Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in Performance

Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in PerformanceI CHIN WOON PING This essay uses my play Psycho Wracks as a point of departure from which to explore exilic dimensions of postcolonial experience and discourse. It also investigates the possibilities of feminist performance practices as countercanonical approaches that are both critical and recuperative. In creating the play Psycho Wracks, based on the figure of Sycorax, I was not so much interested in rethinking The Tempest or extending understanding of Shakespeare (though, as discussed later, certain postcolonial and feminist interrogations of his work were relevant to my aims) as I was concerned with abstracting and meditating upon her character as a trope and a springboard for allusive, parodic, and ironic creation.2 Rewriting Sycorax, I was primarily focused on resurrecting the exiled feminine or the exilic consciousness of the banished subaltern female, an endeavor built on a meditation upon absence, literal and symbolic. Mulling over the implications of her "difference" and her history (or lack thereof), I began imagining the possibility of speaking through and for her in performance. Numerous issues and questions concerning her genealogy , subjectivity, characterization, iconicity, and significance coalesced for me around one central question: what would she say, were she to stage a return? This essay traces the theoretical, historical and dramatic considerations underpinning the creation of my play, particularly certain feminist and postcolonial issues related to concepts of exile, muteness, and displacement. Situating Sycorax within the context of Shakespeare's play, I first searched for clues to her characterization before considering the implications of such characterization for contemporary postcolonial identities and terrains of diaspora and deracination. I also look at previous attempts to revise Shakespeare's The Tempest as forms of what Helen Tiffin calls "canonical counter-discourse" (qtd. in Gilbert and Tompkins [6), that is, as "counter" texts rewriting Shakespeare in ways that retain certain recognizable signifiers while altering strucModern Drama. 46: I (Spring 2003) 94 Sycorax Revisited 95 Photo: Psycho Wracks, at t~c Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. Courtesy Corky Lee. lUres of power and affiliation. Finally, in order to reveal the thinking behind some of the choices made in enacting strategies of selfhood, emergence, and empowennent. and to contextualize the play within contemporary performance practice, this essay also outlines artistic influences on the creation of Psycho Wracks. Sycorax's characterization in The Tempest hinges crucially on Caliban's, beginning with his angry, righteous references to his progeniture. (Significantly , the paternal remains unmentioned, suggesting not only his illegitimate birth but, as well, a further absence.) In act I, scene 2 of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Caliban's famous speech can clearly be read as a paradigm for the first contact between native and colonizer and the subsequent betrayal of the native's trust by the latter. Protesting his disenfranchisement and enslavement by Prospero, he reminds his captor of his rights by invoking the name of his mother while recounting a classic narrative of colonialism: "This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, I Which thou tak'st from me" (1.2.332-33). Other references to Sycorax in the play present a simultaneously demonized and victimized figure. who, on the one hand possesses supernatural magical powers (we are told later that she is "one so strong I That could control the CHIN WOON PING moon, make flows and ebbs" [5. I .268--