22 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
MINDMELD
MIRRORING
O
ne rainy night in midtown, the play-
wright Jeremy O. Harris and the
artist Kehinde Wiley took refuge in a
covered alley next to the Golden The-
atre, where Harris is making his Broad-
way début, with “Slave Play.” Around the
corner stood “Rumors of War,” Wiley’s
twenty-eight-foot-tall statue, which sends
up Confederate monuments by placing
a black man in a hoodie and jeans atop
a rearing horse. Wiley’s postmodern take
on Civil War iconography chimes with
“Slave Play,” in which a series of ante-
bellum sex scenes is revealed to be a spin
on contemporary kink. Harris and Wiley
had other things in common: both re-
ceived M.F.A.s from Yale (Wiley in 2001,
Harris this past spring), and both were
making provocative incursions into Times
Square, land of Coke ads and Elmos.
Harris and Wiley had met in pass-
ing, and Wiley attended the opening
night of “Slave Play,” but they were over-
due for a meeting of the minds. As pa-
trons filed into “Slave Play” and tourists
ate hot dogs beneath “Rumors of War,”
the two sat on a bench. Harris (thirty,
brash) wore sherbet-colored sneakers
and a Gucci sweater that he’d picked up
at Milan Fashion Week. Wiley (forty-
two, sagelike) wore ripped jeans and an
oxford shirt. He would soon leave for
Senegal, where he runs an artists’ resi-
dency. “I’m dividing my time between
New York and West Africa, and Afri-
ca’s winning,” he told Harris.
“That’s amazing, to see Africa win-
ning,” Harris said. “I’ve never been.”
“We’ve got to fix that,” Wiley said.
“You’re coming with me.” Wiley grew up
in Los Angeles, but his father lived in Ni-
geria. “When I was twenty years old, I
got on a plane to find my father,” he re-
called. “He disappeared shortly before my
twin brother and I were born. Africa has
been this constant, mysterious presence.”
Many of Wiley’s paintings, including
his official Presidential portrait of Barack
Obama, pair traditional Western portrai-
ture with explosive floral backdrops.
“When I look at your paintings,” Harris
told him, “there seems to be this, like, not
reframing or reimagining but undoing of
history, and planting a new one inside of
it. And the patterns are so African.”
“So much of the patterning comes
from the marketplaces of Africa,” Wiley
said. He mentioned the mirror that hangs
from the set of “Slave Play,” reflecting
the audience. “Mirroring is something
that so many creative people do, this idea
of shadow dancing—we’re touching the
exterior world, but ultimately we’re
defining the contours of our own inte-
riority.” Wiley added that he’d found the
second act of “Slave Play” particularly
trenchant. “There’s this urge with so
much of the hard work that needs to be
Jeremy O. Harris and Kehinde Wiley
to all of what we had been trying to do.
It was illogical. It could not be explained.
It was crazy.”
The President dismissed the hear-
ings as a “hoax.” He insisted that he
was “too busy to watch,” although he
retweeted more than a dozen video clips,
articles, and commentaries in his puta-
tive defense. Conservative media out-
lets, from Fox News to Breitbart, de-
clared the hearings “boring” and hoped
their audience, the Trump base, would
remain unmoved. Republican members
of the Intelligence Committee, led by
Jim Jordan, of Ohio, and Devin Nunes,
of California, made every attempt to
confound voters with misdirection and
conspiracy theories. Nunes warned ob-
scurely of the prospect of “nude pictures
of Trump.” The Republicans complained
that Taylor and Kent didn’t even know
the President—their testimony was so
“secondhand”—and yet these same leg-
islators are in no rush to have the White
House lift its block on witnesses with
distinctly firsthand access—including
Giuliani and the acting chief of staff,
Mick Mulvaney.
As Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and
their colleagues were drafting the found-
ing documents of the country, they ex-
pressed concern about “foreign influence”
on the Presidency. The sources of their
anxiety then resided mainly in France
and England. It was therefore power-
ful to hear Kent compare the plight of
the American colonists in their strug-
gle against the British crown to that of
the post-Soviet Ukrainians as they have
struggled against the Putin regime in
Russia. Trump favors Moscow. He has
repeatedly dismissed the intelligence
community’s conclusion that Russians
interfered in the 2016 election. As Pres-
ident, he has made it plain that he wel-
comes outside interference again, if it
helps him win reëlection.
The President and his confederates
have warned of the consequences of im-
peachment. In 2017, the self-described
“dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who is
now on trial for lying to Congress, is-
sued a characteristically Trumpish threat:
Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will
have a spasm of violence in this country, an
insurrection like you’ve never seen. Both sides
are heavily armed, my friend. This is not 1974.
The people will not stand for impeachment.
A politician who votes for it would be endan-
gering their own life.
Impeachment is a grave business, and
the risks are manifest. But no democ-
racy can overlook evidence of abuse of
power, bribery, and obstruction in the
hope that an election will set things right.
These hearings and a potential Sen-
ate trial will never get to the full range
of Donald Trump’s corruptions, be
they on Fifth Avenue or Pennsylva-
nia Avenue, in Istanbul, Moscow, or
Riyadh. But the focus of Congress is
on this particular and outrageous abuse
of the public trust, and for now that
must suffice.
—David Remnick
