we call it history.
It’s magical, the theatre. It makes me emotional, as all good music does. This show in particular captured me because I believed “the green faced witch” followed me around for years. YEARS. (This is a very real story for another day.) But watching her on stage, seeing her backstory, the pain she lived through that no one knew about, it just made her so…human.
And within the very first scene, she won me over. I was cheering for her, this (supposedly) fictional character who had haunted me through my childhood. Not because I’d changed my mind about her, but because I’d changed my heart.
This was in London in 2008 when the most generous friends surprised us with tickets. More than a decade later, it’s still a story I go back to again and again. The soundtrack, the lyrics, the power in their voices. It’s moving. But it hit me in a new way recently. Not only is “the green faced witch” not the bad guy, but maybe the bad guy is the one pretending he isn’t.
“We believe all sorts of things that aren’t true.
We call it history.
A man’s called a traitor or liberator,
A rich man’s a thief or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities so we act as though they don’t exist.”
-The Wizard, Wicked
These lyrics have stuck with me for weeks. What if the people we think have our best interests in mind are actually hiding behind a curtain, pretending to be someone else? What if the people we think are completely different from us are very much the same but we’re missing it because we haven’t taken the time to learn their backgrounds or their history?
What if the history we’ve grown up knowing and basing our beliefs, biases and prejudices on isn’t completely accurate? What if it really is more about which label, story or narrative was able to persist?
The more I read about America’s history, especially the experiences of black Americans, the more I realize that the history I was taught is the smallest sliver of the truth. Not that what I was taught was necessariily inaccurate, but incomplete. I’ll admit to not caring about history in the past which certainly would aid to my lack of memory but my experience isn’t unique. A lot of us are uneducated because we simply were not educated!
It’s Black History Month. Let’s question, dig in and begin to know what we don’t know. I have plenty of resources to share if you're interested in what I’ve been reading, who I’ve been listening to or who I like following. Feel free to drop yours below if you have a good one to recommend!
