Twilight Symbol Analysis

Twilight symbolizes the ambiguity of justice and the possibility of hope and healing. In “Twilight #1,” literary critic, writer, and scholar Homi Bhabha describes twilight as “an in-between moment” that is both night and day. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Bhabha sees the city as being in a moment of “ambivalence” and possibility. According to Bhabha, “the fuzziness of twilight / allows us to see the intersections / of the event with a number of other things that daylight obscures for / us.” In other words, he suggests that the lawlessness of the riots turned all prior expectations about social order and justice upside-down. As Los Angeles struggles to recover from days of violence and social and political upheaval, Bhabha hopes that a new way of seeing and being in the world may emerge from the rubble. The play’s closing scene, “Limbo/Twilight #2,” told from the perspective of Twilight Bey, the ex-gang member after whom the play is named, expands on Bhabha’s understanding of the symbol. Twilight Bey sees himself as embodying twilight in that he portrays himself as “a dark individual” who struggles to look beyond himself at the “light,” which he suggests represents wisdom, knowledge, and “the understanding of others.” He describes himself as existing in a twilight state of “limbo,” where he fails to understand others whose experiences and racial backgrounds are different from his own. Twilight Bey believes that occupying this space between light and dark is essential to transcending the racial tensions that contributed to the unrest. He states, “And I know / that in order for me to be a full human being / I cannot forever dwell in darkness.” In other words, to achieve peace and resolution, it is necessary to move through this twilight space, thereby developing mutual understanding among disparate racial and economic groups.

But the ambiguity of twilight means that the symbol carries negative associations as well. In “Magic #2,” Betye Saar, an artist, recalls looking up at the twilight sky one night during the riots and seeing the sky—and the city—as existing in “a sort of limbo” that is “maybe even magical.” Whereas Homi Bhabha sees hope and possibility in uncertainty, Saar imagines the “evil / and control” that can exist in magic. With the world in a state of limbo, Saar believes that people will be too disoriented and despairing to know how to move forward and rebuild the more just society that Bhabha and Twilight Bey believe is possible.