Post Pardon: The Opera was initially supported by a Cultural Funding Grant from the City of Oakland, CA, in 2013-14 to create the first libretto and score.  Commissioned by Colby College’s Art Office in 2022 and incubated during the summers of 2023-2025, Post Pardon: The Opera received funding and support from The Haynesville Project, The Carter Family, Dance Company of Middlebury, SPACE Gallery, New England Humanities Consortium, the Cave Canem Foundation, and Indigo Arts Alliance. Post Pardon: The Opera made its concert premiere on June 7, 2025, at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts in Waterville, Maine.

Post Pardon: The Opera draws on African diasporic spirituality and folklore to tell the story of Willow, a queer activist confronted by the ghost of her estranged mother. Set between the material and spiritual worlds, where Elsa, The Bottle Tree, serves as the threshold; Willow is guided by The Sistas (Tulsi, Astragalus, and Reishi), empowered by the eco-activist group Black Azaleas, and inspired by Rosa’s love as she embraces the multiplicities of death. With its concern for gendered and ecological violence, Post Pardon is the transgenerational apology needed to repair a Black woman’s soul.

Through poetic expression, employing innovative language, music, and botanical imagery, Post Pardon explores the inner world of a woman on the edge. It offers a nuanced and empathetic portrayal of alienation, madness, and the search for understanding.

Adapted from my eponymous poetry chapbook, published by Mouthfeel Press in 2011, Post Pardon was a grief response to poet Reetika Vazirani, who killed her two-year-old son and then took her own life in the summer of 2003. I was struck by these events, having met Vazirani and Jehan a few weeks before their deaths. As a device to non-judgmentally enter the interior landscape of a woman who grapples with murder-suicide, the poetry collection employs Caribbean mythologies and West African cosmologies to explore the concept of inherited sorrow.

Composer Jessica Jones and I approach opera not as a fixed, elitist form, but as a living genre with a deep history and ample room for experimentation. Opera is an immersive experience, and its ability to move the soul is inescapable. Post Pardon is soul work. Our collective consciousness needs a narrative that opens us to an interconnected understanding of who we are and our shared purpose. Opera, as an art form, is the necessary volume to bring the voices not heard from the margins to the center.

The music for Post Pardon is, first and foremost, a reflection of the libretto’s rhythm, tone, and emotional content. It is influenced by avant-garde improvisation, Buddhist and Hebrew chants, field hollers, and musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Abdullah Ibrahim, Roberta Flack, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. The sweeping arpeggios and impressionistic impact of Debussy, as well as the Romantic-era composers, and the spectrum of jazz in the last century, also have an influence.

SELECTED PRESS

June 5, 2025| COLBY News
Colby Hosts a World Premiere

June 4, 2025 | Colby College
YouTube: Post Pardon: The Making of an Opera

October 14, 2024 | Kennebec Journal (Central Maine)
Photos: “The Black Azaleas Song Cycle” from Post Pardon: The Opera

September 22, 2024 | State of the Art
Maine Public Radio: Post Pardon: The Opera

September 13, 2023 | MARKETPLACE
Investments in the arts could turn around Waterville, Maine’s economy

July 13, 2023 | COLBY News
Arisa White’s Powerful New Opera

July 20, 2014 | The Daily Californian
Mythology and poetry unmask death in “Post Pardon: The Opera”

PROCESS NOTES

The elements that moved me to write Post Pardon–yes, fairies are involved!