Staging Cultural Encounters

Algerian Actors Tour the United States

Jane E. Goodman

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253052308
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An anthropologist recounts an Algerian theater troupe's 2016 US tour, detailing the highs and lows of the cross-cultural exchange. Staging Cultural Encounters tells stories about performances of cultural encounter and cultural exchange during the US tour of the Algerian theater troupe Istijmam Culturelle in 2016. Jane E. Goodman follows the Algerian theater troupe as they prepare for and then tour the United States under the auspices of the Center Stage program, sponsored by the US State Department to promote cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. The title of the play Istijmam produced was translated as "Apples, " written by Abdelkader Alloula, a renowned Algerian playwright, director, and actor who was assassinated in 1994. Goodman take readers on tour with the actors as they move from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to the large state universities of New Hampshire and Indiana, and from a tiny community theater in small-town New England to the stage of the avant-garde La MaMa Theater in New York City. Staging Cultural Encounters takes up conundrums of cross-cultural encounter, challenges in translation, and audience reception, offering a frank account of the encounters with American audiences and the successes and disappointments of the experience of exchange. "This is a ground-breaking and beautifully written work in the anthropology of performance as well as an intervention in experimental anthropology, wherein theater play is both ethnographic subject and method. The book is accompanied by a detailed website of audio-visual examples, making this a hyper-text, a multi-modal way of knowing. It is a tour de force." —Deborah Kapchan, author of Theorizing Sound Writing "In this engrossing ethnography [Goodman] brings to life the excitements, hopes and disappointments of their staged cultural encounter. We are shown in fascinating detail what lies behind and before the tour: the actors' intense disciplined dedication to avant garde theatre practices, the political and economic constraints of contemporary Algeria, the labour of translation, the performance traditions of the Algerian market place.... Subtle, searching and empathetic, with touches of wry humor, Goodman's study will become an instant classic in anthropology, theatre and performance studies." —Karin Barber, London School of Economics, author of A History of African Popular Culture

ONE

THE CUSTOMER AND THE ATTENDANT

Desire, Disappearance, and Disenfranchisement in Neoliberalizing Algeria

The Customer is desperate. He can barely keep it together. He enters the Restroom groaning, his hand plastered over his mouth, straining to hold in the words that he knows will spew out if he lets down his guard. The Attendant is puzzled: Who is this new client? What does he need? Unable to get the Customer to respond, he at first takes him for hearing impaired and tries to direct him to the School for the Deaf. Finally, the Customer takes his hand off his mouth and begs the Attendant to let him “jump, stomp, holler, release the pain.” The Attendant is put off. After all, he’s trying to run a business. His house rules don’t allow for stomping and screaming. But the Customer is persistent. He starts telling the Attendant his story.

When Abdelkader Alloula started writing Et-Teffeh in 1991, he and his characters were living through the most significant social and political upheaval in independent Algeria’s history. The short version is often told like this: On October 5, 1988, Algerians took to the streets to protest a variety of ills: skyrocketing unemployment, severe housing shortages, soaring prices, scarcity of basic goods, and a general sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and their government. During six days of street riots, army tanks fired on the crowds, killing several hundred and injuring many more.¹ The government regained control by promising political reforms. Then-president Chadli Bendjedid rapidly put through a new constitution in February 1989 that permitted the creation of independent political parties and paved the way for democratic elections. Seemingly overnight, Algeria went from a single-party socialist stronghold governed since independence by the National Liberation Front (Front National de Libération, FLN) to a fluid electoral field featuring some sixty new parties, including the burgeoning Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique de Salut, FIS).² In 1991, Algeria appeared to be on a path to democracy.³

When the Customer and the Attendant were born of Alloula’s pen in 1991, Algeria was also on the brink of the Dark Decade. The Islamic Salvation Front, having won municipal elections in June of 1990, was poised to take over the national parliament in December of 1991. The FIS had swept the first round of national elections, but their victory was short-lived. In a military-backed coup on January 3, 1992, the second round of elections was canceled and President Bendjedid was forced to resign. A small group of cadres calling themselves the High Council of State (Haut Comité d’Etat, HCE) took the reins, calling revolutionary war figure Mohamed Boudiaf back from exile in Morocco to head the state. The FIS, made illegal, formed a military wing (the Armée Islamique de Salut, AIS) and entered into what became a widespread civil war that would claim between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand lives over the next eight years.⁴ On June 29, 1992, Boudiaf was assassinated.

Just after I arrived in the country to begin my dissertation fieldwork in ­August 1992, the international airport in Algiers was bombed, killing 9 and injuring 128 (McDougall 2017, 307). First police and government officials became targets of violence, followed by reporters and writers, artists and singers, intellectuals, foreigners, and ordinary Algerians. I left the country in December 1993, four days after a “foreigners: leave or die” fatwa (religious opinion) went into effect.⁵ Abdelkader Alloula tragically succumbed to an assassin’s bullet four days after he was shot outside his home on March 10, 1994.

The intense years from the riots of 1988 to the coup d’état in 1992 and its tragic aftermath can be readily incorporated into a scenario of populist uprising like that often marshalled in popular discourse surrounding the Arab Spring. In this scenario, the people, fed up with their authoritarian rulers, rise up against them, experience a brief but exhilarating surge of democratic aspiration, but are quelled in the end. Such an account, however, obscures the ways that Algeria had already been moving toward political pluralism and economic liberalization before 1988 and would continue to do so during the Dark Decade. On the ground, the process was not linear but contingent, stemming more from internecine, factionalized power struggles than from any centrally orchestrated plan. These struggles show that Algeria’s transition was motivated not by an altruistic demand for liberty and justice that exploded onto the scene in 1988, but by a more implosive process that saw pressures for liberalization mounting from any number of sectors.⁶

From the vantage point of the Center Stage tour, the stories of the Customer and the Attendant convey an “intimate” and “gritty” sense⁷ of what it can feel like to live into the kinds of precarity often associated with neoliberal transformation.⁸ These characters (like many of the Algerians they are meant to represent) did not experience neoliberalism as a named political-economic formation but as an “atmosphere” (Anderson 2016) that was as much affective as economic. Affect, writes Kathleen Stewart, “is the common-place, labor-intensive process of sensing modes of living as they come into being” (2010, 34). As an atmosphere, neoliberalism could be sensed but not seen, encountered but not identified. It was one of those “barely coherent, amorphous backgrounds that people adjust to, live with and dwell in” (Anderson 2016, 8). It was like the air: present but invisible, permeating everything but barely palpable. It emerged in fragmented, momentary encounters. It came into people’s lives almost the way a dream does: People sense something that they can’t quite articulate but that lingers with them, sometimes troubling and sometimes hopeful, unfolding in unpredictable sequences that often do not make sense until later (or just as often, never at all).

In 1991, the Customer was not yet experiencing the violence to come, but he was living the kinds of explosive frustrations that would leave him begging for a place to holler and shout, to stomp his feet, to release his pain. The hopeful prospect of being able to buy an apple became the point at which his life started to unravel. In the Restroom, the Customer vomited up the bile accumulated by his generation: of those who could no longer provide for their families, who saw their jobs vanish overnight, who could find no justice, who could not purchase a simple apple. The Customer’s stories speak of tantalizing desire that is just out of reach, of apples that can be seen and smelled but not consumed. They speak of jobs and entire factories that disappear overnight without warning or explanation. They speak of the Customer’s initial sense of hope as he goes to the courts only to be dashed when he finds a system stacked against him. They speak of desire, disappearance, and disenfranchisement. The Attendant’s story offers a counterpoint. Formerly a labor union steward, he lost his job and had to start over from scratch, becoming an entrepreneur who set up a new business in the Restroom.

The Istijmam actors, as gouals or storytellers, animated the stories of the Customer and the Attendant some twenty-five years later, using the play and the tales it tells as a springboard to revisit memories of that era and critically evaluate their own present. Fragmented recollections of the years when the play was written inform Istijmam’s 2016 encounter with the play as the actors (born between 1979 and 1987) came to see Algeria’s present through the shards of events and memories from their childhood and adolescence. The actors could use their own present, informed by their knowledge of what had happened to Algeria since the early 1990s, to talk about Algeria’s past in ways that were inaccessible to the Customer and the Attendant.

Figure 1.1. Talking about the play in rehearsal, Oran, Algeria, August 2016. Left to right: Mustapha, Jamil, Moussa, Jane, Rihab. Photo credit: Istijmam Culturelle.

This chapter moves between the encounters in the Restroom between the Customer and the Attendant and the encounters of the Istijmam actors with these characters in 2016. Stories of desire, disappearance, and disenfranchisement emerge from both the characters in the play and the actors as they talked about the play. The stories the Customer and Attendant told each other in the Restroom speak of the Algeria of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which Alloula was writing. These stories are told not as linear arcs but as fragments. From the perspectives of the Customer and the Attendant, Algeria’s transition to neoliberalism took shape in episodic and uneven ways. It was through messy, inchoate encounters like theirs that most Algerians began to feel their way into new economic times. The experiences of the Istijmam actors as they got to know the play’s characters were likewise conveyed to me in fragments—sometimes as we discussed the play together in rehearsal, other times in one-on-one interviews. Alloula’s own writing style similarly employs not a linear narrative but rather story fragments that together convey something of his characters’ encounters with the new world that they were beginning to inhabit. Similarly, this chapter uses an episodic, storytelling style to convey a sense of the moment when the play was written and the actors’ later reencounter with that historical moment as they prepared to bring Apples to the United States.

DESIRE: FROM APPLES TO APPLES^®

The Customer’s wife, Khouira, is pregnant. Her body is crying out for a luscious red apple, but apples do not grow in Algeria. When they can be found at all, they are a luxury product that only the privileged can afford. Khouira insists, however, that she can smell fresh apples when she goes up to the roof to hang out her clothes. Now she cannot get the enticing scent out of her mind. Her husband sets out to follow the smell. It leads him to a local fruit and vegetable stand, its products displayed on the street for passersby to see. A crowd has gathered, staring silently at an unusual sight: a case of shiny red apples. But it turns out that they are not for sale. The grocer had rented them for two days, thinking that by displaying the apples, he could attract more customers. Yet the Customer is desperate. “How much?” he cries out. A neighbor standing behind him unceremoniously covers the Customer’s mouth, whispering, “Behave yourself!” How has the Customer not understood, the neighbor says, that the apples are not for the likes of him, a simple factory worker? Isn’t it enough just to see and smell the apples? But the Customer is not content to simply “breathe these heavenly perfumes.” He struts to the middle of the crowd and makes a scene. The crowd, aghast, pushes him away, telling him to “shut up” and accusing him of “ruining our lives.” The grocer goes so far as to close the store, zinging the Customer with a well-known proverb: “The donkey can’t appreciate cinnamon.” Suddenly afraid, the Customer retreats.

We next see him in an imaginary conversation with his wife. “Oh, Khouira . . . why did you choose apples? Don’t you see the misery I’m living? Don’t you see that nobody can afford fruit in our country? It’s only for the rich, the businessmen and politicians, or people at death’s door. People like us are only allowed to desire walnuts, carobs, and jujube fruits, dear Khouira.” {Video 01.01}

When they were written into life, the Customer and the Attendant were already adults with established careers. The Customer had five children (with a sixth on the way) and a steady factory job. The Attendant had had a prior career in the labor union. They had no doubt come of age in the decade surrounding Algeria’s revolution (1954–1962). They had experienced the heady postcolonial years of the 1960s. Perhaps they started working during the prosperous 1970s, when Algeria’s economy was roaring with hydrocarbon wealth and the country was being characterized as the “Mediterranean dragon” (Martinez 2012). They most certainly experienced the acute recession of the mid-1980s, when the price of oil and gas plummeted on the world market and the Algerian economy started to fall apart.⁹

The Customer did not describe the changes he saw happening around him in terms of neoliberalism. This was not a term that a factory worker like the Customer would have used or likely even seen at the time. But he did have a word to characterize the changes he saw happening around him: democracy. For the briefest of periods in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the prospect of democracy in Algeria was potent and at times exhilarating. I spent a month in the country in 1990 as the national electoral field was t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Videos
• Introduction
• 1. The Customer and the Attendant: Desire, Disappearance, and Disenfranchisement in Neoliberalizing Algeria
• 2. Restaging the Halqa: From Algerian Market to Global Marketplace
• 3. On the Road: Cultural Encounters in Cosmopolitan Times
• 4. Behind the Scenes: The Disciplines of Rehearsal
• 5. Encounters in Translation: How Et-Teffeh Became Apples
• Epilogue: Apples in America
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author