CANVASS OF LIFE

Carol Chehade

Inspirational reminders come in any form you wish to recognize. One of the reminders that many gathered around to recognize was a theater performance written by Renaissance artist, Dr. John Scott and performed by New Works Writers Series. The play was like a moving and breathing exhibit of how art may draw experience from the past and hope from the future, but its manifestation must be practiced in the present.

Dr. Scott regularly uses his experience as a playwright and imaginatively applies it to the field of psychodrama. I asked him how he directed non-professional acting people with problems they want to resolve. He told me that he allows the people he works with to write out there own story. People involved in his therapeutic artistic approach essentially learn to draw upon their own healing powers, thus taking responsibility for their self- written roles. Indeed, everyone has their own story craving to be heard and begging to be shared.

I was supposed to have written about Dr. Scott last week, but an unrelenting series of unfortunate personal events culminated in the death of a dear comrade of mine by the name of Abo Dok. I met Dok when I was thirty and he was a mere sixteen. His stunningly innocent face belied the experiences that come from being a refugee from Sudan. Dok is part of a group of orphaned youth whom are known collectively as “The Lost Boys of Sudan.” Lost because they are stripped from their community’s embrace, left alone to figure out the alternate routes in reaching adulthood amidst trauma while being marked with the crimson blood that draws all forms of hunters – both human and animal. Dok was one of those lost boys that hunters preyed upon. Dok’s young eyes watched his entire family raped and/or killed in a war that has been fed by the indifference of the entire world. What happened to him along the way of his year long journey into Kenya is enough to conclude that man has not yet evolved to being called anything remotely close to human. Alone he made an arduous journey from the refugee camp from Kenya to the United States, where he was granted asylum. Sadly, Dok’s journey ended last week when he died at the age of 21 years old. I tried to feel his life and the bit I could feel threw me into a profound sadness -not for my strong brother Abo Dok, but for the human race that refused to shine the bright lights needed on his path toward freedom.

You may wonder what Dr. Scott, Abo Dok and I have to do with each other. It is very simple. It is on the stage of my own life that recruited actors with both minor roles and major roles to help carve my character using the tool of a knife. Sometimes at the worst possible moments in our lives, the point where it seems like all the pain we have managed has caught up with us and refuses to be merely managed anymore but to finally be resolved, something or someone unexpected brings things together to what is known as a crossroad. Instead of writing about Dr. Scott as a third person who does not know him well, I will instead put him into the context of how we are connected – even for a brief second- in life.

We are connected as we choose to be. Therefore, I will not separate my long experience with Dok with the short experience with Dr. Scott. I believe every single human being is an artist. A realized artist looks at the entire canvass of life as one plane of existence.

The realized artist is not only a dancer, painter or writer. A businessman like Bill Gates who connects his fortune with the unfortunate without losing one thing but instead gaining everything is an artist. There is no room for the segregation of creation. We are not with the spirit we are in the spirit. The former suggests separateness while the latter demonstrates oneness, meaning we are in it and never with it. The homeless person we see, we are in him; when we watch the theater of war play out on the TV set we are in that war and never with it or against it. This is great power to realize because it gives us such incredible freedom as to how we will act. How I treat loved ones can actually be carried over and manifested by an entire nation. For instance, if I deceive my family, then I have no excuse to wonder why my nation deceives me. Simply, good or bad, we are in it. In the book Love and Law, Ernest Holmes states, “God can become to the individual only what God can become through the individual.” Since God is the original creator of existence, we can easily interchange God with Creativity.

When Dok got sick last year I asked him if he desired to go back to die in his homeland. He told me that his homeland is wherever his soul occupies. He explained to me that any land that can evict you without a moment’s notice is really beyond ownership through the proclamation of nationality. Instead, he claimed home where home was at the moment. Art indeed imitates life. As I watched Dr. Scott talking to many admirers, he reiterated similar advice to those who venture out looking for their stage. Instead of trying to find the so-called proper stage, we must see that the stage is under our feet; instead of trying to find the so-called right connections, we must connect the myriad elements within us; instead of trying to land the lucrative contract, we must enrich the contract we are divinely given before the contract of our lives reaches its expiration date.

The most common feature of all those who are oppressed is the frustration of not being heard, seen, understood and felt. Whether your frustrations persist in not being visible to world leaders or being invisible to ourselves, the degrees of being blotted out is experienced by all of us who have felt powerless to some degree. Essentially, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man could have well been meant for the majority of humanity.

We are made from the rib of creativity, therefore it is logical that we have a drive to fulfill what we are- creativity. Whether our creative soil is seeded by the offspring of our images or through the expression of our talents, we must create to live. Otherwise we commit a spiritual murder worse than a thousand physical deaths. The frustration of all creative force lies in one of the most unresolved relationship we have and it is this: the infinite soul trying to express itself through a finite body. The frustrations, misunderstandings, incompleteness is what drives the artist to keep pushing until the spirit is freed from the jagged instrument of the body. It is no wonder that every single form of human relationships is one of struggle.

Yet, it is that very struggle that has chiseled the road toward evolution with creativity that is unbearably beautiful in its scope. It is not an accident that some of the most creative human beings came from the dark, hidden corridors of the world. Those places where haters of creation have tried aborting the life force of the universal womb. Flip the stereotypes upside down and you will see a much simpler truth. The happy Sambo who is singing and dancing for your comfort is actually the one who has had to use an unpopular form of creative resistance as a way to escape the oppressive gaze; the comedian who makes you laugh is actually crying at our simplicity in not seeing that beneath a comedy routine that makes it comfortable for us to laugh is a wise comedian who knows that we are too limited in digesting the raw, unlaughing truth; the dancer who moves to our delight actually mocks the slothfulness of the body that is unable to keep up with the omnipresent spirit; the eccentric thinker who sees things through the mind’s eye that most of us can not even see through a microscope teaches us that the real handicap is our self-inflicted blindness; the actor who imitates the contradictory characters of his audience shows us how the real actors are the deceitfulness of our masks. Yet, oppressors of creativity will tell African Americans of yesterday that they cannot sing, dance, ball, and act because they are Black, then flip it around a few generation’s later to fit it into oppression’s convenient psychotic justifications by saying they can sing, dance, ball and act because they are Black.

I say all this not to preach, but to put things in perspective. Before we go back to our jobs, our families and our desperate reach to simply understand our place on the world stage, it is important to remember that the stage we play out our struggle on does not allow for dress rehearsals. We are vulnerable to our choices as we are given one opportunity to prove that we made the most thoughtful choice. Should we fail at the choice we have picked we must be prepared for the consequences of where it will take us. Looking around, it is easy to see that our choices are not always successful, but they are perhaps a necessary exercise that sheds our weak habits so that the next generation can follow a wiser path. The good news is that every so often we are gifted something or someone so rare that we are given the right to accept whatever happiness is inspired from such purity. To reach happiness learned from struggle is more freeing than happiness reached through naiveté. Just do not get enslaved to the perception of the struggle anymore than we can become enslaved to the perception of happiness. Rather than run from the gifts given to us, we must unwrap them with patience, wonder and love. Our closing act is up to how we write the next scenes that will be played out by all those made by the same cast that breathed life into life. To my late old comrade, the young Abo Dok and my new comrade, the older Dr. Scott, thank you for contributing a scene to my life. We have much to write, much to share and even more to learn. Seek refuge in the knowledge that even though our stories are written and ready for every act that follows the last one, they are written by a pen that will write as long as the infinite source of its well is re-filled with realizing what we are – a race of vast creation.