These writing…“pauses” really are getting to me.
Anyway.
Hello again after…(approximately) 4 months! Life (and by life I mean work) really did decide to throw me for a loop this year, what with innumerable college applications to sort out for students (ah yeah, I do that now), teaching feeling generally just more loaded than ever, and the added nonsense of having to navigate between two school sites (yeah, the admin at my establishment made some fascinating decisions last year because school is a business and businesses need to be in a perpetual state of expansion). Every time I have sat down to gather my thoughts a bit after getting home from a show, I’ve just felt nothing. Empty. A vide, if you will.
It’s like my brain is too exhausted from just constantly juggling other things that I’ve had to leave behind writing, something I avidly enjoy. But damn does capitalism really love sucking the joy out of things.
In any case, I am here now, so with the small bit of bandwidth I’ve managed to scrounge up from somewhere, here are some thoughts on the current theatre season.
Its…fine.
There have been some exceptions to this (see: Carte Noir nommé desire, which I saw again, as well as another piece which I will briefly touch on in a bit), but for the most part, what I have been seeing hasn’t left me with anything that lingers on after the show is done. Perhaps it’s because – aesthetically speaking – not much of what I have seen has proposed something new regarding the approach to staging / performance / audience relationship. Then again, it could also just be due to the fact that going to the theatre as much as I do almost inevitably means I have more chances of encountering something aesthetically familiar than not.
It is nice, though, when a surprise does come, and Hatice Özer’s Le chant du père at the MC93 on January 21 certainly was a welcome surprise. Semi-autobiographical and very intimate (staging it upstairs in the Salle Christian Bourgois helped), the piece is also something of a dialogue between Özer and her father who appears on stage with her. Yet rather than confrontational – a tone which a piece with the premise of a young person whose defied their immigrant + working class parents’ wishes and pursued a life in the arts could have adopted – the piece is steeped fully in melancholy. It’s the kind of bittersweetness that comes when one at once embraces traces of one’s past or origins, yet the very act of doing so simultaneously reveals how much has been lost – likely permanently – and the weight of these losses on one’s identity.
And though I cannot go as far as saying that Özer’s own history as she presented it on stage exactly mirrored my own, there were certain resonances in it that stayed with (and still in some sense are) with me after the performance ended. For one thing, Özer’s family hails from Anatolia and, for anyone who is not familiar with that region in modern-day Türkiye, the cultural and historic ties of the region with Greece are hard to ignore. This goes beyond the Ottoman years, as well as the genocides and (many) migrations and population exchanges in the area (though one really cannot minimize those). If you were to listen to the music, particularly the kind of blues that’s played in cafés that (on both sides of the Aegean) are largely (if not fully) dominated by men, even if you cannot understand the lyrics, there is an inherent sadness in the music, in the way a sustained note becomes almost like a thread, stretching out as though in search of something (or someone) that has wandered off, attempting to bring them back in.
Özer’s father is a musician, and, after she has finished setting out and pouring some tea, comes on stage from sitting in the audience, sits at the wooden table which – along with two chairs – makes up the sparse furnishings, drinks a tea, and then picks up his saz, and begins playing and then singing. Just prior to, and intermixed with this, Özer has told us some stories of her father – his gift for music, how she decided one day to just go into one of the cafés he and other Anatolian transplants to France frequented sometimes for hours to see what was keeping him in there. She does hint at the start of the piece that these stories, like all her father’s stories, are a mix of truth, fiction, and a bit of what I can translate as “mystery” or “uncertainty”, yet what does become very clear by the piece’s end is that the question of an adherence to “truth” does not really matter so much. It does not, for instance, change the basic fact that Özer’s father (and her mother) had to leave their homeland to try and seek a better life, that their French is an immigrant and working-class French and that their daughter – in her words – speaks Turkish like a child.
Language – and communication more broadly – is rather central in this piece, and in that sense, one could also consider the folk songs Özer’s father plays as a kind of language, an attempt to “re-inhabit” the body with melodies which are inextricably tied to place. Thus, it may (slightly) bridge that remaining gap that a loss in the poetics or subtleties of spoken/written language has left following the act of migration.
On a more personal note, other than the question of being able to speak one’s “mother” language (which I could certainly relate to), as well as Özer’s recounting of the difficulties she encountered at school when teachers could not (or – equally as likely – would not) pronounce her name correctly, what really weighed on me was the question of existing as something of an “in-between” – not entirely of one place or another one. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I may have been born in California, but there’s no way the name “Ifigenia” is not going to evoke the image of a “somewhere else”, the name thus becoming its own evidence of a migration. Hell, this is not a unique experience for other first-gens – and I cannot ignore the degree to which my white and class privilege have and continue to “shield” me from the ugliest sides of this. In my own case, though, I’ve also managed to go through a good portion of my public life using a shortened, more “palatable” version of my name. I have also come very close to losing the first language I learned to speak, and if it weren’t for my own initiatives, I would have probably lost numerous other cultural, historical, and culinary ties as well. My name says one thing, yet my lived experience, and the minute I open my mouth say another, no matter how many attempts towards closing these small gaps I have taken.
To return to Özer’s piece, the wonderful thing about theatre – and I am going to be cheesy here for a minute, sue me – is that the space and the medium are already pre-disposed to plural and alternative modes of language and dialogue. Of course, theatre is not a panacea, and no matter how close the act of (re)playing the gestures or rituals of a removed place approaches a lived memory, it will never be enough to erase the reminder of loss. But, as Özer, during the latter half of the piece, begins to “plant” long stalks of these small yellow wildflowers that grow abundantly in that part of the world all around the stage, something about the way this abundance of plastic flowers approximates a field – an unabashed construction of a place that itself likely a mix between the imagined and the “real” – felt, good. As in, settled good. As in, the recognition of the in-between as a possible new space in itself good. Unfixed and ephemeral, still, but somehow better than trying to force the dominance of one side of the familial / cultural divide over another.
For the sake of not getting too in my head on this (and because I did intend for this to be brief – though these things never are for me), I’ll end things here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more consistently soon, and maybe find the habit of regular post-show writing again. It’s hard to get back into the academic mindset – or rather, the researcher’s mindset – when things have been getting in the way for so long. Still, I’m trying.
Scènes sur Seine 