Maria and Ndemeh.
Making a painstaking cup of coffee the traditional way while recounting a harrowing story of flight from Ethiopia into an unknown future. Family photographs lovingly thumbed through, even while the speaker mourns a sense of childhood lost. And dancing that invokes ancestors and reaches back into the past to both face trauma and draw strength.
Curated and produced by Jasmin Agosto and featuring Haben Maria, Colleen Ndemeh, Paul Bryant Hudson, Zvlu, Yexandra Diaz, and Ch’Varda, Yerba Bruja is part ceremony, part storytelling, part music, spoken word, and dance performance, and all honesty and respect, as the participants ruminate on what it means to leave home, lose home, and reconnect and stay resilient, in ways large and small.
Yerba Bruja has its debut through Long Wharf Theatre’s virtual programming on Thursday evening, June 10, at 7 p.m., and will be available through June 25.
The film takes its name from “a medicinal plant that can survive the most hostile of conditions,” as the accompanying notes describe it. “It is a metaphor for the multi-generational survival of members of the African and indigenous diasporas. The film itself — a partnership between Long Wharf and SageSeeker Productions — is also a document of one of the ways Long Wharf has used its theater space during the pandemic to continue to foster deeper connections with the community around it. It makes the quiet of the stage feel reverential and intimate, the camera allowing us to get up close to the performers in ways that would be impossible if the piece were live theater.
After Agosto blesses the space, Maria and Ndemeh share their family stories as the children of immigrants, and in Maria’s case refugees. The story of the flight from Ethiopia is Maria’s. She tells about how her mother, on the march to Sudan in search of security, found at one point that she simply could not go on. “Her body just gave out on her,” Maria says, and “she laid against a tree and slid down to the ground, and she felt her mind leaving her body.” Her mother was saved, Maria said, by a man who was leading the refugees across the landscape and came back for her. “Lady, I don’t know if you’re an angel or a demon, but my spirit won’t let me leave you here,” the man said. He “picked her up off the ground and threw her on his back, and he walked and caught up with the rest of the group,” Maria says; she doesn’t have to say how she owes her life to that man.
Ndemeh begins as audience member but tells a story of her own, as the descendant of immigrants who came from Liberia to Providence, R.I. “And of course the U.S. does what the U.S. does to them. It just squeezed them, and they worked, and worked, and worked. No rest,” Ndemeh says. “They really laid themselves down for all of us to grow from them.” She then goes to say that “I dream of a future where that cycle doesn’t continue, where we have joy and rest and pleasure for you and me, for our moms, for our ancestors, for our future descendants, because we all deserve that.”
The next segment, featuring a collaboration between musicians Paul Bryant Hudson and Zvlu, makes the story more local and suggests that you don’t have to travel thousands of miles and across an ocean to lose where you came from. Sometimes just the passage of time is enough. After the duo’s musical performance, Hudson uses photographs from his early childhood to reflect on the houses and apartments he lived in around New Haven that were witness to his growing up. He recalls with a chuckle that a couch appearing a photograph of him as a toddler, his family still had until very recently. He also recalls a “small duplex on Elizabeth Street” that holds a special place for him. “It’s funny how even back then it felt like a castle to us — not because it was large, but it was just so significant. It had so much for us in it. That’s the place that I mourn when I miss home, now, as an adult, with a home of my own.”
Yexandra Diaz and Ch’Varda bring the proceedings home with a dance and spoken word piece that acknowledges the loss — not only of the other artists in the film, but of their people writ large — and finds grace and strength in that acceptance. As Diaz puts it in her spoken-word piece: “Surrender like the tides to the moon. Surrender like the ocean to Oshun. Surrender like the waters to the winds. Surrender to this spiritual hymn. Surrender like fire releasing embers. Don’t you die atop that hill. Hold on until forever, and remember: desire for control leaves you powerless. Surrender like sand slipping through an hourglass.” There is resilience in her voice; her words mark a path forward that waits for us to follow it.
Yerba Bruja is available through Long Wharf Theatre’s website beginning June 10.