Telling Tales Edition: Act Out the Message, with Yvette Modestin

Yvette Modestin is a writer, playwright, poet, and activist who sheds light on the Afro-descendant experience across the Americas. She was born and raised in Colón, Panama, and is the founder and executive director of Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, MA. She recently produced two short plays, written with Our Place Theatre, that mine her own life, and the stories of her family. She hopes to unearth the nuances of intersection and to underscore the importance of Black love and safety in the face of white supremacy. Ujima's Editorial Manager, Alula Hunsen, sat down with her this fall to chat about "I Am Black, Too," and "The Banana Tree," and to learn more about her story-telling praxis. 

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I'm Yvette Marie Modestin Durant, Lepolata Apoukissi, born and raised in Colón, Panama. Colón, Panama is my anchor garden. It is where I fell in love with my Blackness. It's where I saw Blackness shine. It's where I saw Black resiliency. It's where I saw Black beauty. It's where I saw Black athleticism. It's where I saw Black power, even in the midst of segregation—being born and raised in an American territory, and literally growing up in a segregated Black community. But that's what I saw in Rainbow City. That's why I say to folks, America didn't make me Black. I came Black. I come from a Jamaican grandfather who was a Garveyite.  

What’s it been like for you, coming from Panama and now having spent so much of your adult life in Boston? 

I think I've made peace with being one of the first Afro-Latina women in Boston to organize around the intersection of both of these identities, taking something of a beating in people not understanding my complexity, my need to stand strong in my Blackness, owning the culture that shaped me—which comes in Spanish, in Patois, and in French—that I'm not willing to give up. 

The ancestors’ spirits kept putting me in situations where my Blackness was questioned, my Panamanian-ness was questioned, and I felt absolutely pulled out from my root by these questions. I had to search to answer them for myself, to understand why certain questions were being placed before me, why I felt excluded going into a Black party because I spoke Spanish. Why I felt excluded going into a Latino party, because I was Black. And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I was seeking reparations and reparative justice before it became a popular term. Not only as an individual, as an Afro-Latina, but as a Black woman born in the American territory to segregation in Jim Crow. Yeah. And coming here and having folks not even know that that story existed. Shirley Chisholm said, “bring your [own] chair” to the table. My whole thing was, even when I bring my chair, I don't fit. So let me just create a place where I fit; where we fit. 

Are there any ancestors or collaborators you’d like to call into this conversation at this moment?

My parents, my family; I come from a legacy of organizers at home and founders of organizations. I come from a grandmother who was the first Black woman in Colón to run her own business.  

As far as people that shaped me here, in Boston: former city councillor Chuck Turner. Dr. Loretta Williams. Tony VanderMeer, who is the person that introduced me to Assata Shakur’s words. Baba Askia Toure, Dr. James Jennings, Sophia Elijah. Dr. Jemadari Kamara, Dr. Joyce Hope-Scott. I sat with Jeremiah Wright as one of the founding commissioners of the National African American Reparations Commission. I sat with Conrad Worrill, Ray Winbush, Joanne Watson, Iva Carruthers, Mark Thompson, Baba Leonard Dunston—one of the founders of the Association of Black Social Workers. I sat in space with Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. I remember one Black Left Unity Network conference we had in North Carolina, I went with Baba Tony and Baba Askia Toure. I presented at the conference, and one of the radical organizers ate me up. They were like, “who you?” “What are you talking about, you with Black folks?” I was just breaking down in tears; too thin of a skin for that kind of thing, you know. I walked off and Amiri Baraka called me over, sat me down, and said “listen, everything you said was okay. They’re being small-minded.”  

Who I always come back to, though, is Chuck Turner, and this line he left me: whenever I got stressed [about how I was being received], he would tell me, “let your work speak for itself.”  

Speaking of the work: I’d love to talk about the plays you’ve recently written and put-on: for our audience, who hasn’t yet gotten a chance to see or interact with the plays, “I Am Black, Too,” and “The Banana Tree,” how would you describe “I Am Black, Too”?

The play is drawn from a true moment in my life. It starts with an interaction between two Black Latina women; one of them is lost and in need of directions. In real life, I picked up on her accent and entered into a conversation, seeing her as a sister, a comrade, a fellow Latin American; but she met me with, “we ain't that” <laughs>. And the “we ain't that” came from her inability to see her Blackness, which didn’t allow her to see me and my Blackness, which meant she couldn’t see me through our other cultural connections. She couldn’t get there if she can't get past the color of our skin. 

“I Am Black, Too” started with one line that came to me, and then the play showed up. I started with what I would've wanted to say to the person as I walked away. I remember that interaction really threw me off because she was so stumped by our exchange and not accepting her own Blackness, that she didn’t even thank me for helping her. 

I didn't want to write something that I've written about before, which is in a sense what “I Am Black, Too” is. That’s been the core of much of my activist work. But Jacqui Parker, who's the executive director of Our Place Theatre, told me it would be good to write something about that. The line that first came to me is, I wish I would've said to her: “I look forward to the day that you can look in the mirror and be proud of being Black, too.” That's how the play ends. I was able to heal from and ground the exchange in a way by saying that out loud within the play. 

I extended the conversation with historical notes, and the issue of hair; I also added an African American character who wasn’t there in real life, to bring another Black perspective to bear. Sometimes African Americans will see a Black Latino denying their Blackness and think that’s all of us—”ah, you know, those Latinos?” And I'm like, “hold on.” You know? It's an opportunity for me to say, “pause.” Black Latinos don't all move that way because for many of us, our Blackness defines our experience.  

In the play, my character gets to say what I always say: I was born loving my Blackness, and the Black Latina who doesn’t identify, she was born rejecting it. The play also pushes back on Africans of the diaspora who feel as though they can’t claim Blackness, making the point that you walk in these streets as a direct result of the African American struggle. 

The exchange in the play is equally in English and in Spanish. When we showed it a few months back at the Roslindale Library and we had a Q&A, it was interesting to hear one African American elder say, “I wish you had more [of the play] in English.” And then hearing an Afro-Latina saying, “no, I think it's good because it shows us in the other language that we speak.” And then another African American woman saying, “no, it being in a language I don’t understand pushed me to look at the body language, to hear the tones that were changing in different parts of the conversation,” that she felt all of it.  

I'm hearing you describe the power that comes through in allowing these conversations, these memories, to live on the stage and contextualizing them in that way. I'd love to hear more about “The Banana Tree” and the power of sharing such a personal and familial history on the stage—you tell this story about how your father, as a boy, was wrongly accused by a white man of stealing bananas from a tree that was on half on your grandfather’s property, half on this white man’s property, and how your grandfather beat him after this to teach him a lesson.

I remember the day I said, “okay, let's, let's get this out.” And literally just walking in front of my altar and talking to my dad and my grandfather, like, “okay, we gonna do this. Let's get it out.” And just sitting and it coming out. I actually wrote “The Banana Tree” first, 'cause I really wanted to tell that story, my father’s story. 

“The Banana Tree” is so powerful to my sister, my brother and I. I speak more of my father because my mom passed away when we were very young. So my father was our primary caretaker from the ages of 17, 14, and 12 for each of us. He was very attentive, and we were very attentive to each other.

One day, I told my dad, “hey, let's go around your old neighborhood,” which is called Gatún, where he grew up—one of the locks on the Atlantic side of the canal, where I also grew up. Gatún was very segregated, you know? But my father speaks of it with such love, because the community held so much joy. Because here were these people who had left their homeland, from Martinique, from Jamaica, Barbados, wherever, and created this wonderful in-sync Caribbean community that stood up for each other and took care of each other. I remember being home in Panama, and I loved hearing stories from my dad when I was with him. I remember when I was younger, too, asking for my grandfather's stories about his time coming from Martinique and the construction of the canal and everything; it’s all in my journals from when I was a teen.  

I asked him for stories as we're driving around and he told me this long story about a banana tree--he doesn't eat bananas anymore, because of this traumatic moment. My father had this wonderful relationship with my grandfather; my father's the youngest of nine. And to hear him tell this story, about one of the only times my grandfather beat him, stood out for us.

So in the play, I try to represent the exchange between my father and my papa, with a chorus of women as the collective conscience; you hear the voice of the white man, you know, sort of coming to the house and sort of feeling like my grandfather should do what he says. He knows my grandfather, because my grandfather was one of the supervisors during the construction of the canal, and the white man worked above him—my papa would tell these stories about the white man telling his crew to come out of lunch before it's time, and my grandfather would be like, “nope, you tell him Big Mo said you’re not finished yet.” Anyway, this white man comes with the assumption that he and my grandfather can have a good exchange because they've worked together. My grandfather's like, “nah, this ain't work. You came to my house. I don't have to listen to you when you come to my house.” And the women are the ones to say, don't beat the boy in front of no white man. 

We didn't get to do a Q&A after putting on “The Banana Tree” at the library, but it was interesting to hear folks tell me the play reminded them of their upbringing in the South. I got to say, “well, this is not in the South. This was Panama.”  It's an opportunity for everyone to understand that the US had another forum where they were playing out similar dynamics to what was going on stateside.  

There's multiple levels of tension in “The Banana Tree.” There's tension that arises from your dad's character, your dad in real life, grabbing this banana from a banana tree, and this white man alleging that he stole the banana, that the banana came from the wrong side of the property line. You clearly outline how this white man believes whiteness is connected to property and connected to lawfulness—he is almost saying,  “it doesn't matter what actually happened, whatever I say is correct, and whatever I believe about these properties is correct.”  This white man then comes to your grandfather and expects him to enforce this in his own home, expects him to enforce white supremacy in his own home. Like, “your son stole this, what are we gonna do about it?”

And my grandfather tells the white man, “you don't own Earth.” Like, “nah, you ain't got control of that piece. You come to my house to accuse my son.” What I didn’t write in "The Banana Tree" is that same man tried again to accuse my dad and his friends again, and the women were on it, already looking out for them, and they headed off the accusation. So there's that maliciousness of wanting to get young Black boys in trouble.  

And there is this second tension that emerges that's perhaps more subtle or more hard to parse for folks who aren't Black, but I think is familiar in many Black households: this tension between your dad and your grandfather.  Your grandfather does beat him, but it's not at the behest of the white man. It's because he's trying to keep him safe, indicating that if this interaction teaches him one thing, it is not that the white man is right. It is not that what your father did was wrong. But it is that this world is not safe for us. We keep us safe.  

I felt that I needed to put that in, too: I often saw my grandfather and my father deal with conflict in a very mature way, but the outcome was always, they both walked away well and fine. You know, my father had an enormous amount of respect for my grandfather. I never saw him cross that line. And it was a lovely thing to watch, you know? 

At no point did my father speak ill of my grandfather, even in the telling of that story. My father sharing that story was for me to know the story and to understand the depth of what we're facing. It almost mirrors the conversation every Black boy receives about how to act when you’re confronted by the police—like, tighten up, whiteness is around you, and there could be mal-intent.

Still, in the play, you feel my grandfather's pain of having to hit my father, and you feel my father's pain in being on the receiving end, but they continue the conversation afterward. 

My daddy would say, “a white man will make you a hypocrite,” because they basically had to agree with things and do things in accordance with white people’s wishes, against their will or against their disposition. At first, he would say that about work. But then when we integrated and we started to have our own experiences, we would hear that phrase again and again. Come to find out, that phrase that came from my papa, who had said that to my dad, letting him know to always be aware. 

It's a beautiful way to work through, think through, act through these themes that we're talking about, themes that apply across contexts. I’m curious about how it felt for you to see one of your family’s stories acted out on the stage. 

I was a crying mess. My father is my everything. I was loved and cared for by this man, so I saw this as an opportunity to uplift my relationship with my father. He was only 44 when he became a widow, and he always says he grew up with us because he also had to learn a new reality. So I have great respect and love for my father. Before he passed, but definitely since his passing, I’ve been understanding and honoring what a unique and beautiful relationship my sister, my brother, and I had with him. When people see me speak, it's always, “you're so lucky for the women that have shaped you.” And my extra response to that is, “and the men!” because I have been shaped by a Black man—deeply shaped by a Black man. He wasn't perfect. We saw his flaws, saw his weaknesses. But we navigated it all together. 

My last question for you is: what is narrative power, to you, as a playwright mining your own life?

It's an ability to speak your truth. There's a quote from Maya Angelou: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." There's nothing worse than having a story in you and not being able to tell it. 

I don't want to have to say that these two plays were written by a Black Panamanian woman about Black Panamanians. They were written by a Black woman, sharing Black experiences. I don't have any experiences that are not Black experiences.  

We have so many stories to tell and we need to continue to tell them, in ways that shift us and create different conversations than someone just talking to you straight. You get to see it, feel it, hear it, sense it, smell it, in these forms. We are a culture of storytellers. It's how we pass down our history. 

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Yvette Modestin - Lepolata Aduke Apoukissi- Empress Modest-I (she/hers) is a scholar, activist, writer, poet, abstract visual artist, storyteller, curator and playwright, born and raised in Colón, Panama. She is the founder and executive director of Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, MA. Ms. Modestin has been profiled by the Boston Globe as "The Uniter'' for her work in bringing the Latin American and African American community together and for her activism in building a voice for the Afro Latino Community. She is a member/Ambassador for the Rastafari Alliance of Panama, and a Board member of the center for African, Caribbean and Community Development (CACCD) at UMass Boston. As an artist, a mental health clinician, wellness facilitator, community organizer, educator and Ifa practitioner, Ms. Modestin speaks to acknowledge the historical connection of people of African descent and the importance of seeing each other as we seek our collective liberation.