My's Silent Scream: Memory, Traumatic Time, and the Embodiment of the Black Surreal in Rickerby Hinds's Dreamscape

Abstract

Ever had one of those dreams where nothing comes out when you [try to] scream . . . –Rickerby Hinds, Dreamscape 2011, 56 TH R O U G H F I C T I V E R E I M A G I N A T I O N, RI C K E R B Y HI N D S’S H I P-H O P P L A Y Dreamscape: A Play Based on True Events retells the 1998 police shooting of Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old black woman from Rubidoux, California. She was slumped over in a locked vehicle with a flat tire near a Riverside gas station, shaking and foaming at the mouth with a semiautomatic pistol in her lap (66DZ, 2012). Far from simply documenting this historical horror, Rickerby Hinds creates from these details a contemplation of life, the promise of violence, the ubiquity of death via the story of “Myeisha Mills,” a young woman who survives nine gunshots wounds before a final three kill her. Myeisha wakes up into a living nightmare as she faces death at the beginning of the