High school browsing included Tennessee Williams and Adrienne Kennedy, who I thought was simply amazing. College added Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones and Derek Walcott, as well as Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, and all of Ionesco. I had nearly memorized Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun by that time, though I don’t remember exactly when I first read it.

Robert McDowell:

What difficulties can you share with readers regarding your adaptation of a classic?

Rita Dove:

Using the ancient Greek dramatic form, with its infamously difficult-to-handle master chorus, proved less problematic than I anticipated. I’d grown up in the black church, where call-and-response was part of the ritual. The black community extends beyond immediate family and even the neighborhood; it’s a community that holds itself responsible for each member’s actions and will feel free to voice its opinions—often loudly and with great sarcasm. So the type of running commentary provided by the Greek Chorus sounds “down home” to me!

Robert McDowell:

When did the inspiration for The Darker Face of the Earth come to you?

Rita Dove:

My husband and I spent five months in Jerusalem in 1979. I had recently finished the manuscript of my first book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, which contained a section of poems based on slave narratives, and I suppose that was on my mind one late afternoon that summer, as I stood looking out over the walled city of Jerusalem with its turrets and citadels. I had just reread Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex; and perhaps it was the natural amphitheater of the Kidron valley, where King David cried out at the loss of his rebellious son Absalom, perhaps it was the slanted sunbeams striking the pale stones of the Old City like a spotlight dressed with the palest of pink gels—but I found myself musing on kings and all-too-human heartbreaks, looking for similarities between the classical sense of destiny and our contemporary attitudes toward history and its heroes. What is it, I wondered, that makes Oedipus interesting as a hero when his course has been set at birth? Why do we watch, enthralled, if we already know his fate? I searched for a modern analogy, a set of circumstances where the social structure was as rigid and all-powerful as the Greek universe, one against which even the noblest of characters would be powerless. And as the sun began to set behind the Mount of Olives, a Jimmy Cliff song floated from my husband’s study:

Oh de wicked carry us away,

Captivity require of us a song;

How can we sing King Alpha’s song

In a strange land?

The lines are adapted from Psalm 137, the cries of the Israelites in bondage—but sung, in Cliff’s version, by the slaves in the Americas.