixedly there. In the background, fashionable wall-mounted light fixtures, small stacks of books, handwoven baskets and artisanal woodwork adorn a built-in shelf and console. Meanwhile the foreground features mid-century modern living and dining room furniture. By keeping stage props to a minimum, viewers are encouraged to focus on character-driven dialogue more than elaborate surroundings.

However, one outstanding visual aspect of the play is the multi-purpose use of a large background screen. The screen is used to project an opening video-montage which recounts a short story of the playwright’s casual, but impactful, encounter with an elderly stranger on a public transit platform. After this prelude, and for the rest of the play, the screen then transforms into a large window that looks out towards mountain silhouettes against the backdrop of colorful, beautiful skylit evening hues.

Youssef is a retired African astrophysicist who searches for his kin in the firmament. Bajran is a former chemist from the Balkans who celebrates his 91st birthday and seeks to purify his soiled spirit through a cleansing ritual that might absolve him of past family abuse. Meanwhile, Moon-So, a South Korean filmmaker, wrestles with emotions of shame and guilt rooted in a mysterious violent history.

For a group of supposed octogenarians, the cast of quick-witted elders moves across the stage with grace. The comedic facial expressions of Richard Ooms offer a light-hearted touch to his otherwise manipulative character—who pressures his friends to join him in a ritual they do not believe in. Alternatively, Stan Egi’s calm and collected stage presence contrasts sharply with his character’s internal disharmony. Meanwhile, Warren Bowles’ intentional positioning on stage, which occasionally separates him from the other actors, foreshadows his character’s fate. The chemistry between the three makes for an overall performance that is not only hilariously entertaining but moving and at times sentimental.

Within the context of the play, these older characters respectively deal with bad knees, auditory hallucinations, and life-threatening feverish symptoms which trigger them to question the fragility of life. Close attention is paid to each character’s unique individuality, but not at the expense of dignifying their collective struggle to form a sense of diasporic community while living in a form of institutional exile. Between the joyful and painful memories that flood their percussive dialogue, soothing essences of patchouli and eucalyptus oil are evoked amidst the tumultuous arguments that their heat of the moment exchanges give rise to.

For the most part, costumes in the play mark their respective diasporic identities. Youseff’s long sleeved white tunic and leather slippers sartorially mark his character’s Africanness. And Bajran’s white fur vest not only fits with his Viking-themed birthday party, but also evokes his Balkan roots. However, Moon-so’s costume of comfy pajama pants and V-neck cardigan does not reflect his South Korean heritage. But this may be the point, given that his character is the one whose memory of home may be the least reliable given his disturbed mental state.

Overwhelmed with the panoptic aspects of assisted-living the group daydreams of a daring escape from the facility—an exciting adventure to another city, to a faraway mountain range, an exploration of the lives of insects. Poetically teasing out themes of embodied knowledge, the play considers what it means to take an elder by the hand and read the stories that their pronounced veins recount. The surreal perception of the characters can visualize continents, coastlines, and landscapes in the micro-cosmic matrix of blood flow spilled by an accidental cut wound. By staging such intimate corporeal encounters, Jallo explores how these men possess reading competency of a different kind of body language.

Due to the Afro-diasporic consciousness that underlies the entirety of the work, consideration is given to how the afterlife is not simply a dead end, but a return home to the ancestors, a sacred reunion. Even the play’s musical sounds of griot vocals accompanied by kora music throughout characterize its sonic identity as unmistakably West African. But the inner conflicts of the three friends begs the question: What does it mean to long for a return to the father land when one’s geographies of home are dispersed across terrestrial and extraterrestrial grounds? Such uncertainties, among several others, are explored by Zainabu Jallo through this play. It’s a kind of story that raises intriguing questions which don’t have simple, straightforward answers. Yet, it is precisely these compelling mysteries of life that the theatrical stage is made for exploring. 

We Take Care of Our Own recently opened as part of The Afro-Atlantic Playwright Festival at The Illusion Theater in Downtown Minneapolis. Stagings are running until October 29th.

About the author -
Michael Reyes Salas, PhD
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Vassar College
Faculty Profile

Michael Reyes Salas is Assistant Professor of Critical Carceral Studies. His teaching and research interests focus on Caribbean literature, French and Francophone studies, cultures of urban modernity, and visuality of imprisonment. His language areas are French, Spanish, and Portuguese. His writing is forthcoming in the CENTRO Journal, and appears in Dalhousie French Studies, Asymptote, Ethnic and Third World Literature’s Review of Books, El Mundo Zurdo, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and El Salto. Before joining Vassar College, Michael held postdoctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Texas at Austin—where he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature in 2020.