I convinced myself it was original.

Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays

Outside of the musics to which their own temporalities have trained, explorative Black writings and films are the figural zones in which to most reliably find one's perceptual registers altered by Black people who, in James Baldwin's words, ‘are not controlled by the American's image of them’ – but who are animated instead by those private sounds and visions that know no negation or exclusion; no fixities of beginning or end; no identity that does not mutate; and no power either to assert or to relinquish power. Yet, these same phantasmal sounds, colours, textures and times take indissoluble hold in the shaping of the works bearing their mark. In her 1987 preface to a collection of her (then) nearly three decades of plays, Adrienne Kennedy illustrates the working ferocities of this imagistic abduction from anthropomorphic representation:

Without exception the days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head and days of walking … in Ghana across the campus of Legon, in Rome through the Forum, in New York along Columbus Avenue, and in London, Primrose Hill (hadn't Karl Marx walked there?). Walks and coffee, all of which seem to put me under a spell of sorts … I am at the typewriter almost every waking moment and suddenly there is a play. It would be impossible to say I wrote them. Somehow under this spell they become written.

The amnesic intervals in which the plays ‘become written’ as if by alien hand, inscribing invisibly the spaces of cities traversed incessantly and the durations of moments wakened interminably to the force of their own clamours, are what disclose the futurity of those plays in their incommensurability to the presumably ‘understood’: plays whose linguistic and aural-visual opacities articulate tenacious rapport with the subtextual depths of their sources, whether familial, literary, cinematic or pop-cultural.

Doubly dispossessed by the images besieging her and by the supplements through which to reassign the burden of finding terms for them, Kennedy narrates the scene of writing as a material takedown of ‘consciousness’.