April 14, at the Ray Stark Family Theatre at USC School of Theatre
A year ago I was asked to create a short performance piece, based on materials housed in the new Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection in the basement of Doheny Library at USC. Acquired with funds from Wolf Gruner’s endowed Chair in the History Department, the USC Libraries and the College of Letters & Sciences, this archive is intended to be the foundation, along with the Shoah Foundation—also housed at USC—for an international “research cluster” for the resistance of genocide. I can get behind that.
That was a year ago. Now the performance is exactly a month away—on April 14—and all the writing I have been doing in search of whatever story I can pull from the morass of information in the archive is clearly not dramatic or performative. It is process writing, and since so much of this exercise is an inquiry into the creative process in response to testimony of trauma or catastrophe, I figured I would start posting it here, as a chronicle of the process.
Here goes:
January 19, 2011
Thinking about death a lot and grieving. Deeply grieving the loss of Martin Luther King because at the end of his life, what he was doing–and why he was even in fucking Memphis–was working for jobs. Job equality. Economic equality. And even though some may consider the election of half-black Barack (don’t get me wrong: i worked my ass off to get the guy elected, and pray for him every day) to be president of the US, I consider where we are economically a big back-step from where we were in 1968, in terms of consciousness about economic issues, which are at the center of civil rights, from my point of view.
Grieving MLK. Grieving Bobby Kennedy, who I was in love with as a very little girl, and whose loss tore my heart out even before I found out a couple of years ago about his flatbed speech in a black community of Indianapolis, where he actually had to tell people that Martin was dead. And he quoted Aeschulis! And all I could think of was do you think any of these goons in the Senate even know who Aeschulis is?
And then there’s the frigging Holocaust. I mean you can say “the frigging–or even fucking–Holocaust.” You can’t really say “the fucking Shoah.” Or I can’t. Maybe someone can. But what better thing to modify with that modifier.
Fuck. You can’t get away from it, no matter how hard you try. My family came here at the turn of the twentieth century. I have a record of my Dad’s dad coming in with his mother, brother, and older sister from Liverpool (they were living in Manchester) on March 5, 1904. The husband came earlier. The manifest says he met them at the boat. Okay! We’re clear. That’s long before any world war. Pogroms, maybe they had to deal with, which were horrid, I’m sure, but not the bloody Holocaust.
But what about the husband’s family? I know nothing about them. From somewhere near Kiev. Did they get out? What was their life like? I have no idea. His wife, my grandfather’s mother, had her family here. Here mother was here, her brothers.
All of us have links to someone who was lost.
So. I think a lot about death and cruelty and horror and what choices we have about how closely we wish to dance with them. Sometimes we have no choice about the closeness. My mother got some grotesque cancerous aberration in the cartilage of her left ear when she was so young. Barely forty. They cut it out, along with anything else they thought might be touched by it. Muscle, bone, nodes. Her ear. Five years later the familial predisposition to malignancy of the gut raised it’s ugly head. Inoperable. Yes, there was what they believed to be a miracle, but fear of death, and loss of body parts great and small loomed large in my mother’s life. And that was her life and collaterally my own. And how we do that dance, and what we do with our partners in that dance are what I’m interested in now, in this, our cave.
How do we as artists handle–I often use the word “metabolize”–the raw material of catastrophe, in our own experience, or as recounted in the personal testimony of others?
Victims of trauma who are able to, in some sense, move on, carve from the morass of information that is their experience some “story” that makes some sense, even if the story is that it makes no sense: Evil exists. Or simply chaos. There is no one in charge.
It is not recommended in most current therapeutic approaches that victims of trauma–sexual violation, domestic violence, battlefield scars, etc.–relive those experiences. The reliving does not set the monsters to rest. The reliving does not give any reason for a tomorrow.
Rather people are encouraged to “storify”, just as we artists make stories.
Victims have no choice whether to walk in those waters. They are the waters they had to walk in. We–you and I–have a choice. Holocaust? Fuck that shit. No way!
Or, like the masochists we are, we choose to stick our feet in. And we train our bodies to breathe, where most sane folks know to stop. Because if you stop breathing, you stop feeling. For a time. You can’t not breathe forever. But you can take only little bitty breaths, and get enough oxygen to be barely alive. But you can’t run or sing or dance, which is what we aim to do in the face of this stuff.
Because when we run and sing and breath in its face, we say, “No. You can kill my body, but you cannot take away what is was always will be me. My human right to be now and forever to have been, to have taken up whatever space I took up, to have touched whomever I touched, whatever I touched. I was here. And I will always be here.” Cleopatra’s bath water. My pee. You drink me, and you will always drink me, just as I drink you. Hah!
That may be it for today.
Tags: creative process, death, grief, USC
