Exilic Perspectives: Introduction

Exilic Perspectives: Introduction SILVIJA JESTROVIC Humpty Dumpty: Someone always has to see both sides. I am the all-inclusive dialectic between here a:nd there. If you want to know what's on the other side, you have to ask me. (Schmidt 44) Volumes could be - and indeed have been - written on the state of exile and its various dramatic and theatrical renderings, starting with the foreigners and excommunicated personages of Greek tragedies, continuing with works by Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, BUchner, and, more recently, Joyce and Brecht. Today exilic theatre and drama is further explored and re-shaped, not only through an intertextual dialogue with theatrical predecessors, but also through the contemporary experience of displacement, exile, and mass migration. The relationship between theatre and exile is perhaps now more complex than ever before. On the one hand, modem technology of both art and warfare enables a theatricalization and fictionalization of destruction, loss, dislocation, and trauma; on the other, theatre is still a means of transcending the experience of exile, of turning trauma into a creative force and turning the no man's land between languages and cultures into a fruitful soil. Theatre and drama, with their various tricks and devices from naturalistic iconicity to parody and pastiche, are able to show that behind the statistical data and the brief televised images of war and displacement, there are real people and personal stories . Moreover, live performance has a potential to be immediately politically relevant in its unmasking of power structures that wage wars and perpetuate traumas of violence, loss, and displacement under the auspices of salvation, prosperity, and security. The mass media of the global village, having simplified the experience of exile, are no longer able to depict this phenomenon in its full political, social, and cultural scope. Rather, theatrical practice and critical thought can pierce through the everyday barrage of information Modern Drama, 46:1 (Spring 2003) I 2 SILVIJA JESTROVIC and images, pointing out that the exilic experience is no longer something that happens to someone else, in some remote place. but is a part of our own reality. Contemporary exile can no longer be embodied within one cultural paradigm nor could its theatrical and dramatic renderings be expressed through a universal model. There are various kinds of exilic experiences that shape the consciousness: from the state of dislocation preceded by war or political oppression to the sense of marginalization within one's own culture; from enforced to self-imposed exile; from exile as existential necessity to exile as a moral choice or political statement. Exilic consciousness is not just a scar, reenacting over and over the moment when the wound was inflicted; rather, it turns in time into a worldview, a way of comprehending reality, and a mode of artistic thinking. The exilic perspective, intrinsic to the nomadic artist and thinker, is one of estrangement. It implies the strategy of uprooting, taking things out of their habitual context, and making them more perceptible through displacement. The exilic point of view establishes a distance from one culture but never completely integrates into another, which enables seeing both worlds from an unusual perspective. It fractures the conventional definitions of borders and national cultures, forcing a search for new models that embody more effectively a modem sense of identity, culture, and nationhood. An exilic perspective is replete with positive epistemological potential that highlights the duality between familiar and strange present in everything that we consider our own and in everything that we recognize as foreign. Theatre, at its best, appropriates this perspective and shows the world through the eyes of a foreigner, enabling us both to discover the intrinsic Otherness within the well-known and to know what's on the "other side." As an artistic and theoretical approach, an exilic perspective has the potential to illuminate various areas of theatrical and cultural practice and theory. Contemporary aspects of political exile are framed and defamiliarized through both the exilic destinies and the artistic strategies of Joseph Brodsky, Breyten Breytenbach, Reza Baraheni, Athol Fugard, Vaclav Havel, Wole Soyinka and many others. Feminist and postcolonial theory and practice have shown that the exilic state can also be internal - experienced through various kinds of...