NGGRFG. It's the name of the play. Picture the title in neon, all lit up except for the vowels, which you can't see. The words are there, lit up waiting for you to acknowledge them. Look up and try to sound it out. Let the consonants fill up your throat, push your upper palate out and then lead your top teeth to drag over your bottom lip. How did that feel? Did you say the words? Did you say Nigger? Fag? Did you just say one of them? Neither of them? After saying either of these words most people can't deny the power of language, the inherent strength and history that comes with each sound compounded on top of each other, echoing the vileness from all ages. And these are just two of many words—fat, retarded, ugly, dyke, stupid, sick, pervert, sissy, queer, homo, wop, terrorist, redskin, lazy, chink, stupid, paki—that make up the endless list of hurtful words hurled by others towards us in our lifetimes, words we would rather forget than ever read or hear again. But as Berend McKenzie, playwright and performer of NGGRFG, currently playing at the Edmonton Fringe suggests, if we banish these words it is those of us on the receiving end of them that lose power.
"I had wariness about these words and had thought about banning nigger and fag. But now I question if we ban these words what happens to our stories? How do I tell my stories?" wonders McKenzie, "If these words disappear will we forget about slavery, about hate crimes? We have to talk about these words, use them with intention and not hide behind them. We have to chew on them, see how they feel in our mouths and in our hearts."
Using stories from his real life, thought-provoking writing and humour, McKenzie's one-man show explores the realities of being both black and queer growing up in rural Alberta before making it in the entertainment industry in Vancouver. Adding a layer to his story is the fact that growing up McKenzie was the only black child in his family and often the only—sometimes the first—black person in the various towns where he and his family lived. When the TV miniseries Roots came out, heralded at the time by some as a landmark for race relations in the US, his life in small-town Alberta got worse. Whereas kids at school previously knew he was different and treated him with indifference, now they had references to use and names to call him. With each new episode came a new word to throw at him. First it was Kunta Kinte, the black protagonist of the story, then Toby, the slave name that Kunta Kinte would not accept. For him, and for reasons he could not articulate at the time, the worst was when they began calling him Kizzy, a daughter born into slavery. It wasn't until writing NGGRFG, revisiting the childhood trauma, that he realized the pain of someone else (a bully, no worse) pointing out something that made him different beyond his skin colour was more than he could accept at the time. Being black was hard enough, he thought to himself at the time, he wasn't ready to deal with more.
"I thought God didn't like me, that he was punishing me," McKenzie recalls. "He took away my birth family, made me live in a cold climate in isolated places far from the arts, and he made me different."
While being black was not something he could resist or deny, being gay was. He assumed at first that on top of all the other injustices bestowed upon him, that God had also confused his gender. It was not until he attended college in Edmonton that he began to claim his manhood.
As time passed McKenzie grew into himself, and through performing and acting and then writing was able to find outlets to express himself. In a powerful vignette in NGGRFG McKenzie shares the story of meeting his birth father, and the excitement of finding out he shared a bond with him since they were both performers, only to be rejected by him soon after making contact due to his birth father's inability to get past his own homophobic upbringing.
Sitting in the audience, enraptured by McKenzie's weaving and expelling of stories, energy and emotion, one can tell that in the telling and the using, questioning and sharing of words there is healing for him.
"I have been a fighter since birth, I have screamed my whole life to be validated for my skin colour and my sexuality. The worst thing in the world is for me to feel as if I don't exist," McKenzie explains, before adding that the feeling is undergoing a change. "This need for validation in every moment is finally subsiding, and now I am exploring what has brought be to this point."
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