Can the Child Testify?: On Childhood, Testimony, and the Cultural Construction of the Child as Political Subject

In February 2009, the English playwright Caryl Churchill presented her work, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, at the Royal Court in London, England. Her ten-minute play, directed in this performance by Dominic Cooke, was staged free of charge. The play consists of seven events in Jewish history, including, for example, the Holocaust, the establishment of the Israeli state, the first intifada, and the expropriation of water supplies, and concluding with the recent Israeli onslaught in Gaza in January of 2009. Each scene in this production was performed by a different actor. Churchill has made the text of the play and a performance directed by Elliot Smith readily available on the Internet. In Smith's production, the play is performed by one woman, Jennie Stoller. In performing all parts, Stoller is seen and heard speaking in a series of oppositional imperative sentences, as if she is talking to another adult or other adults, telling them what to say or not to say to an absent Jewish female child in order to explain the meaning of each of the events. Churchill's directorial comments in the text of the play made available on the web through the Royal Court Theatre are as follows:

No children appear in the play. The speakers are adults, the parents and if you like other relations of the children. The lines can be shared out in any way you like among those characters. The characters are different in each small scene as the time and child are different. They may be played by any number of actors.

Here is an excerpt from the play, taken from the part where Jewish settlers are living in the former Palestinian territory. The adult voice exhorts the listener to instruct the child in the following manner:

Don't tell her she can't play with the children Don't tell her she can have them in the house.Tell her they have plenty of friends and familyTell her for miles and miles all round they havelands of their ownTell her again this is our promised land.Don't tell her they said it was a land without peopleDon't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.Tell her maybe we can share.Don't tell her that.

The text is performed on the basis of this dialogic tension, "tell"/"don't tell." What conditions the rhetorical action of the play is the way the audience is positioned as witness to the crisis of Jewish individuals who, visibly torn by internal and external pressures of censorship, desire to say one thing but are compelled to say another. What becomes apparent in the oscillation between the sayable and the unsayable is that "truth" is overdetermined in the sense that a regime of veridiction exists due not only to historical realities, but also to the fear of violence. The play incited a good deal of controversy (see Henry; Jacobson); charges of anti-Semitism, rebuttals, and defences abounded, including the making of another play, titled Seven Other Children: A Theatrical Response to "Seven Jewish Children," by Richard Stirling. As with Churchill's play, Stirling's response was performed free of charge in London, England during May 2009. Stirling's intent was to demonstrate the "distorted education of many Palestinians about Israel, Israelis and Jews" (qtd. in Nathan).

Churchill's play "works" on the basis of an absent child, gendered female, about whom the ostensible instructions are directed. (In Stirling's adaptation, the child is male.) This absent child constitutes a subject position that may be filled by the promise of a better future or by the overdeterminations of fear and suffering as they are made to continue into the present and future of Palestinian and Israeli political relations. This rhetorical figure of absence is a powerful subject position, in part because it is the figure of the child, in all its connotations of fragility and vulnerability, that is being recalled here, being female making such vulnerability all the more extreme. But...