Resmaa Menakem finds his next act with ‘Mothership’ at Penumbra

“Growing up, my mom often said to me, ‘From the time you arrived on this planet you always leaned in to people,'” recalls Resmaa Menakem, whose new drama, Mothership, co-written with playwright, curator and producer Kristen Adele Calhoun, kicks off its world premiere run at Penumbra this month.

“You scared the hell out of me,” his mother would add. “You weren’t afraid of others in the least; you’d let anyone pick you up.”

Menakem doesn’t shy away from that assessment of his youth, or how it shaped his four-decade career as a healer and psychotherapist and his philosophy of Somatic Abolitionism, which he defines as “a living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building, a way of being in the world… a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies. This precept treats racism not as a political or philosophical construct, but rather as a wickedness that penetrates our nervous systems and physical bodies, activating an innate survival response. Somatic Abolitionism is designed to identify, tackle, and heal the racialized trauma that white-body supremacy has inflicted over generations.”

Minneapolis dreaming

A native of Milwaukee, Menakem’s earliest aspirations were centered elsewhere. Classically trained as an acoustic bassist, he had dreams of making it in the music business and was drawn to what was happening 300 miles northwest of his hometown: the Minneapolis Sound.

“Prince was steeped in Black revolutionary music. He was born into that piece,” Menakem says, citing comparisons to James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Sly Stone and George Clinton. Even in those early days, he says, Prince was “pushing the boundaries with songs like ‘Annie Christian,’ ‘Uptown,’ ‘Sexuality,’ ‘Head,’ and even ‘1999.’”

At 18, Menakem made his way up Interstate 94 and tried to “make it all happen” in the City of Lakes. With no money, he initially lived out of his car, and when he did finally put a roof over his head, it was, he notes, “a crack house.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize a music career may not have been in the cards. “I felt that I had talent, but I wasn’t a child prodigy,” he explains, “and I didn’t have the discipline I needed at that time in my life.”

He found his footing, though, becoming a groundbreaking psychotherapist in his early 20s. In 2017, he published his second book, “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.”

International acclaim

Although it instantly garnered critical acclaim, My Grandmother’s Hands wasn’t widely recognized beyond academic circles until the murder of George Floyd. “People who’d already read it started to tell others, ‘Hey! You need to read this too,'” says Menakem. The book climbed the New York Times bestseller list and reached a global audience.

His next book, “The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning”, followed in 2022. Two years later, “My Grandmother’s Hands” became a children’s book, made with Emmy Award-winning actor and longtime Penumbra Company member T. Mychael Rambo, and illustrator Leroy Campbell.

Menakem also found a place on the radio, hosting KMOJ’s “Resmaa in the Morning,” and on vinyl with two albums, “Feral Dreams” and “Dismembered and Unarmed,” blending music, wisdom and spoken word.

Looking back on the 40-plus years since he moved to Minneapolis, Menakem says this is the only way it could have happened. “If I would have had the success at 26 that I do now, I’d probably be an addict today. I’m in a much better place today, not having achieved what I thought I was worthy of at a much younger age.”

Blackness as principle

Mothership, which premieres next week at Penumbra, is the natural evolution of Menakem’s life. “I couldn’t have written this at 26, 36, or maybe even 46. I needed those decades to mature, to get the reps in, so to speak. To come into myself.”

Framed as an “Afrofuturistic” parable, Mothership follows five souls from a shattered world aboard a sentient ship that urges each toward a necessary, sometimes painful transformation.

Blackness runs through it. “Blackness for me is a principle before anything else. It’s liberatory,” Menakem explains. “The first representation of humanity is a Black woman in Africa. Then there’s the through line to us. As with the cosmos, she didn’t always exist, and then she did. Blackness is an idea of the womb, and it moves us forward.”

The ancestors, he says, sometimes said things that weren’t for their time, but for us to hear today. “It’s Kristen’s and my attempt to let people know that what you think is happening, the absurdity in this world, is actually happening. That you’re not f*%#!@g crazy. We need to plant seeds for those who come after us.”

Menakem calls another idea he’s exploring “generative decay,” the notion that all things eventually decay but create the nutrients for what comes next. “What has to decay, not die, but decay, for the next thing to thrive,” he says. “This is an elegant process. There is peril and possibility at every point, but it’s still elegant. So how can I, before I return to the Blackness, leave something here for my babies, and their babies, and so on. It’s not our job to have all the answers, but it is our job to leave something behind.”

Racial Healing (270 North Kent Street, St. Paul) on Thursday, September, 10, and runs through October 4, 2026 (previews on October 8 and 9). For more information and to purchase tickets, visit https://penumbracenter.org/event/mothership/.

Tony Kiene is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at tkiene@spokesman-recorder.com.