Terror and Performance

Rustom Bharucha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317744641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

'This work goes where other books fear to tread. It reaches the parts other scholars might imagine in their dreams but would neither have the international reach nor the critical acumen and forensic flourish to deliver.' Alan Read, King's College London

'This book is not only timely. It is overdue – and it is a masterpiece unrivalled by any book I know of.' Erika Fischer-Lichte, Freie Universität Berlin

'The first and only book that focuses on the intersections of performance, terror and terrorism as played out beyond a Euro-American context post-9/11. It is an important work, both substantively and methodologically.' Jenny Hughes, University of Manchester

'A profound and tightly bound sequence of reflections … a rigorously provocative book.' Stephen Barber, Kingston University London

In this exceptional investigation Rustom Bharucha considers the realities of Islamophobia, the legacies of Truth and Reconciliation, the deadly certitudes of State-controlled security systems and the legitimacy of counter-terror terrorism, drawing on a vast spectrum of human cruelties across the global South. The outcome is a brilliantly argued case for seeing terror as a volatile and mutant phenomenon that is deeply lived, experienced, and performed within the cultures of everyday life.

1

Genet in Manila

‘September 11’ in retrospect

I Pre-Terror

Oh what a beautiful mornin’,

Oh what a beautiful day,

I’ve got a beautiful feelin’,

Everything’s goin’ my way.

Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein

Deadly innocence

Returning to the initial provocation of this book, let us revisit Manila in the first week of October 2001 when I was ready to start a rehearsal process culminating in a long-desired production of Genet’s The Maids in Tagalog translation.¹ The production was six weeks away, and everything seemed to be ‘goin’ my way’, as the opening song of Oklahoma! declares, and which, indeed, was very much the sentiment of most people on that bright and crisp morning on 11 September 2001 in Manhattan, before two planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center precipitating an event which has come to be memorialized as ‘September 11’. Since there is no way in which we can ‘reverse the video of 9/11, [and] watch the two towers climb back out of the rubble, two planes emerge intact from the buildings, nineteen terrorists return to Hamburg, Saudi Arabia, Yemen’, as James Der Derian reminds us caustically,² we have no other option but to exhume the terrifying effects of ‘September 11’ from its overstated, yet unresolved discourse. Before we focus on a critique of this discourse in the second part of this chapter, let me reconstruct the deadly innocence underlying my dramaturgical preparation for The Maids, which had begun on a previous trip to the Philippines between January and March 2001. Perhaps, it was during this period in that buoyant pre-rehearsal stage of dreaming The Maids, when I imagined in a state of no-terror whatsoever that everything was not just ‘goin’ my way’, but surpassing my expectations.

In critical hindsight, I should have been a lot more alert to the fact that directing Genet – and, more specifically, the task of performing Genet – is a form of terror in its own right. Mocking the protocols of security which determine public culture, of which theatre is the most established of ‘civic’ institutions, The Maids can be regarded as a masterpiece of multiple deceptions, which compels its practitioners to submit to the most unsettling of insecurities. On the surface, it comes across like a seemingly staid, one-act play, which deals with two maids, Solange and Claire (Soledad and Clara in their Filipina adaptations), who are constantly interrupted in their role-switching performative rituals as they attempt to kill their beloved, yet insidious Madame. However, this is the mere plot around which Genet improvises a devious meta-performative exercise in which the most basic tropes of theatre – time, illusion, and identity – are deconstructed with a combination of intense decorum and manic energy.

While the action of the play takes place ostensibly in linear time in the illusory present, the actual performance of the play embraces and slips through a multitude, a labyrinth, a kaleidoscope of several conflicting times. Indeed, such is the treachery involved in performing The Maids, that even within the span of a sentence, time shifts at vertiginous levels. In this groundbreaking dramaturgy – groundbreaking in quite a literal sense because there is no firm epistemological ground on which Genet’s ‘characters’ stand – the actors are compelled to work outside the realistic demands of psychological acting to explore a gamut of performance styles: playacting, mimicry, dissemblance, lying, melodrama, burlesque, farce, bad acting, no-acting. In such a virtuosity of styles, blatantly fake and emphatically framed within the deadly artifice of repetition, one is reminded – yet again in critical hindsight – that the maids could be exemplars of all those border-crossers, including terrorists, criminals, refugees, undocumented non-citizens, and ordinary people on the run, whose only ‘identity’ remains constantly re-invented in ceaseless flux.

Recalling his early production of The Maids in 1963, long before performance studies was on the horizon, Richard Schechner focuses accurately on the ‘identity slippage’ that animates Genet’s dramaturgy, which makes it ‘impossible to pin down the characters’.³ In this sense, the Pirandellian distinctions between ‘actors’ and ‘characters’ in search of an ‘author’ are made far more complicated by the fact that Genet’s characters are not just more fluid; they are molten energies, processual animations, always becoming something else, more often than not through the compulsions of desire, only to break down, almost instantaneously. To perform Genet, therefore, is to subject one’s self to ‘a great sense of insecurity’,⁴ as the director Jean-Baptiste Sastre has correctly emphasized. Not only is ‘character’ always on the verge of dissolution and de-formation, the problem has to do with ‘meaning’ itself, which shifts even after it has been determined and analysed in rehearsal, consolidating for a moment in performance, only to ‘evaporate’.⁵

To elaborate on Genet’s dramaturgy is tempting, but that is not the purpose of this chapter, which focuses on more elliptical yet resonant connections between performance and terror in the larger discursive context of ‘September 11’. Genet is at once the stimulus and the pretext for the commentary on ‘September 11’ that follows. In this regard, I will not be offering an analysis of the mise-en-scène of the Manila production, which can be accessed in Marian Pastor Roces’s ‘thick description’ of the maids’ performative bodies, ‘meta-women’ played by ‘men’ cross-dressed in all-black push-up bras, girdles, torn fishnet stockings, and un-laced army boots.⁶ These hybrid creatures (who could be regarded as queer terrorists in at least some of their manifestations) ‘repulsed, embraced and un-manned reality’, as Roces enunciates in her laser-sharp reading of how the actors deconstructed themselves as ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘gays’, ‘actors’, and ‘maids’. An even more quirky deconstruction of the mythology of ‘the maid’ was provided by Judy Freya Sibayan in an installation on ‘The Rights of Passage’, which was staged in the lobby of the Republic of Malate, the impressively named but gritty dance club and bar where The Maids was staged in Manila.⁷

If I resist the temptation to elaborate on the sexual corporealities and masquerades of both the mise-en-scène and the installation, it is because this chapter is not about the representation of The Maids in Manila; rather, it is more enigmatically linked to the ‘political unconscious’ of the production, to those dimensions of terror which never got expressed in the mise-en-scène. It is these dimensions of terror-in-waiting, terror suspended, and terror deferred that are of concern to me. What follows, therefore, is a post-mortem not of my production, but of the larger historical moment and the time of ‘September 11’ that unconsciously pervaded the rehearsal process of The Maids and which continues to haunt the writing of this chapter today.

Intentionality

Looking back on the euphoric moment of beginning to rehearse The Maids in Manila, I would acknowledge that the intentionality underlying my concept of the production had much to do with the illusion that ‘everything was goin’ my way’. Even as one may be aware that intentionality is invariably subverted in the actual practice of doing theatre, the point is that it always exists in some inchoate form as much as one may deny it. Therefore, in addition to my directorial choice to highlight an explicitly gay sexuality in The Maids against Genet’s aversion to identity politics – Leo Bersani has famously identified Genet as ‘the least gay affirmative of gay writers’⁸ – another reason to do the play was irrevocably linked to the political and economic fact that ‘the maid’ is one of the biggest export items of the Philippines. She earns more foreign exchange than almost any other commodity produced in the Philippines, and contributes to 12 per cent of the Philippines’ GDP through remittances made by around 8.5 million Filipino workers, mostly women, who constitute slightly less than 10 per cent of the population.⁹

Even as these facts can lend themselves to a dramaturgy of social realism or documentary theatre, which Genet specifically shunned, how can one ignore the brutal fact that thousands of Filipina maids live and work in varied conditions of neo-slavery, separated from their homes and families, in countries as far-flung as Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Japan? Social outcasts, neither residents in their own homes nor citizens in their places of work, they are humiliated, beaten, abused, raped, terrorized, and even, in one chilling event masterminded by the state of Singapore, executed.

I refer to the tragic fate of working-class Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion (literally, ‘Flower Contemplation’, a very Genet-like name reminiscent of Our Lady of the Flowers), who was hanged in Singapore on 17 March 1995 for allegedly strangling another Filipina domestic worker, and drowning a four-year-old child on 4 May 1991.¹⁰ No amount of high-level governmental intervention on the part of the former President of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos, was adequate to waive her death sentence in Singapore. When Flor’s body was brought home to the Philippines following massive public outrage against the Singapore government, she had already become a ‘people’s saint’. The conclusive evidence provided by the Singapore government substantiating her crime was not sufficient to convince the people of the Philippines that she had not been grievously wronged and exploited. Instead, she was transformed into an icon representing thousands of her sisters who continue to be dehumanized and occasionally raped and killed as ‘overseas foreign workers’ or ‘domestic helpers’, the politically correct euphemisms for ‘maids’ today.

Can I deny that Flor Contemplacion provided the fundamental political stimulus for the concept of my production? Inspired by her numerous fictional avatars in soap-opera, pop music, and, above all, her eerie alter ego in Nora Aunor, the brown-skinned, diminutive ‘superstar’ of the Philippines cinema, I had already strategized a key sequence in the production before the rehearsals started. Almost compulsively – such is the hubris of any concept prior to the performance process – it was clear to me that I had to use the film footage of Flor Contemplacion’s body brought back to the Philippines after her execution in Singapore, which I had wanted to intersect with Soledad’s orgasmic funereal dirge at the end of The Maids. In this dirge, Soledad envisions a procession of maids and other menials accompanying Clara to her final resting place. What had seemed to me in prior readings of Genet’s play as a virtuoso delirium of a maid caught up in her own hallucinations now began to resonate like a requiem for Flor Contemplacion, with all the contradictory signs of performing this moment in Manila within Genet’s complex mythology.

In this mythology, the criminal is a saint. Hard as it may be to accept, Flor Contemplacion was branded – and proved – a criminal in the eyes of the law. Even so her execution exemplifies precisely the brutality that Genet associates with the self-righteous, moralistic state, as opposed to the violence of so-called ‘criminals’. In his seminal essay on ‘Violence and Brutality’ (1977), Genet expresses his allegiance to terrorists through his support for the Red Army Faction (later stigmatized by the media as the Baader-Meinhof gang), who ‘have made us understand’, as he puts it, ‘not only by words but by actions, both in and out of prison, that violence alone can bring an end to the brutality of men’.¹¹ The timing of this essay, which was first published in Le Monde on 2 September 1977, was particularly provocative, because, three days later, the president of the German Employers’ Federation, Hans-Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped in Cologne by the RAF. This high-profile media event only contributed towards the outrage against Genet’s alleged defence of ‘terrorism’. Nonetheless, his position, as outlined in ‘Violence and Brutality’, remained unequivocal: If violence is associated with the necessary and just actions of revolutionaries, rebels, and terrorists, brutality is the anaesthetizing prerogative of the state and its agencies, notably the armed forces and the police, in upholding the law against violence.

Significantly, even as Genet prioritizes his critique of brutality in relation to massacres in war, torture in prison, and the intimidation of immigrants, he has a more intimate envisioning of brutality embedded in the cultures, topographies, and gestures of everyday life. Focusing on the unacknowledged dimensions of brutality, Genet calls our attention to the fact that

Brutality takes the most unexpected forms, often not immediately discernible as brutality: the architecture of public housing projects; bureaucracy; the substitution of a word – proper or familiar – by a number; the priority, in traffic, given to speed over the slow rhythm of the pedestrian; the authority of the machine over the man who serves it; the codification of laws that override custom; the numerical progression of prison sentences; the use of secrets that prevent the public from knowing what concerns it; the useless slaps and blows in police stations; the condescending speech of police addressing anyone with brown skin …¹²

This gamut of manifestations relating brutality to the most ordinary and banal levels of social interaction reveals how people live with terror in everyday life, which gets routinized and accepted. However, from the perspective of the outcast and the criminal, and his affinities to the underworld, Genet is able to question the hegemonization of brutality through his deep awareness of its actual performances at sensory and somatic levels. Thus, a common gesture, like a policeman’s hand clutching on to the scruff of a criminal’s neck, epitomized, for him, the ‘brutal gesture’ that ‘halts and suppresses a free act’.¹³

It is precisely this corporeality that complicates Genet’s envisioning of the police from more philosophical readings of their power. In Walter Benjamin’s prescient analysis, we learn how the ‘law’ assumed by the police is ‘independent of the rest of the law’, residing in a ‘no-man’s land’ that exists outside of the control of the state and is yet ‘indispensable to the maintenance of the law’.¹⁴ Calling attention to this lethal indeterminacy, by which the police are ‘paid to be free of the law so as to be able to get on with their job’, Michael Taussig (2006) directly links this condition to the New York City Police Department, whose licence to interpret the law has increased terrifyingly in accordance with the larger laws of Homeland Security in the United States and the extra-legal jurisdiction of prisons like Guantánamo. The violation of the law in the name of protecting it is no longer the exception but the rule.

For Genet, this practice of the police extending the larger brutalizing mechanisms of the state would come as no surprise, habituated as he was to the blackmailing, extortionist, and double tactics of the police in collusion with the immigration authorities and the legal system. However, what he brought to the complex relationship between the criminal and the police, far surpassing anything Benjamin could have envisioned, was a profoundly troubling dimension of desire. More specifically, it was homosexual desire which enabled him, for instance, to rail against the brutal practices of the US police in an anti-establishment political rally organized by the Black Panthers even while admiring their muscles and thighs. There are many such instances in Genet’s oeuvre where the very signs of power, like the policeman’s badge, elicits a charge in which the police and criminal are ‘erotically intertwined’, as Taussig puts it pithily.¹⁵ At the same time, for all the paradoxical ambivalence that can be read into the figure of sexually desirable ‘cops’ – a more intimate identification of the ‘police’ – the point is that they are repositories of brutality, and no amount of liberal persuasion to discriminate between the ‘tough’ cop doing his job under harrowing conditions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: mapping terror in the war of words
• 1. Genet in Manila: ‘September 11’ in retrospect
• 2. ‘Muslims’ in a time of terror: deceptions, demonization, and uncertainties of evidence
• 3. Countering terror? The search for justice in Truth and Reconciliation
• 4. Performing non-violence in the age of terror
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index