Overview
“Here I am alone
Though it feels the same
I don't know where I'm going
I'm here on my own...
I wish I was home.”
Dorothy sings these lines soon after arriving in Oz, having been swept away from Harlem by a blizzard tornado. Earlier, Dorothy expressed her dissatisfaction with her “home” – not so much that it was bad, just that she didn’t really see her place in it. In this song, she makes it clear that she wishes to be home. As Dorothy makes her way down the Yellow Brick Road, she meets her three expected companions -- just as Dorothy in the 1939 film from which The Wiz is adapted. Each is looking, ostensibly, for the same thing as the original -- brains, a heart, courage. But one could also argue that all the characters -- not just Dorothy -- are looking for a home.
When Dorothy meets each of them, she frees them from an inhospitable place that is holding them down. The Scarecrow is stranded on a pole, tormented by the oppressive Crows, unable to free himself. The Tin Man is literally stuck under his third wife in an abandoned, derelict Coney Island. The Cowardly Lion is locked in a statue in front of the New York Public Library. The Wiz is full of scenes of liberation, which inevitably leaves the characters searching for a new place of safety, acceptance, and freedom -- a new home.
The film version of The Wiz debuted in 1978, four years after the Broadway musical. Not many would consider it part of the Black Arts Movement, roughly 1965-1975, though it would be hard to ignore the influences the Black Arts Movement had on black literature, film and art that followed.
One connection it shares, however, is that search for home. In the nationalist, separatist beliefs that girded the Black Arts Movement one might read a search for “home” -- a place liberated from white oppression, where black people could have something of their own that was not defined by the white mainstream culture.
These homes -- that of Dorothy and her companions and the artists of the Black Arts Movement -- might seem like “dream worlds,” to not exist -- but through their journeys, their art and literature, these artists aimed to construct that dream world in concrete terms. Part of their process is to reframe the argument about what it means to be proud, successful, artistic, accepted, free.
In this unit, students will use poetry from the Black Arts Movement and the film The Wiz, along with nonfiction essays by black writers from the late 20th century and a Radiolab podcast called “Debatable,” to examine the ways that Black Arts Movement writers used their politics and art to search for a home and the influence of that movement on later black work.
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