Other People's Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy, and Justice in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror

The one-woman shows of Anna Deavere Smith combine journalism and performance art to explore the often-violent misunderstandings among different cultural communities. For both Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities (1993) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), Smith interviewed many of the actual protagonists in two traumatic urban conflicts that had riveted the nation. By deft editing, she then turned their words into a series of dramatic monologues and by imitation transformed their language, vocal mannerisms, gestures, and clothes into theatrical experiences that test the audience's social conscience. As Anne Anlin Cheng observes, "On Smith's multiethnic stage, it is precisely the ethical question of point of view that is being explored," as diverse characters move back and forth between grief and grievance, or between a mourning for loss and a demand for justice (171). In Fires in the Mirror, the ensuing cacophony grows most heated when speakers invoke the rhetoric of holocaust, including the Jewish Holocaust and the black experience of enslavement.¹ There is something both illuminating and limiting about this rhetoric, as Smith's performance demonstrates. In Crown Heights, each group has experienced a terrible loss—the accidental death of a young boy, the stabbing death of a rabbinical student—that becomes rhetorically attached to foundational historical traumas that lie at the center of that group's cultural identity. In figuratively swearing to never forget these losses, each community both endures a kind of melancholy of unresolved grief and, at the same time, strengthens its identity by keeping alive the memory of what has been lost. As their speeches incite our empathy, however, they also create competing and contradictory narratives that make it difficult for the audience to take sides or to form a united community sure of where justice lies.

In the introduction to their anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David L. Eng and David Kazanjian call for a "politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive," and they suggest that "a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects" (2–3).² In Fires in the Mirror, Smith enacts such a politics of mourning, taking it across ethno-racial and religious boundaries. By identifying with, acting out, and working through multiple points of view on cross-cultural conflicts, she endeavors to represent and depathologize the attachments that fuel them.³ Smith's impersonations do justice to each character's interpretation of events by grounding that individual's world view in exquisitely rendered details of locality and personality. Smith arranges the order of her monologues to highlight how they dialogue with and contradict one another; in so doing, her performances make reconciliation into a problem at once emotional, epistemological, social, and political. Smith intends audiences and readers to engage in the same labor of unsettling cross-cultural empathy with loss that she herself performs on stage; if we do, the result complicates our commitments by challenging the identity politics that influence them. In the process we become more accountable to each other's griefs and grievances and thus enter into a difficult negotiation of ethical, social, and political demands. Reconciling the competing claims of different stories, however, becomes especially problematic when each side invokes the rhetoric of holocaust to frame its tale, not least because the effort to "work through" trauma toward personal or social reconciliation runs headlong into the imperative to remain true to the lost.

Surprisingly, commentaries on Smith's work pay little attention to how black and Jewish holocaust discourse shapes the language and perspective of her characters. While my analysis belongs to the general effort to connect Holocaust studies and cultural studies, it specifically answers Paul Gilroy's injunction to set "the histories of blacks and Jews within modernity in some sort of mutual relation." Aware of the dangers involved in comparing slavery and the Holocaust, Gilroy nonetheless contends that the "issues of tradition and memory provide a key to...