JULIE SALVERSON
Are uses of personal narrative in community arts projects overly romanticized? Is a critical pedagogy approach to witnessing testimony caught in a discourse of victim/oppressor/helper (educator)? This paper suggests that theatre exercises based in naturalism, when taken up by community groups and schools for use with people who have experienced violence, may evoke performances of testimony caught in an aesthetic of injury and an overly simplistic "standing in" for another. Such performances reinscribe a victim discourse that sustains the psychic residues of violent histories, codifying the very powerlessness they seek to address. How might the tools of the artist and aesthetic forms of popular theatre perform engagements with testimony that are insurgent or transgressive? This paper considers questions of power and ethics to problematize how my role as researcher and theatre/video writer impacted the way a group of refugees represented their testimonies to a Canadian born audience. Transgressive storytelling in this context considers the intimacy of speaking and listening to life histories and the vulnerability of the body as testimonial site. My theoretical approach to the re-telling of others' stories pays particular attention to the complex relationship between meaning and representation. The paper raises the danger of a superficial empathy that can result in approaching representation as a "mirror of reality," and suggests instead an intervening space of translation as transformation which takes into account the complexities of both speech and silence.
Est-ce que l'utilisation des récits personels dans les projets d'art communautaire est imbue de romantisme? Est-ce qu'une approche de pédagogie critique au temoignage est prise dans le discours victime/oppression/aide (éducateur)? Cet article suggère que des exercices de théatre basés dans le naturalisme, quand adoptés par des groupes communautaires et des écoles au bénefice de ceux qui ont vécu la violence, peut evoquer des interprétations du temoignage inscrites dans une esthetique des blessures et une«prise de place» simpliste de l'autre. De telles interprétations réinscrivent un discours de victime qui soutient les résidus psychiques de récits violents, codifiant l'impuissance même qu'elles cherchent à addresser. Comment pourraient les outils de l'artiste et les formes esthetiques du «théatre populaire» peuvent interpréter les engagements avec un temoignage qui soient insurgents ou transgressifs? Cet article considère les questions de pouvoir et ethique pour problematiser la manière dont le rôle du chercheur et écrivain pour le théatre/video ont affecté la façon dont un groupe de réfugiés ont représenté leur temoignages à une audience Canadienne «de souche». Une interprétation des récits transgressive dans ce contexte considère l'intimité de raconter et écouter des récits vrais et la vulnerabilité du corps comme site de temoignage. Mon approche théorique à l'interprétation réitérée des récits de l'autre porte l'attention en particulier à la relation complexe entre sens et représentation. Cet article souligne le danger d'une empathie superficielle qui peut résulter de l'approche de la représentation comme «mirroir de la réalité», et suggère au lieu un éspace intermédiaire de traduction comme transformation qui prend en compte les complexités de la parole et du silence.
An old friend of mine came to Canada as a refugee. I asked him if he thought there was a need to present oneself as a victim in order to be heard in Canada. He told me that his friends who are refugees say "it's an odd thing, but in Canada you have to learn to complain."
I mentioned this to another friend who is a prosecutor in Vancouver. She thought about it for a minute. Then she said, "You know, it is very important that I teach my witnesses, in court, to be victims. Otherwise they won't get anywhere."
I was part of a team leading a popular theatre session with activists who work with refugees. They were making images of their experiences, showing in what situations their strategies worked, when they didn't, and why. I was watching from the side, looking for this phenomenon of articulating the victim. I noticed that one group made an image of a group of people working, in which no individual seemed to differ in status. I was glad to have my theory proved wrong, and made the comment "this is kind of nice, I can't tell who the refugee is." Immediately the group appeared upset, and rearranged the image to create a victim in the centre who looked lost and had people around him reaching out helping hands. The group then looked at me and smiled, as if to say, "isn't that better"? My question is: what is this script, where does it come from, and what does it have to do with theatre or pedagogy?
In this essay I am discussing a video created through a theatre process about refugees in Canada. Several things are worth considering at the outset. In a pedagogy which involves the intimacy of speaking and listening to life histories and the vulnerability of the body as testimonial site, it is easy to be caught as artists/educators in our own conceptual categories. The choices I have within the political nexus of what Foucault calls "power-knowledge relationships" emerge when, as an ambitious graduate student, I present papers at conferences, where I am tempted to perform what Patti Lather calls "researcher as 'Great Emancipator,' saying what things mean" (italics mine, 58). My assumptions about what must be testified to by refugees, and what Canadians ought to hear, can drive my theatre process perhaps more in the direction of what refugees suffer than of how they survive, or of exposing difficulty before accounting for accomplishment.
What kinds of assumptions am I talking about here? Within what kind of obligation do I examine them? My essay asks what it means to represent testimony in ways which minimize the inevitable violence enacted within the failure and defeat of the act of translation (see Felman and Laub). What kind of artistic forms and pedagogical practices might this look like? How overwhelming is the impulse to see the refugee as "victim," the Canadian as "helper," within communities of artists/educators/activists who consider ourselves progressive? How difficult is it in lived practice to rewrite that script? My broader context is to wonder if popular theatre in Canada is caught in an aesthetic of injury that reproduces configurations of power necessary to the identity of "injured." Furthermore, there is the question of the next step. What happens when as artists/educators we respond to testimony and represent it in the name of the injured, the oppressed, and the enemy?
Introducing The Project
The project I am discussing began in 1993. When I was approached to research and create a play and video with refugees, my first thought was to listen more to the ideas of the refugees than to those of the initiating organization. My desire, as a well trained popular theatre artist, was to "give voice" to the oppressed and pay all the attention I could to the refugees. The group I was to work with for several months agreed to two points pertinent to this discussion. First, they wanted to present themselves as individuals "less than as representatives of refugee issues, and certainly not as victims" (Salverson 1993-1996). Secondly, they wanted to make a video that would teach Canadians about "how we feel from the inside by living this label of refugee" (Salverson 1993-1996). The objective of the video, then, was to educate the Canadian-born members of our audience. It was agreed that we would not tell one story but rather a series of disrupted narratives; we would problematize the category of "refugee;" and we would address the political context that creates refugees--indirectly in the video, and directly in the educational materials which were to accompany it.
Ethics and the Impossible Task
Hindsight, and several years as a graduate student, have provided a helpful theoretical grasp of what I was trying to do then, and what I attempt to accomplish on such projects now. Feminist researchers have pointed out that people do not take risks equally. Creating performance with refugees means taking into account that people who talk about difficult histories run emotional, economic, and sometimes political, risks. It also means continually resisting the tendency to tell "one refugee story" and responding instead to how particular people live their multiple positionings. How might a practice which addresses these concerns be conceptualized? Why is it important?
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has presented a complex and demanding call for an ethical relation which puts concern for others before concern for oneself. If this appears an unlikely assignment, it is worth considering the damage history has seen in the alternatives. Levinas writes to disrupt Enlightenment notions of the whole, the totalizing results of which are imprinted on this century in the forms of fascism and genocide. What is important to my notion of ethical relations in performing testimony is Levinas' objection to the violence implicit in a process of knowledge and meaning-making that incorporates the other into itself. He proposes another form of knowledge which replaces ontology with ethics. In the process of creating a play involving testimony, applying Levinas' concerns means assuming responsibility to guard the Other against the appropriation that would deny difference. The act of performance, then, would ask artist and listener to attend to both what Levinas terms the "said" (the marked, the evidential), and the "saying" ("the non-thematizable ethical residue of language that escapes comprehension within the conceptual framing of thought" (Critchley in Simon and Eppert 179). As Simon and Eppert have pointed out, "contemplating the accuracy and historical significance of testimony is a response to its 'said.' Attending to the translative, performative moment of testimony is a response to its 'saying'" (179). Within these terms, artist and audience are asked to become a "Here I am...a witness that does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation, is not evidence" (Levinas 146). What would it look like to consider such an ethic as playwright in both my direct relationship with the refugees, and in how I represented them in the video?
Identification, Proximity, and Trauma
In naturalism...fictional dialogue is identical to narrative dialogue...it's too tied up with the notion of reproducing reality. Naturalism doesn't question anything, and the world it represents has no strangeness. (Michel Marc Bouchard 1989 22)
I am waiting for everyone to throw out the tricks of the trade, the contrived formulas, the tears and superficial laughs. I am waiting for a dramatic work void of declamations, majestic speech, and noble sentiments, to have the unimpeachable morality of truth and to teach us the frightening lesson of sincere investigation. (Emile Zola 1881 11)1
Issues of witnessing and testimony confront us with the relationship between loss, identification, and representation. The term "representation" brings to mind a mirroring of reality, an interpretation of the function of mimesis that dates back to Plato's condemnation of art as a bad copy. Theories of mimetic representation have, for the most part, fallen on two sides of the same metaphysical coin. That is to say, whether the function of art is to reflect society, or to reveal the artist's creative insight; in both cases, mimesis upholds--and produces--pre-existing "truths." Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht are among the contemporary thinkers who have joined a less dominant tradition of emphasizing the performative, generative, and material aspects of mimesis. These two orientations--mimesis as mirror of reality or illustration of truth, and mimesis as performative "interpretive labor" (Diamond 1997 ix)--have different ethical implications. In Levinasian terms, representation as mirror means to grasp and fix the other within a closed circle of my own understanding. Yet it is this tradition of mimesis, as expressed through the theatrical form of dramatic realism, which has dominated Canadian theatre practice.2 Naturalism is a form of theatre which produces "reality" by naturalizing the relationship between character and actor, and positioning spectators to verify universalist notions of truth. Pertinent to this discussion are the expectations naturalism3 fosters for audience reception and for how the re-telling of testimony in theatre is conceived, performed, and attended.
Many exercises taught in Canadian theatre classrooms are adapted from acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski in such a way as to emphasize the internal, psychological aspects of the craft, to the exclusion of his work on theatricality, historicization, and the external (Mann). The goal of these exercises is to help students identify with the roles they are playing and to discover the emotionality and intention in themselves that is similar to that of their characters. This approach looks for empathy and connection and encourages a "standing in" for another. Educators in Canada adapt these theatre exercises to encourage people who have experienced marginalization to tell their stories, with the intention that those stories be taken up with some obligation by the listener: in other words, to testify. When such techniques are transferred to autobiography or biography, similar goals of empathy and identification are at play. People who are only exposed to a taste of theatre training in this way tend to "play the emotion," believing that putting across strong feeling displays (to themselves and listeners) their compassion and depth of commitment to a role or a story. What effect does this have when the stories passed on are those of testimony, where the story has a stake in particular lives?
When people encounter stories which involve violence and loss, the engagement is complicated by the impact of trauma on either the storyteller, the listener, or both. Encounters with what Deborah Britzman (1998) calls the "difficult knowledge" of trauma have the potential to set in motion dynamics of identification and defense that play out the uneasy negotiation between one's own experience of loss and the other's account. This suggests that each person on the refugee project must notice how our identifications are characterized, what versions of the story they emphasize, and what futures they permit. The tendency of dramatic realism in theatre to encourage a standing in for another proves more disturbing when the question is asked, what does the event being testified to mean to the potential witness? If we write a play that presents an uncomplicated portrayal of victims and heroes, what choices do we give an audience as to how to relate? If making contact with characters in a play slips too easily into substituting myself for them, will I want to identify with a victim? And if I do, is it helpful? I desire to empathize with another's pain but make myself the focus of the inquiry. Such identification is not only voyeuristic, it is also too a great burden. How can I accept obligation without having to stand in the shoes of those to whom I am obliged?
If our theatre is to bear witness to the "saying" of refugee stories, we must take care not to reduce testimony to the interpretive frame, where "the unworded is sentenced to meaning" (Phelan 17). Levinas urges us towards an encounter with the precariousness of the other through a destabilizing of identity that is "not a thought of....a representation, but...a watching over the other human in his or her unicity which is indiscernible to knowledge, an approach of the first comer in his or her proximity as neighbour" (italics mine, Levinas 1996 166). What does it mean to sift through our multiple identifications in search of the role of neighbour? To perform representations wherein "identification might be understood as a psychic activity that destabilizes the subject [and works to] politicize our identifications" (Diamond 1992 391)? To perform a mimesis which lets the object be?
Anna Deavere Smith has created and performed a number of portraits of people living in communities immersed in violence. She develops these characterizations through interview and documentary techniques. She has this to say about her work in performance:
It's not psychological realism. I don't want to own the character and endow the character with my own experience. It's the opposite of that. What has to exist in order to try to allow the other to be is separation between the actor's self and the other. What I'm ultimately interested in is the struggle. The struggle that the speaker has when he or she speaks to me.... Somewhere I'm probably also leaving myself room as a performer to struggle and come through. Richard Schechner talks about this much better than me when he talks about "not me" and "not not me." (italics mine, Martin 192)
Theatre as an art form has the political potential to hold contradictory material-- including the "me" and the "not me"--without insisting on its truth or resolution. Mimesis, despite this potential, is enmeshed in anxious reachings for the reassurance of "truth," secured through illustrative notions of theatre as "mirror of reality." This security, however, is itself an illusion. If our play invites an audience to step into the shoes of the refugee, to empathize with her "as if," then the refugee becomes an object of spectacle and the audience member--and, by extension, playwright, director and actors--offstage voyeurs. Both are less secure, less able to listen and respond within the encounter. It is possible that both even disappear. But what happens if the character of the refugee turns to encounter the gaze of the actor/playwright/audience, demands our presence in the process, and names the illusion of representation?
It is not the attempt to understand another that is the problem. The illusion of complete closure, says Adorno, is a "necessary illusion" (Caruana 1996 96). The problem is "the forgetting of the illusion of conceptual closure or identification" (italics mine, Caruana 96). A theatre project which tries to enact a Levinasian ethic could do well to remember that it is indeed a theatre, a laboratory of identities and representations. It seems to me highly ironic if a popular theatre project which sets out to work pedagogically finds itself working with theatrical form in ways which encourage an easy empathy, rendering the audience--the potential witness--invisible. Absent. If, however, participants learn to use the medium of theatre deliberately,4 to create their own images and play with them consciously and willingly, then artists, participants, and audience members might remain present, seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard. In this case mimesis masks itself, and performs what Costa Lima calls "a representation of representations, [where] mimesis presupposes between representations and its own scene a separation that makes it possible to appreciate, know, and/or question representations" (461).
Well, this sounds quite wonderful to me. A radical space in which saying and said are retained. Invigorated with my theoretical support team, I returned to the project. This, I think, is the kind of performing I was trying to achieve. This disruption of the single subject, this playing with what's assumed, this encountering of the witness. What, then, were the results in practice? How was this video received?
ARE THE BIRDS IN CANADA THE SAME? EXCERPTS FROM THE OPENING
Written by Julie Salverson, from stories by Jorge Barahona, Mima Vulovic, Colin McAddam, and others.
l. OVERHEAD ESTABLISHING SHOT OF THE STAGE. ON THE FLOOR IS AN OUTLINE OF THE GLOBE, ROUGHLY OUTLINING DIFFERENT CONTINENTS. EACH 'REFUGEE' IS IN HIS/HER OWN LOCATION, CATHY IN CANADA. ACTORS TAKING THEIR PLACES AND SETTING PROPS. WE SEE KATIA (IN SARAJEVO) IS SETTING THE DINNER TABLE. DEEPTHEE (IN SRI LANKA) IS PUTTING THE SEWING MACHINE ON THE DESK. CARLOS (IN EL SALVADOR) IS LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS SITTING ON HIS BED. CATHY (IN TORONTO) IS ARRANGING HER TEXTBOOKS AND THE NEWSPAPER. OUTSIDE THE GLOBE IS A COMPUTER TERMINAL, WHERE A MAN SITS WITH HIS FACE HIDDEN.
KATIA: Sometimes I don't know if my life is real or a fiction. I have been cast, like some of the others here, in this strange part. The refugee. We are going to show you here a fiction about this reality. A reality about this fiction.
CAMERA, PULLING BACK, REVEALS THE MAN TALKING ON A CELLULAR PHONE, WALKING FREELY THROUGHOUT THE SET. WE DO NOT SEE HIS FACE.
KATIA: You see my face, you hear my voice, you wait to find out which I am, one of the refugees or one of the others. What does this mean, to be 'other'?
CARLOS: We are setting up this fiction to try and talk about our reality. Three of us here, living such very different lives. At what moment did we become this thing, the refugee?
MAN HAS SAT AT COMPUTER SCREEN. CAMERA ZOOMS IN TO SCREEN. SOUND OF HIGH TECH COMMUNICATIONS.
2. SCREEN: "Inter-governmental memo. Please advise that refugees from the following countries are acceptable for economic and political reasons: Bosnia, South Africa, Sri Lanka..."
3. CUT TO KATIA, SITTING ALONE AT TABLE.
KATIA: You pull the blinds down at night and try to pretend things are the same. You want to preserve your world as it is. You hear footsteps outside, and wonder if they are men. If they are men, it usually means they are the army.
CAMERA SLOWLY PULLS AWAY, WE SEE THERE ARE MANY PLACES SET BUT SHE IS ALONE AT THE TABLE. SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS. CAMERA DRAWS BACK TO SEE CHILD, FRIGHTENED, BY THE DOOR. SHE PICKS HER UP AND CARRIES HER OUT OF THE ROOM. CAMERA FOLLOWS KATIA AS SHE DISAPPEARS INTO BACK ROOM; WE SEE HER WITH HUSBAND AND CHILD. THERE IS A FLASH, LIKE AN EXPLOSION.
V.O. KATIA: Will they find your husband hiding in the back room? You are like in a cocoon, thinking you are safe. But then it all explodes, and you have to get out.
4. CUT TO CATHY, A CANADIAN STUDENT, AT HER DESK, READING TEXTBOOK: "SOCIAL WORK IN CANADA."
CATHY: I'm a Canadian student, trying to make a difference. I've seen pictures of refugees, they look like they need my help. But I don't always trust what I read. How can I know what's really going on?
5. WE SEE WOMAN SITTING AT TABLE PUSHING CLOTH THROUGH SEWING MACHINE. SHADOW FALLS OVER THE CLOTH; HER FACE FALLS.
DEEPTHEE: My husband deserted from the army, so the soldiers came. They couldn't find him, so they took it out on me. Afterwards they kept phoning, threatening to pick me up again. My mother told me to leave. A man from another city took me to the border. She had to pay double, all her savings. He said I was a woman and needed protection.
WE SEE HER PACKING A SMALL SUITCASE.
DEEPTHEE: Because a woman travels alone, it is proof to them that she is a prostitute. You have to belong to a man to be safe. But even then, you are not safe. How can I trust a man, after what the soldiers did?
SHE CLOSES AND PICKS UP THE SUITCASE. THERE IS A FLASH LIKE AN EXPLOSION.
6. CUT TO CATHY SITTING IN A CLASS WITH OTHER STUDENTS. SHE RAISES HER HAND. CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON HER DESK, WHERE OPEN BOOK SAYS:
PAGE: In the world today, there are ___ displaced persons, and ___ refugees....
7. CUT TO KATIA'S CHILD IN THE STREET PARK. SHE IS WALKING UP TO SOME BIRDS.
KATIA V.O.: We told my mother, on the street outside her bank, that we were going to Canada. She realized in that moment we were taking her grandchild away. My daughter wanted to know if the birds in Canada are the same.
8. CUT TO DISTORTED MONTAGE OF 'WELCOME TO CANADA' SIGN, SOME STILLS OF CANADA--CN TOWER, ENGLISH BAY, WINTER, GRAIN ELEVATOR. A MOUNTIE RIDES HIS HORSE ACROSS THE SCREEN....
WE HEAR: BARRAGE OF SOUND BITES OFF THE RADIO: "967-11-11, call pizza pizza....hurry down and buy our latest home improvement package; you too can own a deluxe colour t.v....don't be shy, buy buy buy"...segue into "why don't you go back to Africa?...hey, there's no jobs for us, buddy...fill out this form, this form, this form...hey, there aren't enough jobs for us, buddy...but if they're real refugees, we should let 'em in...everybody's a refugee in Canada, except the natives, eh!"
9. CUT TO DISTORTED FACES LEANING IN AT THE CAMERA SPEAKING THE FOLLOWING:
ACTIVIST: Hello, I'm a Canadian activist. I make a difference and know what's best.
LAWYER: I am a refugee rights lawyer. I am the star of the show. My card.
CATHY: Hello! I'm a community development student. I want to make a difference. I need to meet you. It's the only way I'll understand anything.
REPORTER: I'm from downtown t.v., I'll tell your story for its human interest value. But don't mess it up with politics, ok? Why don't you tell us about the torture. And smile for the camera. So, what's it like here in Canada?
CAMERA FLASHES
How the Video was Received
The final footage presented three characters new to Canada whose stories are non-linear and partial, and are interrupted by satirical segments and interviews with other "real refugees." In the video we included the story of a Canadian-born sole-support mom who begins a relationship with a man from El Salvador, but is bombarded with media warnings about violent men and religious fanaticism and finds herself afraid to pursue things further. When viewed by refugee audiences, the portrayals of refugee experience were said to be very accurate and those of Canadians termed "right on." The exception to this was the response of some people, recently arrived, who were alarmed to see that Canada might pose more difficulties than they had hoped. The project group seemed happy with the video on the whole,5 but some shared with me a concern which was substantiated when I began using the video with social workers, schools and unions. I was disturbed to find that the stories from the group appeared, to me, sad and heavy, in a sense the "victim stories" we had wanted to avoid. They stood in marked contrast to the poise and the articulate anger of the non-staged interviews. The choice of how to represent the "helpers," with a degree of critique and of satire, was responded to by some social workers as anywhere from guilt-provoking to downright insulting. Many refugee advocates thought our portrayals of Canadians were mild and well-deserved, but the so-called "general public"--students and government workers who had little contact with refugees--responded with a mixture of defensiveness and confusion.
Why should this matter? Why not confront Canadians with our privilege, our ignorance, the harm we do? But was that the aim of the video? Rather, it was explicitly stated by the refugees that they wanted, 1) to create a testimonial document which would allow them to be seen and heard by Canadians, and 2) to educate those same Canadians so that how they behave towards refugees would change. Instead, many Canadians looking at the video are unable to listen at all to the refugees, because 1) they are fiercely searching for the "one" "personal" "story" and we refused it, and 2) they are caught up in what they don't like about portrayals of themselves and the proximal relations implied in those portrayals.
Audience resistance can be accounted for to some degree by the very real fact of privilege and the material reasons for those who have it to avoid addressing it. In this case, however, we did not sufficiently strategize how to carry out the aims we had set. The juxtaposition of the "sad stories" of injury and the portrayals of bumbling or hostile Canadians did not help to create an atmosphere in which to encourage listening. In our attempt to suggest there was not simply one refugee story that explains all, it is possible we went too far in fragmenting the stories that were presented. For a general audience used to empathizing, to standing in, the gulf was too great. By refusing "mimesis as mirror" our project failed--for many of our intended audience members--to provide a new way of looking and listening. Perhaps the voices of the playwright/director/actors as witnesses was not explicit enough to break the expected frames of representation. The pedagogical question which emerges becomes: what is the value of creating a representation that so alienates the intended student or audience that all listening shuts down, and, worse, anger at refugees is re-enforced? What effect might this have in the future on refugee experiences in Canada? It seems that showing people with power how they exercise that power is not automatically educational. Would it not have been better pedagogically to have designed the project to discover what strategies of testimony and representation maintain the dignity and authority of refugees while opening spaces for dialogue and listening with Canadians?
So what happened? What other understanding of the relationship between testimony and identification could make sense of this result? How might artists and educators further consider issues of identification, implication, and responsibility when performing or soliciting testimony and trouble?
I want to move now to the wider context within which our play and video was produced, and look at how the discourses of popular education and the institutionalization of injury might shape the production and reception of an aesthetic of injury within popular theatre and, in particular, this project.
Broader Concerns Towards Practice
Popular theatre comes from a popular education tradition grounded in the thinking of Brazilian Paulo Freire which emphasizes the development of "critical consciousness." When this methodology is applied overly straightforwardly in North America, it can become caught in an orthodoxy in which not only is the "other" encircled in the material analysis of how the whole operates, but there is only one "other," that of the working class or whatever oppressed group takes that subsumed position. I said that I came to the project wanting to pay special attention to the refugees. In a process driven by the wish to "empower," could this have led to a collapsing of "other" with the kind of totalizing violence which Levinas warns against? This may occur if the people troubled are assumed to be unequivocally "the oppressed," and their accounts considered authentic expression by virtue of simply being marginalized, working class, refugees, or outside the main stream. This runs the risk of classifying people in romantic or simplistic terms through what Joan Scott calls a "metaphor of visibility as literal transparency" (23), which denies the multiple realities and contradictions present in those who testify. The effect on audience reception is similar to that of dramatic realism--what you see is what you get. In the case of our play and video, an audience member operating out of these assumptions will collapse each distinct person with refugee experience into "the oppressed," and each Canadian-born character into "helper" or "oppressor." I am suggesting that both the artistic team and our audiences were influenced to some degree by this thinking, in which case it makes sense that people watching our play--unable to find the White Canadian hero, reluctant to identify with the only other role with which they are familiar, that of perpetrator6 -- became not only defensive but confused.
Creating theatre or video which attempts to testify does not prevent us from reproducing dominant relations of power even as we investigate them. What in my own investments contributed to the re-inscribing of "refugee as victim" (explicit) and "artist/activist as rescuer" (implicit) in the video? Perhaps I didn't pay sufficient attention to my own relationship with violence. If this is the case, I run the risk of wearing what I have called elsewhere a "mask of solidarity" (Salverson, 1994) wherein I combat my own oppressors by joining others' battles. This is a kind of colonizing of others' experience, because I am driven by projection or transference (see LaCapra and Britzman) rather than my own conscious investment in liberation. This plays itself out by listening more for injury or violation than for resistance. Ngg wa Thiong'o's description of activists and solidarity workers he has encountered elaborates this necessarily schematic picture. He speaks about the "vacillating psychological make-up" of "the petty-bourgeoisie," who show up on every stage of the post-colonial project, as having a "lack of identity in its social and psychological make-up as a class", (22) and assume that this 'crisis of identity' applies to everyone. He reminds us that the effects of colonialism was to control not only political and economic wealth, but the entire realm of the language of real life, people's tools of self-definition in relation to others (16).
Wendy Brown has written about how freedom can respond to particular practices of domination whose terms get reinstalled in how freedom is exercised. "When institutionalized, freedom premised upon an already vanquished enemy keeps alive, in the manner of a melancholic logic, a threat that works as domination in the form of an absorbing ghostly battle with the past" (8). What this suggests is the fixing of roles, injured and oppressor, helper and helped, which are constituted by the discourses within which testimony is heard, a video is watched, and which allow the listener limited choices as to where to be positioned. A theatre process which 'listens' in this way, while seeking to redress pain and injustice, may backfire by sustaining "the psychic residues of these histories" (Brown 29) and codifying "the very powerlessness it aims to address" (29). If I am not victim, if I am not rescuer, what can I be? Performances which testify must explore form and content in ways which move beyond the various binaries touched upon above to invite and retell the complex mix of fears and desires, abilities and injuries, that comprise subjecthood.
Brown says there is an ambivalence today about encountering and practicing freedom which exhibits a sustained willingness to risk identity, and with which comes responsibility. It is this anxiety about freedom that may collapse action and analysis into rebellion and the seeking of refuge in roles of victim and oppressor. However unpleasant such roles may be, they are at least familiar. For myself and the other artists involved in this video, perhaps it was easier to recreate, however unconsciously, forms of representation that continue an easily identifiable picture of refugees and Canadians than to open the floor and rethink the picture. The challenge, then, is to imagine a theatre and a pedagogy that recasts the script of injury, risking a freedom which sets the terms for social existence rather than rebelling against it. If there are experts in our video, they are the people interviewed, the non-theatricalized (though nonetheless mediated within the video) refugees, who give context to the characterizations. The performances of these people in no way indicate that they are victims, nor do they suggest anything to confess. These characterizations, if you will, are asking for a different kind of listening, a different kind of response. They invite an encounter that does not dismiss empathy, but rather challenges the terms on which it is negotiated. Perhaps our audiences and we ourselves need to look further to find role models for such encounters. Images not to mirror but to engage as we seek out Levinas' notion of neighbour, and attempt this curious mixture of obligation and freedom that is witnessing.
NOTES
1 Both citations from "Holding the Mirror up to Naturalism,"
a survey conceived by Peter Hinton and Nigel Hunt, with compilation assistance
from Paul Lefebvre, published in Theatrum #13, April/May 1989, 19-22.
Return to Article
2 See R.P. Knowles' article "Voices (Off): Deconstructing
the Modern English-Canadian Dramatic Canon," in Canadian Canons: Essays
in Literary Value, Ed. R. Lecker, University of Toronto Press, 1991,
91-111.
Return to Article
3 Although the terms are distinct, for my purposes
naturalism and social realism both contain the characteristics of mimesis
as "mirror of reality." Elin Diamond points out (1997) that any critique
of a representational practice needs to be contextualized and historicized.
For a fuller discussion of social realism and the universal "we," see both
Diamond works referenced.
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4 I am not suggesting an abandonment of realism, but
rather a consideration of the differences within how realism operates and
is performed. This project included professional actors who had come to
Canada as refugees. These actors worked very much in the way described
by Deveare Smith, performing characters that were distinct from themselves,
"not me."
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5 The exception to this is a story which makes evident
the complex role trauma memory can play in popular theatre projects. I
have written about this in "Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre
and the Lie of the Literal," Theatre Topics 6.2 (Sept 1996).
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6 The most "neutral" character in the play and video
is a Canadian social work student trying to understand the issues. She
is a very undeveloped character whose main function is to ask questions.
In both the play and the video Cathy is played by a Black actor. A number
of audience members felt this was confusing. Some assumed that Cathy was
a refugee, since she was not White (one of the refugees was White). Others
said the character was not sufficiently sympathetic, and that a Black student
would have understood refugees better than a White student. Our casting
and choice of which refugee stories to tell was a deliberate attempt to
confront the assumptions behind these responses.
Return to Article
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