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Beyond the Horizon of Computability 16th Conference on Computability in Europe CiE 2020 Fisciano Italy June 29 July 3 2020 Proceedings Marcella Anselmo
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank some of the institutions and individuals who have helped me in developing material for this book, particularly my colleagues in the Drama Department and the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin and the Research Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität, Berlin. I am also indebted to many people who read and commented on parts of this work in progress or offered advice: Azadeh Sharifi, Samee Ullah, Warsame Ali Garare, Marco Galea, Vicki Cremona, Fiona Macintosh, Erica Fischer-Lichte, Audrone Žukauskaite, Christel Weiler, Tania Wilmer-Tsui, Jean Graham Jones, Jisha Menon, David Savran, Jenni Schnarr, Anna Lohse, Katrin Wächter, Herman Grech, Nicolas Stemann, Ernest Allan Hausmann, Marina Carr, Anthony Haughey, Holger Hartung, Maxi Obexer, Neil Blackadder, Ahmed Shah, Nadia Grassmann, Dennis Kennedy, Brian Singleton, Matthew Causey, Janelle Reinelt, Florian Borchmeyer, Janez Janša, James Harding, Bruce McConachie, Freddie Rokem, Maria Slowey, Evan Winet, Rhona Trench, Anika Marschall, Sruti Bala, Soldedad Pereyra, Isabelle Redfern, Emma Cox, Alison Jeffers, Charlotte McIvor, Jason King, Lily Kelting, Katrin Sieg, Jamie Trnka, Torsten Jost and Marja Wilmer. I also want to thank Orla McGinnity, who proof-read the manuscript, Elske Janssen, who formulated the index, and Tomas René and Vicky Bates at Palgrave Macmillan. I am also grateful to Laura Gröndahl, the editor of Nordic Theatre Studies, for permission to reuse parts of ‘The Spirit of Fluxus as a Nomadic Art Movement’ published in Nordic Theatre Studies in 2014.
list of figures
Fig. 2.1 Ruth Negga as Antigone in the world premiere of The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney, Abbey Theatre, 2004. Photo: Tom Lawlor 18
Fig. 2.2 Charges (Die Schutzbefohlenen) by Elfriede Jelinek directed by Nicolas Stemann, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 2014. Photo: Krafft Angerer 35
Fig. 3.1 Poster for Lampedusa, St. James Cavalier Theatre, Valetta, 2016. Design: Faye Paris 63
Fig. 4.1 Andrea Thelemann on a revolving stage in Illegal Helpers (Illegale Helfer) by Maxi Obexer at Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam, 2016.
Credit: Hans Otto Theater / H. L. Boehme 78
Fig. 5.1 Poster for Laundry, The Magdalene Laundry, Sean MacDermott Street, Dublin, 2011. Photo: Owen Boss 108
Fig. 5.2 Sorcha Kenny in Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe, Dublin, 2011. Photo: Pat Redmond 110
Fig. 6.1 The Situation, devised by Yael Ronen and company, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, 2016. Photo: PR/Ute Langkafe/MAIFOTO. (From left): Orit Nahmias, Maryam Abu Khaled, Yousef Sweid, Ayhan Majid Agha, Karem Daoud, Dimitrij Schaad 127
Fig. 7.1 NSK, NSK State Sarajevo, 1995. Photo: IRWIN archive 144
Fig. 8.1 Sébastien Brottet-Michel, Serge Nicolaï, Sarkaw Gorany, Dominique Jambert, Maurice Durozier, Virginie Colemyn, Stéphanie Masson, Alba Gaïa Kraghede-Bellugi. The Last Caravan Stop (Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées)): Origines et destin, ‘ Sur la route de l’Australie’. Création collective du Théâtre du Soleil dirigée par Ariane Mnouchkine, Cartoucherie, 2003.
‘Our age […] is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’ —Edward Said (1984, p. 159)
Performing Statelessness in Europe examines recent performative work by and about refugees and the dispossessed. Immigration has become one of the most contentious topics in Europe today. While the fall of the Berlin wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Schengen zone heralded a new dream of a free world, the period since 9/11 has confirmed that globalization has resulted in the free movement of goods but not of people. Barriers between nation-states have once more been erected and the borders of the European Union (EU) have become a fortress against migration. Ongoing wars in the Middle East and Africa, and poverty and authoritarian or unstable rule in Sub-Saharan African states have made many people flee. Fifteen million Syrians and Iraqis have been displaced. Moreover, the lawlessness in Libya (following the overthrow of Gaddafi by Western powers) has endangered refugees from Africa and the Middle East who have found themselves at the mercy of rival militias, smugglers, and slave traders.1 The number of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to get to Europe has steadily increased (with more than 5,000 dying in 2016), and the total of displaced people in the world has reached a record 65 million.2
S.E. Wilmer, Performing Statelessness in Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69173-2_1
The EU has failed in its attempt to agree on a coordinated approach to immigration. In her book Security Integration in Europe, Mai’a K. Davis Cross (2011, p. 5) provides some of the common reasons offered for EU countries failing to cooperate and share the responsibility to provide asylum:
First, the many member states have vastly different languages, cultures, customs, and identities, all of which pose significant obstacles to shifting national and political allegiances to Brussels. Second, the member states have entrenched constitutional and judicial traditions that they are not willing to give up. Finally, and perhaps most commonly cited, EU member states do not seem to be able to work together when it comes to foreign and security policy, thus preventing the EU from projecting itself as a coherent international player.
For example, despite being in the Schengen zone, certain states (such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Poland and Sweden) reintroduced border controls in 2016 following a large influx of refugees in 2015.
Because the need for asylum has been increasing and the problem is not being solved by political means, artists have been using theatrical performance to intervene in the political arena to offer insight and new perspectives. Through specific examples and case studies, this book assesses strategies by creative artists to address matters relating to social justice. Chapter 2 considers adaptations of Greek tragedy that reflect traditional ethical values from ancient Greece that have been reemphasized recently by philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Modern versions of such plays as Aeschylus’ The Suppliants recall the ancient Greek duty to welcome a guest and provide hospitality. They confront the situation whereby the EU, rather than welcoming refugees, has generally tried to discourage or impede them, thereby gaining the reputation of ‘fortress Europe’.
Many European countries have closed their borders, reinforced and extended their border defences, banned air and sea travel for those without visas,3 and introduced intimidating practices. Following the creation of the Schengen zone,4 the EU created the European Agency for Management of the External Borders (Frontex) to monitor its external borders. With a budget of many millions of euros, Frontex, based in Warsaw, oversees border control around the entire European Union. Rather than safeguarding the rights of refugees, it has focused its efforts
on their interception and deportation (see Cross 2011, p. 58). For example, in 2006 Frontex launched Operation Hera to prevent migration from Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania to the Canary Islands. According to Frontex (2017), ‘The route between Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco and the Spanish Canary Islands was once the busiest irregular entry point for the whole of Europe, peaking at 32,000 migrants arriving on the islands in 2006.’ With the help of the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Finnish governments and ‘following bilateral agreements between Spain and Senegal and Mauritania, including repatriation agreements’ (Frontex 2017), Frontex used planes and boats and ‘the installation of the SIVE maritime surveillance system’ (Frontex 2017) to intercept boats leaving the African coast, reducing the number of migrants to a mere 170 by 2012. By blocking the Atlantic Ocean route to Europe, Frontex thereby forced refugees to cross North Africa by land and then to cross the Mediterranean Sea by boat. More recently, Frontex has concentrated on blocking the humanitarian route through the Balkans, and the routes from Turkey to Greece. This has resulted in more refugees trying to make the deadly journey from Libya to Italy. Like the women in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, refugees surviving the boat trip across the Mediterranean arrive in Europe to request protection. However, European leaders tend not to be as accommodating as King Pelasgos of Argos.
Modern versions of The Suppliants, such as Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges (Die Schutzbefohlenen), demonstrate the hardship encountered by refugees once they arrive in Europe to seek asylum from unsympathetic government officials. Jelinek’s version was inspired by events in Austria where a group of refugees took sanctuary in a central Viennese church and went on hunger strike, demanding better conditions. Jelinek uses Aeschylus’ play as little more than a pretext for critiquing governmental policies and nationalist attitudes towards refugees. Her play has become one of the most celebrated pieces to deal with refugee issues in German-speaking theatres, having been performed in more than ten separate productions between 2014 and 2016.
Chapter 3 discusses plays that encourage empathy and identification not only with refugees but also with those offering hospitality. Two specific examples, Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! and Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa, depict fictional characters who have experienced extreme danger in their lives. In Asylum! Asylum! the protagonist is a refugee who has been tortured in his home village in Nigeria and tries unsuccessfully to obtain asylum in Ireland. In Lampedusa a refugee from Mali survives a
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boat trip to Lampedusa and waits desperately for his wife to arrive by the same route. Interestingly, European helpers become the pivotal figures in the plays as they undergo a transformation in their values with which the spectators are encouraged to identify. Amongst other productions, this chapter examines a production of Lampedusa in Malta that was particularly apposite given Malta’s proximity to the island of Lampedusa. Asylum! Asylum! and Lampedusa demonstrate the damage done to individuals by the restrictive EU policies, but they indicate hope for a possible change in attitudes.
Chapter 4 reviews various types of documentary theatre that record actual events in the lives of individual refugees, relying mainly on interviews and verbatim speeches. Such plays try to create a sense of authenticity in their representations even when, as in Maxi Obexer’s Illegal Helpers (Illegale Helfer), the scenes, based on real people and events, have been slightly modified for dramatic purposes. Like Illegal Helpers, which focuses on helpers in the host country who act illegally to assist immigrants in danger of being deported, performances such as Tribunal 12 and Case of Farmaconisi resemble judicial inquiries to investigate how justice is denied in current legal procedures. Other types of documentary theatre include productions devised and performed by refugees who recount their past experiences and ambitions, using their own bodies as evidence, such as in Letters Home by the Refugee Club Impulse in Berlin and Dear Home Office by Phosphorus Theatre in London.
Chapter 5 takes the book in a somewhat different direction with an analysis of an unusual type of asylum where unwed Irish mothers were confined in institutions, deprived of their children and identities, and used as slave labour. The chapter indicates the resemblance of the unwed mothers to refugees in their unlimited detention and their reduction to a social status equivalent to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. It also demonstrates how theatrical and filmic performances as well as journalistic research have shone a light on those who were rendered invisible to society and have served as a means to illuminate and denounce past practices. Films such as Philomena, with the Oscar-nominated Judy Dench in the role of Philomena Lee, and dramas such as the deeply disturbing Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe and performed in an immersive style in a former Dublin convent, have awakened the Irish public to a misguided practice (which finally ended in 1996) and prompted a protest movement demanding transparency and redress. As the Irish government has only begun to investigate the practices of these institutions and the extent of the
unmarked graves of the mothers and their babies throughout the country, it is too early to predict the results of this inquiry.
Chapter 6 examines plays that polarize characters and reveal the problem of statelessness in greater relief. Rancière’s concept of dissensus is deployed here to explore how Yael Ronen, for example, devises dialectical material for characters with opposing viewpoints and backgrounds in her productions of Third Generation: a Work in Progress and The Situation, and how Caryl Churchill divides the audience in her controversial play Seven Jewish Children. The chapter also discloses a tactic of crossidentification in such pieces as Robert Schneider’s Dir t and Amos Elkana’s The Journey Home to create a dissensus in which the central characters, based on real people, identify problematically with another group in society, decentring the basis of national, religious and ethnic identities. In the case of Dirt, an Iraqi illegal immigrant named Sad identifies with the racist values of German nationalists. In The Journey Home, the Arab protagonist converts to Judaism to raise a Jewish family, but when his country of Palestine becomes divided, he converts back to Islam to raise a Muslim family. By creating dissensus and cross-identification, these plays pose social and political problems for the spectators to consider.
Chapter 7 employs subversive identification as a strategy to exaggerate and decry nationalist policies. Performance artists NSK, Janez Janša, Christoph Schlingensief, and the Centre for Political Beauty have provided startling images to call attention to the authoritarian role of the nation-state. Despite avowedly emphasizing European over national identity in order to reduce nationalism and nationalist policies, the EU has done little to counteract the exclusive privileges of citizenship. By continuing to stress the rights of the citizen over the human rights of individuals, the EU relegates the asylum-seeker to a liminal state or a kind of no man’s land. As a non-citizen and thus virtually a non-person, the asylum-seeker is vulnerable to deportation at any time. NSK in Slovenia has parodied the exclusionary practices of the nation-state by creating their own nation in time rather than in territory and by establishing their own embassies and issuing their own passports. Similarly, the Janez Janša trio has critiqued state identity papers by changing their names to that of their right-wing Prime Minister and displaying their new identity cards as works of art. Christoph Schlingensief has lampooned the xenophobic policies of the farright FPÖ party in Austria that entered a coalition government in 2000 by staging Please Love Austria as a big brother event. Housing refugees for a week in an industrial container on a main square in Vienna, Schlingensief
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invited the public to vote on whom to deport. Like the Yes Men in America, the Centre for Political Beauty (CPB) in Berlin has impersonated government officials to announce changes in government policies on immigration. For example, the CPB publicized a plan that they attributed to an Austrian government official (and which was reported by Al Jazeera: see Manisera 2015) to support the needs of refugees by constructing a 230-kilometre Jean-Monnet Bridge across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Italy at a cost of 230 billion euros to be completed by 2030. By parodying government policies and over-identifying with right wing politicians, these artists have called into question normative values and policies.
Chapter 8 reviews two contrasting artistic groups, Fluxus and the Théâtre du Soleil, that employ a nomadic approach as an alternative behaviour. By applying Rosi Braidotti’s analysis of nomadic subjectivity, the chapter reveals how these two groups exhibit specific features favoured by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, such as transnationalism, communal property, becoming minoritarian, originality of approach, and desubjectivation. Although the Théâtre du Soleil is a tightly organized professional group compared with the loosely structured and amateur policies of the Fluxus artistic movement, they exhibit many nomadic features. Both have been experimental in developing new artistic forms and in their original ways of thinking, and both have been egalitarian in welcoming different nationalities and ethnicities into their company. Although Fluxus was based in New York, their inaugural concerts took place in Wiesbaden, and subsequent events occurred throughout Europe, with regional headquarters in Western and Eastern Europe and strong links with Asia. The Théâtre du Soleil, while based in Paris, travels throughout the world, and the members of its company hail from a variety of lands and cultures, speaking many different languages. Their examples of openness and collaborative procedures offer encouraging models for a more accommodating society. In particular the Théâtre du Soleil addresses the dangers and hardships of migration through its production of The Last Caravan Stop (Le Dernier Caravansérail). In one scene a boat of refugees, having survived huge storms in crossing the sea, is ‘intercepted by Australian border guards descending from the sky, machine-men in black helmets and goggles, dangling unnaturally from the air as their artificially amplified voices intone over the roar of helicopters, “You are illegally in these waters! You must turn back!”’ (Playgoer 2005). The scene was based on an incident in 2001 when an Indonesian boat carrying more than 400 immigrants was in
danger of sinking near Australia, and a Norwegian tanker, Tampa, rescued them. However, the Australian government refused them permission to land and sent out troops to deal with them instead. Despite international condemnation, Prime Minister John Howard held firm and transferred the boat people to a military frigate and sent them off to New Zealand and the island country of Nauru. Howard (2001) famously proclaimed, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ The Théâtre du Soleil’s production of The Last Caravan Stop as well as the policy of their company reflects a much more egalitarian approach than that of many governments.
Chapter 9, rather than examining specific performances, considers the way in which German theatre institutions have demonstrated a positive attitude in welcoming refugees. In September 2015, the journal Nachtkritik identified the activities of more than sixty theatres that were initiating humanitarian actions, ranging from running welcome cafes, organizing language classes, offering accommodation, and staging performances with, by or about refugees. One of the main motivators of these actions was the Turkish-born Shermin Langhoff who petitioned the government to assist refugees and who transformed the famous Maxim Gorki Theatre from a white German ensemble to a post-migrant enterprise.
At the time of writing in 2017, EU practices and policies continue to evolve amidst the rise of nationalism in many European countries. The electoral gains of far-right leaders, (such as Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Norbert Hofer in Austria), the decision of Britain to exit the EU, the nationalist policies in Central and Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Poland, and the anti-immigration actions of US President Donald Trump do not bode well for refugees. Many countries resort to detention as a means of preventing asylumseekers from par ticipating in the society until their case has been thoroughly investigated and their status determined. The United Kingdom detains a portion of asylum-seekers on a somewhat arbitrary basis, sometimes locking them up in detention centres along with those who had been refused asylum, such as in the Campsfield House, operated by a private security firm. Since this particular detention centre opened in 1993, it has experienced riots, fires, hunger strikes and suicides, as methods for protesting the conditions (see BBC 1994).5 In Central and Eastern Europe detention is frequently used as well as other forms of inhibition. For example, even though the EU considers the detention of children to be dangerous, Hungary announced in 2017 that it was detaining all asylum-seekers over
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the age of fourteen in converted shipping containers at their border (Rankin 2017). Moreover, the EU has been resourcing detention centres outside of the EU so that refugees are not able to enter the EU to ask for asylum.
As this book ends with a chapter affirming a progressive stance by the German theatre institutions, it offers some hope at a micro level for a more open response to immigration, egalitarianism and becoming other. However, it is also clear that at a macro level a new approach to the relationship between citizenship and human rights is needed. The nation-state has become a fortress to protect its citizens against the immigrant. Despite EU efforts at common policies, member countries have continued to operate their own idiosyncratic practices that frequently contravene UN conventions on the protection of refugees. As Mai’a Davis Cross (2011, p. 61) points out, ‘the EU focuses more on integration of border security than on achieving a comprehensive approach that balances the need to protect EU citizens with the need to respect foreign nationals’ rights.’ Moreover, as Judith Butler and Agamben have shown, governmentally imposed ‘states of exception’ or states of emergency have become the norm in which anyone can lose their rights and freedom of movement.6 Butler (2004, p. 51) argues, ‘with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty’. What is needed, therefore, and what these creative artists advocate, using a variety of strategies, is not an increase in sovereignty but a greater emphasis on human rights, and in particular the rights of the non-citizen.
Notes
1. For the recent development of a slave trade and slave auctions in Libya, see Graham-Harrison (2017).
2. See Guterres (2015).
3. The European r egulation (EU Directive 200l/51/EC) prevents refugees from flying directly to an EU country and makes airlines and shipping lines financially responsible for the return of passengers arriving in EU countries without valid travel documents, as well as being potentially subject to a large fine (EML 2001). By this regulation the EU effectively requires the airlines and shipping lines to vet passengers to identify refugees. Thus the airlines and shipping lines have been reluctant to take any passengers without valid travel documents, and this had led to unfortunate consequences. In one case in 1992, according to Andy Storey (1994), Director of the Irish Refugee Council, ‘seven stowaways discovered on a boat to France
were knocked unconscious and thrown overboard, because the captain feared being fined if the group claimed asylum in France: six of the stowaways drowned.’ In another case ‘British airline staff prevented three Kurdish asylum-seekers from leaving a plane at Heathrow—this led to their return to Turkey where they were severely tortured for 34 days’ (Storey 1994).
4. The Schengen zone is the passport-free area in the EU where national borders have been eliminated. It also includes non-EU states Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland, but does not include the UK and Ireland.
5. The detention centre was subsequently conver ted into a prison.
6. See for example Judith Butler (2004, p. 97); and Agamben (2005, pp. 3–4, p. 22).
BiBliography
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
BBC (1994) ‘Asylum Seekers Flee Detention Centre’, 6 June. http://news.bbc. co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_2499000/2499099.stm, date accessed 29 April 2017.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso).
Davis Cross, Mai’a K. (2011) Security Integration in Europe: How Knowledgebased Networks Are Transforming the European Union (Michigan: University of Michigan Press).
EML (2001) ‘European Migration Law: Carriers Sanctions’, 28 June. http:// www.europeanmigrationlaw.eu/en/immigration/366-directive-200151eccarriers-sanctions.html, date accessed 6 February 2017.
Frontex (2017) ‘Western African Route’. http://frontex.europa.eu/trends-androutes/western-african-route/, date accessed 29 April 2017.
Graham-Harrison, E. (2017) ‘Migrants from West Africa Being Sold in “Libyan Slave Markets”’, The Guardian, 10 April. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migration, date accessed 29 April 2017.
Guterres, A. (2015) ‘Opening Remarks at the 66th Session of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme’, UNHCR (Geneva), 5 October. http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&doc id=561227536&query=refugees%20october%202015, date accessed 30 October 2015.
Howard, J. (2001) ‘Election Policy Speech’, 28 October. http://australianpolitics.com/news/2001/01-10-28.shtml, date accessed 29 April 2017.
Manisera, S. (2015) ‘Could a Bridge over the Mediterranean Save Refugees?’, Al Jazeera, 22 December. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/12/ bridge-mediterranean-save-refugees-151216081619467.html, date accessed 20 April 2017.
Playgoer (2005) ‘Review: Le Dernier Caravansérail’, Playgoer, 26 July. http:// playgoer.blogspot.com/2005/07/playgoer-review-le-dernier.html, date accessed 29 April 2017.
Rankin, J. (2017) ‘Detaining Child Refugees Should be Last Resort, Brussels Warns’, The Guardian, 13 April, p. 17.
Said, E. (1984) ‘Reflections on Exile’, Granta, 13, 157–172.
Storey, A. (1994) ‘Asylum! Asylum! Programme Note’ (Dublin: Abbey Theatre).
CHAPTER
2
Recontextualization and Adaptation of Ancient Greek Dramas
The refugee is a familiar character in ancient Greek tragedy. Medea, Orestes, the Children of Herakles, Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, and the daughters of Danaos in Aeschylus’ The Suppliants all seek asylum. In Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, the fifty daughters of Danaos ask King Pelasgos for protection in Argos. Likewise, the Children of Herakles flee to Athens to get away from Eurystheus who is determined to kill them. Medea, who refers to herself as apolis or stateless, persuades Aegeus to grant her asylum in Athens before she wreaks vengeance on Jason. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus asks King Theseus for sanctuary in Colonus and succeeds in finding a final resting place.
These plays not only depict uprooted and homeless persons seeking protection, they also demonstrate the importance of hospitality or xenia and the ritual of supplication or hiketeia as a moral practice in ancient Athens (a process discussed in detail in Gould (1973) and Naiden (2006)). It is significant that in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus provides a kind of sanctuary for Athens in return for being granted one. By allowing Oedipus to be buried in Colonus, Theseus ensures that Athens will be protected in the future. The play thereby emphasizes the potential benefit of looking after asylum-seekers. Thus these ancient Greek dramas easily lend themselves to the issue of refugees today and have often been appropriated to legitimize the concept of hospitality, a social duty which was revered not only by the ancient Greeks, but which has also been stressed as fundamental to ethics by modern philosophers such as Emmanuel
S.E. Wilmer, Performing Statelessness in Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69173-2_2
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Levinas (1991a) and Jacques Derrida (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, p. 151). As Judith Butler (2004, pp. xvii–xviii) writes, ‘Emmanuel Levinas offers a conception of ethics that rests upon an apprehension of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precarious life of the Other’. In addition, writers and directors have used other Greek tragedies such as Antigone, The Trojan Women and Hecuba to focus on the rights of the dispossessed, the vulnerable, and the disenfranchised. Moreover, these plays have carried all the more impact as the world has been experiencing, according to António Guterres (2015), when he was United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘the highest levels of forced displacement in recorded history.’
Without substantially altering the texts, recent productions have carried strong resonances of the current refugee crisis. For example, in the ancient theatre at Siracusa in Italy in 2015, a production of Aeschylus’ Suppliants conjured up images of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, partly because Sicily has been one of the primary destinations of refugees in recent years. In the original text, fifty women who describe themselves as ‘a sunburnt race’ (Aeschylus 1992, p. 11) have crossed the Mediterranean from Egypt and arrived in Argos to ask for asylum to escape fifty men, the sons of King Aigyptos, who are pursuing them. Pelasgos, the King of Argos, after deliberating over the consequences of protecting the women and asking for his subjects’ approval, agrees to shelter them. And so the tragedy ends happily, but with the ongoing fear of a possible attack.
Oliver Taplin (2015), in reviewing the performance in Siracusa, described how he entered the theatre with the political relevance of the play in mind because of ‘the sight of so many recently arrived migrants from Africa in the streets of Catania.’ The production, directed by Moni Ovadia, was rendered in Sicilian and modern Greek, with the addition of a narrator who impersonates Aeschylus serving as a commentator on the action and informing the audience about the missing parts of the trilogy. The chorus of women seeking asylum was, according to Taplin (2015), the most impressive aspect of the show: ‘As I saw it, the primary drivers of Moni Ovadia’s production were not journalistic, but were ethnographic and musical. The centrality of the chorus was embraced. Through them Le Supplici showed how the arrival of foreign cultures from ancient lands bring fresh sights—clothing, utensils, gestures and movements.’ Taplin (2015) also praised the director for the ‘superb control of group movement, beautifully exotic costumes, attractive choreography, and music that, although played on often unfamiliar instruments, was nonetheless
tuneful and accessible’. The director Moni Ovadia (in Taplin 2015) commented on the relevance of his production to the political situation without having to alter the text:
We knew from the very beginning that our Suppliants had to be politically and socially relevant and especially connected with the dramatic problem of present immigration of people landing on our shores asking to be received. It was not only a demand of ourselves, the reality itself was asking it, Aeschylus himself keeps asking it from the depth of times, from the core of his tragedy. There was no need to show it explicitly.
Likewise, David Greig’s version of The Suppliants at the Edinburgh Lyceum in 2016 updated the language by employing a modern poetic style of English, but otherwise stuck very closely to the original text. Because of the relevance of the play to the fierce debates in the United Kingdom about refugees during the ‘Brexit’ referendum, he did not need to adapt the play to make it seem more relevant, and used fifty local Scottish women rather than immigrants to perform the chorus. Greig (in Brooks 2016) argued that it was unnecessary to make the play more relevant: ‘There will be people who say, “Well they’ve made this all about asylum seekers, and that line about Syria has obviously been placed”, and the frustrating thing is that all that stuff is already there—it isn’t imposed by us.’ Ramin Gray, the director of the play (in Brooks 2016) added, describing the circumstances of the plot: ‘We’ve just allowed 50 refugee women in, but the worry is that this may lead to war in our city. The debate at the heart of the play is the current debate’.
Antigone
In addition to contemporary productions that conjure up images of stateless persons through performances of the original texts, contemporary playwrights have adapted ancient tragedies to emphasize the plight of the dispossessed.1 Antigone is a play that sometimes serves as a vehicle for calling attention to the position of the stateless person and has been adapted to comment on the current refugee situation. She has been used as an emblematic figure to embody the excluded, the dispossessed or the Other in society. While the chorus refer to her as autonomos because she favours her own laws instead of those of the state, she refers to herself as metoikos (Sophocles 1996, pp. 42–3). It is interesting that, despite being a member
S.E. WILMER
of the royal household of Thebes, she uses the term metoikos, which Liddell and Scott (1940, p. 1121) translate as a ‘settler from abroad, alien resident in a foreign city’. One wonders in what way she considers herself to be a foreign settler or an alien resident, situated somewhere between being accepted and not accepted in society. Is it because her father, Oedipus, had been exiled from Thebes and she therefore feels half-exiled? Or is it because she is caught between the laws of the state and the laws of the gods in wanting to bury her brother? Is it because her ontological status is uncertain as a result of her incestuous family relationships? Or is it because she is in a liminal state between life and death as she goes off to be buried alive? In any case, as discussed by Butler (2004) and Castro (2013), it seems evident that she is referring to a psychological rather than a political status, a state of vulnerability and precarity in her attempt to mourn for the ungrievable body of her brother. However, it is important to mention that recent interpretations, which tend to provide Antigone with the higher moral ground and the more sympathetic position, are not inevitable. For example, Hegel regarded the play as pitting the law of the state against the law of the family in an equal balance. He concluded that Antigone was a danger to the state and that Creon was justified in defending the laws of the state over the concerns of the individual. Generalizing from his discussion of Antigone, Hegel (1977, p. 288) referred to women, because of their concern for individual family members, as ‘the everlasting irony […] of the community’. Hegel’s views continued to influence nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations of Antigone, as George Steiner (1984) has shown.2 Jean Anouilh’s version, produced in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, depicted Antigone as an irrational and uncompromising character juxtaposed with the more mature and amenable figure of Creon who (like Marshal Pétain of the Vichy Regime) has to make uncomfortable decisions in a war-torn country. Creon offers to ignore and hide Antigone’s crime. But when she refuses, he has her executed. As detailed by Fleming (2006, p. 168), the production caused a major controversy in Paris, with the collaborationist press more favourably disposed towards the performance than those in the resistance.3 More recently, Jacques Lacan (1992, p. 263) viewed Antigone as ‘inhuman’ and as exhibiting an uncontrollable death drive: ‘In effect, Antigone herself has been declaring from the beginning: “I am dead and I desire death” […] she pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire’ (Lacan 1992, pp. 281–2).4 Slavoj Žižek (2001, p. 163)
took this Lacanian approach even further, considering her actions and her death wish to testify to a self-destructive ‘monstrosity’.5
Despite the Hegelian interpretation of the play, which demonstrates the superior claim of the community over that of the individual, as well as the proto-fascist adaptation by Anouilh and the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that portray Antigone as determined to die, recent productions have often represented her as defending human rights in defiance of an oppressive and arbitrary authority. In particular they have used the play to call attention to the oppressive conditions in specific recent contexts, almost inevitably stressing the rectitude of Antigone’s position.
Some productions in the last few decades have employed Antigone as a kind of homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben discusses the notion of homo sacer as ‘nuda vita’—(variously translated as ‘bare life’, ‘mere life’ or ‘naked life’). It implies a life with no ethical value, thus a person who can be killed with impunity. It is originally a concept in Roman law that permits the killing of people with this exceptional legal status. In the modern world, Agamben (1998, pp. 126–80) applied the notion of homo sacer particularly to Jews in concentration camps, and also to other people of uncertain legal status such as refugees, asylum-seekers, Roma, the mentally ill and illegal immigrants. More recently, Judith Butler (Butler and Spivak 2007, pp. 40–4) has applied the term to stateless people (for example Palestinians), and suspected terrorists, especially those detained in centres such as Guantánamo Bay.6
In The Island, devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona and staged first in Cape Town and London in 1973, the two prisoners on Robben Island, after a hard day’s meaningless labour, use their evenings in their cell to prepare for a truncated performance of Antigone. Winston, who takes the part of Antigone in the play within a play, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in guerrilla activities against the apartheid regime. In the isolation of a prison cell on an island off the coast of Cape Town where he expects eventually to die, Winston holds a status resembling the living death of Antigone imprisoned in her cave. In the character of Antigone, he concludes the play with a speech that merges his own situation with that of hers: ‘I go now on my last journey. I must leave the light and day forever for the Island, strange and cold, to be lost between life and death. So to my grave, my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death […] I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs’ (Fugard 1993, p. 227).
Antigona Furiosa by Griselda Gambaro, first staged in Buenos Aires in 1986, portrays the experience of the ‘disappeared’ during the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and the mothers and relatives who protested on the Plaza de Mayo against their disappearance. By contrast with other versions of Antigone, in this adaptation the brother has vanished, reflecting the situation in Argentina where the police arrested dissidents and terrorists and never released them alive (except in some cases dropping them from aeroplanes). The head of the government, Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, (in Nelli 2010, p. 360) commented on this situation at the time, ‘[A]s long as (somebody) is missing (desaparecido), they cannot have any particular treatment, they are an enigma, a desaparecido, they do not have an entity, they are not there, neither dead nor alive, they are desaparecidos’. Therefore, in this adaptation, there is no body for Antigone to bury, and so she claims that her own body will be the grave of her brother, a site of memory (see Nelli 2010).
In Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York (staged at the Arena Stage7 in Washington, DC in 1993 and later translated and performed in Germany, Poland and other countries in Europe), Anita, the Antigone figure, tries to reclaim the body of Paulie, her dead lover, who has been removed by the authorities to be buried in an unmarked grave. Anita, a homeless immigrant from Puerto Rico, wants to bury Paulie in a Manhattan public park where she lives. As both a homeless person and an immigrant, Anita’s legal and ontological status is ill-defined. Her friend Sasha tells her: ‘We have to get indoors. When you live outdoors no one thinks you are a person’ (Glowacki 1997, p. 72). Moreover, because it is dark when her friends retrieve the body and mistake another corpse for Paulie’s, ironically Anita ends up burying someone else in the park instead of her lover. Eventually, the police close down the park, erecting a ten-foot-high barbed wire fence around it, and rendering Anita’s status even more insecure. After trying unsuccessfully to climb over the fence to return to Paulie’s grave, she hangs herself on the main gate of the park. The authorities take her body to be buried in an unmarked grave, sadly rejected by civil society.8
These three productions bear a disturbing relationship with the 2004 production of The Burial at Thebes, a version of Antigone by Seamus Heaney directed by a Canadian theatre director, Lorraine Pintal, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.9 The Burial at Thebes supported Antigone’s moral position as much through production techniques as through the text, with Creon dressed like a pompous and arrogant Latin American dictator in a white suit with red sash and medallion, recklessly wielding his authority.10
Antigone demonstrated her autonomy11 and strength of character from the opening moments of the play, in a dance sequence with her fiancé Haimon during which she left him abandoned on the stage. From her opening lines, which followed this mimed sequence, she indicated her determination and sense of urgency, especially through Heaney’s use of trimeter for her lines compared to the more languorous tetrameter of the chorus.12
Ismene, quick, come here!
What’s to become of us?
Why are we always the ones? (Heaney 2004, p. 1)
As a woman of action and no regrets, Antigone forcefully challenged Creon’s authority in the performance such that his fear for his status rang true:
Have I to be
The woman of the house and take her orders? (Heaney 2004, p. 22)
And later:
No woman here is going to be allowed
To walk all over us. Otherwise, as men We’ll be disgraced. (Heaney 2004, p. 31)
At the same time, the emphasis on gender politics in the production served as an analogy for the geopolitical relationships in the text. The text bears witness to the indelible marks of colonialism and oppression in Irish history, and to the process of disengagement from it. This is quite a common trope in post-colonial discourse. As Williams and Chrisman (1993, p. 18) have argued, ‘For some theorists and critics, colonial, imperial and indeed post-colonial or national discourses are largely allegories of gender contests.’ Thus, Ireland has often been posited as the feminine Other in relation to the aggressive male British empire, and so, in a Romantic nationalist or postcolonial interpretation, Antigone represents an oppressed Ireland fighting for her rights. Antigone as Ireland (or the nationalist community in Northern Ireland) is clearly given the morally superior position in Heaney’s adaptation, justifying action as the repressed feminine Other against the colonial oppressor, whether it involves acts of civil disobedience, hunger strikes or even more violent acts. With regard to Creon’s edict, Antigone says (see Fig. 2.1):
Fig. 2.1 Ruth Negga as Antigone in the world premiere of The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney, Abbey Theatre, 2004. Photo: Tom Lawlor
I chose to disregard it […] If I had to live and suffer in the knowledge That Polyneices was lying above ground Insulted and defiled, that would be worse Than having to suffer any doom of yours. (Heaney 2004, p. 21)
And later:
I never did a nobler thing than bury My brother Polyneices […] There’s no shame in burying a brother. (Heaney 2004, p. 23)
Moreover, Haimon argues that the people support Antigone:
As far as they’re concerned, She should be honoured—a woman who rebelled! (Heaney 2004, p. 31)
In explaining the reasons for his adaptation, Heaney (2005b, pp. 169–73) indicates that the British treatment of Irish people in Ireland over the centuries helped him find a voice for Antigone as well as a moral context for her stance. In thinking about the struggle between Antigone and Creon over who owns the body of Polyneices and who can have access to it, Heaney remembered the situation of Francis Hughes, his 25-yearold neighbour in Northern Ireland who died in prison in 1981 after being on hunger strike (demanding political status as an IRA prisoner) for 69 days.13 His body was in the custody of the Royal Ulster Constabulary but his family and friends wanted to pay their last respects and to bury it. The battle over his body was emotionally heated, setting the hunger striker’s family against the state, and reflected the division between the regulations of the state authorities on the one hand and the personal needs of the family to observe the traditional rites on the other. For this and other reasons Heaney decided to emphasize the word ‘burial’ in changing the title of Antigone to the Burial at Thebes. 14
While the adaptation is loaded with postcolonial resonances, the immediate justification for Heaney to write a new version of Antigone in 2004 was the policy of US President George W. Bush in his ‘war on terror’. In defying international opinion by invading Iraq, and creating an extra-legal system of detention without trial for prisoners from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a prison at Guantánamo that was beyond US jurisdiction (see Butler 2004, p. 97), Bush appeared as a contemporary equivalent
of Creon. Much of the aggressive rhetoric of George Bush is echoed in Heaney’s rendition of Creon’s speeches which stress the need for unity and loyalty to the polis:
Solidarity, friends, Is what we need. The whole crew must close ranks. The safety of our state depends upon it. Our trust. Our friendships. Our security. (Heaney 2004, p. 10)
Speaking in iambic pentameter and emphasizing his goal ‘to honour patriots in life and death,’ (Heaney 2004, p. 11) Creon establishes his authority over the citizen chorus, declares the importance of civic over family duty, and extols the value of strong leadership:
Worst is the man who has all the good advice And then, because his nerve fails, fails to act In accordance with it, as a leader should. And equally to blame Is anyone who puts the personal Above the overall thing, puts friend Or family first […]
For the patriot, Personal loyalty always must give way To patriotic duty. (Heaney 2004, p. 11)
By emphasising such words as ‘patriot’, ‘patriotic duty’, ‘patriots in life and death’, as well as ‘safety’ and ‘security’, Creon’s phraseology calls to mind the post-9/11 climate of fear, loyalty (to the government) and vengefulness which was encouraged by the US president through the adoption of the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.15 Like Bush, who boasted of the US military pursuit of the Taliban, ‘We’ll smoke ’em out’ (CNN 2001a), Creon in Heaney’s version (2004, p. 3) says of potential saboteurs: ‘I’ll flush ’em out.’ And, virtually quoting Bush’s speech at a news conference in 2001 where he declared to coalition partners: ‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror,’ (CNN 2001b)16 Creon warns:
Whoever isn’t for us Is against us in this case. (Heaney 2004, p. 3)
Moreover, there is an underlying parallel between Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and Bush’s denial of human rights in the interrogation and imprisonment of anyone labelled as a ‘terrorist’. Creon decrees:
Never to grant traitors and subversives
Equal footing with loyal citizens. (Heaney 2004, p. 10)
And with regard to Polyneices:
He is forbidden
Any ceremonial whatsoever.
No keening, no interment, no observance
Of any of the rites. (Heaney 2004, p. 11)
The phrase ‘no observance of any of the rites’ in the performance of the play echoed the denial of human rights and dignity to suspected terrorists. The US military was torturing prisoners, denying them access to lawyers, and justifying such treatment because of the exceptional conditions (state of exception) engendered by terrorism. Slavoj Žižek (2002, p. 105) commented at the time:
[T]he topic of torture has persisted in 2002: at the beginning of April, when the Americans got hold of Abu Zubaydah, presumed to be the al-Qaeda second-in-command, the question ‘Should he be tortured?’ was openly discussed in the mass media. In a statement broadcast by NBC on 5 April, Donald Rumsfeld himself claimed that his priority is American lives, not the human rights of a high-ranking terrorist, and attacked journalists for displaying such concern for Zubaydah’s well-being, thus openly clearing the way for torture.
The journalist Jonathan Alter (in Žižek 2002, p. 102), sympathizing with the general trend away from human rights after 9/ll, argued in Newsweek:
We can’t legalize torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.17
Like George Bush, who denied human rights and, more specifically, the applicability of the Geneva Convention (relating to prisoners of war) to
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“Oh, dear mist’ess, we-dem all frought as you-dem had forsook us forever and ever, amen!” said Luce, bursting into tears, as she took and kissed the hand her mistress offered.
CHAPTER XXIII LE’S PLAN
When all the greetings were over the family were allowed to go upstairs—still in custody of the dog, who kept his eye on them—and take off their traveling suits.
Mrs. Anglesea walked ahead to see that every one was comfortable. Every bedroom was perfectly ready for its occupant, well lighted by candles in silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece and on the dressing bureau, and well warmed by a bright little wood fire in the open fireplace, which this chilly April evening rendered very pleasant.
“One thing I do grieve to part with, even in the lovely spring, and that is our beautiful open wood fires!” said Elva, as she sat down on the rug, with Joshua lying beside her, before the fire in the bedroom occupied by Wynnette and herself.
“So do I! I am always glad when a real cool evening comes to give us an excuse to kindle one,” Wynnette assented.
But the tea bell rang, and they had to leave the bright attraction, and, closely attended by Joshua, who resolved to keep them in view, go down to the dining room, where all the family were assembled.
This apartment was also brightly lighted by a chandelier, which hung from the ceiling over the well-spread table, and warmed by a clear little wood fire in the open chimney.
“Strawberries and wood fires! The charms of summer and winter meeting in spring!” exclaimed Wynnette, glancing from the open chimney to the piled-up glass bowl of luscious fruit that stood as the crowning glory of the table.
“Raised under glass, honey. And a time I had to keep the little niggers from stealing them! Children may be little angels, but I never
seed one yet as wouldn’t steal fruit when it could get a chance.”
“I think they instinctively believe that all the fruit that grows belongs to them, or at least, as much of it as ever they want, and— maybe they are right,” said Mr. Force.
“That’s pretty morality to teach the young uns! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, ole man. That’s not my way, nohow. I spanked every one of them little niggers with a fine new shingle until they roared again, every time I caught ’em at the strawberries; and, providentially, there were plenty of new shingles handy—left by the carpenters who put the new roof on the back porch,” said the lady from the mines.
But no one replied; and as Mrs. Force had taken her seat at the head of the table, all the party gathered around, while the dog stretched himself on the rug before the fire and watched his family. They wouldn’t get away again for parts unknown, and stay three years—not if he knew it!
It was late when they sat down to tea, but as they were all very hungry, and this was their first meal at home after years of absence, they lingered long around the table.
And when at last they arose and went into the drawing room, still “dogged” by Joshua, it was only for a short chat around the fire, and then a separation for the night.
“Jake, put that dog out,” said Mrs. Anglesea, who could not all at once forget to give orders in the house she had ruled for three years, even now when the mistress was present.
Jake advanced toward the brute, but Joshua laid himself down at Wynnette’s feet and showed all his fangs in deadly fashion.
“’Deed, missis, it’s as much as my life’s worf to tech dat dorg now,” pleaded Jake.
“Let Joshua alone,” said Wynnette; “he shall sleep on the rug in my room, shan’t you, good dog?”
Joshua growled a reply that was perfectly well understood by Wynnette to mean that he certainly should do that very thing in spite of all the wildcat women in creation.
And so when all went upstairs, the dog trotted up soberly after his little mistress, and when the latter reached their room, he laid
himself down contentedly on the rug, and watched until he saw them abed and asleep. Then he resigned himself to rest.
“Oh! the rapture of being at home again!” breathed little Elva, standing on the rose-wreathed front piazza, and looking forth upon the splendid April morning, when the sky was blue, and the bay was blue, and the forest trees of tenderest green, and the orchard trees with apple blossoms, peach blossoms, all like one vast parterre of blossoming flowers; and the tulips, hyacinths, jonquils, daffodils, pansies, japonicas, and all the wealth and splendor of spring bloom on the flower beds on the lawn were radiant with color and redolent of perfume.
“Oh! the rapture of being at home!” said little Elva, softly to herself, as she gazed on the scene.
“‘Hail, blest scenes of my childhood!’” sentimentally murmured a voice behind her.
Elva turned quickly, and saw, as she expected to see, the mocking face of Wynnette.
“Oh, Wynnette! how can you make such fun of me!” inquired Elva, in an aggrieved tone.
“To prevent other things making a fool of you. Come in, now, to breakfast. They are all down, and I came out to look for you.”
The girls went in together, and took their places at the table.
When the breakfast was over, Le asked his uncle for the loan of a horse to ride over to Greenbushes.
“I want to take a look at the little place, which I have not seen for three years and more,” he explained.
“Why, certainly, Le. Take any horse you like. And never think it necessary to ask me. Are you not as a son to me?” said Abel Force.
“I did hope to be your son, sir, in every possible sense of the word, but that hope seems dead now,” sighed the young man.
“Not at all, Le! We have only to prove a fraud in the alteration of the date of Lady Mary Anglesea’s death to set aside every imaginary barrier between you and Odalite.”
“But, sir, he denies that there ever was any marriage between himself and this Californian lady. He declares that it is all a conspiracy between the woman and the priest, that the marriage
certificate is a forgery, and the telegram a fraud, and he defied us to go or send to St. Sebastian to test the matter. Now if this Californian lady is not Anglesea’s wife——” Le paused. He could not bring himself to conclude the sentence.
“If the Californian is not his wife, Odalite is, no matter at which date the first wife died,” said Mr. Force, finishing the unspoken argument.
“Yes, that is what I meant to say—only I could not.”
“My dear Le, have you the least doubt as to the reality of that St. Sebastian marriage, whatever may be said of its legality?”
“No, none in the world. Still I want further proof of it. I want to go to St. Sebastian and search the parish register, as he challenged us to do!”
“Bah! He only did that out of bravado, to annoy us and to gain time. He no more believed that we would either go or send to St. Sebastian than he believed that he would ever be permitted to touch the tip of Odalite’s finger as long as he should live in this world! He acted from a low spite, without the slightest hope of any other success.”
“Notwithstanding that, Uncle Abel, upon reflection, I shall go to California and search that parish register and bring back with me absolute, unquestionable proof of that marriage to take with us to England. Then, when we can prove that Lady Mary Anglesea’s death occurred before Col. Anglesea’s second marriage, we shall know Odalite to be free to become my wife. Don’t you see?”
“Yes, Le; but when do you propose to go to California on this quest? You know we sail for England in six weeks from this.”
“I shall start to-morrow, and lose no time! travel express! do my work as quickly as it can be done thoroughly—for to do it most thoroughly must be my first care—then I shall travel express coming home, and so be back again as soon as possible.”
“Well, my boy, go!” said Mr. Force. “I approve your earnestness, and may Heaven speed you.”
CHAPTER XXIV
WHAT FOLLOWED THE RETURN
“Now, ole ’oman, I want you to go all over the house ’long o’ me, to see for yourself how I’ve done my duty,” said the lady from Wild Cats’, as she followed Mrs. Force from the breakfast room on the day after the return of the family to Mondreer.
“Indeed, Mrs. Anglesea, I have no doubt you have done perfectly well,” replied the mistress of the house, deprecatingly.
“Yes, but I want you to see that I have. Now come into the storeroom,” said the housekeeper, resolutely leading the way, while Mrs. Force obediently followed.
“Now look at them there rows of pickles and preserves, and jams and jellies, on them there shelves. All made by my own hands. Them on the top shelf is three years old, and all the better for their age. Them on the middle shelf was made last year, and is very good. Them on the bottom shelf is the newest, and wants a little more age on ’em.”
“I’m afraid you worked too hard in making up these things, and also denied yourself the use of them, since the shelves are so full.”
“Who? Me? Not much! I own I did work hard. I like work. But as to denying myself anything good to eat, jest you catch yours to command at it, if you can; and if you do, jest let me know, so I can consult a mad doctor to find out what’s the matter with my thinking machine. No, ma’am. I don’t deny myself nothing good to eat. You bet your pile on that. Fasting never was no means of grace to me. I had plenty of pickles and preserves at all the three meals of the day. And so had the two niggers. Lord! why, next to eating myself, I love dearly to see other people eat.”
“I am very glad you enjoyed yourself,” said Mrs. Force.
“You bet! And now look into this closet, and see the dried yerbs and roots and berries I have got here. See now!”
“A great store, indeed.”
“All gathered by my own hands, and with the dew on ’em, before the sun was up, and shaken and dried in the shade by me. And now look here at this shelf full of boxes of honey. I ’tended to it all myself. I hived eleven swarms of bees since you have been gone. And I did want to complete the dozen so much. But, Lord! it is always so. Just because I wanted to, they got away while I was at church one Sunday morning. You can’t beat any religion into bees. They didn’t mind breaking the Sabbath no more than a wild Indian. But I’ll more than make up that dozen next season, you bet.”
“You have done admirably well to have saved so many.”
“Think so? Well, now come out into the meat house, and see the barrels of salt pork and beef, all corned by my own hands, and the sugar-cured hams and the smoked tongues. Oh, I tell you!”
Mrs. Force followed her manager out of a back door into a paved yard and across it, to a small detached building of stone, set apart for the purpose to which the able housekeeper had put it.
We cannot follow the two women through all the round of inspection, into the smoke houses, meat houses, poultry yards, etc., but will only add that the lady was gratified by all she saw, and was liberal in commendation of her deputy.
“Now come into the house, and we’ll go upstairs into the linen room, and then up into the garret to look at the carpet and woolen curtains, and blankets and things, laid up in lavender for the summer, and if you find a hole unmended in anything whatsoever, or a patch put on crooked, jest you let me know it, will you, and I’ll go right straight off and consult that same mad doctor I mentioned before, to see if anything’s the matter with my headpiece.”
When the inspection of the house was entirely over Mrs. Force was very earnest in her expressions of satisfaction and gratitude to the faithful and capable manager.
“You are a much better housekeeper than I ever was, Mrs. Anglesea,” she said, as they came downstairs together.
“Why wouldn’t I be? Gifts is divers. You’ve got a gift of working in silks and worsteds, and beads and things, and playing on the
pianoforty, and speaking in all the lingoes of the Tower of Babel. But you can’t keep house worth a cent. And the Lord knows what would a-become of you all if it had not been for ole Aunt Lucy. Now she’s a fairish sort of a manager, though she can’t come up to me. No, ma’am! I never graduated from no college. I can’t play on nothing but the Jew’s-harp, and I can’t speak any language but what I learned at my ole mother’s knee. But, Lord! as for good housekeeping and downright useful hard working, I can whip the coat offen the back of any man or any woman going.”
“I think that few can excel you,” said Mrs. Force, as they entered the little parlor.
“You bet!” said the lady from the diggings, as she dropped heavily into an armchair and panted. “And I didn’t learn to keep house at Wild Cats’, neither! Lord, no; there wasn’t much chance to keep house in a log cabin with a dirt floor, and not even a loft or a lean-to! It was from my good ole mother I learned all I know! And little use it was to me at Wild Cats’. And, oh! when I think of the gold diggings, and my poor ole man leaving of a comfortable home to go and live in a poor shanty, and dig in the bowels of the earth for nigh eleven years to make his pile, and then to die and leave it all behind for that grand vilyan to rob me of——But there! Lord, what’s the use of thinking of it when I’ve got as fine a goose in the roaster before the kitchen fire as ever swam upon a pond, as rich a green gooseberry pie in the oven as ever was baked! And so, ole ’oman, I’ll leave yer now, ’cause I can’t trust ole Luce! She ain’t the ’oman she used to be by a long shot. She’s sort o’ getting blind, I think,” concluded the housekeeper, as she arose and left the room.
Mrs. Force sat back in her chair to rest after her tour of the house and yard.
While thus resting she heard the sound of carriage wheels, and then a gay bustle before the front door, the voices of Wynnette and Elva mingled with the voices of a lady and gentleman, the laughing of a child, the crowing of a baby, and the barking of a dog.
Presently the hall door opened and all this merry confusion of sounds rolled into the hall and into the drawing room.
And before Mrs. Force could arise from her chair to go and see what could be the matter, her door was suddenly thrown open and
Wynnette, all aglow with excitement, burst into the room, exclaiming:
“Oh, mamma! It is Natalie! Dear Natalie and—and two babies! Dr. Ingle brought them in his gig, and he is only waiting to speak to you, to leave them here while he goes his round among his patients, and then he will call and take them home! But, oh, mamma, I want you to make him promise to come back and stay to dinner and spend the evening—will you? Oh, mamma, Natty is looking so lovely, and her babies are just heavenly!”
“My dear, impetuous Wynnette, stop and take breath! Of course Natalie and her children must spend the day, and the doctor must return to dinner. Come! I will go to them,” said Mrs. Force, as she arose and went into the drawing room, followed by the delighted Wynnette.
CHAPTER XXV
THE FIRST VISITORS
As soon as Mrs. Force opened the door Dr. Ingle stepped rapidly to meet her, with both hands extended.
“Welcome back to us! Dear friend! Only this morning we heard of your arrival through Ned Grandiere, who came to my office early to ask me to call and see one of the colored folks on his farm; but Natalie immediately took a fit, and declared that I must bring her and the babies here before going anywhere else! So here they are, and now I must be off to Oldfields.”
Before the doctor had half finished this speech Natalie herself was in Mrs. Force’s arms, laughing and crying for joy.
“Well, well! I must say good-by, madam!” exclaimed the doctor, rather impatiently, as he held out his hands to the lady of the house.
“I suppose I must not detain you from your patients; but I cannot let you go until you have promised to return to dinner, and to spend the evening with us,” said Mrs. Force.
“I thank you! I promise! Good-morning!” And the doctor bowed himself out of the drawing room.
“Oh, you sweet little thing! You lovely, lovely little thing!” cooed Elva, seated upon a hassock, with the few months old baby across her lap.
“These are your children, Natalie? What fine children they are,” said Mrs. Force, as they all resumed their seats.
“Do you think so? I am glad you think so,” replied the proud young mother. “Come here, Effie, and speak to this lady,” she continued, taking a little, white-robed toddler by the hand and leading her up to Mrs. Force.
The little one stood before the lady, with her chin down on her bosom, and her soft brown eyes turned shyly up to her hostess.
“Make your courtesy now to the lady,” said her mother.
The little creature obeyed and dropped her courtesy, still turning her soft brown eyes, full of reverence and admiration, up to her hostess’ face.
“So this is my little namesake?” said Mrs. Force, lifting the child upon her lap.
“Yes, named Elfrida, for you and Elva; but we call her Effie, and she calls herself Essie,” said the young mother.
“Ah! is that your name, little one?” inquired the lady, stroking the child’s curls.
“Es, ma’am—Essie,” replied the baby.
“And what else besides Essie?”
“Essie—Indy, ma’am.”
“Oh, Essie Ingle—is that it?”
“Es, ma’am; Essie—Indy.”
“And how old are you, Essie?”
“Me—two—doin’ on fee.”
Mrs. Force looked at the mother for a translation of these words.
“She is two years, going on three,” laughed little Mrs. Ingle.
Mrs. Force continued her catechism of the child, who answered in broken baby language, but with rare intelligence, and still with such simple reverence and admiration as touched the lady’s heart.
“Oh, Natalie!” she said, “can there be anything more spiritsearching to a grown-up sinner than the innocent reverence and trust of a child! Lo! they think us so wise and so good, while we know ourselves to be so foolish and evil! Ah me, Natalie!”
Young Mrs. Ingle made no reply, but looked puzzled and distressed while little Essie put up her hand timidly—reverentially, and stroked the fair cheek of the lady, with some vague instinct of tenderness and sympathy.
“Oh, mamma, look at little Wynnie! sweet, little Wynnie! You have not noticed her yet!” said Elva, reproachfully, as she arose, and brought the infant to her mother.
“Wynnie?” inquired Mrs. Force, looking up into Natalie Ingle’s face, as she sat Essie on the carpet and took the babe on her lap.
“Yes, we have named her Wynnette, and we call her Wynnie. She is not christened yet. We waited for you to come home,” Natalie explained.
They were interrupted by other visitors.
The Rev. Dr. Peters and Mrs. Peters came to welcome their old friends to the neighborhood.
“Three years and three months since you left the neighborhood, madam,” said the rector, when the first greetings were over. “And dear, dear, what changes three years have made! Your two younger daughters have grown so much! Wynnette is a young lady. Elva soon will be one. And Odalite, madam? I hope she is well.”
“Odalite is quite well, thank you, Dr. Peters. She has gone over to Greenbushes, but she will be back to dinner. You and Mrs. Peters, I hope, will give us the happiness of your company for the day,” said the lady.
“Thank you, very much; but on this first day after your return home——”
“Now, doctor, I will take no denial. Wynnette, my love, go and tell Jacob to put up the doctor’s carriage and horse. Mrs. Peters, will you lay off your bonnet here, or will you go to a room?”
“I will go upstairs, if you please, dear. You see I have my cap in this little bandbox,” replied the rector’s wife.
So they had come to stay! And, of course, Mrs. Force knew that well enough when she invited them.
An old couple, like the good rector and his wife, could not be expected to come so long a drive only to make a short call.
Mrs. Force conducted her latest guest upstairs to a spare room, where the old lady took off her black Canton crape shawl, and her black silk bonnet, and put on her lace cap with white satin ribbons.
And then they went down together.
When they returned to the drawing room they found the place deserted.
Wynnette had carried off young Mrs. Ingle and the two babies to her own and Elva’s room, which was now converted into a day
nursery, where Natalie, seated in a low rocking-chair, was putting her baby to sleep, while Elva, with a picture book, was quietly amusing Essie.
“Now, Natty, dear, as you know you are quite at home, you must excuse me, and let me go down to Dr. Peters, who is alone in the drawing room,” said Wynnette, as she kissed her ex-governess and dear friend and left the chamber.
But when she reached the hall below she found that the good rector was well taken care of.
Through the open hall door she saw him and her father walking up and down the piazza, enjoying the fine spring day, and smoking some of the squire’s fine cigars.
So Wynnette went into the drawing room, where she found her mother and the rector’s wife, who had just entered the place.
More visitors.
The gallop and halt of a horse was heard without, and soon after Mr. Sam Grandiere, escorted by Mr. Force and Dr. Peters, entered the drawing room, and made his bow to the lady of the house and her guest, and then shook hands with Wynnette and sat down, looking as red-headed, freckle-faced, bashful and awkward as ever.
He remarked that it was a fine day, though bad for the wheat crop, which wanted rain; and then he hoped that Mrs. Force and the young ladies felt rested after their journey.
Mrs. Force thanked him, and replied that the whole family were quite recovered from any little fatigue they might have felt.
The rector, to help the bashful young fellow out, inquired how he had enjoyed his trip to Washington, and what he thought of the city.
Young Sam was not to be “improved” in that way. He made a characteristic reply. Ignoring every object of interest within the city’s bounds, he answered that he thought the land about Washington very poor indeed, and very badly farmed, and crops looked very unpromising. He thought the soil had been too hard worked, and too little manured, and that it wanted rest and food, so to speak.
“But the city, my dear boy, the city! What do you think of the city, the great capital of a great nation?” persisted the minister.
“The city!” Well, Mr. Sam Grandiere didn’t think much of the city. There didn’t seem to be much downright, solid, earnest business going on there, like there was in Baltimore; and, for his part, he didn’t see how the people lived, except such as were in the service of the government. No, bad as the country was round about Washington, the city was even worse—even less productive.
The rector took up cudgels in defense of the national seat of government; spoke of the public buildings—the capitol, the departments, the patent office, the navy yard—and so on.
But Mr. Sam Grandiere could not see any profit or “produce” in any of them.
So the rector gave him over to a reprobate spirit.
Presently Mrs. Ingle—having left both her babies asleep upstairs, with Elva lovingly watching over them—came down into the drawing room and greeted the minister and his wife, and also Mr. Force, whom she had not earlier seen.
“You have grown plumper and rosier in the last three years, my dear. I should scarcely recognize in you the pale, delicate young bride whom I gave away to the worthy doctor. Ah! I see how it is! He has enforced the laws of health,” said the squire, as he warmly shook her hand.
“Yes; that is it,” replied Natalie. “He makes my life a burden to me with régime and hygiene.”
At this moment Le and Odalite walked into the room.
Le shook hands with the rector and his wife, while Odalite literally threw herself into the arms of Natalie.
And a few minutes later, when she had greeted all her parents’ guests, she went upstairs with young Mrs. Ingle to feast her eyes on the sleeping babies over which Elva was proudly and tenderly watching.
There the two friends sat down and had a good, long talk—all about the young doctor’s prospects, the young couple’s home, the neighbors, and so forth; but not once did they speak of Odalite’s trials. Odalite herself never alluded to the subject, nor did Natalie dare to do so.
And it may here be said that the reticence which was observed in the seclusion of the bedchamber was practiced in the social circle of the drawing room.
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Force mentioned the subject of their family troubles, nor could their guests venture to do so.
Elfrida dreaded the indiscreet tongue of the lady from Wild Cats’; so she was greatly relieved, when she went out to caution Mrs. Anglesea, to hear that honest woman say:
“Let’s try to be jolly this one day, and forget all about my rascal and our troubles! ’Deed, do you know I have told everybody in this county how he treated me, so that they all know it as well as their a b c? And that’s a rhyme come out of time. I didn’t intend it, but I can’t mend it. I say! hold on here! there is something the matter with my headpiece! I never composed no poetry before and didn’t mean to do it now! It come out so itself! But you needn’t be afeard of me talking about Skallawag Anglesea! I’m sick to death of the name of him!” concluded the lady from the mines.
Mrs. Force then turned to receive young Dr. Ingle, who had just driven up in his gig and was now entering the front door, while old Jake took his equipage around to the stables.
Half an hour later dinner was served. And, in spite of all drawbacks, it proved a happy reunion of old friends.
After dinner the carriages were ordered, and the visitors departed.
CHAPTER XXVI LE’S DEPARTURE
One day Le spent in going around the neighborhood to see the old friends and neighbors, whom he had not seen for more than three years. The next day he stayed home at Mondreer, and spent nearly the whole of it in company of Odalite.
At night the squire drove him to the railway station, accompanied by Odalite, Wynnette and Elva, as once before. Also, Le was permitted to sit on the back seat beside Odalite, and when there he held her hand in his as on the previous occasion.
They reached the railway station in such good time that they had about fifteen minutes to wait in the little sitting room; and there the last adieus were made, when the train came in.
“It is not for a three years’ absence at sea this time, my dear! It is scarcely for three weeks. Before the middle of May I shall be with you again—please Heaven,” said Le, as he pressed Odalite to his heart in a last embrace, before he jumped into the car to be whirled out of sight.
Mr. Force with his daughters waited until the sound of the rushing train died away in the distance, and then took them back to the carriage and drove homeward.
Again, as before, they reached home about ten o’clock, to find Mrs. Force and the lady from the diggings waiting up for them—only on this occasion they were not sitting over a blazing hickory wood fire, in the dead of winter and night, with a jug of mulled wine steaming on the hearth; but they were sitting on the front piazza, on a fine spring evening, with a little table, on which was arranged a pitcher of iced sherbet, with glasses and a plate of wafer cakes.
“Well, he went off gay and happy as a lark, and we have come home chirp and merry as grigs!” said Wynnette, as she tore off and threw down her straw hat and seated herself at the table.
“Oh, I hope he will have a pleasant journey and a good time altogether! He can’t fail to get all the evidence he wants, ’cause it’s right there, you know! And I give him a letter to Joe Mullins, at Wild Cats’, as one of the witnesses to the marriage, though he wasn’t asked to sign the register! How should he, when he couldn’t read? I hope he’ll have time to run out to Wild Cats’ to see Joe! Though, come to think of it, I don’t know as he’ll find anything there but dark shafts and empty shanties. The leads was running out, and the boys was talking of leaving when I came away. Ah! I hope he will find some of the poor, dear boys! I should love to hear from them direct, once more.”
“How far is Wild Cats’ from St. Sebastian, Mrs. Anglesea?” rather anxiously inquired Wynnette.
“Oh, only a step—le’s see, now; ’bout a hundred and seventy-seven miles, I think they said it was.”
“Is there a railroad?”
“A what? A railroad? Oh, Lord! Why, child, when I was out there, which was less than four years ago, there was not even a turnpike road within a hundred miles of it. There’s a trail, though!”
“What do you mean by a trail?”
“Well, I mean a mule track.”
“Then I do not think that Le can go there. It must be a long and tedious journey, and he will not have time.”
“Oh, yes he will! And opportunity also. There’ll be mule trains, you know. He can pack on one of them. He can rough it! You bet! He’s every inch a man, is Le Force!”
“He must not risk losing his passage on our steamer,” said Odalite.
“Do not be anxious, my dear; he will not run any risks of losing the steamer. I think, also, that he will have time to do our friend’s commission. There has been a road made over that section since Mrs. Anglesea left it. And, now I think, we had better go indoors. The night air is too cold to remain out longer.”
They went into the house and soon after retired to bed.
The days that followed Le’s departure were active, cheerful, full of life.
The old friends and neighbors of the Forces received them back into their midst with not only the earnest love of time-honored friendship, but with the distinction due to illustrious visitors.
They called on them promptly.
They got up dinner and tea parties for their entertainment.
They would have nominated Mr. Force as their representative in Congress for the ensuing year, but that he was going abroad with his family for a year.
The Forces entered heartily into all the schemes of pleasure and hospitality set on foot in the community.
They accepted all the invitations given to them, and in return they gave dinner and tea parties until they had also entertained all their friends and neighbors.
And so the last weeks of April passed and May was on hand.
Letters from Le came by every Californian mail.
He had reached St. Sebastian; he had found the Rev. Father Minitree; he had searched the parish register; found the marriage between Angus Anglesea and Ann Maria Wright duly recorded, signed and witnessed; he had hunted out the living witnesses, and he had procured attested copies of the marriage record, further indorsed by the written and sworn statements of the officiating priest and of the surviving witnesses. And so, with evidence as strong as evidence could be, he wrote that he was ready to come home, only that he wished to oblige Mrs. Anglesea by going out to Wild Cats’ Gulch to inquire after her boys. The journey there and back, he thought, might occupy him four days. After that he should start for home, which he hoped to reach about the fifteenth of May.
Letters also came from the Earl of Enderby in answer to Mrs. Force’s missive that had announced the time of the family’s sailing for Europe—letters saying that the very near prospect and the anticipation of seeing his dear and only sister and her children had made him feel so much better in spirits that his health had improved under it.
Among the most constant visitors at Mondreer was Mr. Sam Grandiere, whose visits could not be mistaken as to their meaning, and whose attentions to Wynnette on all occasions of their meetings in other companies had attracted the observation of the whole neighborhood and caused much talk.
“Mr. Force is such a practical sort of man that so long as he knows young Grandiere comes of a good old Maryland family, and that his character is beyond reproach, he will not mind his roughness of manner or plainness of speech, or his want of a collegiate education, or refuse him his daughter on that account,” said young Dr. Ingle to his wife one evening when they were talking over the affair.
“No, perhaps not; but how could our brilliant Wynnette ever fancy such a lout!” exclaimed Natalie, indignantly.
“Oh, indeed, you are too severe on the poor fellow! And you, coming from the North, do not understand our Maryland ways. In your State it is the farmers’ boys who are sent to school and college in preference to the girls, if any are to go; but in Maryland it is always the farmers’ girls who are put to boarding school in preference to the boys; as in your State you find learned statesmen, lawyers and clergymen belonging to families of very plainly educated women, so in our State you will find refined and accomplished women in the same families with very plain, simply schooled men. It is queer, but it is so. Our Maryland men will make any sacrifice, even that of their own mental culture, in order to educate their women, and I think in that they show the very spirit of generosity.”
But among all the people who observed and criticized the growing intimacy between Wynnette and young Grandiere, none was more interested than quaint little Rosemary Hedge.
Rosemary was poetic, romantic and sentimental to a degree. She was devoted to Wynnette and Elva Force; and she could not bear the idea of Wynnette “throwing herself away” on such a rustic.
“He is my own dear cousin, Wynnette, and I love him dearly as a cousin; but, indeed, I could not marry him to save my soul! And though he is a good boy, I do not think he is a proper match for you,” said Rosemary, one morning, when she had come to spend the day at Mondreer, and the two girls were tête-à-tête in Wynnette’s room, where she had taken her visitor to lay off her bonnet.
“Why not?” curtly demanded Wynnette, who did not like these criticisms upon her lover.
But worse was to come.
“Why not?” echoed Rosemary. “Why, because dear Sam is so rough and ungainly. He has red hair and a freckled face——”
“So has the Duke of Argyll and all the princely Campbells!”
“And he has a club nose!”
“So have I. ‘Pot can’t call kettle black.’”
“And such big hands and feet——”
“So much the better for useful work.”
“But, oh! Wynnette, he—he——”
“What now?”
“He has no education to speak of—nothing but a common-school education!”
“Like any number of our great men who have risen to high rank, wealth and fame in the army, navy, civil service, or learned professions.”
“Yes, but he’ll never rise above his station. He hasn’t intellect enough.”
“Neither had any of the grand, brave, simple heroes and warriors of old whose deeds stir our hearts, even now.”
“But, Wynnette, Sam Grandiere is nothing like that! He would not even understand you if you were to talk to him as you do to me. His thoughts run all on crops and cattle and——”
“Whatever is really useful and beneficial to his folks.”
“In meeting their material wants only, Wynnette. But it is vain to argue with you. If you are determined to throw yourself away on Sam Grandiere——”
“Now, Rosemary, stow that, or the fat will be in the fire!” exclaimed the girl, flushing with a blaze of short-lived anger. “I mean I cannot bear to hear you depreciate the excellence of Samuel Grandiere. He is honest, true, and tender. He is as brave as a lion, and as magnanimous as a king—ought to be!”
