Erased: a Poetic Imagining on the Life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
From our performance at Kelly Strayhorn Theatre, Friday, September 6, 2019
ERASED: A Poetic Imagining of the Life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is a theatrical collaboration between Magdalena Gómez and composer Ben Barson that confronts the historical sidelining of one of the great archivists of the Black diaspora. Gómez’s text approaches Schomburg through tribute, memory, and poetic imagination, opening a space to reflect on Black Pan-African history and the stakes of cultural erasure. A vanguard member of the Nuyorican Literary Movement, Gómez has spent decades developing a work that honors the autodidactic scholar, activist, collector, archivist, and bibliophile whose life’s labor preserved Black history even as his own story was pushed to the margins.
ERASED is a tribute portrait rather than a strict chronology: a poetic imagining that evokes the struggles, loves, and influences that shaped Schomburg while inviting audiences into a wider Pan-African conversation about memory, exclusion, and historical repair. The score draws on jazz, blues, Afro-Cuban, Borikén, and gospel traditions, along with his wider engagement with Haiti, Radical Reconstruction, and Afro-Atlantic histories of resistance, giving the work a sonic language equal to Schomburg’s vast political and intellectual world.
Come to our event at the National Jazz Musuem of Harlem!
Coverage from our friends at the Pittsburgh City Paper
“Rectifying the erasure of pioneering historian Arturo Schomburg, one poem and song at a time
Springfield, Mass. poet laureate teams of with Afro Yaqui Music Collective for Erased
