The Theatre of Genocide

by Shushan Avagyan

Published: Saturday March 22, 2008

The Theatre of Genocide, a collection of four plays, presents a retrospective of specific historical genocides.

As Aristotle wrote once about tragedies and tragic narratives, he examined their effects through catharsis, which purified feeling and emotion by forcing the audience to identify with the play's characters, compelling them to experience their suffering and to learn the true causes of their death. Through catharsis we reach that overwhelming feeling of having been exposed to ("lived through") the dark and ominous forces that lay just beneath the surface of human life, and of having survived. We "redeem" tragedy by experiencing it, but, despite this redemption, we do not get over it. Rather, to achieve redemption we are compelled to dramatize and redramatize, experience and reexperience the trauma, i.e., we identify and sympathize with the victims of the trauma, we bear witness to their suffering.

This is perhaps the overarching premise of The Theatre of Genocide, a collection of four plays that present retrospective assessments of specific historical genocides. However, unlike earlier theatrical explorations of tragedy and trauma, these plays, insist upon the notion of non­closure. As Robert Skloot notes in his introduction, "Certainly, the cry of ‘Never again!' that was heard first in the aftermath of the Holocaust has come to seem little more than a hollow slogan today."

And it is precisely this feeling of non­closure that prevails in Lorne Shirinian's Exile of the Cradle, the unresolved conflict of adequacy and inadequacy; is the act of telling, instructing the progeny on the Armenian genocide adequate for the healing of wounds, or does transmittance in itself somehow perpetuate cultural trauma? Shirinian's characters, members of an Armenian diasporan family living in Canada, want to expose the clichés of history, they want to reveal the emotional automatism that the genocide evokes but they can't break free from two self-imposed and uncompromising paths: internalization of the trauma and its habitual replication, or estrangement from the trauma and the pursuit of new paths seemingly devoid of cultural baggage. Ultimately, Shirinian interrogates the categorical nature of these distinct paths, searching for ways in which they might overlap and, moreover, go beyond the bifurcation.

Catherine Filloux's Silence of God is a play that deals with the genocide in Cambodia. The play's protagonist is an American journalist who conducts an interview with Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for over one million deaths. The play explores the duality of erasure, the erasure of the victim's identity and the erasure of the perpetrator's crime, as Pol Pot declares: "There must never be a face to the act." This facelessness then links perpetrator and victim, as well as the contending forces of ego and anonymity in human life and deeds.

A Patch of Earth by Kitty Felde employs the trope of a trial to explore the nature of crime and justice, as the protagonist of the play, Drazen Erdemovic turns himself in to relieve his conscience, pleading guilty at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Felde's particular interest in the perpetrator is his internal mechanism of guilt, which is more often suppressed in the conscience, like in Erdemovic's comrades in arms from the Tenth Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serbian Army, who irredeemably fall into the cycle of chronic denial and destruction. Like the ancient Greek Erinyes, the ghosts of the dead from Srebrenica plague Erdemovic in his dreams and reality, culminating in the voice of his own infant son who calls him "monster."

A dramatized story taken, like Felde's play, from an actual trial, Maria Kizito by Erik Ehn is a lyrical meditation around the inexplicable actions of Benedictine nuns refusing refuge to Tutsi women and children, and helping the Interahamwe soldiers brutally murder innocent civilians on the very grounds of their monastery. While the two characters, Sister Maria, a Rwandan who is on trial for taking part in the atrocities, and Sister Teresa, a white American who thinks ("Do you think thinking hides you?") that learning about the trial will help "expose something" in herself ("I am the empathy fairy. The atrocity Tinkerbell"), seem unconnected, they share complicity through actual deeds and through deliberate non­action/silence.

The construction and representation of the tragic narrative in these four plays is critically important for the personalization of real, embodied trauma and persons involved-survivors, instigators, and witnesses. Rather than focusing on larger-than-life-leaders, mass movements, ideologies, these dramas portray the events in terms of individuals, families and friends, parents and children, brothers and sisters, thus personalizing these monumental catastrophes and bringing them home.