Theatre and Human Rights after 1945

Things Unspeakable

Mary Luckhurst, Emilie Morin, Mary Luckhurst, Emilie Morin, Mary Luckhurst, Emilie Morin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137362308
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This volume investigates the rise of human rights discourses manifested in the global spectrum of theatre and performance since 1945. Essays address topics such as disability, discrimination indigenous rights, torture, gender violence, genocide and elder abuse.

Part I

Colonial Legacies and the Unspeakable

1

Unspeakable Tragedies: Censorship and the New Political Theatre of the Algerian War of Independence

Emilie Morin

The word ‘unspeakable’ is ubiquitous in accounts of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In this context, unspeakability works as shorthand for legal and political issues that are still deeply contested, and are indexed to the use of torture by the French army and the guerrilla war led by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian war had roots in colonial realities and French assimilationist aspirations – more precisely, in the tiered system of civic and voting rights that categorized the majority of Algerians as French subjects, but not French citizens, in Algeria’s distinctive administrative status as a French province, rather than a colony or a protectorate, and in the dedication of the large community of French settlers or pied-noirs to a French Algeria.¹ In French public discourse, the word ‘war’, largely banished, was commonly replaced by euphemisms such as the ‘Algerian problem’, ‘counter-insurgency operations’, a ‘law-and-order problem’ or ‘pacification’, in order to avoid giving credence to the idea that a civil war was tearing the nation apart.² The Evian Accords ending the war in 1962 did not address its obscured status but declared a moratorium on the prosecution of all acts of violence committed during the ‘events’ and opinions voiced about the ‘events’ before the 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination.³

The consensus around the war’s unspeakability also grew from the draconian censorship legislation introduced in 1955. A national state of emergency was declared in response to the Algerian uprising, and measures were taken to give to the public authorities in France and its colonies control over the information disseminated in the national press and in radio broadcasts, print publications, dramatic performances and the cinema. Censorship was extended to all public channels of expression in 1956.⁴ If some polemical publications were indeed censored, a considerable number of war testimonies, reports and essays continued to appear and circulate.⁵ Plays occupy a neglected position in this canon of war writing; yet, as I show in this chapter, the problem of speaking about a war without a name presented itself in even more challenging and politicized terms in the theatre than in other public arenas.

It has proved difficult for historians to evaluate the political efficacy of the anti-war campaign in France, especially since expressions of dissent had to negotiate various layers of censorship and political discourse and brought together likely and unlikely advocates. But for many French intellectuals, the unspeakability of the conflict provided welcome rhetorical tools calling into question the French army’s use of torture and repression of Algerian nationalism. Notably, in an unpublished text from 1960, Maurice Blanchot denounced an ‘illegitimate, indefinable, unspeakable’ war, ‘scandalous to the point that no one has the right to name it’.⁶ The form of unspeakability invoked by Blanchot is embedded in an intellectual climate in which mass suffering and horror had acquired specific currency: the testimonies published in France in the wake of the Nuremberg trials by concentration camp survivors such as Robert Antelme and Jean Cayrol described a history that eluded the possibility of expression unless it was recognized as unsayable.⁷ To qualify the Algerian war as unspeakable, as Blanchot does, is also to probe subterranean tensions which haunted French public debate – that which Henry Rousso has termed the ‘Vichy syndrome’.⁸ Indeed the discursive registers used to summon the Algerian war or deny its existence can be perceived as attempts to repress or exorcize the spectres of the Vichy regime and French collaboration with Nazism.⁹ In 1960, Blanchot also lent his authorial hand to a controversial petition expressing support to the FLN, the ‘Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War’ (known as the ‘Manifeste des 121’), which connects in interesting ways with his other pronoucements. Emphasizing connections between past and present, the manifesto’s signatories reminded the French public that ‘fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitlerian order, French militarism [ … ] has managed to reinstate torture and to make it an institution in Europe once again’.¹⁰ Such analogies between the French army’s use of torture in Algeria and the practices of the Gestapo, relatively frequent during the 1950s and 1960s, provided a moral compass within movements of dissent across metropolitan France, enabling supporters of Algerian self-determination and detractors of torture to summon the spirit of Resistance movements which had defeated Nazism.¹¹

Dramatic writing and political militancy

This combination of intense political tension, censorship and uneasy memorialization shaped dramatic writing and performance on many levels and encouraged the production of historical dramas relying upon transposition and omission. Notable examples include Jean-Paul Sartre’s play about Nazism, Les séquestrés d’Altona (first performed in 1959), which raised troubling questions about national guilt and torture, and Emmanuel Roblès’s Plaidoyer pour un rebelle (written in 1959, published in 1965), which transposed the events leading to the execution of Fernand Yveton, an Algiers Communist and FLN militant, to another historical context, that of the Indonesian war of independence against the Dutch. The Algerian war years also yielded a corpus of plays that defied censorship and denounced torture and mass executions. These plays were, for the majority, written in French, a language which the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine memorably described in 1988 as that of a ‘neocolonial political machine’ – ‘la Francophonie’ – that ‘perpetuates our alienation’, but through which the francophone writer can account for the new forms of political consciousness fostered by anti-colonial revolutions.¹² Among these Algerian war plays, Kateb Yacine’s Le cadavre encerclé and Jean Genet’s Les Paravents have received close critical attention.¹³ But there is another, long-forgotten strand of political plays dealing directly with the conflict, and written between 1954 and 1962 by lesser-known French and Algerian playwrights such as Michel Vinaver, Xavier-Agnan Pommeret, Geneviève Baïlac, Mohamed Boudia, Henri Kréa and Hocine Bouzaher.¹⁴ Most of these war plays, it seems, were conceived or written in materially difficult conditions. Some were published before the Evian Accords, some after; some were staged, some were not. Most have not been republished since their initial print-run. The rise of this politicized strand in playwriting contrasted sharply with developments in the cinema, since the Algerian war was rarely evoked or represented directly on film.¹⁵ Some playwrights – Boudia for example, from his prison cell in France – furthered the political work conducted by the FLN’s theatre company internationally.¹⁶ Others embraced values championed by the FLN and, in doing so, offered dramatic representations of silencing that share affinities with and further the political verdicts offered by contemporaries such as Blanchot. Kréa and Bouzaher, whose dramatic works have not received much critical or public attention, belong to the latter category. Their plays, however, offer illuminating and courageous commentaries on Algerian colonial history and are to my knowledge the only dramatic texts of the period to address the problem of the war’s unspeakability and grant a historical dimension to it.

In this chapter, my focus remains on plays by Kréa and Bouzaher that represent wartime events as unspeakable, either literally or metaphorically. The plays that I discuss include Le séisme (The Earthquake) by Kréa and a collection by Bouzaher labelled as ‘militant Algerian theatre’ and entitled Des voix dans la Casbah (Voices in the Casbah). Here, literal and figurative deployments of unspeakability are not merely rhetorical or allusive – as is the case in polemical texts by Blanchot and others – but didactic: that which is unspeakable is invoked as a political metaphor, in order to pose economic and legal questions that pertain directly to civic rights and social justice after the Geneva Conventions. Both Kréa and Bouzaher published poetry alongside their plays, and their interest in poetic speech is manifest in their dramatic texts. Notably, Des voix dans la Casbah juxtaposes historically-inflected poems in the Surrealist vein, a play about torture entitled On ne capture pas le soleil (The Sun Can’t Be Captured), and a play about the abuses perpetrated in Serkaji-Barberousse, the colonial prison of Algiers in which the Algerian national anthem was written: Serkaji (à l’ombre de Barberousse) (Serkaji, in the Shadow of Barberousse).

The trajectory of these plays from manuscript to print is distinctive and sheds further light upon the obstacles faced by politically-engaged playwrights during the war years. Indeed these plays owe their publication to underground solidarities and to the willingness of radical editors, Pierre Jean Oswald and François Maspero, to work in precarious conditions. Le séisme was published by Oswald in Paris in 1958, and republished in Tunis in 1962, in Kréa’s volume Théâtre algérien, by Oswald and the Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion, the Algerian national publishing press. Oswald championed revolutionary poetry by Algerian authors, and Kréa met him through the FLN. Alongside his own publications, Oswald also printed censored testimonies of torture and tracts and brochures for the FLN and for the anti-war review Vérité-Liberté. After the French police found FLN publications in his empty car, Oswald left Paris, assisted by Maspero, and settled in Tunis in 1961, where he continued to publish work by Kréa and others.¹⁷

As the only dramatic work banned during the Algerian war, Bouzaher’s Des voix dans la Casbah holds added significance. The book inaugurated a series on revolutionary literatures conceived by Maspero and was published in December 1960 and seized in all bookshops in France and its colonies in January 1961.¹⁸ By this point, police efforts were fruitless: Maspero had publicized the book widely and few copies of the initial print-run remained.¹⁹ The author’s name had been misspelt as ‘Bouhazer’ on the book jacket, which made Bouzaher’s whereabouts impossible to trace, and Maspero as his publisher was charged with ‘insults to the army’ in May 1961.²⁰ Maspero’s commitment to documenting the war left him exposed to interventions from the courts and the police, and much of his catalogue was censored, notably Frantz Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) and Les damnés de la terre (1961).²¹ From the early months of 1961, the Editions Maspero also became a regular target of the far-right Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, campaigning for a French Algeria. Explosives were left or thrown into Maspero’s bookshop on several occasions and he was gravely injured in a street shooting.²² Dissent came, of course, at a high price for many others, and the controversies around these publications and others documenting the Algerian war show the extent to which writing and publishing were fraught with serious dangers.

Towards a new political theatre

Kréa and Bouzaher did not merely write about the war; their literary identities were radically reshaped by it. Bouzaher’s case is particularly interesting since the historical record yields not one but four different figures: the censored playwright Hocine Bouhazer, advocate of a ‘militant Algerian theatre’; the FLN militant Si Salim, whose involvement in political nationalism began in 1950 in the Guelma branch of Messali Hadj’s nationalist movement; the poet, critic and journalist Hocine Bouzaher (b. Liana 1935, d. Algiers 2010), who made a career in the Algerian petroleum industry after the war and published histories of the war of independence; and Sofiane Zuhier, the pseudonym under which Bouzaher also published poetry.²³ Bouzaher’s political activities encompassed union activism during his studies in Bordeaux, serving in the Algerian Liberation Army in 1958 and 1959 and, between 1956 and 1962, working as Editor of Edition B of Résistance Algérienne, the FLN bulletin issued from Tetouan, Morocco to political parties, embassies and the international press. He later worked as Editor of El Moudjahid alongside Frantz Fanon and Redha Malek.²⁴ There is no evidence that Bouzaher was involved in the FLN’s theatre company, but he may have seen some of its performances or read some of its plays. In the journal chronicling his years in the ALN, Bouzaher mentions attending theatre productions and, in diffuse ways, Des voix dans la Casbah responds to the FLN company’s revered play about the aftermath of the Battle of Algiers, Abdelhalim Raïs’s Les enfants de la Casbah (1959).²⁵ In 1960, Bouzaher also acted as FLN treasurer and was sent on missions between France and Germany. Because Des voix dans la Casbah was written on the run, he was unable to proofread his text, and the volume went directly into print – hence the jac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Theatre and the Rise of Human Rights
• Part I: Colonial Legacies and the Unspeakable
• Part II: Unspeakability and Ethnicity
• Part III: Returning Histories, Listening, and Trauma
• Part IV: Theatres of Advocacy and Western Liberalism
• Part V: Militancy and Contemporary Invisibilities
• Select Bibliography
• Index