55 pages • 1 hour read
Anna Deavere SmithFires In The Mirror
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaAct I: “Identity”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I, Scene 1 Summary: Ntozake Shange, “The Desert”
The interview is completed over the phone in the afternoon, with Shange taking off one earing to speak into the phone.Shange speaks of identity as being “a psychic sense of place” (3) where the person compares themselves to what they are not. She separates herself from her surroundings and includes her experiences as a part of her identity. However, she admits that she is at once a part of the desert and separate from it. Upon going home, she takes a part of the desert with her, even though she is not the desert. She says that this differentiation is important to understand what belongs to whom, in terms of what you are taking.
Act I, Scene 2 Summary: Anonymous Lubavictcher Woman, “Static”
The interview is conducted over the phone, and Smith believes that the woman was folding clothes while her male children were watching television and her female child was sweeping. The woman says that at the end of Shabbas one night, her baby was playing with the stereo system and accidentally turned it on. Because it is the holy day of rest, the family cannot turn the blaring music off. They try to get the child to do it, but he makes it worse. They try to find someone who is not Jewish to turn off the radio, so they don’t break the laws. The woman goes out and finds a young black boy and explains the problem, but the boy thinks they just don’t know how to turn off the radio so he explains it: “‘You see this little button here / that says on and off? / Push that in / and that turns it off’” (8). The woman believes that the boy thinks she is stupid, but he turns off the radio.
Act I, Scene 3 Summary: George C. Wolfe, “101 Dalmatians”
The interview takes place in the Los Angeles Mondrian Hotel, during the morning,and while Wolfe drinks tea. Wolfe speaks about growing up amidst the black community, how he went to a black school where he was told he was extraordinary but he still could not go to see a movie at a segregated theater. Wolfe explains the confusion that arose when he traveled outside his community: he went from being extraordinary to “beyond a certain point / I was treated like I was insignificant” (10). Wolfe did not experience outright bias, but he still knew that his extraordinariness only resided within his community: “I was extraordinary as long as I was Black” (10). He refuses to compare himself to whiteness. He tries to understand his own identity and where he comes from, ultimately admitting that there is a point when his identity comes into contact with whiteness.
Act I Analysis
These three scenes move from a general examination of identity, in Shange’s scene, into more specific examinations of Lubavitcher and black identity. All of these scenes examine how personal identity differs from communal identity while still rooting personal identity within a larger communal identity. Shange describes identity as a desert, a kind of trance state thatthey are both a part of and separate from. In this way, they are both a part of and separate from their identity, especially in regard to the communal identity versus the personal identity. For both the Lubavitcher woman and Wolfe, identity slips between the personal and the communal.
For the anonymous woman, her identity is inextricably linked to her communal identity through the eyes of the young black boy. That is, her communal identity—not being able to touch electronics on the Sabbath—affects how others perceive her personal identity, such as her intelligence. This conflation between the personal and the communal aspects of identity are rooted in the perceptions of others, perceptions which themselves are often based upon a lack of understanding of another’s communal identity.
Similarly, Wolfe’s communal identity shapes the perception of his personal identity depending upon what context he is placed in. Within his own community, his personal identity holds precedence over his communal identity; however, once he ventures outside of his community, bias and discrimination against his communal identity affect the perception of his personal identity. In this way, Wolfe’s construction of identity is deeply rooted in place, as previously described by Shange through the metaphor of the desert. It would appear that Smith is attempting to create identity as a combination of personality, experiences, and responses in interaction with the surrounding environment.
