Afterword: Theatre and Exile

Afterword: Theatre and Exile VERONIKA AMBROS, DANIELLE COU TURE, YA NA MEERZO N Exile;s strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. -Said 173 Contemporary history and politics make it clear that exile is still, and perhaps more than ever, an overwhelming political, economic, and cultural dilemma. Former ideological battles have shifted only to give way to new ones. War continues to create trauma. People continue to experience exile and displacement . The performative practices and theories touched upon in this special issue of Modern Drama show how drama and theatre can explore memories. traumata, joy, and injuries associated with the exilic experience. The articles also suggest that theatre can describe, explain, tell, enact, and cope with the experience of exile in ways that other media, such as journalism. fiction , photography , or film, cannot. As a dynamic medium of performance, embodiment , and movement, theatre can make space for the displaced to tell their story publicly; in performance, the experience of exile can be personified, given a real voice and body. Reading an account of exile on the page is a very different experience than witnessing a performance of exile in a communal and confrontational context that can readily juxtapose exilic and non-exilic perspectives in the same space. The rendering of the exilic experience onto the moving body. its scars, its intonation and pronunciation, in addition to the text's narrative structure can reveal and intensify the effects of exile, much more than printed words can. Theatre can also give meaning and weight to silence, to what cannot be said out of horror or fear or the inadequacy of language. The articles in this issue call into question the very tcnn "exile": the authors do not use it uniformly, nor do the people about whom they write. The "exile" may just as likely be called an asylum seeker, a refugee, an emigrant, or a Modern Drama, 46:1 (Spring 2003) 11 9 120 VERONIKA AMBROS, DANIELLE COUTURE, YANA MEERZON diasporic subject. While these tenns may mean different things, the authors and the people about whom'they write use them, Janice B. Gross in particular makes the point that the Algerian playwrights about whom she writes do not all refer to themselves as exiles. Mary Trotter refers to how Irish emigrants were considered exiles in the early decades of the twentieth century. Elaine Aston writes about asylum seekers, while Dragan Klaic focuses on refugees. At the same time as Edward Said distinguishes between these different labels in his "Reflections on Exile," he also concedes that "it is true, that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile" (181). ' In the theatre, the "exile" may be the playwright, the performer, the character , or the spectator, and representations of exile may be factual or fictional, metaphorical or metonymical, internalized or externalized. In this issue, exile captures the point of view of personal experience as well as theatrical creation , subject matter, performance, and reception. Many of the plays discussed here explore exile through monologue, direct-address, parody, humour, and other strategies designed to defend against over-sentimentalizing and romanticizing the topic: in the theatre, there is no single poetics of exile. Like all theatre, exilic theatre implies translation; the very transfer of dramatic text into a stage perfonnance involves the merging of multiple semantic and semiotic systems. Exilic theatre demands the ability to recognize foreign signs and to learn new cultural codes. Exilic theatre may also impose or draw upon additional cultural, political, and linguistic codes that may make theatrical production and reception more complex. and that can place a special burden upon spectators. Exilic theatre demands (he ability to recognize foreign signs and to learn new cultural codes, in addilion to the possibility of imposing or drawing upon additional cultural, political, and linguistic codes that may make theatrical production and reception more complex. The "foreignness " inherent in exilic theatre challenges audience reception in that it is not necessarily easy to decipher and decode what one cannot recognize. The spectator has to work harder to find or make meaning but this work generates the rewards that come from recognizing something anew or for the first lime. Some contemporary theatres address these issues by...