Caryl Churchill's The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution: Algerian Decolonization (Re)viewed in a Protean Contemporary Context

Caryl Churchill's The Hospital at the Time ofthe Revolution: Algerian Decolonization eRe)viewed in a Protean Contemporary Context IRIS LA VELL In 1972 Caryl Churchill wrote The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, a stage play based on Algeria's struggle in the nineteen-fifties against the French Occupation,l Many of the characters were inspired by case studies in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched ofthe Earth and the central character is based on Fanon himself. The text raises pertinent questions about the strategic application of power by oppressive political forces, the mechanisms of which are particularly visible in times of crisis, and about the fonns and consequences of retaliation by oppressed peoples. Churchill addresses acts of terrorism as part of a continuum of oppression and retaliation, the dynamic of which reveals pathological behaviour in both the colonized and the colonizer. This paper explores the complications of the construction of colonizer and colonized in Hospital, complications that are too frequently ignored by contemporary history. Citing instances of torture and terrorist bombings and their disparate constructions by colonizer and colonized, Hospital above all suggests that the dynamics of power are played out largely in the arena of representation. It demonstrates that the symbolic employment of power occurs before, during, and after its physical realization. The interaction between the power that is demonstrated through physical violence and the power produced via language is shown to be symbiotic inasmuch as the physical imposition of force establishes supremacy while the rhetoric of truth "justifies" the use of institutionalized violence. Thus force is seen as an indispensable and fundamental. strategy used to reify and rationalize the manner in which the truth is couched. In The Body ill Pain Elaine Scarry argues this point with regard to the relationship of the interrogation process to tOrture (19-20; see also 27- 59). Drawing on Amnesty International documents across a range of countries, she illustrates that there is a reciprocal link between the representation of power and its physical implementation: Modern Drama, 45:1 (Spring 2002) Churchill and Decolonization IAlt particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief - that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population's beliefeither because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation - the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of "realness" and "certainty." (14) 77 Representation - in terms of the exercise of power - is currently being manipulated in the political arena in a particularly unilateral manner in the aftermath of the attacks on and by the U.S. following the events of I I September 200 I. There has been a tendency by the conservative presses of the "West" to interpret the attack on the World Trade Centre as the point at which this particular historical chapter commenced. The assault continues to be portrayed as unprovoked and inexplicable, and dissenting debate in the popular press has typically been discouraged.' In association with this there has been an almost tangible pressure to move away from the confusion of complexity into the clarity of simplicity, that is, to perceive the events purely in binary terms. This has involved a strategic conflation of disparate elements - the terrorist with the country that harbours the terrorist, with the race and religion of the terrorist, with his posited disregard of women, children, and the innocent, and more recently with President Bush's "axis of eviL"3In the process, individuals have been tactically brought in and out of focus, as an acknowledgment of suffering at the human level from one side has been used to legitimize the infliction of often unacknowledged suffering on the other side. Integral to this binary conceptualization is the way in which a single subjectivity is assumed and race and gender are covertly invoked to anchor easy preconceptions and reinforce existing power relalionships.4 Churchill's text explores, in satirical fashion, precisely these representational tactics for a historical situation that bears some resemblance to the current conflict. She brings into visibility the processes used to interpret events following retaliatory aggression...