Share on X Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Written by Ipsita Dey Sept. 14, 2023 Ipsita Dey attended the Bulrusher, a Pulitzer prize finalist play by Eisa Davis, at McCarter on September 14th, 2023. Dey is a 6th year Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her areas of research expertise include environmental studies and encounters between black/brownness and indigeneity. This essay is part of The Scholar's Take Series. Upon walking into the theater, I was surprised to see a river coursing its way along the border of the stage. The theater’s golden lighting produced the effect of sunset: shadows from prop plants mixed with a yellow haze and danced in the eerie blue-gray of the still water. The soft sepia colors of the wooden set on stage complimented the earthen green, blue, and brown tones of the river. Between the set construction, color tones, and lighting, I was transported to a small town nestled within a rural forest location. Soon, I would learn that this was Boonville, a rural logging town in Northern California facing severe population loss due to the death of the local lumber industry. Boonville is home to the main characters of Bulrusher (the only Black girl in town, found as a baby in the River and adopted by a white teacher nicknamed Scoolch), Madame (who runs the local brothel), Lucas (a Black man who remained in town after the lumber yard shut down), Boy (who is singularly obsessed with wooing Bulrusher), and Vera (Lucas’s niece who comes to town for a visit, and Bulrusher’s love interest). In the audience, we see how Bulrusher’s struggles with love, romance, and loneliness stem from her overwhelming sense of abandonment. Bulrusher is crippled by fear and anger: questions about who her mother might have been, and why this woman left her to die in a basket in the River, haunt her attempts to find love and belonging. The only place she feels at home is in the River, who she turns to for guidance and safety. In the last act, Madame reveals she is Bulrusher’s biological mother, but then quickly displaces motherhood onto the River: “The river’s your mother. I throw stones into it everyday to thank her for caring for you.” Quickly, the audience comes to understand Bulrusher’s deep emotional connection to the River as due to her inheritance of Pomo Indian Ancestry. Her bond to the River stems from this indigenous legacy and from the Pomo prayer Madame made to the River when she placed Bulrusher in its waters: “River water, I ask you, protect her, help her. Take her to your bosom. Save her from the night and cold, river water, protect her. I thank you.”Madame is standing at the edge of a cliff as she remembers this prayer, Bulrusher’s shotgun pointing at her back. Bulrusher’s face, etched in sorrow throughout the play, slowly lightens. The ocean’s roar softens. In the next scene, Bulrusher reveals that she can no longer “read water” - the River has stopped speaking to her, stopped revealing futures about the places and people she has been in contact with. Slowly, she empties the bowl of water that she was using to attempt to “read” Vera’s letter, and proclaims, “I got a new name.” The River has finally delivered Bulrusher home, to a new identity where Bulrusher can remake herself outside of the contexts of loss and abandonment.By the end of the play, Bulrusher has come to know and meet her past, slowly moved past the anger she harbors towards her biological mother, and worked through her fear of abandonment. This clean conclusion necessitates a question, one that has dogged me since I saw the play: what would have happened if Bulrusher had never learned of her Pomo ancestry, or that Madame and Lucas were her birth parents? How would she have made sense of her connection to the River? Where would the River have taken her if she always remained afraid of the ocean, and of her past? Most of us will never receive the gift of a neat third act that tidies the loose ends of family mysteries and answers questions we have carried with us. We learn to live with our unknowns, carrying them, sorting them, and passing them down. Some of us carry histories of violence, trauma, and dehumanization. Others of us struggle to find a place to belong, our feet placed in homes separated by oceans and/or geopolitical borders. Some of us yearn for dreams we cannot articulate, hopes we cannot speak aloud because no one has cared to listen before.Since we know we won’t get a neat third act, we need to learn to find a way to share, honor, and work through these weights we carry. Scholars in the Black radical tradition, such as Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten., have written extensively about how we can productively engage and contend with pasts that haunt us. First, we must acknowledge the pain, and from there, begin building institutions and structures that reflect rather than erase personal and communal histories.We don’t get a chance to see what this looks like in Boonville, but we can imagine. Madame used to hide her Pomo past, but since the truth has come out that she is Bulrusher’s mother and the woman who placed her in the bosom of the River, perhaps Native American connections to land and place will be cherished and celebrated. Lucas, the logger, is the only Black man left in town since the entire Black community has been displaced by the death of the logging industry. Perhaps Lucas’s decision to stay in Boonville, with Madame, will make space for rethinking place-based belonging outside of the logic of capitalism and settler colonialism.How do we, as Lucas challenges Bulrusher (and, by extension, the audience) in the last scene of the play, “make something out of…what pain life has to give you?”The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University. 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