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Articles

Volume 36, Number 2 (2015)

Carmen Aguirre’s The Refugee Hotel and the Space Between Limited and Unlimited Hospitality

Submitted
December 21, 2015
Published
2015-10-01

Abstract

Rabillard considers Carmen Aguirre’s The Refugee Hotel in the light of Jacques Derrida’s “On Cosmopolitanism” and his Of Hospitality, focusing on Aguirre’s use of fictional place and presentational space. As Derrida teases out contradictions in the concept and practice of hospitality and the limitations of attempts to respond to the limitless demands of cosmopolitanism, understood as the right of anyone to dwell anywhere in the world, so Aguirre stages the limitations of the refuge Chileans find when they flee to Canada in the wake of Pinochet’s takeover. Much of the play’s power lies in its evocation of trauma and its presentation of the refugees’ stories of suffering, stories based upon the experiences of Aguirre, her family, and opponents of the Pinochet regime with whom she worked. But an important aspect of the play’s political significance emerges via comparison with Derrida. For The Refugee Hotel challenges the spectator to recognize both the difficulty and the necessity of welcoming refuge seekers without imposing boundaries and definitions or requiring them to assimilate. The limitations of the refuge offered are figured in the play’s single set: a shabby hotel in Vancouver; evoked via representation of linguistic barriers; and dramatized in the parochialism of the welcoming social worker, and in the pressure to assimilate experienced by the refugee children. The play intervenes in Canadian political discourse, dispelling myths of national generosity, and represents hospitality based upon the mutual responsiveness of guest and host. Rabillard argues in conclusion that the political challenge of The Refugee Hotel, its requirement that we apprehend the full demand of true borderless hospitality, extends to the cultural space of Canadian theatre, where immigrant authors such as Aguirre must find a place.