Destinies Manifested

A discussion of A People’s History by Mike Daisey

The story of America, in this particular telling, begins in 1492, when Christopher Columbus first makes contact with the inhabitants of a distant western land. Was there a moment here, we are asked to wonder, a moment of peace and goodwill where the Europeans and the natives of these lands exchanged gifts and greetings and meant no harm to one another? We know what eventually happened, but was there not at least a brief period before everything started to fall apart? There was not.

Instead, amongst the first few thoughts that occurred to Columbus and that he later recorded in his log of the day were: I can subjugate these people and make them bring me gold. And so he did. And so begins Mike Daisey’s 18 chapter, 30 hour series of monologues on the history of America. There was greed and there was violence and from that moment on, all the way to the present day, there has been little abatement in either.

Throughout his A People’s History, Daisey will revisit these dark themes as, night after night in the Seattle Repertory Theatre, he recounts another period from the 526 years that span Columbus to the present day. Every night, as we hear about how the wealthy and powerful have pursued greater wealth and power by so many violent means, Daisey argues that this is not just the theme of the work, but the theme of the nation itself. A fact that has been so well forgotten, hidden, and disguised in the standard historical narrative that is taught in all the school textbooks and reinforced throughout adulthood.

To tell his story, Daisey refers often to the book A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Zinn’s book was an attempt to re-tell the history of the US from a perspective of its people rather than its leaders, with special attention paid to the experiences of its oppressed people: the native population, people of African descent and other people of colour, the poor, women, and the LGBTQ community. In contrast, we hear from Daisey’s high school text book on American History (a stand-in for all the textbooks high school students across the country are taught from). From the textbook’s version of history we get what Daisey calls the Default Narrative: a narrative where great men do great things and America becomes great.

This method, where Zinn and the default narrative get compared side by side, is a rewarding and illuminative device and achieves so much throughout the performances. One of the effects is to highlight the omissions of the textbook. It’s not that the default narrative lies about what happened, but rather that it spends so much time discussing the more redemptive or benign aspects of the past. By doing this the more horrific and troubling events recede or even fail to make an appearance.

For example, we are told about how much coverage is given to Sir Frances Drake and his minor misadventures, and how little time is spent describing the genocide of millions of Indians by the early settlers. He tells us how much detail and dedication is given to the Civil War (down to learning about specific battles) and how little is taught about the origins and practice of slavery, that led to the deaths and displacement of tens of millions of Africans.

It won’t be a surprise that Daisey, as a monologist and story teller, is interested in what can be achieved by different ways of telling stories. From his close study of how Donald Trump ran his campaign as a performer rather than a politician (in The Trump Card), his discussions of“Ishmael”’s slippery narrative techniques (in Mike Daisey’s Moby Dick), to his own personal experience of having a story fact-checked and ceremonially rejected by This American Life, Daisey surely knows better than most of us how message can be shaped by its narrator. And isn’t history just a type of story by another (authoritarian) name?

So it feels right to have Daisey as our guide here, to work with Zinn’s book and the default narrative: to show us how the history of America has been told in such a way as to perpetuate the myth of American Triumphalism; to tell us about all the darkness and violence that totally undermines this triumphalism; to help us see the present day in this new, troubling light; and, to point out all they ways we are complicit in this lie.

A superficial description of A People’s History might lead you to think that the work is more lecture than theatre: a man sits behind a table, a map of America behind him, and speaks on a subject traditionally confined to the university or classroom. Witnessing a small duration of the performance will completely disabuse you of this idea. Daisey trained as an actor and has not left his craft behind in this work. The scenes may not change and other players do not enter and exit the stage but this is absolutely a piece of theatre. I don’t say this to lessen its weight or the importance of its message.

In the last year, I’ve listened to three different lecture series on American history by three professor’s (two from Yale and one from Stanford). During none of these did I really take any real implications from the history that was being delivered (David Blight’s publicly available lectures on the Civil War and Reconstruction are somewhat an exception to this). There were more facts for sure, if only by dint of time spent on each subject, but the actual human meaning behind these was never really conveyed. Daisey’s approach, making full and splendid use of theatre’s allegiance with pathos, can’t fail to awaken us to the implications of what transpired.

Compare, for example, Stanford’s Jack Rakove telling us in a cheery tone that, actually, a relatively small percentage of African slaves were shipped to the US compared to other countries in the Americas. On the same subject (the same set of data even) Daisey describes the horror of the slave trade by telling us how many Africans died even before crossing the Atlantic; how millions of African bodies still lie rotting at the bottom of the ocean. I can’t do justice to his performance here, but throughout A People’s History there were so many moments when I trembled and tears ran from my eyes. An academic telling these same histories cannot move us like this. With Daisey’s approach to telling this history, we actually feel the lessons, we remember them, and we understand what it means for us, now, in the present moment.

It’s not all shocking and poignant though. Another aspect of Daisey’s skill as a storyteller is his way with comedy and digressions. Stories from his own life weave in and out of the story of America. Sometimes we might not know where we’re going—but we’re laughing—and then we bump abruptly into the past. Sometimes things are getting so dark in America as we are led to the precipice of atrocity, we’re holding out breath, and then there’s a pause, a digression begins, and we exhale.

This is not to say the tension has gone. The facts and figures, the digressions, the whispering, the sly sarcasm, the Screaming: all this turbulence in tone and in content whips us up and leaves us in a heightened receptive state. So often in regular contexts when (if) slavery or the murder of the native population is ever discussed, it is talked about in serious tones with concerned adjectives—“regrettably”, “sad”, “unfortunate”—and we’ve heard it all before. The fact and significance of these events can often fail to penetrate. Or maybe not even.

Halfway through listening to the A People’s History I was sitting on a bus from Hanover, NH to Boston’s Logan airport. In the seats in front of me was a Dartmouth college student and an older woman, maybe in her 70s. They were strangers but the student seemed keen to talk. He said that he was studying politics and computer science and was describing a recent essay he’d been working on. In the midst of this he mentioned Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. In explaining one of the book’s central theses—that the diseases the Europeans brought to the Americas killed much of the native population—he listed additional causes of death.

There were wars, he said, between the Indians and the settlers and this also accounted for their deaths. But not once did he mention other causes of death. Not their casual or systematic murder by the colonists, their enslavement in gold mines, or their forced displacement to barren inhospitable parts of the country. This student was very well educated, clearly sympathetic to liberal causes, but seemingly ignorant or unwilling to acknowledge the deliberate brutality of his European ancestors. I can’t help think that if he’d heard just one chapter of A People’s History, his story would have been very different.

But perhaps I’m not saying very much new here. We all know that art can do things to us. Nevertheless, I think it’s especially important for Daisey that his work have this effect. There is a point to it. He talks often about our blind spot: the reality of American society which sits in plain view but that is skipped over and ignored each time we glance out onto the world. We don’t see it because we’ve learnt in a very deep way to not even notice certain things. It takes a serious change of perspective to overcome the limitations of this blind spot, and with A People’s History I think Daisey has done so much to help with this.

One of Daisey’s more provocative moves is to frequently remind his audience—an audience he understands to be largely white—that they are racist. And if we also happen to be straight and male, that we are also sexist. It is this blind spot that is the root of our racism and sexism. Our inability to see the oppression of people of colour and women, both historic and present, and even the ways in which we participate in this oppression.

It hurts to be called racist (and Daisey doesn’t excuse himself). But maybe it’s what we need. And when we are given so many explanations for its foundations, and delivered in such a way so that we actually feel those lessons, we can actually start to believe it. And maybe this will help us change. So that we can start to trace the edges, as Daisey puts it, of our blind spots. So that we can start to notice that which we fail to see.

The present day of Trump and the vocal rise of white nationalism, is a spectre that appears again and again throughout the 18 chapters. The present state of things looks like a crisis (it is a crisis), but it’s not entirely new. As Daisey argues so convincingly, the foundations for the present day have always existed in America, it’s just that now they’ve become more blatant, and because affluent white people are starting to suffer the effects of oppression for themselves. When you are able to see America’s history in the way that Daisey allows us to, the present day becomes easier to understand.

One of the major complaints Daisey levels at the textbook’s default narrative of American history is how little sense it makes and how incoherent the sequence of events are. At its best, it tells us what happened and when, but not why. This has the tendency of leaving its students baffled and bored and starved of reasons to care. One of the clearly stated purposes for A People’s History is to correct this. To make sense of American power when it flexes its muscles.

After laying down the groundwork of early American history, we are led through the 19th century and the ascendancy of capitalism. In a country that enslaved people in pursuit of productivity, it won’t be a surprise to learn that workers’ rights are seriously lacking, the poor treated with contempt, and only the most basic of their demands met after their protests become absolutely impossible to ignore.

As we start to move into the 20th century much of the stories we hear involve America’s growing role internationally. In a country that genocided its native population because its European settlers were “manifestly destined” to all of the land, it won’t be a surprise to learn that America considers itself superior and justified in invading and controlling other (non-white) countries. Amongst a long list of such actions we hear much about the invasions of Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan; the nuclear bombing of Japan; and the failed invasion carried out in Cuba.

A popular approach in telling historical narratives is to explain how a series of events led to where we are now. Daisey’s monologues certainly do contain some amount of this. However, the kind of sense-making that I’m trying to describe here, is of a different nature. It’s not that Daisey is trying to explain how one thing led to another, and so on. Instead, what he argues is that present day America has some deep similarities to its starting conditions. The beginning didn’t just lead to the present. Rather, things have largely always been this way.

If the past is painted darkly in A People’s History, the future has much the same palette with some even darker strokes. The roots of the present are deep, hard to see, and even harder to change. So we can’t expect these terrible patterns to stop easily. What’s more, the world is starting to burn.

Every chapter, in the midst of hearing about the past, we are reminded of the latest IPCC report. We are at great risk, it tells us, of rises in temperature that would cause significant changes in the environment and seriously challenge human populations around the world. The equator will start to become inhabitable for humans, for example, but the people there won’t stay and die, they’re going to move. The borders of countries around the world will strain with this massive migration. We already have a refugee crisis in Europe, but this is nothing compared to what’s coming.

In this very chilling, very real, very imminent scenario, how can we expect power to react? After this eighteen chapter lesson in precedent, the prognosis is disquieting. Daisey asks us to consider: if we are concerned about the sweeping powers we have already given to our governments to interfere with our lives after 9/11 (think about the legal norms broken by the Patriot Act), what can we expect when our governments face a crisis on this scale? In the white supremacist United States that Daisey has described, we can absolutely think the worst.

To what end all this doomsaying? In a sense, maybe a lot of us wouldn’t need an answer to this question. We’re so used to scrolling through our social medias, scouring for shock and outrage. This isn’t even limited to the left; we all have something to fear and the thrill of it seems to compel us. So is this reason enough for Daisey to put together this show? Just more fuel for our ire?

Online platforms push this content and press publish it for a simple answer: attention, clicks, and cash. And Daisey is selling tickets, to be sure. But the theatre has a very limited capacity, and surely he has a limit to how often he can perform for 30 hours over 18 consecutive shows. I and many others were given access to the recordings (actually 61 hours of audio covering two cycles of the performance) for free, on the sole agreement that we would respond by writing about the work. So if Daisey was out to profit off our outrage this is surely a highly inefficient method.

No, Daisey has another motivation. There is a beautiful moment in the second cycle (I won’t say when so as not to ruin the surprise) where he pauses from storytelling and explicitly describes a motivation for doing these performances. In short, it was to change us. To get us to actually see our own racism and sexism and to start to modify how we think and behave towards women and people of colour. To the extent that we are white, and also to the extent that we are male, the history of America that Daisey describes is our legacy and our culture. So to understand the past better is to better understand ourselves, to see our flaws, and to realise how and why we need to change.

There is also another more pointed message, made half obliquely and half explicit. Daisey often points out that whenever there has been social change in America—from the enfranchisement of women, to improved working regulations, to the voting and civil rights acts (and so many other incremental improvements to the lives of people)—these changes have come from the bottom up rather than the top down. The wealthy white men in power did not decide one day that some group of people just deserved a small improvement in their lives. Instead, what happened every time, was that people engaged in direct action for so long and with such drive that power was forced to capitulate. Direct action is therefore not only important but vital if we want things to change.

Looking back at the past from our vantage in the present, the space between all the small acts that constitute a movement collapse. We can actually see “a movement”. But viewed from within, all protests can often just look like a series of failures. People stick their necks out and are beaten back (often not just figuratively) and only in the end does the cumulation seem successful. In Daisey’s history we actually learn about these individual acts and their small failures, as well as the celebrated ends. Compare this to the default history which rather than focus on protest movements themselves, triumphantly congratulates the magnanimity and good sense of the government for making things better.

Daisey’s point here sit that we need to act. Even if everything we do seems futile, we do not know how long it will take. We do not know when the right moment will be. But nothing will change without it.

I said that this point is made half obliquely because the message never really reaches the point of a rallying cry and no chapter ends with a call to arms. Perhaps a reason for this is that if you make a plea too bluntly an audience could more easily ignore it. They could leave, decide direct is too much for them, and then file away the history they’ve heard as an informative experience not to be dwelt upon much further. Instead we are taught how important direct action is, that if it doesn’t work immediately it is still worthwhile, and then left to mull and draw our own conclusions in the new knowledge of everything that needs changing.

Because it is impossible after a full immersion in Daisey’s A People’s History not to believe that things need to change in a drastic way. The Republicans have abandoned all decency and convention and seem to be gunning for despotism. The Democratic party is lost in an indeterminate centre ground, pleasing to few and certainly not the left. And the majority of the American electorate have given up voting entirely. Maybe if America can be recognised for what it is and the obstinate triumphalism justly abandoned, then maybe its people can start to ask for something better and begin the hard work that will get them there.