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Enter the Theatre (in between) HELENE CIXOUS TRANSLATED BY BRIAN J. MALLET Editors' Note: Modem Drama is pleased to present Helene Cixous's "Enter the Theatre," the original text of a special guest lecture she delivered in English at the University ofToronto on 30 September 1999. Cixous's visit was sponsored by the Drama Program and Sexual Diversity Program of the Department of French, University College, and by the Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies. We are grateful to Professor Jeannelle Savona for her help in acquiring the text, to Brian J. Mallet for his translation, and of course to Helene Cixous herseiffor permission to publish her lecture. Everything began in 1940 and up to 1948 in my very early childhood before consciousness, thought, with a play without an author, which was history itself, Res gestae, the theatre of which was the centre of my native city Oran. The core of Oran had by chance the shape of the Theatre, I only realized it fifty years later. The scene was the Place d'Armes - to the right the MuniCipal Theatre, to the left the Military Club and the pharmacy. On the comer Les Deux Mondes, my aunt Deborah's tobacconist's which was Ali Baba's Cave and the first version of the chorus. I myself was in the upper circle of Philippe Street and 1 could see the history of the entire world played out before me. This history was structured by a twofold plot. One world was trying to annihilate one world. In the first plot Nazism plus Vichyism and the fascisms were trying to destroy the wavering democracies, the champions of eternal moral values. In the second plot these same forces of good were divided and half evil, colonialist , misogynistic, repressive. From the upper circle where I climbed onto the rails, flanked by the hen, I wondered how in this entanglement of violent evil forces and good forces, and where it was impossible to separate a pure good from any kind of morbid or diabolical attack, anything other than a tragic ending could be expected. I could not see any possibility of this on the stage. I Modern Drama, 42 (Fall 1999) 301 302 HELENE CIXOUS was three-and-a-half, four years old and searching with all my strength for a beyond. My German family was in the concentration camps, my grandmother had just managed 1 0 escape. She had come to us in Algeria where we were witnesses and hostages to many major and secondary persecutions. From everywhere there loomed the forms of exclusion, exile or massacre. I also saw Fortinbras de Gaulle and the Allies enter the Place d'Armes. We were liberated but the Algerians were more enslaved than ever. Democracy showed itself to be a dream, a word. There was no justice, no equality, no respect. Almost no courage. I was on the verge of despair. The world is tragic. If I did not give up hope, it was because my family was without sin and my father was a young doctor true-spirited and incorruptible. But then he died at thirty-nine. What are the gods doing meanwhile? And we who are small and threatened, what can we do? "If there is a somewhere else," I would say to myself, "which can escape the infernal practice of repetition. then it is there that new wor1 ds are written, dreamed, invented." Such was my obsession and my need. Is there a somewhere else? Where? It has to be invented. This is the mission of poets. Assuming that there are any. And that they are not cast into the triturator of history before they have even created. Decades later I am attending the performance of my plays, and what do I see? That they had begun before I wrote, in Oran, Algeria. In the meantime I have not stopped asking myself with growing ·astonishment what evil is, experiencing it in increasingly stupefying and painful ways, trying to understand its structure, machine, ineluctability. And feeling myself cast as the keeper of after-lives (I do not say lives - after-lives) or Night light. The mission entrusted to me by my father I...

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