Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ode to Babel: The ecstasy of Michael K. Williams

2023; Wiley; Volume: 111; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2023.0000

1467-9736

Roger Reeves,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Ode to BabelThe ecstasy of Michael K. Williams Roger Reeves (bio) The dead dance and yelp far beyond their dying. This, the irony of our digital age–the dead undead in the afterlife, dancing. The image of them easily obtained with a few strokes in a search bar–"Michael Williams dancing." There, on the screen: the scar across Michael's face, his dark skin, gold chains bouncing against his chest, his arms striking the air as if beating a large invisible drum. I watched this video every day, multiple times a day, in my hovel of a studio apartment in Cambridge after his death. Michael, dead, yet released from his death each time I clicked the YouTube video's link. His body full of motion and vibrantly so. [End Page 95] Maybe it's not ironic. The dead have always done this–moved, danced–in the phantasmagoria of memory. But now we can touch them with pixelated accuracy, where the blue of Michael's shirt becomes midnight blue, and the red a gutbucket red. In this digital age, detail that would have become a casualty of time refuses to lose its luster, refuses to slip into the fog and sublimity of an aging mind, of a bygone world, of history. So for weeks after his death on September 6, 2021, Michael K. Williams, native son of Brooklyn, dances in a park in Brooklyn on my screen. Michael, the actor known for playing Omar Little on The Wire and Montrose Freeman in Lovecraft Country, known for groundbreaking roles that complicated American representations of Black masculinity and sexuality, known for holding his dark body unashamedly up and against our eyes, for the scar that ran down the center of his head over the right side of his face, continuing over the bridge of his nose and down along his cheek, a scar given to him in a fight at a club, a scar that defies the patina'd beauty of Hollywood. In the video–recorded in October of 2020, well into the pandemic–his arms wash the sky in front of him as if they have transformed into the limbs of some dark tree. He bows, spins, bounces, jumps, beseeches, hops, and tosses himself into the heat and thump of the house music playing in the background. The driving bottom of the beat lifts him into ecstasy, causing him to clutch his head, to yip and growl in pleasure. I watch and watch and watch Michael not only because I am looking for something to hold onto, for some memento that defies and counters the tragedy of his death, an overdose. But also because he's beautiful and loved to dance, and his darkness, his dark skin, reminds me of the hue of my own skin, my own beauty, my love of dancing, and the necessity of reveling in what one loves, even if it has taken you years to love it. The necessity of loving the way your skin moves against the skin of others or disappears when a lover puts her body on top of yours. The disappearing not a relief because my skin could no longer be seen but gratitude for the way she could see me enough to want my body beneath hers and know that as love, as the feeling she wanted. [End Page 96] Watching Michael dance, getting caught up in spirit, reminds me of my time wrestling with a deathless God on the floor of Full Gospel Church of God, the Pentecostal Church I grew up attending. The church was nomadic, housed in homes of parishioners or the pastor, or in storefronts and strip malls up and down the Delaware River in southern New Jersey. In the summer of 1997, services convened in a storefront that shared its parking lot with a barbershop. Everything in the sanctuary–from the crosses on the Christian flags in the corner of the pulpit to the folding chairs to the long heavy curtains that covered the large plate-glass window–was burgundy or red. In that bloody sanctuary, when I was seventeen, I tarried, wept, and called out to the Christian God for relief, for salvation. My...