Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969

5. Responsibility Unveiled: Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul

5 Responsibility Unveiled Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul Written in the late 1990s, Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul has been called “uncanny” and “eerily prescient” for anticipating and addressing the violence between the United States and Afghanistan leading up to and sustained after 9/11.1 Kushner explains that he had been thinking about Kabul and the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States since the 1980s.2 As for the prescience of the play, Kushner remarked that if a playwright could anticipate terrorism and reprisal, the real question should be, why was Washington and the U.S. press looking the other way?3 What was the nation attending to when the 9/11 hijackers were plotting destruction? Ahh, 1998...Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, the blue dress. The widespread mock surveillance marking that event seems like a parodist’s prologue to the post-9/11 climate of surveillance: Linda Tripp recording phone calls, Monica Lewinsky saving forensic evidence in her closet, the rumor of Abu Ghraib–style photos of the president’s genitals. If Kushner is viewed as “eerily prescient,” eerier still is the redeployment of the Clinton-Lewinsky costume box: the blue dress became the burkha, 140 Chapter 5 extralegal wiretapping and other forms of surveillance were mobilized to catch foreign rather than domestic “evil-doers,” and rumors of lurid photos gave way to stacks of naked bodies at Abu Ghraib.4 They became us. Nathan Zuckerman’s defense of Bill Clinton in Roth’s 2000 novel The HumanStain—“Theyoughttohangabanneroutsidethewhitehouse...that says ‘A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE’”—is an attempt to humanize and universalize the seemingly strange and perverse (3). That novel’s representation of monstrosity without monsters helpfully forecast global politics after 9/11. Though these distinctions, human and inhuman, were not part of public rhetoric in 1998, they certainly comprised the subsequent framing of global politics after 9/11. Along with the widely circulating dichotomies of “freedom-lovers/freedom-haters” and “with us/against us,” where “freedom” and “us” are the presumed stable terms of virtue, defining enemies as negations, we find the rhetorical dichotomy of “human/inhuman.” Subsequent U.S. intervention involved politically aligning with those in Iraq and Afghanistan whose values reportedly most matched our own and waging war on their behalf against agents of terror, totalitarian dictators, and “fundamentalists.” Remarkably, if temporarily, the poster-person for the humanity we sought to liberate was the Muslim—especially Afghani— woman, who, beneath the burkha and despite her having been denied an education by the state and, often, her family, despite her grinding poverty, despite her lifelong experience with invasion, war, ethnocide, and regardless of her professions of fidelity to Islam, was in fact, like “us.” This chapter, focusing on Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul but containing a significant detour into popular depictions of the veiled Afghan woman, is about the politics and ethics of recognition and responsibility , especially as it pertains to the Western engagement with Afghanistan. Here I advance the book’s claim that Jewish writers continue to excavate the normative bases for contemporary thinking on national identity, universal human rights, and concomitant accounts of universal human being. Though geographically more cosmopolitan than Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint , where Portnoy’s psychology provides the provincial frame through which he sees the United States and Israel, the play and the novel circulate a common exposure of the social and theoretical structures that sustain inequality, domestic or global. Homebody/Kabul’s characters are not conscious agents manipulating a corrupt system, as Roth’s Portnoy is, but privileged Western consumers who are dimly aware that Western zones of Responsibility Unveiled 141 safety are sustained through opportunistic and exploitative relations with the developing world. However, unlike Portnoy and every other literary text under review here, Homebody/Kabul is not about Jewish characters, let alone Jewish history, geography, or identity. Kushner does not juxtapose Jewish cosmopolitanism with histories of nationalism and civil rights, as Segal does, for instance. On the contrary, Kushner’s characters experience their Western privilege as something like oblivion and are far too caught up in personal problems to think clearly about the global arrangements of rights. Even the title character, the Homebody, who indeed feels guilt over third-world suffering, loathes what she considers her own self-serving affectation . The play’s social and ethical dramas, then, are wrapped around personal and domestic dramas; his cosmopolitan characters are in fact provincial after...