Social critic Stuart Hall suggests that a recalling of Africa, a return to the source of continuity in spite of dislocation, is inevitable, but it cannot happen via a linear, simplistic route. The embodiment of the African experience must happen by a circular route, he says, to express "what African has become in the New World, what we have made of 'Africa': 'Africa' as we re-tell it through politics, memory and desire" (Hall, 1994, p. 399). Zollar's Bitter Tongue seems to dramatize Hall's words: in it, "Uganda" resists devising a return to some imaginary past or longing for an "innocent" Africa, free of exploitation by Europe. Africa is recalled in all its contemporary complexity--and, if anything, the profound continuity between the experiences of African women and African-American women, despite the dislocation, is heightened in this imagining.
Questions of identity and its relation to a preferred aesthetic and set of themes--along with a commitment to the community that formed the context for her work--were important to Zollar from the beginning of her career. She has said that when she started her company in 1984, she didn't want to create dances just to show how good black dancers and a black choreographer could be. After all, the predominant standards to measure up to would be those of white artists and critics. She didn't want to have to contend with that "as good as" agenda, which had a point to prove to white audiences. In turning the mirror on the community, Zollar has created work that emerges out of the richness and the pain of African-American lifestyles, out of "the structures that come out of the African-American community: church, testifying, emotional energy shaping the form and the rawness of the form, like you have in jazz" (In Sunder, 1994, p. 85).