“HoD tackles the question of colonialism from the Chinese point-of-view — the reflexive, interior point-of-view of the neo-colonizer,” playwright Siting Yang explained. In a workshop hosted by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, Siting presented a multimedia reading of her latest work, HoD, a docufiction piece that loosely adapts Joseph Conrad’s (in)famous British novella Heart of Darkness. Weaving together literary texts, interviews, and documentary materials, Siting presents the story of Ma Luo who works for a Chinese government-owned company as a pilot selling military aircraft to African governments. Ma Luo’s story is contested, however, throughout the play by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, a spectral presence who uses his knowledge and perspective to deliver questions of ethics and history to Ma Luo, forcing him to reconsider his own role in a colonialist project. Siting developed the play partially from a friend’s experiences in West Africa which spurred her to ask these questions and focus on a modern Chinese perspective. Her work investigates what colonialism looks like today, how it functions in contemporary politics and economics, and how we understand our own roles in colonialist efforts.

The reading was presented virtually via Zoom as a film which ran for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. The audience watched loosely staged scenes, but also saw images, documentary media footage, maps, and cinematic flashback scenes that connected with interjected voice-over narration. It produced a thoroughly engaging multimedia experience that fleshed out Siting’s intentions and vision for the play and gave the audience a well-developed grasp on the production as well as its larger questions. Part of accomplishing such success must be attributed to director Rakesh Palisetty, dramaturgs Zhe Pan and Yizhou Zhang, and the cast. Following the workshop was a 30-minute talkback in which audience members posed complex questions, engaging with the work and its specifics with nuance. It appeared that Siting had in fact reached the audience she had in mind while writing the HoD, an audience “eager to care and learn about complex racial/geo-political relations” as she put it. As a result, Siting had also planned for her audience to likely be unfamiliar with the modern Chinese context she investigates.

“As a play about Chinese people in Africa, written in English, it’s meant to have a complex audience body. The content of the play is not an ordinary, familiar representation of daily life that is immediately relatable to most of the theatre-goers in NYC or China, so the play does hope to demonstrate and inform people of a distant reality.”

Accomplishing such a feat required Siting to do quite a bit of research and handle difficult material. “When interviewing and web-searching for verbatim materials, I found the actual Chinese discourse around Africa and African people shockingly disturbing,” she shared. “On the one hand, I need to present racist, chauvinist, and misogynist materials in a raw and real way to expose the severity of their influence to the public discourse; on the other hand, I need to handle these materials in a distanced way to avoid sensationalizing and aestheticizing their impact and to dissect the economic and political relations behind their formation.” Interspersed a few times throughout the play is news footage from Chinese media about Africa which shows racist stereotypes of violence, poverty, and chaos. “Ma Luo will be on stage telling his story in a quite wordy and evasive way, and the realistic footage cuts in to interact with him,” she shared. Siting works to undermine this footage and its use as racist propaganda throughout the play in a framing structure reliant on Chinua Achebe. “He will be onstage the whole time. The staging idea is that Achebe frames Ma Luo’s actions of narration, and Ma Luo frames his own memory of the past.” Alongside this structural work, Siting hopes to juxtapose the footage with more impressionistic multimedia. Currently, there are plans in development for her to do just that in a live performance this winter in New York City.

Siting also captures the racism and misogyny of Chinese discourse about Africa and African people through the dialogue. In one particular scene where employees of the company talk over a game of Mahjong, Siting uses the most verbatim dialogue of the play. “I gathered a large amount of real accounts, anecdotes and comments of Chinese people in Africa from social media postings, internet forums, and interviews. My job was to weave them into a smooth dialogue that can let their arguments flow and collide, so the audience can see not only how ugly racism and misogyny are in reality, but also how powerfully they are able to persuade and affect,” she explained. We hear as the men in the scene play out the intersections of prejudices with horrifying stereotypes such as oversexualizing African women’s bodies with comparisons to the bodies of white and Chinese women, blaming poverty upon work ethic, and blaming the Islamic practice of praying five times a day as an excuse to avoid working, amongst similar commentary. The result is a scene with its own specifics grounded in the Chinese perspective (“We don’t have democracy or freedom, but do we need them? Look at America, they have Trump”) as well as some universality with comments already so familiar to American audiences. One man says they cannot be colonizers because they’re not white, a glaring line that clashes against their colonialist involvement and the prejudices that inform their words.

In her work utilizing Heart of Darkness to explore the play’s concerns, Siting took on two challenges: developing her own take on the novella’s minimal female voices and the lack of African perspectives. To address the former, Siting gives the novella’s character of Kurtz’s fiancée a voice and her own story with concise, yet insightful, dialogues and monologues. The result is a minor female character with depth and impact that works alongside Siting’s voice as a female playwright to bring the origin text into better alignment with her ambitions for HoD.

To address the latter, Siting developed a new framing through Chinua Achebe’s role. “In its plot of a single event, there’s not an adequate space to contain and unfold a solid African world,” Siting said.

“I chose to let Achebe intervene in a highly intellectual and philosophical way, and to open up more space beyond the text in visual and directorial choices for the African world to bleed through this Chinese distortion.”

The result of pulling these threads together with such attention and intention is a powerfully investigative work that re-contextualizes a piece of the British literary canon and unpacks the bare reality of modern neo-colonialism in all its racial, political, and economic complexities. In focusing on the modern Chinese perspective, Siting grounds the play in relevant specificity that allows her larger questions, questions for all of us to consider and investigate further, to unfold with nuance and urgency.

Extended Play is a project of The Civilians.To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.