Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul: Staging History in a Post-colonial World

Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.

—Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration

To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). ... The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves—because they are so defined by others—by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

—Salman Rushdie, "The Location of Brazil"

A few minutes into the astonishing hour-long monologue that begins Tony Kushner's new play, Homebody/Kabul, ¹ the Homebody, a middle-aged, middle-class English housewife with a voracious appetite for uncommon words and dusty books, hesitates, looks directly at us, smiles ruefully, searches the antiquarian shelves of her mind for exactly the right way to make her apology, and then declares:

I speak ... I can't help myself. Elliptically. Discursively. I've read too many books, and that's not boasting, for I haven't read many books, but I've read too many, exceeding I think my capacity for syncresis—is that a word?—straying rather into synchisis, which is a word. So my diction, my syntax, well, it's so irritating, I apologize, I do, it's very hard, I know. To listen. I blame it on the books, how else to explain it? My parents don't speak like this; no one I know does; no one does. It's an alien influence, and my borders have only ever been broached by books. Sad to say. Only ever been broached by books. Except once, briefly. Which is I suppose the tale I'm telling, or rather, trying to tell. ²

Syncresis is not a word, but it resembles syncrisis (a rhetorical figure comparing diverse objects or subjects) and syncretic (the reconciliation of opposing beliefs or practices). It is a portmanteau that articulates a paradox. Synchisis, on the other hand, denotes, according to the OED, "a confused arrangement of words in a sentence, obscuring the meaning." What then might it mean for the mind to stray from syncresis to synchisis, from paradox to confusion? How does this affect the telling of stories? Is there an aesthetic and political consequence to making a character speak in a manner that rejects easy access to meaning, and to making a narrative that defies coherence, that maneuvers circuitously through multiple histories in order to arrive at its own irresolution?

The monologue relates two histories: one confessional, private, intimate (the life of the Homebody and her encounter with an Afghani storekeeper), the other violent, sociopolitical, public (a short history of Afghanistan). Both shift from the linear to the tangential to the barely comprehensible and back again as if to anatomize the exhausted overflowing of a contemporary mind tangled, for want of a better diagnosis, by the "posts"—the post-modern, the post-colonial, the post-structural (though perhaps not the post-national, post-feminist, or post-human). The Homebody suffers a pathological inability to get to the point, or more accurately, an inability to get to the point except by way of many, many other points. Her affliction derives as much from the dilemma she formulates partway through the monologue&#8212...