Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror firstly published in 1992 in New York is one of her famous plays devoted to one of the current issues of modern society namely to ethnic conflicts. The play consists of a number of interviews of the participants of the accident happened in the Crown Heights (Brooklyn Hights, 1993).
Smith performed her play herself presenting each interviewee with all emotions and feelings. This play presents a deep conflict of minorities living in the Crown Heights from different points of view. Smith presents the historical preconditions, the racial theories and the participants of this conflict trying to understand the essence of this conflict better. This play is known as the thirteenth part of her project On the Road: A Search for the American Character that is the combination of drama and journalism (Rayner, 1993). The aim of this project is to cast light upon the current issues of the USA connected with religious, racial and gender conflicts (Reinelt, 1996).
Smith has been interested in this problem since her youth. Studying at Beaver College, Smith was captured with the Black Power movement. She decided to move to San Francisco to take part in social and political movements. Living in San Francisco, she attended classes at the American Conservatory Theatre in order to become an actor (Lyons & Lyons,1994). Then she decided to move to New York to practice her actor skills. Further on, she began her teaching career. She gave lectures at New York University, Carnegie Mellon and Yale. After such experience of being involved in political movement, trying as an actor and a teacher helps her to create such an outstanding project On the Road: A Search for the American Character. The first play of this project was presented in 1983. Fires in the Mirror produced in 1992 is the play that has attracted a lot of attention to her project. This play was awarded in 1993 with a Pulitzer-Prize and was presented on TV. After this play she has written four works for this project (Lyons & Lyons, 1994). Smith has been awarded with “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. She has created the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard. She continues her teaching career as well as she sometimes tries herself as an actor. Being an all-round person, Smith presents such a profound representation of ethnic conflict in her play.
The subject matter of Fires in the Mirror is the conflict between the Jewish community and the black community. This conflict was caused with the accident happened in the Crown Heights in 1991when the representative of the Jewish community lost control of the car and killed a black boy that was seven years old. This accident intensifies the conflict between these two communities. This accident results in a number of riots and the murder of the Jewish driver of that car (Kifner, 1991).
The play Fires in the Mirror begins with the section under the title “Identity”. This section presents the attitudes of different people to the problem of identity in the USA. Is it really a problem for them? Why is the identity the reason of many conflicts? Ntozake Shange discusses the notion of identity as the feeling to be the part of the whole in the first scene called “The Desert” (Smith, 1993). The next scene presents the story about a little black boy who comes to the house on Shabbas to switch off the radio on the Jewish holy day.
The next chapter under the title “Mirrors” presents Aaron M. Bernstein’s discussion about the symbolic sense of the mirror. Mirrors are the symbol of “distortion” in literature, science and society (Smith, 1993). The telescopes created by physicists with large mirrors have the minimal circus of confusion. When the mirror is larger the distortion is less. The next section “Hair” is devoted to the story of a little black girl about the relationships between black and Hispanic children at school. In the section “Race” the problem of women and black people is discussed. Angela Davis points out in this section that the situation has been changed since 1960. In the next section “Rhythm” the role of women in music namely in hip-hop culture is discussed. The accident happened at the Crown Heights only intensifies the problem that has been in the USA for a long time. Smith tries to find the roots and real causes of such attitude to women and people belonging to other ethnic groups.
The Section “Seven Verses” presents Professor Leonard Jeffries’ discussion about the slave trade. The American history provides the real reasons of conflicts between white and black people. Letty Cottin Pogrebin casts light upon the real reasons of the conflict between the black and the Jewish community. Jews are the only nation that treats black people as human beings and black people abuse their attitude. On the other hand, Minister Conrad Mohammed considers black people not the Jews to be the people chosen by the God as far as these people are destined to suffer from white people all their life. The choice of the conflict between the black people and Jews is no mere chance. The black community as well as the Jewish community has been suffered from white people. The black people were slaves in previous centuries while Jews were exterminated during the World Wars. Factually, both these communities are victims of the history but it is unclear why they fight with each other. Robert Sherman, one of Smith’s interviewees, states that English language is not sufficient to express the real reasons and understanding of this problem. He highlights that these conflicts are impossible to explain with the language.
Rabbi Joseph Spielman starts the final section with expressing his point of view to the happened accident. He considers the actions of the black community to be deliberate to start anti-Semitic riots. In this section anonymous expresses, the dissatisfaction of the American police who never arrests Jews and makes black people guilty. There are a lot of stereotypes captured the modern society.
There are a lot of versions of the accident happened at the Crown Heights and it is quite difficult to decide who are guilty. Presenting all these versions, Smith tries to depict the problem of ethnical conflicts in America (Moore, 2011). Factually, there is no clear answer in her book. She presents the problem as it is.
The central theme of this play is multicultural anger. This anger is often irrational as the reader may observe from the play (Trotter, 2005). The people captured with their emotions cannot assess the real situation. This anger to each other is historically developed and rooted in the people’s minds on the subconscious level. Factually, they cannot explain the reasons of this anger themselves. The black community that has been always suppressed by white people feels their power over the Jews and they use this situation to revenge for their past suppression (Greenberg, 2007). Even if they realize that the Jews may be not guilty the black people do not have another way to revenge. On the other hand, the Jews who have been also suppressed during Holocaust do not understand why black people are so aggressively towards them. The Jews also need to have the subject for revenge for their past offences (Rich, 1992). The life becomes easier for people when they have found the so-called “scapegoat”. The Jews and black people consider each other to be this “scapegoat”.
Although, Smith does not provide a clear explanation to this conflict all these interviews help to understand each opponent better. The specific genre of this play combining the elements of journalism and drama helps the reader to observe the real participants of the conflict and their own points of view and assessments of the current situation. Factually, Smith did not have to create invented characters and use different stylistic devices to pass the message to the reader. She just collected the interviews of real people with their emotional words and feelings that are so precious in Fires in the Mirror. Nevertheless, Smith’s talent should not be underestimated as far as it is necessary to be a talented person to imagine such project with such a current issue. A real life sometimes is more interesting than literature. When the reader observes real people with their real problems he/she is more concerned with the subject matter. This play helps the representatives of both these communities to look at the conflict from another side. Such social project as Smith’s one is very useful in our society and helps to attract the people’s attention to the problems that need to be solved.
Reference List
Brooklyn Hights (1993). Entertainment Weekly, 168 (30), 44.
Greenberg, C. (2007). Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn riot. Web.
Kifner, J. (1991). Tension in Brooklyn: Clashes Persist in Crown Heights for 3d Night in Row. Web.
Lyons, C. & Lyons J. (1994). Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her Performance within the Context of Critical theory. Web.
Moore, M. (2011). Black-Jewish Relationships Today. Web.
Rayner, R. (1993). World of Mouth. Harper’s Bazaar, 126(3376), 248-249.
Reinelt, J. (1996). Performing Race: Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. Modern Drama, 39 (4), 609 – 617.
Rich, F. (1992). Diversities of America in One-Person Shows. New York Times, 141(15).
Smith, A. (1993). Fires in the Mirror. England: Anchor Books.
Trotter, J. (2005). Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Web.