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Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre's Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2012

EMMA COX
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Abstract

Contemporary theatricalized refugee narratives are often understood to communicate the profound trauma associated with forced displacement, even as this trauma is made ‘meaningful’ or ‘recognizable’ to audiences by the identification, however nebulous, of hope. This article examines some of the ways in which an affective dialectic of victimhood and hope functions in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking (2006–), a small-scale international touring work directed by Mark Fleishman and produced by Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre. Paying attention to questions of narrative and performative form, I investigate how, and for whom, victimhood and hope function in and through the work, constructing its emotional and political tensions. I trace some of the conditions of its circulation, with particular emphasis on its transnational work with respect to a metropolitan audience at London's Oval House Theatre in 2010. In this, my purpose is to probe the question of who is served (as well as who is implicated and mobilized) by refugee narratives that may occupy all too easily a generalized geopolitical imaginary: ‘far from here’.

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Articles
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Theatre Research International , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 118 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2012

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References

Notes

1 South Africa receives more asylum applications than any other Refugee Convention signatory nation in the world; viewed in this light, Every Year can be seen as a response to the enormous challenges faced by the nation in its role as host to around 85,000 asylum seekers and refugees and hundreds of thousands more displaced people unassisted by the UNHCR. 2011 UNHCR Country Operations Profile – South Africa, UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, 2011, www.unhcr.org/pages/49e485aa6.html, accessed 10 February 2011.

2 To date, Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking has been presented at the African Festival for Children and Youth Theatre, Yaoundé, Cameroon (2006); National Festival of the Arts, Grahamstown (2007); French Cultural Centres in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Swaziland; Franco-Mozambican Cultural Centre, Maputo; Baxter Theatre, Cape Town (2007); Hilton Arts Festival, KwaZulu Natal (2008); London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) (2008); Proyecto Festival, Argentina (2009); Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, Oudtshoorn (2009); International Theatre Festival of Kerala (2009); Juice Festival for Young Audiences, Newcastle, UK (2009); Aardklop National Arts Festival, Potchefstroom (2009); Oval House Spring Theatre season, London (2010); World Congress International Drama in Education Association (IDEA), Belem, Brazil (2010); Teatro Pombas Urbanos, São Paulo, Brazil (2010); ASSITEJ World Congress, Malmö, Sweden (2011). It had been scheduled for performance in 2011 at the Imbewu Contemporary South African Theatre Festival, New York, but the Festival was postponed until 2012.

3 Crane, Mary Thomas, ‘What Was Performance?’, Criticism, 42, 2 (2001), pp. 169–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here pp. 170–1.

4 For a discussion of this piece see Jeffers, Alison, ‘Looking for Estrafil: Witnessing “Refugitive” Bodies in I've Got Something to Show You’, in Forsyth, Alison and Megson, Chris, eds., Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 91–106Google Scholar.

5 Verbatim works by Actors for Human Rights (a constituent strand of Ice and Fire Theatre Company) include their flagship production, Asylum Monologues (2006–), and Asylum Dialogues (2008–), both scripted by Sonja Linden.

6 For a discussion of Towfiq Al-Qady's work see Cox, Emma, ‘The Intersubjective Witness: Trauma Testimony in Towfiq Al-Qady's Nothing but Nothing: One Refugee's Story’, RIDE: Research in Drama Education, 13, 2 (2008), pp. 193–8Google Scholar. For a discussion of Shahin Shafaei's work see Cox, Emma, ‘The Citation of Injury: Regarding the Exceptional Body’, Journal of Australian Studies, 33, 4 (2009), pp. 459–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo discuss the centrality of shame in responses to theatre about asylum seekers and refugees in Australia in a chapter on performance and asylum in Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 201–4.

8 Edmondson, Laura, ‘Of Sugarcoating and Hope’, Drama Review, 51, 2 (2007), pp. 7–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 7.

9 Crane, ‘What Was Performance?’, p. 171.

10 Feldman, David B. and Snyder, C. R., ‘Hope and the Meaningful Life: Theoretical and Empirical Associations between Goal-Directed Thinking and Life Meaning’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24, 3 (2005), pp. 401–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 402.

11 Ibid.

12 Hage, Ghassan, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 9Google Scholar.

13 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 10.

14 Salverson, Julie, ‘Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Injury’, Theater, 31, 3 (2001), pp. 119–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 122.

15 Salverson, Julie, ‘Transgressive Storytelling or an Aesthetic of Injury: Performance, Pedagogy and Ethics’, Theatre Research in Canada, 20, 1 (1999), pp. 35–51Google Scholar, here p. 35.

16 Wise, Amanda, Exile and Return among the East Timorese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 119Google Scholar.

17 Ibid, p. 93.

18 Edkins, Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Salverson, ‘Transgressive’, p. 35.

22 Salverson, ‘Change on Whose Terms?’, p. 121.

23 Thompson, James, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Salverson, ‘Change on Whose Terms?’, p. 124.

25 Thompson, Performance Affects, p. 139.

26 Fisher, Amanda Stuart, ‘Trauma, Authenticity and the Limits of Verbatim’, Performance Research, 16, 1 (2011), pp. 112–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 113.

27 By invoking the term truthfulness here I follow a distinction made by Charlotte Delbo, a Holocaust survivor and member of the French resistance, that holds truthfulness to be different from factuality; in the epigraph of her poetic Holocaust memoir Auschwitz and After (published in English in 1985), Delbo writes, ‘Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful’. Delbo, Charlotte, Days and Memory, trans. and preface Lamont, Rosette (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

28 Thompson, Performance Affects, p. 139.

29 Zygmunt Bauman weaves literal and metaphorical understandings of societal waste to frame his discussion of the ways in which certain human lives are comprehensively excluded from the benefits of global modernity. Bauman, Zygmunt, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 17.

31 Feldman and Snyder, ‘Hope and the Meaningful Life’, p. 406.

32 Ibid., p. 407.

33 Magnet Theatre, Productions: www.magnettheatre.co.za/productions, accessed 11 March 2011.

34 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 10.

35 Quoted in Anton Krueger, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, OpStage, 2 July 2007, http://litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&cause_id=1270&news_id=18985&cat_id=245, accessed 10 February 2011.

36 Liz Frank, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, National Theatre Namibia, Windhoek, Sister Namibia, 2008, www.thefreelibrary.com/Every+year,+every+day+I+am+walking.-a0184550000, accessed 9 February 2011.

37 Ibid., np.

38 Chris Thurman, ‘Theatre that Transcends Language and Borders’, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, 29 March 2008, www.businessday.co.za, accessed 11 February 2011.

39 Astrid Stark, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, The Magnet, Cape Town, 11 February 2010, http://astridstark1.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/theatre-review-every-year-every-day-i-am-walking/, accessed 9 February 2011.

40 Programme Note, Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, 23 February–13 March 2010, Oval House Theatre, London.

41 Howard Loxton, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking at Oval House Theatre, London, British Theatre Guide, 2010, www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/everyyear-rev.htm, accessed 9 February 2011.

42 Ibid., np.

43 Lindsey Johns, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking at Oval House Theatre, London, Afridiziak, 1 March 2010, www.afridiziak.com/theatrenews/reviews/review-every-year-every-day-i-am-walking.html, accessed 8 February 2011.

44 Belinda Otas, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, Oval House Theatre, London, Belinda Otas: Telling It like It Is!, 3 March 2010, http://belindaotas.com/?p=1639, accessed 15 March 2011.

45 Brian Logan, review of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking at Oval House Theatre, London, Time Out London, 4 March 2010, www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/176935/every-year-every-day-i-am-walking, accessed 10 February 2011.

46 Quoted in K. Santhosh, ‘Physical Theatre at Its Best’, The Hindu, 22 December 2009, p. 4.

47 The international research database resource, Dow Jones Factiva, which encompasses 28,500 sources from two hundred countries in a number of media, including newspapers, journals, magazines, television and radio, contains no record of performances of Every Year at the ASSITEJ Congress.