Imperialism and Theatre

J. Ellen Gainor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134844302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Imperialism is a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon; it occurs neither in limited areas nor at one specific moment. In cultures from across the world theatrical performance has long been a site for both the representation and support of imperialism, and resistance and rebellion against it. Imperialism and Theatre is a groundbreaking collection which explores the questions of why and how the theatre was selected within imperial cultures for the representation of the concerns of both the colonizers and the colonized. Gathering together fifteen noted scholars and theatre practitioners, this collection spans global and historical boundaries and presents a uniquely comprehensive study of post-colonial drama. The essays engage in current theoretical issues while shifting the focus from the printed text to theatre as a cultural formation and locus of political force. A compelling and extremely timely work, Imperialism and Theatre reveals fascinating new dimensions to the post-colonial debate. Contributors: Nora Alter; Sudipto Chatterjee; Mary Karen Dahl; Alan Filewood; Donald H. Frischmann; Rhonda Garelick; Helen Gilbert; Michael Hays; Loren Kruger; Josephine Lee; Robert Eric Livingston; Julie S. Peters; Michael Quinn; Edward Said; Elaine Savory.

1
VIETNAMESE THEATRE OF RESISTANCE

Thich Nhat Hanh's Metaphysical Sortie on the Margins

Nora M.Alter

The whole of this contradiction—revolutionary anti-colonialism; the most advanced socialist political practice in the most backward peasant economy; the direct, historic, prolonged combat between socialism and imperialism; the utterly unequal balance of forces—was condensed in the Vietnam War.

Aijaz Ahmad

No scientific instrument can verify the existential nature of life in this story.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Few of the recent studies about the Vietnam war, even those dealing explicitly with protest theatre, mention, let alone analyze, protest plays written and produced by the Vietnamese. This omission is unfortunate in light of the exceptionally rich theatrical tradition of Vietnam, and in particular the use throughout its history of theatre as a cultural-political tool and weapon, most recently in the struggle against European and American colonialism and imperialism. Both part of a larger tradition of global protest thought and writing and also a unique contribution in its own right, Vietnamese theatre both offers itself to and yet also resists incorporation by Western audiences. As such, it remains a response on the margins. As put by the Vietnamese filmmaker and theorist Trinh T.Minh-ha in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991):

The margins, our sites of survival, become our fighting grounds and their site for pilgrimage. Thus, while we turn around and reclaim them as our exclusive territory, they happily approve, for the divisions between margin and center should be preserved, as clearly demarcated as possible, if the two positions are to remain intact in their power relations. Without a certain work of displacement…the margins can easily recomfort the center in its goodwill and liberalism; strategies of reversal thereby meet with their own limits.

(Trinh 1991, 17)

During the Vietnam war the National Liberation Front and Viet Cong were able to draw on the long history of Vietnamese theatre to develop extensive culture-drama programs, which had itinerant groups of performers travel from one hamlet or village to the next, educating the people, spreading the word of communism, and calling for resistance against the South Vietnamese and the United States armies. This form of oral interaction stressed both visual and verbal messages and could change its thematic content from day to day, adapting it to current events. It was thus an especially flexible and effective type of theatre for a rural, often illiterate or preliterate and largely pretechnological society.¹ Its power—actual or potential—lay in part in its recognition by the Joint US Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) as a major medium for spreading enemy propaganda. Indeed, in general, JUSPAO seems to have given more credit to the power of fiction than was generally admitted either to or by the general public. It had an ordinance which specifically prohibited playwrights from being granted passes to travel to Vietnam. (See Moeller 360.) JUSPAO was so concerned about the impact of North Vietnamese and Viet-Cong theatre troupes that it began to imitate them, promoting several theatrical performing groups siding with the South Vietnamese and the Americans. Among these, the Van Tac Vu Cultural Drama Teams engaged in “cultural seed planting” and served “as a uniquely credible means of communication between the government and the people in a rural society where word of mouth and face-to-face discussion remain the major means of communication.”² Clearly the theatre played an important role on both sides in Vietnam, and any full account of the history of that conflict ought to reserve a place for it. In a moment I will be looking at a Buddhist play that attempted to negotiate the space between these competing ideologies, staging an ostensibly neutral space in their interstices, between margin and center. In the words again of Trinh, “On the one hand, truth is produced, induced, and extended according to the regime in power. On the other, truth lies in between all regimes of power” (Trinh 1991, 30). In the case of the play in question, the attempt was made to find a truth not merely between, even beyond, the ideological positions of North and South Vietnam but also between, and beyond, the positions of East and West, “Third World” and “First,” “theatre” and “fact.” But first a few more preliminaries. There are several explanations for the neglect of Vietnamese protest theatre. Two lie no doubt not only in the difficulty of dealing with the live-performative aspect of theatre generally but also in the marginalized institutional status of theatre studies both within and without the academy.³ A third reason may be found in the general neglect of any kind of non-American representations of the Vietnam war—films, novels, poetry—within most Vietnam war studies.⁴ A fourth, perhaps more immediately relevant to my topic, surely results from the specific nature of the Vietnamese performances, which were rarely recorded in writing. Instead they favored the oral form that could easily change according to shifting external events and internal conditions: where they were being performed and for whom. To that extent they may seem to come close to the tradition of Western (political) cabaret and agit-prop, sharing with them also a certain collective spirit. It is important, however, not to leap too quickly into comparisons that might deny Vietnam theatre its specificity. However, The Path of Return both encourages comparison and slips away from it—its path of protest is always marginal, always “other.” Its construction is that of a type which, in a different context and text, Trinh has called “the inappropriate/d other.” (See Trinh 1986/87.) In any case, the plays in question were rarely the product of a single author but instead manifested the ongoing work-in-progress of an ensemble. A final explanation of neglect is related to the fact that few of the war plays have been translated or performed outside of Vietnam, and unless one has had the rare chance to have seen and heard them directly in Vietnam, any discussion of their performances can only be imaginative speculation. It is with this caveat in mind that I propose to take a closer look at a play that a Vietnamese Buddhist monk wrote against the war, a play located at various kinds of margins—theatrical and religious, as well as social and political.

Thich Nhat Hanh's The Path of Return Continues the Journey was published in English translation in 1972, with a foreword by Daniel Berrigan. (See Nhat Hanh 1972.) The publisher, Hoa Binh (Peace) Press, was linked to the Jesuit Thomas Merton Life Center. Born in 1926 in Dalat, Nhat Hanh became a novice monk at age 16. After studying literature and philosophy at Saigon University, he went on in 1961 to study philosophy of religion at Princeton and lectured on Buddhism at Columbia two years later. He returned to South Vietnam, where he was already one of the most popular poets in the early 1960s, and took a leading role, through various writing and publishing activities, in several Buddhist social and political movements. Adopting a position on the war opposed to both North Vietnamese Communism and the repressive, US-backed Vietnamese Government in the South, Nhat Hanh attempted to synthesize European Existentialist philosophy with Buddhist pacifism. He outlined his political, literary, philosophical, and religious convictions in a short Preface, “A Buddhist Poet in Vietnam,” to some of his explicitly political poems which appeared, in his own translation, in the New York Review of Books, June 9, 1966. (See Nhat Hanh 1966.) This Preface made it impossible for him to return to Vietnam, because of the subversive nature of his argument; in his own words: “I risk my life publishing these poems. Other Buddhists who have protested the war have been arrested and exiled and now they are being killed” (Nhat Hanh 1966, 36).

To my knowledge, The Path of Return is one of a tiny handful of plays to have been translated into English during the Vietnam war. This exceptional circumstance is quite significant. On the one hand, the publication of a political message in the land of the enemy is often problematic, even when that message adopts the fictional or, in this case, quasi-fictional form of a play. One cannot help wondering what sort of “Western” or “American” limitations and restrictions were imposed—unconsciously if not consciously—during the process of translation on its political content. To be endorsed by one of the leading Jesuit anti-war demonstrators in the US must have further informed the thematic and ideological orientation of the translation. On the other hand, the English translation was clearly authorized by Nhat Hanh himself. (As we have seen, he could easily have translated this play, too, as he had his political poetry six years earlier.) What matters most for our purposes here is to interpret The Path of Return as it is presented to an English-speaking readership.

The Path of Return, similar to Berrigan's own quasi-documentary play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1969), is based on a “true story”: in this case, the self-immolation of a young nun and social worker, Sister Mai, and the killing of four young men (a fifth was badly injured). Nhat Hanh's play adds two additional figures (also based on fact): Vui, “a young girl student of the School of Youth for Social Service [SYSS], Saigon”; and Lui, “a young woman teacher [and] political prisoner just released from jail,” who was also part of the SYSS. Both were murdered “during a terrorist raid on the School by a group of unknown persons” (Nhat Hanh 1972, 6). They appear as talking, visible ghosts in the play. But before it narrates its central story, explicitly Vietnamese in origin, the play, as it is presented to an American audience or reader, introduces a framing device in the form of a statement by Berrigan which serves as proleptic commentary on the main plot. This statement, elliptically entitled “…Their Speech Is All of Forgiveness…,” is signed with a facsimile of “Dan Berrigan, S.J.”: thus it conveys at once a sense of existential authenticity and familiarity (the reproduced signature and the nickname) and also official sanction or legitimation (The Society of Jesus). This framing is completed by an equally significant, anonymous closing statement on the final page, where, blocked out separately, one finds a call for contributions to the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation—with an address in Paris. Both parts of this “frame” (along with an additional sub-framing at the onset, about which more later) contribute a definite tone of commitment to what at first sight may be a relatively mild political statement. The larger “frame” makes it clear that the play has, in part, a distinctly pragmatic goal: to raise money for a Vietnamese peace organization. In a written text, this call for money might not appear controversial or dangerous today, and likely did not result in any censure at the time. But it is important to note that, a few years earlier, the earliest performances, in 1968, of Peter Weiss' Viet Nam Discourse in Germany were closed numerous times because, directly after the show, collections were taken for the Viet Cong. The Path of Return also tried to raise money in a foreign country for a peace mission officially considered as “subversive” in that country. One may also note the irony that the two ends of the frame are attributed, respectively, to an American citizen (Berrigan), and to a committee in France, so that two imperial powers seem uncannily to embrace/contain the Vietnamese core play. It is within these boundaries, for better or worse, that a resisting, colonized, and imperialized voice is left “free” to speak.

It is also striking to find that the properly “Vietnamese” text also is preceded by yet another framing device: a page-long statement, also elliptically titled, “Love Enables Us….” It, too, is undersigned with a facsimile hand-written signature (in Western script), this time: “Nhat Hanh,” which suggests that his statement was written explicitly for the American version. Nhat Hanh's statement of intent clearly serves two purposes, corresponding to the two distinct aspects of his play (aspects that are part related, part contradictory): first, it constitutes a third-person factual reference to the murder of four students/workers of the SYSS on the bank of the Saigon river in 1967; second, quoting the author's own paradoxical words, it conveys the claim to “guarantee” not only the truth of the murder story (which however doesn't really need such a guarantee since it is supposedly so well-known, albeit less in the US than in Vietnam) but also the authenticity of the story of what ostensibly happened afterwards, posthumously, to the four dead students and the self-immolated nun Mai. This push toward a certain kind of documentary truth or verisimilitude impacts on the problem of representability, as we will see later. In any case, this second part of the truth, the author freely admits, is a lived (read: poetic or fictional) rather than scientific (read: historical) truth. Certainly it is produced and moved less by any conventional Western principle of dramatic conflict but by “love” (as is the entire play itself), and promises to lead hermeneutically to ever higher levels of “love,” if only one is willing to join the author on his imaginary boat, and row together with him. Vocabulary, images, and the thematic formal principle of “love” set apart this “play” from the Western Vietnam protest theatre.

We shall follow the author's invitation and, as the play proper begins, join him and his characters on the sampan. They are just getting ready to row with their bare hands. And this rudimentary physical act of rowing, along with some other small gestures, is virtually all the action that will take place on the boat and in the play. What follows is a fragmented retelling of the circumstances of the deaths of the characters, as related by them, and a long, sometimes poetic but repetitive discussion of the meaning of life in general as well as of specific manifestations of war and violence. Much of that conversation, led by the nun Mai, is devoted to philosophical and/or moral considerations that preach understanding and forgiveness—even (indeed especially) forgiveness of those who kill “us.” It is in this context, then, that the Buddhist themes of love and tolerance are most evident. To quote one of the characteristic concluding statements: “Let us hope that our earthly lives, as well as our death, have sown the seeds of tolerance and love” (Nhat Hanh 1972, 27).

Thus summarized, the play cannot be fit easily into the rubrics of traditional Western theatre. At the very least it is marginal to them, in the sense that it has no acts, no scenes, little or no dramatic or conceptual progression of any type. Rather, it resembles a collective poem recited by several voices, something that in the West could be qualified as a “performance” (i.e., a kind of dramatic monologue collectively recited), but questioned as “theatre.” Needless to say, any definition of theatre qua genre or medium is a matter of cultural opinion, and, to be appreciated fully in its own ter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 VIETNAMESE THEATRE OF RESISTANCE: Thich Nhat Hanh's Metaphysical Sortie on the Margins
• 2 MISE-EN-(COLONIAL-) SCÈNE: The Theatre of the Bengal Renaissance
• 3 POSTCOLONIAL BRITISH THEATRE: Black Voices at the Center
• 4 ERECT SONS AND DUTIFUL DAUGHTERS: Imperialism, Empires and Canadian Theatre
• 5 CONTEMPORARY MAYAN THEATRE AND ETHNIC CONFLICT: The Recovery and (Re)Interpretation of History
• 6 ELECTRIC SALOME: Loie Fuller at the Exposition Universelle of 1900
• 7 DRESSED TO KILL: A Post-Colonial Reading of Costume and the Body in Australian Theatre
• 8 REPRESENTING EMPIRE: Class, Culture, and the Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century
• 9 “THAT FLUCTUATING MOVEMENT OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS”: Protest, Publicity, and Postcolonial Theatre in South Africa
• 10 LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM THE EARLY ABBEY THEATRE AND THE TRANSLATIONS OF BRIAN FRIEL
• 11 DECOLONIZING THE THEATRE: Césaire, Serreau and the Drama of Negritude
• 12 INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE, THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE IMPERIALIST CRITIQUE: Identities, Inheritances, and Neo-Orthodoxies
• 13 SATELLITE DRAMA: Imperialism, Slovakia and the Case of Peter Karvas
• 14 ON JEAN GENET'S LATE WORKS
• 15 STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL: Anti-Imperialist Theatrical Forms in the Anglophone Caribbean
• Index