The "Bogus Woman": Feminism and Asylum Theatre

The "Bogus Woman"; Feminism and Asylum Theatre ELAINE ASTON At the start of the twenty-first century the number of people at risk from persecution , fleeing the~r homes, and seeking asylum in another country continues to rise. Under the United Nations Convention on Refugees that reinforces the international protection promised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all people have the right to asylum from war or persecution. While the Declaration promises the "right to freedom of movement'" European coun~ tTies such as Britain, Germany, and France are also trying to initiate border control, especially as the threat of international terrorism increases. Hence there is a conflict of interest between those people who are displaced and in need of refuge, and those of whom they ask help who are looking for ways to tighten rather than to relax borders. All of this fuels an image of the asylum seeker as unwelcome suppliant and encourages racist and nationalist thinking so that seekers are viewed as "bogus" rather than genuine, despite evidence to the contrary.' As a subject of much debate and policy-making in Britain, the asylum issue has begun to surface in a number of cultural activities. These include a range of projects and events that are designed to help those coping with asylum, such as the London-based Artists in Exile scheme, funded by London Arts and supporte<\ by Riverside Studios,' as well as plays and performances that feature the asylum issue as a matter of public debate. In particular. such work is concerned to challenge the mounting hostility expressed towards asylum seekers .' On the British stage, for example, the figure of the asylum seeker surfaces in Jonathan Dove's modem opera Flight (with libretto by April de Angelis, staged by Glyndebourne Touring Opera, 1998) which is set in an airport and features a refugee who has made the airport his "home." More recently Tanika Gupta's multi-racial drama, SanetuGlY, brought asylum issues to the National Theatre, London in its "Transformation" season (2002). The increased dramatisation of the asylum issue was an important factor in Modern Drama, 46:1 (Spring 2003) 5 6 ELAINE ASTON prompting Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington to lay claim to a renaissance of political theatre on the British stage. "It's almost like the old days," wrote Billington. "Political theatre has started popping up everywhere" ("Theatre of War" 4). When he made this observation Billington especially was concerned with two productions, Kay Adshead's The Bogus Woman and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Credible Willless, perfonned within a day of each other in February 200I,5 at a lime when asylum-seekers to Britain were increasing dramatically.6These two productions also claim my attention as the subject of this essay, though in a way that complements Billington's: not just on account of their significance as political theatre, but also because of the way in which asylum figures as a feminist "subject." In seeking to persuade their theatre audiences of the very real histories and sufferings hidden within the dominant "bogus" viewpoint, The Bogus Woman and Credible Witness also show these narratives of displacement and dispossession as raced and gendered. Feminism always has concerned itself with the damage caused by the social and cultural mechanisms of "othering." With postcolonial criticism it shares an interest in the future erasure of past subjugating forces of the master-slave binary: the hierarchical arrangement of male/female, coloniser/colonised, white/black. It recognises the dangers of nation as a "state" of masculinist belonging or, as Benedict Anderson so insightfully describes it, nation as "an imagined political community 1...1 inherently limited and sovereign" (6) and desires different ways of "belonging," or non-belonging. In both The Bogus Womall and Credible Witness the liminali!y of the asylum-seeker, fleeing one country but not yet accepted by another,' centrally is staged through the racialized, female body, in a way that situates the narrative of asylum within a matrix of gender, race, and nation. If the "bogus woman" is to be believed, to be found "credible," her privileged audience of viewers must learn to see differently : they must shift their view of an imperialist past and learn to see themselves as inside (not outside) asylum histories. Moreover, the "bogus woman" also interrogates white western feminism as a site of privilege and shows a need for feminism to evolve through making cross-border connections with histories and geographies of racialized and gendered "othering." Such feminist directions, as both plays illustrate, may in turn prove significant in forging more progressive, future histories and as such deserve to be recognised as a feature of the contemporary political landscape. KAY ADS HEAD A N D TIMB ERLAKE WERTE NBA KER: FEMINIST HI STOR IE S, CONTEX TS, A ND PLAYS Primarily a perfonner in television, film, and theatre, Kay Adshead's first full length play, Thatcher'S Womell (Paines Plough, Tricycle Theatre, 1987) identifies her as a socialist-feminist writer. Thatcher's Women treats the subject of Feminism and Asylum Theatre 7 an economically divided Britain in the Thatcher years, a prosperous South and impoverished North, that forces ordinary, working-class women from the North to make their way to London to take up prostitution as a means of supporting their families back home. Tracing events in the lives of three women who make their way to London, Adshead shows an emergent concern with the migration of women whose bodies have become their only means of economic survival. for themselves and for their families. While their migration is within national borders it takes place across regional boundaries, heavily marked in 1980s Britain by a hierarchical arrangement of material privilege and disadvantage. A little over ten years later, The Bogus Woman returns Adshead to the female body as a site of abuse, but in the context of asylum. The play began as a short piece for the fringe theatre season "Seeing Red" at The Red Room, London in 1998. Launched in a pub theatre space in 1995 by Lisa Goldman and Emma Schad, "The Red Room has increasingly defined its role as a provocateur on the London new writing scene, pro-actively commissioning and developing political new writing" (Goldman 9). "Seeing Red" was the umbrella title for a series of plays taking a critical look at Britain under Tony Blair's then-recently elected New Labour government. From Thatcher's Women, Adshead had moved to Blair's asylum seekers. The Boglls Woman subsequently underwent development as a work in progress at Waterman's Arts Centre, London in June 2000. premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 2000, and transferred to The Bush Theatre , London, in February 200 I. Adshead's production company Mama Quillo was co-producer of The Boglls Woman. Described as a company "for theatre, radio, TV and film, created by women-for men and women" (Adshead, Bogus 11),8 the feminist concerns of Mama Quillo are made manifest alongside the socialist principles of Lisa Goldman's Red Room. The Bogus Woman has two, parallel stories: the atrocities in a war-lorn African country in which a young black woman's family, including her oneday -old baby, Anele, were shot on account of her human rights journalism (she herself was brutally raped by the soldiers who came for her family); and how she is treated after she manages to leave Africa for England. In the juxtaposition of the atrocities in Africa with the woman's detention in England, Adshead superimposes the treatment the young woman receives by the various British authorities with the brutality of the crimes committed against her and her family. The play ends violently: deponed by British authorities who insist that it is safe for her to go back to Africa, the woman is shot dead after her return. The Bogus Woman is written as a one-woman show9 in which the anonymous, unnamed black woman, played in the original production by Noma Dumezweni, acts out all of the character~ in her asylum-seeking story. ]n this way, the collective social realities of asylum seekers are condensed into the "fiction" of one "bogus woman." 8 ELAINE ASTON Timberlake Wertenbaker is a high profile writer on British and international stages and came to prominence in the 1980S with her widely acclaimed The Grace ofMary Traverse (1985), Our Country's Good (1988) and The Love of the Nightingale (1988). She has long-standing associations with London's premiere new writing venue, the Royal Court, dating back to the mid-I 980s, a time when "women were prominent" at the theatre. The Court "was the first theatre," she argues, "to realise that there were women out there who could write and that there was an audience for those women" (Wertenbaker, Interview in Rage and Reason 137). Her early career was also nurtured by explicitly feminist contexts: The Women's Theatre Group commissioned New Anatomies (1982) at a time when she was in financial difficulty and in need of a supportive women's environment for her writing.1O Working at the Court also brought her into contact with director Max Stafford-Clark, with whom she continues to collaborate, more recently with his company Out of Joint. 11 In brief, Wertenbaker's theatre has developed within democratically organised ensemble theatre-making methods that formally reflect her thematic engagement with a politics of collaboration. In recent years, Wertenbaker increasingly has been drawn to staging questions of citizenship and exploring ways in which Britain's history and tradition of imperialism militates against the possibilities of a more democratic configuration of European citizenship (The Break of Day [1995], After Darwin [1998], Credible Witness [ZOOI]). Her own mixed cultural background Wertenbaker is Anglo-American by birth, but was brought up in the Frenchspeaking part of the Basque country - positions her as a stranger to "the British theatrical establishment: a tolerated guest rather than a permanent resident " (Billington, "'Men Judge the Plays'" 10). It is from her position as an "outsider," however, that Wertenbaker is able to critique dominant ideologies of identity and nation. As Susan Carlson summarises, Wertenbaker offers "onstage a view of late twentieth-century 'Oreat' Britain in which she examines the multiple and conflicting subjectivities of the world and brings to life the various 'others' created by hierarchies of gender, race, and nation" (134). In Credible Witness Wertenbaker particularly is concerned with ideas of history, nation, and identity as they arise in the context of asylum seeking. Produced at the Court's studio Theatre Upstairs, Credible Witness locates the asylum issue within a mother and son narrative. Petra Karagy (played originally by Olympia Dukakis) arrives in England to look for her son, Alexander, a history teacher who fled northern Greece to seek political asylum. Travelling on a false passport, Petra is detained on her arrival at Heathrow airport. She assumes, incorrectly, that the British authorities will be pleased to help her find her son, whom she also believes will be being treated as a welcome guest and not an unwelcome stranger. Instead, Alexander has been unable to prove - to claim - his identity, has had to give up his teaching job with refugee children, and has taken to living on the streets. Petra's search for her son Feminism and Asylum Theatre 9 collapses into the several stories of other asylum seekers with whom she is detained. With the aid of an overworked immigration officer and through the publicity that Petra attracts through hunger striking, she eventually finds her son. At first she disowns him for the way in which the experience of Iiving in exile has turned him away from his Macedonian history. Gradually, however, Petra comes to understand that she must also embrace a different view of the past, must move "outside" of her own history in the interests of achieving a more democratic future. Only then is she able to give her son her blessing before he returns to his life of exile on the English streets. "THE POLITICAL DRAMA OF THE FUTURE" We cannot, as Billington correctly observes in "The Theatre of War," simply go back to "the old days" of political theatre (by which he means the post- . 1968 era of British drama). Theatre has to find new ways of being political and, with this in mind, Billington stresses the importance "in an age top-heavy with opinion" of "establishing the importance of fact": "information" as "[tlhe key to the political drama of the future" (4). Both Adshead and Wertenbaker spent time researching "infonnation" on the asylum issue, so that each dramatic fiction is underpinned by a feeling for the real experiences of asylum seeking. Adshead, for example, describes how she consulted a number of refugee stories and documentary source materials provided by The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and The Refugee Council. She also acknowledges her study of the transcript of the Campsfield trial in which nine detainees were tried for protesting against the conditions of the Oxford-based detention centre (15). In Wertenbaker's case, she was originally approached by the International Department of the Royal Court to get involved in a research project on refugees. The educational resource pack published by the Court to accompany Credible Witness put out more infonnation about the immigration system and asylum-seeking, creative ideas for playwriting, and described the research process of the production: This project involved working with a team of actors and directors who, over a period of two weeks, went out in pairs to refugee and detention centres, to interview people and come back to the group to share what they had found. In sharing their experiences, this research process relied on the interviewers not acting as the people they had met, but rather impersonating them- becoming them almost. (Royal Court. n. pag.) Wertenbaker took this research away and used it in drafting Credible Witlless over a period of some two and a half years. To identify that each project involved a process that put the writers in touch with the experiences of asylum seeking is a straightforward matter. More significant (coming back to Billington's point about information and the politi- 10 ELAINE ASTON cal) is understanding how each play stages and persuades audiences of the truth value of the information that each presents. How exactly does this form of political, information-giving theatre engage people now more in tune with the popular "Big Brother"-style television programmes in which ordinary people play at being voted off islands or out of rooms, but whose lives are never actually at risk, whose "crisis" situations are chosen and not enforced? How does it persuade people of a social reality when, according to statistics, "80% of the British population" believe "immigrants to be a 'drain on national resources'" (qtd. in Goldman [3)? THE DETENTION CENTRE The choice of selling is important to the issue of persuasion. Both writers locate their plays in a detention centre. For Wertenbaker this was a "place that had both moved and disturbed her deeply during [...] research" (Royal Court, n. pag.). The detention centre disturbs because it suggests internment and punishment , and is evocative of concentration camps, or prisoner-of-war camps. It also suggests asylum as a kind of madness. In Credible Witness, for example, when Petra tries to understand what is meant by asylum, she assumes that she is being treated as a mad woman (20). Moreover, the fact that the detention centre is not represented in some far away, "foreign" country but in England is also frightening. "I could not believe," Adshead writes in her author's note to the play, "that the violation of human rights of vulnerable people was happening in England in [997 (outside Oxford no less) and more shocking still in the first year under a Labour government for which I had waited [8 years!" (Bogus Woman [5). Similarly, Wertenbaker's stage directions for the confinement selling state that this "could be a refugee camp anywhere in the world, but in fact, it is a detention centre in England" (Credible Witness [6). In the production of The Bogus Woman Ti Green's set - a stark, bleak construction - was designed to create a diasporic "space" of Africa and England and visually impressed upon spectators that England is not the safe, civilised haven one might imagine it to be. While three roughly-hewn pieces of wood were suspended to one side of the perfonning space and used to beat out memories of Africa, the other side was occupied by a large corrugated sheet, evocative of an England which is not the England that the young woman first imagines as "holding out/ its one good/ hand to me," but is, ralher, the England that she actually experiences as "Campsfield Detention Centre'; A tangled tower/ of twenty foot high razor wire" (28). The visual and verbal signs of an England that seeks to punish rather than welcome cut across or cut off the occasional strains of African music, thereby countering the risk of over-sentimentalising the loss of a past, of home, family, and belonging. The sense of non-belonging, dispossession and displacement was also signalled through the woman's only piece of ' luggage:' a wooden crate moved around Feminism and Asylum Theatre [ [ through the various narrations and interrogations (and even brandished as a weapon). In Credible Witness, Es Devlin's design for the detention centre took the form of a rising. circular walled environment, evocative of a layered or fossilised history. When the play opens, Alexander is seen instructing a group of local children on "{aJ small archaeological dig in Northern Greece" (9). In the opening image, therefore, the walls come to stand for the sedimentation of history : a Macedonian ancestry going back to another Alexander, Alexander the Great, and "hidden" by the social and cultural values of contemporary Northern Greece that refuses to recognise its Macedonian past. As the detention centre in England, where Petra and others are detained, different "histories" are locked up together. Like Adshead, Wertenbaker uses the setting as a location for what Homi Bhabha describes as the "turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated" (Introduction 4. emphasis in original). History eventually "shifts" (63) in the detention centre, because those detained and those officially in charge of the detention begin to exchange different histories, and crucially because spectators too are being invited to "see" differently. While both plays locate their dramatic action in a detention centre, the invitation to "see" differently is realized in radically diverse ways: The Bogus Woman sets up the rebel gaze of the racialized, female body, and Credible Witness seeks to persuade through a dialectical debate in which an idea of identity rooted in history and nation gives way to the [onnation of a community based on transnational citizenship. Where Adhead '5 drama is "impassioned ," Wertenbaker's "raises philosophical questions about nationhood, identity and history" (Rev. of Credible Witness [84). "They are," Billington summarises, "complementary and, in the current climate, necessary viewing" ([84). I would also add that they are "necessary viewing" forfeminism. THE BOGUS WOMAN AND THE TERROR OF THE "OTHER" When I saw The Bogus Woman on national tour in the studio venue of The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in March 200 [ , I was struck by the way in which the arrangement of audience and perfonner in the studio space was important to establishing the young woman's truth-claim. Under Lisa Goldman 's direction, the intimacy of the studio venue was exploited to instil a feeling of confinement in spectators and to bring perfonner and spectators close together in a storytelling arrangement. In a semi-circular configuration around the individual, single performer and her playing space, spectators were positioned as "her" audience, her listeners. In Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," he notes that ''The storyteller takes what he [sic) tells from experience - his [sic) own or that reported by others" (87). The proxemic relation of audience and performer in the produc- 12 ELAINE ASTON tion of The Bogus Woman gave authority to the young woman's position as official teller of true stories, gave credence to the idea that the stories were taken "from experience." Benjamin further notes that the role of the storyteller is not only to tell the experience, but also to ensure that it becomes "the experience of those who are listelling to his [sic] tale" (87, my emphasis). This comment from Carole Woddis is typical of the reviewing response and it testifies to the transference of asylum experience from storyteller to audience: [...JThe Bogus Woman stands out as one of those shows that change lives. You can't possibly come away from it without feeling a deepening sense of shame about Britain 's treatment of its asylum-seekers, even if, at the same time, you know the argument to be hopelessly one-sided. But then writer Kay Adshead hasn't set out to offer solutions but rather to wake us up to the infamies perpetrated in our name. (138) In my citation of Benjamin, I have signalled that it is important to mark the gender of the storyteller, but it is also necessary to take account of race in the position from which the tales are told." The young black woman "speaks" from the margins of racialized experience. The presentational performance register demands of the performer/narrator that she double as the centre and the margin, although it is important to note that the centre is perfonned from the margin. The reverse of this, playing the margin from the (white) centre, would risk colonising the margin, making history and nation whole. In switching between direct address engagement with the audience and the acting out or multi-role playing of asylum episodes, what is exposed is the way in which the immigration system "authors" the young woman's representation as "bogus" and refutes the truth of her story. In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua argues that "[blorders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them" (3, emphasis in original). On the same theme, Bhabha, in the context of "nationness," writes of "the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unlzeimliclz terror of the space or race of the Other" (Introduction 2). What occurred in the "space" of the performance was a drawing out of the spectators from their "place" of safety, by confronting them with the "unheimlich terror" of the "Other" through the presence of Dumezweni and her storytelling. While the physical arrangement of the playing space separated performer and audience, the gaze of the performer directly, deliberately, and dangerously transgressed the theatrical conventions of "looking." Her gaze did not stop at the "edge" of the playing space, nor as a performer did she adopt the pretence of looking out at the audience, while actually looking beyond them. Rather, Dumezweni held the gaze of individual spectators, for real. This she did frequently, singling out and maintaining eye contact with individual audience members, while continuing her narration. This was a particularly dis-comforting experience. Spectators could not look away, or break the gaze. A spectator was held in the Feminism and Asylum Theatre 13 performer's gaze until she broke eye contact. It meant that spectators could not avoid whatever terrible event or experience was revealed in that moment of telling, could not stand back, step aside, or be unaffected by the telling, but were rather made to feel a guilty part of it. As a mostly white audience held in the gaze of the young black woman, spectators were made to feel the weight of a colonial past/present looking back at them not through the submissive gaze of the victim, but through the resistant gaze of the rebel. This gaze is one that might be summarised as the kind of oppositional looking that bell hooks describes: all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look. a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking. we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." (I 16) Through her oppositional gaze Dumezweni insisted that her spectators see that the black "bogus woman" is a fiction of the white English gaze. '" will tell you my story," the young woman says to her fictional and to her real audience, but try to "Forget I'm black/ by the way/ I could be pink/ or puce/ or grey" (Bogus Woman 47). In her story not only the present, but also a colonial past circulate in the telling. The "ghosts of other stories" (qtd. in Bhabha, "DissemiNation " 307) haunt the tale of contemporary asylum seeking; stories of an imperialist past, acontemporary history of British race relations, and immigration policies,I3 "HISTORICAL PARALYSIS" A ND SHIFTING IDE N TITIES Where The Bogus Woman seeks to persuade spectators of the truth by means of its confrontational style and the gaze of the rebel, Credible Witness works dialectically through a style of socialist realism to oppose the idea of nationalist belonging with an idea of transnational citizenship. Ensemble playing by a cross-generational, multiracial cast was used to support an imaging of a democratised, cross-border community. Wertenbaker argues that we do not debate publicly any more and that theatre is one place in which, exceptionally, debate can take place (Interview, BBC Radio 4). What gets debated in Credible Witness is not so much the asylum issue, but the violence of history when it is conceived in terms of a nationalist belonging, and what happens to people when they step outside, or are forced outside, their history, their identity. In her exploration of "women's time" Julia Kristeva presents nation, like Anderson's "imagined communit[y)" as "illusion" rather than as reality (3 [).'. She goes further to identify it as "problematic" (32) -as an impediment to feminist activity that variously and differently, as it evolves generationally, seeks to expose women (in all their diversity) as "casualties" ofthe "sociosymbolic con- 14 ELAINE ASTON tract" (42). To be caught up, like Petra in Credible Witlless, in an idea of history that is raced and nationed, impedes, paralyses, the transformational possibilities of a cross-border politics: a trans-national modelling of future European citizenship as democratic and feminist. The play's opening scene creates a gestlls of paralysis that haunts the rest of the play. When Alexander is seen teaching school children history, using the walls of the set as the walls of history, he rushes to complete his instruction as two uniformed figures (suggesting police authorities) emerge out of the shadows to beat him up. As he shouts to the children to run back to their homes, to their history, he freezes: "A moment ofparalysis" in which his body is poised and held in readiness for "the blows" to come (10). Alexander's view of history , of the past, is that it has not one, but many "layers." The history of the walls contains a history of different peoples "criss-cross[ing]" the land in different ages (9). Yet this understanding of history is one that the authorities will not allow. "The layers are well covered, because every generation has thugs who want to bury the past and level the ground" (10). Macedonian history has to be buried, suppressed, because the land to which it "belongs" is now territorially assigned to Northern Greece. "What makes people freeze at certain moments of history?" asks Anna (one of the exiled children Alexander helps in England) in the closing moments of the play (64). "Hysterical paralysis ? Historical paralysis? Is it genetic?" she asks. "And if we understand it, can we prevent it?" (64). Credible Witness "teaches" that the act of remembering history must include the remembrance of histories other than our own. As Anna describes in the play's moments of closure, she is seeking a different kind of history: "Not this country's [England's] history, or the one I came from, but the common mechanism" (64). Both Alexander and Petra shift in the way they see their Macedonian history . Homeless and nameless on the English streets, away from the violent borderlands of his native Macedonia, Alexander takes himself "outside" the history he knows, a history taught to him by his mother. Petra cannot believe that Alexander disowns his history: Petra: [...J a Macedonian son and I suckled you on the pride of your family and of your land. My history became your history. that's how it goes. Alexander: It doesn't have to. Petra: You're nothing without your history. Alexander: From this distance, I've learned to look differently. (48) Petra's experience of the detention centre eventually encourages her to "look differently." Situating the confrontation over history within the family, between mother and son, brings the site of the familial into the critique of history . A child's entry into the symbolic, as Kristeva summarises, is dependent on the "quality of maternal love" (33). Petra's "maternal love" is implicated in Feminism and Asylum Theatre 15 the Macedonian history of violence and therefore in the responsibility of "birthing" the child into a violent symbolic. "You sang me lullabies of blood and hatred,"laments Alexander (Credible Witness 47). The violent heroism of history that locates in the maternal was made visible in Olympia Dukakis's interpretation of Petra: in the ways that she claimed a presence on stage and in the manner of her proud, "foreign" (accented) way of speaking. As Billington argued, "Dukakis [...l superbly embodies maternal and nationalistic pride" (Rev. of Credible Witness 184). All this shifts, however, as Petra comes to recognise the damage of being walled in by her Macedonian past. In the context of black feminist criticism, Nalini Persram insightfully observes that "[tlhe desire for national identity is a powerful and hegemonic ideology (and thus a form of masculism) that posits the absence of a definitive nationality as a deficiency" (212). "It takes a reknowing of one's identity," Persram argues, "to effect a shift in the contours of its constraints" (214). While Petra fiercely guards against a loss of identity, ultimately, as she moves away from identifying with her Macedonian past and is able to embrace a new trans-national community, she illustrates that overcoming the paralysis of history is not a lack or a "deficiency," but a gain. Her maternal role needs to shift from a reproduction of the nation to having a care for others outside of her own history, her own family. Significantly, both Alexander and Petra come to care for children who are not their biological children, but children in exile. To be "frozen" in a particular way of thinking or of "seeing" is also explored in Credible Witness in relation to exile. As the play dramatises Alexander with a community of refugee children in England the idea of future histories again comes into play. "What is an exile, children?" Alexander asks. When the children do not answer he explains to them that "[aln exile has lost his house, her village, his country and cannot go back home. An exile is a guest in a new country" (I2). The children's response is to snigger and even to "spit" at the idea of being a guest in England. Their hostile rather than welcoming reception has not endeared them to their "new country." Nor have they grieved for their violent losses of family and home. Alexander gives the children crying lessons as a way of remembering and recovering. Moreover, he has stepped down, or shifted out of his authoritative position as a teacher, and now serves as a facilitator in a participatory mode of "instruction" in which the children are encouraged to find their own voices as they begin to share their traumatic pasts. Not to be able to deal with the violence of the past is harmful to the self and in tum produces violence. As Franz Fanon so forcefully argued in his writings on colonial oppression and the Algerian struggle, to deny or to repress a part of oneself will ultimately lead to a violent outcome, against the self and others . Anna, one of the exiled children learns to modify, to control her anger, in the intere~ts of gaining an education that she hopes will help her to understand 16 ELAINE ASTON more about the "common mechanism," but she still carries forward her loss and anger. Ali, another exiled child from Algeria, can find no outlet for his pent-up emotions. In the epilogue Anna explains to Alex that "Ali's gone back ... He got involved with the Islamist group in Finsbury Park, they taught him to shoot, he wouldn't talk to us" (64). Wertenbaker also had experience of this kind of violence in her own childhood. Talking about the way in which she was brought up on the French side of the Basque country in the 1950s, she explains how the consolidation of the French influence meant that you had to forget Basque and learn French. "You have a language inside of you," she elaborates, "that is forced into silence." The repression, the silencing of a language you are not allowed to teach, to pass on to your children, causes, she argued, bitterness and hostility (Interview, BBC Radio 4). "THE BODY IN PAIN" Language can also be used to silence people in other ways. Both plays involve stories of how experiences get lost through translation. They variously illustrate how words on which we depend to communicate experiences. feelings. emotions, can be used as a source of betrayal, a means of "silencing" experiences or "writing" them out of "officiaP' history. In particular, language is shown to be inadequate to the task of "telling" pain and torture. As Elaine Scarry explains, the body in pain cannot truly express what it feels in words, because "[pJhysical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it," invoking "a state anterior to language" (20). In The Bogus Woman, the young woman's words fail her when she attempts to tell and re-tell her pain. Yet in that failing, or gap that appears as words collapse, lies the reality, the truth that the authorities deny (but the audience is able to "see"). Moreover, the English authorities deny for months that the young woman worked for the newspaper she said she did, because of "one dangerous word" out of place: "Despite being most careful I in my instructions I all these months I the English authorities I have been writing I to the wrong fucking paper" (43). The gap between words and reality is also most poignantly registered in the narration of the woman's post-rape miscarriage: "I see a tiny foetus I grinning in the puke and piss. II cover it with I the newspaper , I with the grinning yellowy words I and turn away" (37-8). The "grinning yellowy words" are words that are now alien, "strangely unfamiliar" (36), because they fall far short of being able to express the trauma of events that have overtaken the young woman. Not only do words betray the woman's truth-claim, but her body is also a sitel sight of betrayal. No one believes her "story" about the rape and subsequent miscarriage, because no one can actually see the wounds to her body (which have had a chance to heal, during her time in hiding). To the medical gaze the woman's body also suggests she is lying. Feminism and Asylum Theatre '7 In Credible Witness Petra's shift out of her Macedonian history is enabled by the way in which she helps Ameena, a young, black girl from Somalia, to establish her claim to asylum. Unlike the "bogus woman" in Adshead's play, Ameena's traumatic past is visible on her body: multiple cigarette bums provide testimony to the truth of her rape, humiliation, and torture. Petra insists that "Mr Le Britten" sees and believes her story. The pain of this scene is almost too much: for.the official who can hardly bring himself to look, and for the spectators also positioned as witnesses to his witnessing of the young girl's testimony. The body is the site I sight of a double violation: the juncture of a violent heterosexist culture of the masculine from which the woman is in exile, and the colonialist, imperialist gaze of the asylum authority. The looking , seeing and understanding is what is needed, however, for history to "shift." The worn out, overworked Mr Le Britten, figuratively standing in for the overstretched British immigration system, must also confront his own past, his own history, in order to see and to act differently in the future. Turning to Simon Ie Britten and for the first time addressing him by his Christian name, Petra argues: "History shifts, Simon, we can't hold it. And now, when we tum to you, don't cover your eyes and think of the kings and queens of England. Look at us: we are your history now" (63). FEMINIST DIRECTIONS The stories of violence told through Ameena's body signal the very real difficulty of negotiating a "common mechanism" given the unequal positions that people, women especially, may be starting from. Wertenbaker's play, like Adshead's, ~hows that contemporary versions of white western feminism must not relegate Ameena's truth-claim to the borders of a "post-feminist" world in which the lives of only a few, relatively privileged (mostly white, mostly middle-class), women have got "better." This kind of feminism is as restricting in its own way as the "limited and sovereign" imagining of nation that Anderson identified and needs to give way to differently imagined feminist communities. In a climate of 1970S European feminism, Kristeva articulated the desire for a feminism that might move away from the tendency to universalise Woman, and instead aim "to bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplicities, her plural languages, beyond the horizon, beyond sight, beyond faith itself' (51). "Woman" and its denial of difference can, therefore, also be argued as a "bogus" feminist fiction. Adshead's play offers its own critique of feminism that betrays social realities through a denial of "multiplicities ." The well-intentioned, sisterly Janice (in the "non-confrontational" detention centre, Tinsley house [76]) stands, for example, for a kind of white western feminism with one foot still rooted in a colonial past. Janice, in response_ ~o the young woman's singing of an African tribal song says: "Thank 18 ELAINE ASTON you. / That was beautiful/I'm sure, like myself, / everyone here / feels / that you were singing / not just for yourself, / but / for dispossessed people / everywhere " (Bogus Woman 76-7). The specificities of oppression ought not, however , to be erased through a universalising approach, or, as Kristeva argued, through a feminism that denies "multiplicities." A refrain in Adshead's writing captures the image of imagining beyond the borders already in place. Not dissimilar to Kristeva's call for the recognition of the singularity of each person, alongside the multiplicity of a person's identifications "stretching from the family to the stars" (53), the young black woman, in contrast to her state of confinement, repeatedly images "writ[ing]" the history of her people as making "a hole in the sky" in order for her to reach back to her ancestral family and people (45-46). The imagery suggests a state that is fluid, a state without borders, in which life and death cross over, and "seeing" is no longer limited by a horizon. The specificity of differently located struggles requires recognition. in order for them not to remain as Other, as marginal, or to become an "alternative" centre - but to propose a different way of identifying: one that does not depend on a national history or consciousness. Negotiating histories symbolically is imaged in Credible Witness in Scene Eleven in which everyone in the detention centre contributes her or his favourite national dish to make a special meal for Petra on New Year's Eve. The meal brings together different countries, different histories, and different "tastes" in the hope that Petra, who is ill through hunger-striking, will survive. In contrast to the image of being walled-in, visually suggested by the circular wall arrangement of the set, the meal, the "common mechanism," to save Petra, helps to break down walls. In Stigmata, Helene Cixous argues that "we have a duty to act as reverberators by writing the history of this century's pain and sorrow," a history metaphorically represented through the "wall": "the wall in us, outside us" - and one which begs the question "what if we took away our wall?" (36). For walls to come down is not, as Kristeva noted, without "risk." That said, "is it not," Kristeva asks, "the insupportable situation of tension and explosive risk that the existing 'equilibrium' presupposes which leads some of those who suffer from it to divest it of its economy, to detach themselves from it, and to seek another means of regulating difference?" (52). Wertenbaker's theatre stages the "wall," the problem of staying inside your history, but also begins to look at the democratic possibilities that arise when those walls come down, borders are crossed and people look for other ways of "regulating difference." Although, as Adshead illustrates, white western feminism has its own walls to bring down in the interests of 'seeing' across its geographically and materially located borders, '5 it also has a significant body of knowledge that can help to shape, in Michael Billington's words, "the political drama of the future." Feminism and Asylum Theatre '9 NOTES An earl ier draft of this essay was delivered at the annual ASTR conference, "Rethinking the Real," San Diego, CA, November 200T. The United Nations Convention on Refugees reinforces the international protection promised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to those seeking asylum from war or persecution. Anicle Thirteen of the Declaration states that: "( I) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his (sic] own, and to return to his Isic] country." Clause One of Article Fourteen also states: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecUlion." See www.un.orgJrights/50/decla.htm. 2 Statistical analysis by the Guardian' s home affairs editor, Alan Travis, demon~ strates that in 1999 Britain's Home Office granted asylum to 54% of applicants, meaning that "most asylum seekers are genuine and not abusive" (4). In a news release on its web site in 2001, the Refugee Council also noted that "on initial decisions alone, the Home Orfice fou nd 21.565 (3 1%) asylum seekers to be in need of protection in 2000." For routine updates on the situation or asylum seekers in the UK, see http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk 3 For details see www.refugeesonline.org.uk/artistsinexi le 4 Evidence of this hostility can be found, for example, in the tabloid Daily Mail ncwspaper's hate campaign in 1998 in which asylum seeker was used as a dirty word. As Guardian reporter Roy Greenslade explained, "the Mail turned 'asylum~ seeker' into a swear-word, a racist epithet as recognisably repugnant as 'nigger' or 'Jew' in previous generations" (6). 5 The Bogus Woman transferred to The Bush Theatre, London on 7 February 2001. Credible Wime.'is opened at the Royal Court, London on 8 February 200 1. 6 In February 2001 Michael Prescott, political editor of The Sunday Times, reported that Britain had overtaken Gennany "as the most favoured destination of asylum seekers," with a 7% increase on the asylum figures recorded for 1999 (2). 7 A person Oeeing their country on account of persecution may seek asylum, but has to wait for the case to be considered and processed before being granted, or possi ~ bly denied, refugee status. 8 Where the idea of a company dedicated to work "created by women" reatured in the manifestos offeminisl companies in the 1970S (such as the Women 's Theatre Group, for example), it is more exceptional now in Britain to define a theatre com~ pany in relation to feminist concerns. 9 Compositionally, the play's style of narration and multi~character playing means that a large cast could also perronn it. Director Lisa Goldman hopes that it might be staged "by huge casts in schools or community groups" (14). 10 Wertenbaker discussed this moment in an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1991. 20 ELAINE ASTON If Max.Stafford-Clark fonned Out of Joint in 1993 after leaving the Court. Like his former company, Joint Stock, Out of Joint retains a commitment to the performance of new writing and to principles of ensemble theatre-making. 12 In The Wretched ofthe Earth and in the context of the Algerian struggle. Fanon writes of the storyteller's potential to expose colonial systems and identifies the political potential of this entertainment form. "Colonialism made no mistake," he writes, "when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically" (194)· 13 In "DissemiNation" Bhabha also quotes from Rushdie's "Rosa Diamond" section in The Satanic Verses: "on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye" (318). Dumezweni's performance and Adshead's writing demand of spectators that they look their raced, gendered and nationed history in the eye. 14 Kristeva argues that it is the Second World War that effected "an end to the nation as a reality" (31). 15 Recent developments in feminist theory and criticism have,like Wertenbaker's drama, explored the possibilities of a transnational feminism in order to find ways beyond the paradigm of white, western feminism. As advocates of transnational feminism, for example, Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty explain that this involves finding ways of addressing global issues that also take into account local geographies (see their introduction to Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures). For further discussion of these developments in feminism in a perfonnance context, see Case. WORKS CITED Adshead, Kay. The Bogus Woman. London: Oberon, 2001. - -- . Thatcher's Women. Plays By Women. Vol. 7. Ed. Mary Remnant. London: Methuen, 1988. J 3- 50. Alexander, Jacqui and Chandra Talpede Mohanty, eds, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. London: Routledge, 1997. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands! La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lule, 1987. Aston, Elaine, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans, Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109. Bhabha, Homi K. "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modem Nation." Bhabha, Nation and Narration 291-322. - --. "lntroduction: Narrating the Nation," Bhabha, Nation and Narration 1-7. Feminism and Asylum Theatre ---, ed. Nation and Narratioll. London and New Yark: Routledge, 1990. Billington. Michael. Rev. of Credible Witness. Theatre Record 21.4 (2001): 184. - --. '''Men judge the plays, put on the plays and run the theatres.'" Guardian 25 Nov. 1999: 10. - --. "Theatre of War." Guardian 17 February 2001: 4. Carlson, Susan. "Language and Identity in Timberlake Wertenbaker's Plays," Aston and Reinelt 134-49. 21 Case, Sue-Ellen. "Lesbian Performance in the Transnational Arena." Aston and Reinell 253...{;7. Cixous, Helene. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Kristeva, Julia. "Women 's Time." Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Feminist Theory: A Critique ofIdeology. Ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo. and Barbara C. Gelpi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 31-53. Fanon. Franz. The Wretched olthe Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1967. Goldman, Lisa. London: "The Bogus Woman," Adshcad, Bogus Woman 13-14. Greenslade, Roy. "On the Press: When is a Refugee Not a Refugee? 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