Monica Prince’s How to Exterminate the Black Woman (PANK, 2019) is a choreopoem, a form of drama that combines poetry, storytelling and dance. Prince’s work alludes to Ntozake Shange’s, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Like Shange’s, Prince’s protagonist, Angela, is a Black woman who struggles with thoughts of suicide. Angela is not alone, but accompanied by six personifications of emotion: Expectation, New, Fury, Fear, Loss, and Silence. They all have differently colored scarves, resembling Shange’s rainbow. Here the speakers’ lines blend into the next persona’s dialogue to form the lines of a sestina, as with the first lines spoken by the six emotions: “FEAR / My mother said Black women live in fear, / NEW / anxious. Born that way. Brand new / EXPECTATION / bodies full of panic, constantly expecting / LOSS / the worst, never taught differently. Losing / SILENCE / such vigilance begets our death, so we stay silent, / FURY / quiet as it’s kept, nursing our fury, / Hoping it doesn’t kill us first. Hell hath no fury…”

Prince’s work showcases how Black women are, “. . . . constantly expecting the worst, [and] never taught differently.” Although written and performed in 2019, this choreopoem is profoundly relevant to this year’s Black Lives Matter movement and to ongoing racial injustice.

The text of How to Exterminate the Black Woman is formatted as a standard play with seven leading personas, and with ancillary dancers who mostly appear through stage direction and moments of action in the performance as when, “...A dancer enters, picks up / the gun, and starts to remove Silence / from the stage. Silence fights the dancer, to / the point that the dancer must literally / drag Silence off stage.”

The sestina monologues that fill the bulk of dialogue often include the names of the six personification characters. Prince identifies these six names as pain-points in a Black woman’s body and uses her knowledge of pain to communicate the possibility of strength: “NEW / ...This is a spell of motivation. / Pain is the body’s language. It tells you / something is wrong, something is changing, / something is new.” Pain gives perception, and these pains are the vehicle that carries us through the traumas to the end with renewed strength. These pains reflect the experience of being a Black woman in the United States. 

The personas in How to Exterminate the Black Woman explore generational trauma, domestic violence, patriarchal oppression, and racial oppression. Within these cultural explorations, Prince raises a call to action for the oppressed and for the oppressors: “FURY / when we rise, glorious, dressed in the magic of this fury / FEAR / you tried to beat out of us, fearful / NEW / of the day we’d wake up and claim our new / names. Pay attention to this new / EXPECTATION / insurrection. Do not cower here, expecting / LOSS / ancestral amnesia. We the bereaved, mourning the loss / SILENCE / of too many loved ones buried in silence / FURY / white supremacy battled in the dark…”

November 2020