Performing Witness Testimonial Theatre in the Age of Asylum, Australia 2000–2005

Caroline Wake

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of English, Media and Performing Arts University of New South Wales August 2010 ii

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At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator.—Saidiya Hartman

Abstract

Witnessing, as it is currently conceived in theatre and performance studies, is a mode of “active” and/or “ethical” spectatorship. However, such definitions neglect the insights of trauma studies scholars, who suggest that witnessing is neither active nor especially ethical. Instead, trauma studies theorists argue that witnessing is temporally belated, which is to say an after effect of spectatorship as well as a mode. Drawing on the language of trauma studies, and through an analysis of testimonial theatres made by, with, and about asylum seekers in Australia from 2000 to 2005, this thesis develops a theory of “performing witness.” Such a theory considers both the figure of the performing witness, defined as someone who testifies and retestifies in public whether on behalf of themselves or an absent other, and the function of performing witness, which is to say the process of producing, reproducing, representing, and responding to testimony. In order to elucidate this theory, the thesis proceeds through a series of “scenes.” The first two chapters focus on theoretical “scenes,” one from theatre and performance studies (Bertolt Brecht’s “Street Scene”) and another from trauma studies (Shoshana Felman’s “Classroom Scene”), in order to ask: “How have these fields theorised witnessing and how might they illuminate one another?” The next four chapters pursue a single question across a series of sites: “What forms of witnessing do we find in performance?” These performance “scenes” include the interviews conducted by immigration officials (Chapter 3), a verbatim play based on interviews with refugees in which a refugee was cast as himself (Chapter 4), an autobiographical play devised and performed by that same refugee (Chapter 5), and a tribunal play based on the transcripts of a parliamentary inquiry into how a boat of asylum seekers came to grief off the coast of Australia (Chapter 6). Through these analyses, many theories of witnessing emerge: ambivalent; mimetic; antiphonic; and false witnessing. These new theories not only refine our understanding of theatrical witnessing, they also shift our understanding of witnessing more generally, inviting us to rethink the relationship between spectatorship, ethics, activity, and temporality. vi

Acknowledgements

I would not have started this thesis without the encouragement and support of Ed Scheer, who supervised my undergraduate thesis and spurred me onwards and upwards. Likewise, I could not have continued it without the supervision of Meg Mumford, who has calmly steered me through many crises in confidence and direction. Her patient ears, exacting eyes, and incredible work ethic are all much appreciated and admired. When both Meg and Ed were on leave, Jodi Brooks stepped into the breach and I liked her so much I asked her to stay. Throughout our time together Jodi has been a generous and rigorous reader and mentor. In thanking Jodi and Meg for the quality of their supervision, I also wish to thank them for the quantity of it—they have worked with me over many hours, weeks, months, and years. These three are part of a wider intellectual community at the University of New South Wales, which has sustained me throughout this thesis. Special mentions go to the other theatre and performance staff: John McCallum, for kindly reading a very rough draft of Chapter 3; and Clare Grant, for many enjoyable conversations in the corridor. I am also grateful to the School of English, Media and Performing Arts’ Postgraduate Coordinator Paul Dawson for his advice and support during a difficult time. To Paul Brown, from the School of History and Philosophy, thank you for giving me a project to look forward to. I have also enjoyed many conversations with my friends and fellow postgraduates Rebecca Caines, Megan Carrigy, Julie-Anne Long, Sam Spurr, Rayma Watkinson, and David Williams. Beyond the University of New South Wales, I have benefited from conversations with colleagues at the Australasian Drama, Theatre, Performance, and Drama Studies Association (ADSA), Performance Studies international (PSi), and the network for Performance and Asylum. The head of the network, Helen Gilbert, not only gave me an airfare to attend a conference, she also gave me—along with Sophie Nield—generous feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 4. I am also grateful to Helena Grehan for her feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 1 and her encouragement more generally, even from across the continent. Of course, without the artists themselves I would have nothing to say at such conferences so I am grateful to all of the artists of this period, particularly to those whose work is examined here: Shahin Shafaei; Ros Horin; and version 1.0. Special thanks go to Ros Horin for permission to cite an unpublished script and to Heidrun Löhr for permission to reproduce her photographs. vii

There are two very dear friends who deserve special thanks, not only because my own scholarly work is indebted to theirs but also because they have helped me to hatch thoughts, dreams, and selves. Thanks to Melissa Yeomans for her excellent thesis and her endearing enthusiasm for life, art, and especially live art. Bryoni Trezise once introduced me in a theatre foyer as her “other, other half” and I feel the same way about her. For your grace, generosity, and intellectual acuity, I am in your debt Bryoni. To my Sydney family, Maria O’Neill, Sarah, Caroline, and Teri Haid, Campbell McKay and Andrew Messer, I say thank you for the many gluten-free meals, the birthdays, and letting me borrow your dog. To the Wake family, words are not enough for the moral and material support you have given me. I am especially grateful to Stephanie, who went above and beyond the call of sisterly duty and checked some citations for me. While she was doing so, she noticed that we write very similarly, surely a result of the many hours we spent as children listening to our mother Jocelyn read. I thank Jocelyn herself for the post cards, the phone calls, and the fierce love that I can feel even down the freeway. To my father Chris, thank you for your wise and gentle words of advice about patience, perseverance, and the 80-20 rule. Finally, thank you to my partner Patrick Haid, for his love, support, and apparently irrepressible sense of fun. viii

Publications

Sections of this work have been published in the following articles:

Wake, Caroline. “The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies.” Performance Paradigm 5.1 (2009): http://www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-51/articles/the-accident-and-the- account-towards-a-taxonomy-of-spectatorial-witness-in-theatre-and-performance- studies/

Wake, Caroline. “After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory, An Introduction to Volume I” Performance Paradigm 5.1 (2009): http://www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-51/articles/after-effects-performing- the-ends-of-memory-an-introduction-to-volume-i/

Wake, Caroline. “Through the (In)visible Witness in Through the Wire.” Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008): 187–92.

Sections of this work have been accepted for publication:

Wake, Caroline. “Caveat Spectator: Performing Juridical, Political, and Ontological False Witness in CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)” Law Text Culture 14 (2010) (submitted April 29 2010; accepted August 23 2010)

Table of Contents

Introduction. Performing Witness: Testimonial Theatre in the Age of Asylum, Australia 2000–2005 ...... 1 Political Contexts: The Age of Asylum ...... 8 Theatrical Contexts: A “Growing Genre” ...... 19 Theoretical Contexts: Witnessing in Theatre, Performance, and Trauma Studies ....25 Witnessing Methodologies: The Ethics of Repetition ...... 32 Chapter Outlines: Scenes of Witness ...... 34

Chapter 1. The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies ...... 36 The Accident: The Spectator as Primary Witness ...... 40 The Account: The Spectator as Secondary Witness ...... 45 The Accidental Account: The Spectator as Primary and Secondary Witness ...... 49 The Account of the Account: The Spectator as Tertiary Witness ...... 51 Towards a Theory of Spectatorial Witness ...... 53 Taxonomy, Theory, Temporality ...... 55

Chapter 2. The Ethical Potential of the Recording: Regarding Video Testimonies and the Complexity of Copresence ...... 56 Producing Video Testimonies...... 60 Regarding Video Testimonies...... 67 Liveness and Copresence ...... 73 The Spectator as Secondary Witness ...... 77 The Spectator as Tertiary Witness ...... 81 The Ethics of Tertiary Witnessing ...... 83

Chapter 3. Interviewing Asylum Seekers: Performance, Ambivalence, and the Witness in the Refugee Determination Process...... 87 The Refugee Determination Process, Performance, and Ambivalence ...... 92 Screening Interviews ...... 97 Performing Ambivalent Witness ...... 102 Primary Interviews ...... 108 Performing Ambivalent Witness, Again...... 113 x

The Spectatorial Witness...... 121

Chapter 4. To Witness Mimesis: Likeness, Closeness, and the Ethically Ambiguous in Through the Wire ...... 125 Likeness and Closeness: The Aesthetics of Mimetic Witness ...... 130 Risk and Repetition: The Ethics of Mimetic Witness...... 143 Sensuous Struggle, Body Back: The Politics of Mimetic Witness ...... 150 The Example, the Copy, and the Critic ...... 154

Chapter 5. Listening to Testimony: The Poetics and Politics of Antiphonic Witnessing in Refugitive ...... 156 Performing the Call: The Poetics of Antiphonic Witnessing ...... 160 Performing the Response: The Politics of Antiphonic Witnessing ...... 168 The Limits of Listening ...... 176 The Critic as Antiphonic Witness ...... 177

Chapter 6. Caveat Spectator: Performing Juridical, Political, and Ontological False Witness in CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) ...... 180 False Witnessing in Theatre and Performance Studies...... 184 Prologue to Perjury: Juridical False Witness ...... 186 The Fog of War: Political False Witness ...... 193 Show Overboard ...... 200 Witnessing Degree Zero: Ontological False Witness ...... 201 Collision as Conclusion...... 206

Conclusion. Performing Witness, Again ...... 208 Scenes of Witness ...... 212 The Risks of Witnessing ...... 214 The Future of Witnessing ...... 215

Works Cited...... 219

List of Figures

Figure 1. View from outside the external perimeter fence into Woomera Detention Centre, 2003. Photo Damian McDonald, National Library of Australia ...... 10 Figure 2. Detainees holding up a cross over a barbed wire fence to draw attention from protestors rallying outside Woomera Detention Centre, 2002. Photo Tony Reddrop, National Library of Australia ...... 15 Figure 3. Shahin Shafaei, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 135 Figure 4. Ali Ammouchi, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 136 Figure 5. Wadih Dona, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr ...... 137 Figure 6. Eloise Oxer, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 141 Figure 7. Shahin Shafaei, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 143 Figure 8. version 1.0, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 186 Figure 9. Foreground: Danielle Antaki as Vice Admiral Shackleton. Background from left to right: Nikki Heywood, David Williams, Stephen Klinder, Deborah Pollard, and Chris Ryan as Senators, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr.....194 Figure 10. Nikki Heywood, Danielle Antaki, Stephen Klinder, and Deborah Pollard listen to David Williams (not pictured) give testimony as Commander Banks, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr...... 197 Figure 11. Deborah Pollard tends to Stephen Klinder, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr ...... 202 Figure 12. Screen shots of “Ali’s Story,” No to People Smuggling Channel YouTube ...... 208 Figure 13. Screen shots of “Left Behind,” No to People Smuggling Channel YouTube ...... 210

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List of Abbreviations

ANAO Australian National Audit Office DIAC Department of Immigration and Citizenship DIMA Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs DIMIA Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs1 HREOC Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission JSCM Joint Standing Committee on Migration JSCFADT Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade SLCAC Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee SLCLC Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee SSCCMI Select Senate Committee into A Certain Maritime Incident UN United Nations UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNESC United Nations Economic and Social Council

1 Since its establishment in 1945, the department has had several name changes. Prior to 1996, it was called the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. That year, its name was changed to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and then in 2001, in a move that outraged many, it was changed to the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. In 2006, responsibility for Indigenous Affairs was moved to the Department of Families, Cultural Services and Indigenous Affairs. Finally, in 2007, the department was renamed the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. To prevent confusion, for the most part I refer to it as the department or the Department of Immigration. 1

Introduction

Performing Witness Testimonial Theatre in the Age of Asylum, Australia 2000–2005

In February 2007, I was sitting idly in front of the television, when I came across a documentary called Ayen’s Cooking School for African Men. The film, as its title suggests, follows Ayen Kuol, a Sudanese health worker, as she attempts to start a cooking school for male refugees who are now living in the suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. Initially she encounters much resistance and not only from the young men, who state very clearly that “cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the house, it’s the duty of your sister,” but also from the older women in the community, who are adamant that men cannot and should not cook (Ayen). Nevertheless, she perseveres and she soon finds herself overseeing a large cooking class in a community centre. During the course of the documentary some of the class participants tell their stories or, in some cases, seem to have their stories told for them. This is despite the fact that they often express misgivings about sharing their stories. For instance, Alier Ateny says: “My life story is not very interesting. Telling it to other people. There is no fun in it cause it’s all about missing parents, facing hardship. So there’s nothing good about [my] life story” (Ayen; Marriner 7). Strangely enough, this comment comes immediately after the narrator has volunteered Ateny’s life story in a voiceover that serves to introduce him. (The narrator himself is never pictured, nor is he clearly positioned in relation to the community, though his accent and approach seem to indicate that he is an outsider.) Later, Malual Wal states that: “If somebody asks me about the situation in Sudan, I’m still having that wound in my heart. If I try to explain I almost cry because I’m still seeing the image, the picture, of that situation. I don’t like it” (Ayen). This comment, too, comes straight after he has told us, in some detail, about his escape from Sudan. In both of these interactions the prompter and the prompting have been erased, the interlocutor is invisible and the interview inaudible. This lack of self-revelation and self-reflexivity continues in the official study guide for this television documentary, which cheerily notes: “Unlike Alier, Malual is willing to tell his story. What does this account reveal about his attitudes to life and his sense of self?” (Marriner 7). Regardless of what these accounts do or do not reveal 2

about a refugee’s sense of self, they certainly reveal much about the documentary makers and the culture in which they are working. Such a culture might be called a “culture of accounting” where some subjects are compelled to offer an account of themselves in order to account for themselves—who they are and why they are here— while others weigh and assess these accounts at their leisure, indeed for their viewing pleasure. This intersection of history, memory, and media has also been called a “culture of confession and witnessing” (Elsaesser 196) or a “testimonial culture” which is characterised by the “imperative to speak out and to tell one’s story . . . across the traditional boundaries of public and private spaces, and is mobilised by disenfranchised subjects and celebrities alike” (Ahmed and Stacey 1). However we describe it, it is clear that there is a lopsided system of exposure, disclosure, and display functioning within both the film and the study guide as well as the wider culture from which they emerged and in which they now circulate. In an earlier version of this introduction, I too repeated Ateny and Wal’s stories, in an attempt to paint a picture of the documentary program I was watching, the documentary plays I will be dealing with, and the document this thesis will eventually become. However, having read Saidiya Hartman’s book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, I now find this type of repetition problematic, if not impossible. Like Hartman, who refuses to reproduce Frederick Douglass’s account of his aunt being whipped, I am adopting a strategy of non-repetition. Such a strategy is, as Fred Moten has pointed out, “in some sense, illusory” since the scene is effectively “reproduced in [Hartman’s] reference to and refusal of it” (4). Nevertheless, the tactic of non-repetition can function “to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the . . . ravaged body” (Hartman, Scenes 3). For Hartman, the only thing “more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible” (4). In other words, she suggests that as well as describing prior, primary scenes of subjection, stories of subjection can come to operate as scenes in their own right whereby the witness is once again objectified, which is to say identified and defined solely in terms of their suffering. In this way, the demand to testify can produce what we might call a secondary scene of subjection. 3

“Rather than inciting indignation,” Hartman says of these endless recitations, “too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances—and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering” (3). This seems like a simple enough observation, one that might be distilled down to “familiarity breeds contempt” or at the very least “compassion fatigue.” Yet, closer inspection reveals that it is somewhat more complicated than this. What Hartman establishes here is the complex connection between trauma and testimony, spectacle and theatricality. In essence, she argues that the scene of subjection is always already spectacular, in the sense that it is produced and perceived as an image, and that it is in part this spectacularisation of the self that renders this suffering so traumatic.1 However, it is important to note that Hartman is not speaking about any and every suffering but specifically black suffering or, more broadly, the suffering of an other marked as a minority or subaltern subject. In the case of the slave, then, it is not simply that his or her suffering is spectacular; it is also that enslavement itself is spectacular—in the sense that the subject becomes an object, and more specifically “an object of curiosity or contempt” (Kershaw 593).2 It is this too that the slave is made to perform. The mention of performance also raises the problematic relationship between spectacle and what Hartman terms “theatrical language” (3). To frame it another way, what happens when we shift from image to language, from trauma to testimony, from the scene of subjection to the story of subjection? What typically happens, according to Hartman, is that we “resort” to “theatrical language,” meaning that we deploy language that is at once dramatic, derivative, and performative: dramatic, or more accurately melodramatic, in the sense that it is exaggerated, sensational, and emotional; derivative in the sense that it is not only citational but also habitual and therefore clichéd; and performative in the sense that “it enacts or produces that which it names,” meaning that the description of the scene of subjection becomes a reiteration of it (Butler, Bodies 13). These recitations and repetitions produce a profound ambivalence in Hartman and she wonders about “the ways in which we are called upon to participate in such scenes” (3). Ultimately, she states that what is “[a]t issue here is the precariousness of empathy

1 Here I am drawing on Guy Debord’s statement that: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). 2 More generally, Kershaw states that spectacle “deals with the human in inhuman ways. . . . it plays on the visceral mainly through the visual; it can attract and repel in the same instant” (594). 4

and the uncertain line between witness and spectator” (4). Hartman spends the rest of her book tracing this uncertain line and thinking about how to “give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or . . . the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays” (4). The problem of how to represent corporeal violence without reproducing it through a sort of representational violence, or of how to engender a response that is neither indifferent nor narcissistic, is precisely the problem faced by abolitionists, artists, and critics alike. These problems become all the more acute when the representations involved are theatrical. If “theatrical language” is problematic, then what would Hartman make of theatre itself? What would she say about a theatrical reenactment of a scene of subjection or of a theatrical retelling that resisted the temptations of mimetic reenactment but nevertheless incorporated “recitations of the ghastly and the terrible” (3)? Is there any way in which theatre could represent such a scene without reproducing the slave as spectacle or without exacerbating our over-familiarity with accounts of it? More optimistically, is there any way in which a theatrical representation might intervene in this scenario to restore some humanity to the dehumanised figure at its core? These are just some of the questions and complications arising from Hartman’s argument and more generally from attempts to respond to and represent trauma through the theatrical medium.

Though I am writing from and about another time, place and context, this project also sets out to trace “the uncertain line between witness and spectator” and to investigate issues of trauma, testimony, and repetition. While Hartman analyses scenes of subjection in nineteenth-century America, I am investigating scenes of witness in twenty-first-century Australia. This central difference between our two projects gives rise to several others. The first is numerical: slavery traumatised millions of people over hundreds of years whereas Australia’s punitive mandatory detention policy has traumatised thousands of people over two decades. Like Dwight McBride, “I trust that this will not be read in any way as an effort to rank oppressions . . . [but] as an effort to account for the specificity of the circumstances of both of these historical events, in order to determine what creates the difference in the narrative responses to them” (141). If the first difference is numerical, the second is temporal: Hartman is writing about a period of history that has long passed, though its legacies persist, while I am 5

writing about a period of history so recent that the ink has barely dried on the first draft let alone the second. The mention of ink points to another important difference between the types of evidence to which we have access. For her part, Hartman is dealing with the detritus of history in the sense that there are few documents from the period, and those that have survived are inevitably documents of the elites (10). For my part, I am dealing with an abundance of evidence, the sort of hyper-abundance of documents that has come to characterise the digital age—there are more than two hundred government reports on the subject, pages of parliamentary debates, and thousands of newspaper articles. Nevertheless, it too is the evidence of the elite; though there is some evidence from asylum seekers themselves, their testimonies are typically collated and framed by another interpretive expert such as a writer, lawyer, or academic.3 In addition, there is the matter of our own subject positions within these scenes of subjection. Hartman is herself descended from slaves, a history she has since traced in her book Lose Your Mother. In contrast, I am an Australian of Anglo-Saxon descent. In other words, as much as I like to think of myself as an innocent bystander, I am a member of the elite in whose name these policies were perpetrated. Finally, there are the differences between the subjects and subjectivities themselves, between slaves and asylum seekers. While slaves were captured and bred, i.e. intentionally produced as such, asylum seekers have often exercised a degree of agency that was not available to slaves. They have sold farms, raised money, paid people smugglers, secured false documents, boarded planes and boats, and finally arrived in Australia, a place which may or may not have been their intended destination. Even as the comparison between the asylum seeker and the slave risks collapsing two very different subjectivities into the single category of the subaltern, it is also a potentially productive one. First, it is clear that there are concrete connections between the two categories of identity: many asylum seekers are escaping slavery in their country of origin; many become slaves in their country of arrival. Indeed, the link between slavery and asylum seekers becomes brutally obvious when discussing people

3 See for instance the following anthologies (listed in chronological order): Heather Tyler, ed. Asylum: Voices from Behind the Razor Wire (2003); Janet Austin, ed. From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in Australia’s Detention Centres (2003); Rosie Scott and Thomas Keneally, eds. Another Country, spec. issue of Southerly, (2004; republished as a book in 2007); Sonja Dechian, Heather Millar, and Eva Sallis, eds. Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories By Young Writers Aged 11–20 Years (2004); Michael Leach and Fethi Mansouri, eds. Lives in Limbo: Voices of Refugees Under Temporary Protection (2004); Sarah Mares and Louise Newman, eds. Acting from the Heart: Australian Advocates for Asylum Seekers Tell Their Stories (2007); and Dean Lusher and Nick Haslam, eds. Yearning to Breathe Free: Seeking Asylum in Australia (2007). 6

smuggling and the related practices of debt bondage, forced labour, and human trafficking. The mention of traffic more generally recalls the fact that, notwithstanding the differences between the Middle Passage and the many passages that potential refugees travel today, both slaves and asylum seekers arrive scarred by the loss of others in transit. In addition, there are theoretical connections between the categories too. While not on abolitionism per se, this thesis does deal with an abolitionist movement of sorts. Since 1992, when the Labor government introduced mandatory detention, and especially since 2001, when the plight of asylum seekers became particularly visible to the Australian public (for reasons discussed below), the asylum seeker advocacy movement has sought to end some of the more punitive government policies and practices. Like abolitionists, asylum seeker advocates—such as the makers of Ayen’s Cooking School for African Men—have sought to humanise the dehumanised figure of the refugee, to pass on testimony of what exactly is going on in detention centres, and to bring refugees themselves onto the national stage. In this way, they, like abolitionists, have sometimes become complicit in reproducing the refugee as spectacle and in reinforcing a testimonial culture that constantly requires the victim to “confess” to their suffering.4 In essence, this thesis investigates why and how refugees such as Alier Ateny and Malual Wal “perform witness,” when and where they do so, to whom and for what purpose. The etymology of the word witness is not especially clear, however it is thought that it comes from the Indo-European root wid, meaning “to see,” which emerges in Old English as wit, meaning both “to see” and “to know.” More recently, it has come to mean both “to see” and “to say” or rather “to testify” (Oxford). Hence, the verb to witness, as John Durham Peters has noted, “has a double aspect. To witness can be a sensory experience—the witnessing of an event with one’s own eyes and ears. . . . But witnessing is also the discursive act of stating one’s experience for the benefit of an audience that was not present at the event” (709). Though I love this dense and allusive aspect of the word, it also risks collapsing the distinction between spectating and testifying, thus confusing the argument somewhat and perhaps limiting potential conversations. Hence, I distinguish between spectatorial witnessing (and the

4 For an analysis of the way in which the abolitionist movement inadvertently reproduces the slave as spectacle, see Dwight McBride’s excellent book Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony, especially his Introduction “Bearing Witness: Memory, Theatricality, the Body, and Slave Testimony” (1–15). See also Allen Feldman’s article “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic,” especially the section titled “Regimes of Truth” (186–93). 7

spectatorial witness) and testimonial witnessing (and the testimonial witness). To these two categories, I then add a third—the spectator in the audience who was not present at the event but now observes and listens to the testimonial witness’s account of it, i.e. the spectatorial witness to the testimonial witness. Like the word witness, the word performing functions in at least two ways. First, to perform means: “to carry out an action, execute, or fulfil (a command, request, undertaking, threat, etc.)” (Oxford). Second, it means: “to carry into effect, discharge (a service, duty, etc.)” (Oxford). Here, however, I employ the gerund in order to limit the sense of completion or discharge and hence to indicate the way in which some witnesses are not allowed to complete their task but are asked to carry it out again and again. The word performing also turns the phrase performing witness into a compound noun similar to the noun performing artist, defined as “an artist whose work involves public performance” (Oxford). Likewise, the performing witness is someone who testifies in the public domain—in the courtroom, on the television, or in the theatre— rather than in the privacy of the consultation room. Less pleasantly, the phrase also has connotations of coercion, such as when it is used to describe something “that performs (music, drama, acrobatics, etc.) in front of an audience; esp. designating an animal trained or made to perform tricks.” Hence the phrase performing witness hints at how the witness might be made to testify and retestify for the benefit of the public, rather than themselves. In short, the thesis title refers to both the figure of the performing witness, defined as someone who testifies and retestifies in public whether on behalf of themselves or an absent other, and the function of performing witness, which is to say the process of producing, reproducing, and representing testimony. It also refers to the task of the spectatorial witness to the testimonial witness, which is to say the task of responding to testimony. Perhaps another way to put it is to say that I am interested in trauma, migration, and reception: how migration produces multiple traumas; how trauma “migrates” to become testimony; how becoming a refugee depends on that testimony; and how that testimony itself can migrate into new and different contexts. More specifically, this thesis considers what happens when these stories are repeated, why they are repeated, when, where, and by whom. I am intrigued by how repetition and rehearsal can shape a story’s construction, presentation, and reception. In sum, this thesis considers how these stories work in the world and how the world works within them. 8

Finally, while this thesis analyses a particular political and social scene of witness, it also interrogates the terms themselves. What is trauma? What is testimony? What is witnessing? And where do we locate the wobbly and uncertain line between witness and spectator? These are some of the questions that will be pursued throughout this thesis. For the remainder of this introduction, however, I will investigate the question that underlies all of these, the question of: “Why this, why now?” The question of “why this, why now” is a favourite question of trauma studies because it frames not only the peculiar temporality of trauma but also the sudden and surprising emergence of the discipline itself.5 In what follows I set out the political, theatrical, and theoretical contexts that make the issue of witnessing so important, even urgent, thereby taking this question and its possible answers in new directions.

Political Contexts: The Age of Asylum

While issues of spectatorial and testimonial witnessing are arguably always present in any society—who is visible and who remains invisible? whose stories are being told and whose are being heard? whose rights are being “recognised” as a result?—they took on particular significance in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the years between 2000 and 2005, Australia accepted approximately 65,000 refugees. The majority of these refugees arrived under the auspices of the Offshore Refugee Programme, meaning that they had lodged their applications for asylum from abroad. Some others arrived on valid visas, e.g. as students and tourists, and then sought to lodge their application for asylum from within Australia. Still others, however, arrived by boat, without visas. In the two-and-a-half years from July 1999 to December 2001, approximately 9,500 “boat people” arrived in Australia mainly from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. It is the treatment of these boat people, the so-called “fourth wave” in Australia’s history (Manne with Corlett), that was the cause of so much national and international concern; it is also the focus of this thesis.6

5 See for instance Thomas Elsaesser, who states “accepting the latency hypothesis as significant for filmmaking almost necessitates a theory of trauma, in order to understand the nature of the delays (the displacements of an event and its representation) and to be able to pose the question: why this or that film now?” (“Postmodernism” 195, original emphasis). For another example, see E. Ann Kaplan’s chapter “Why Trauma Now?” in which she also cites Michael Roth’s unpublished paper of the same name (Trauma 24–41). In addition, see Matthew Sharpe’s introduction “Why ‘Trauma’ Now?” in his book (Trauma 1–7). 6 In order to be identified as a refugee, an applicant must fit the strict legal definition as stated in the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951. This document defines a refugee as someone who “[o]wing 9

For boat arrivals, witnessing became important from the moment they were intercepted at sea, where officials conducted a brief “biodata interview” in order to establish an asylum seeker’s name, date of birth, and nationality. From here, asylum seekers were conveyed to a detention centre where they went through a “screening interview,” so called because it was designed to “screen out” any particularly unlikely claims. If they passed the screening interview, asylum seekers were then admitted to the refugee determination process proper, where they were once again asked to state their claims to protection in the somewhat misleadingly named “primary interview.” Depending on the outcome of the primary decision, asylum seekers would then have to restate their claims to the Refugee Review Tribunal, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Federal Court, the Full Federal Court, and then the High Court. In other words, “refugees [were] required to produce their traumatic experiences [repeatedly and] on cue” (Parsley 66). For the duration of the refugee determination process, which could take months or even years, boat arrivals were held in detention centres. In 1999 there were three centres in operation and their combined capacity was approximately 1,700, but when the number of asylum seekers started to increase rapidly, the government was forced to construct several new centres in short order. The most significant of these were Curtin (open from September 1999 to September 2002), Woomera (from November 1999 to April 2003), and Baxter (from September 2002 to August 2007). In September 2001, the government established additional detention centres in the neighbouring nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea as part of its “Pacific Solution” (explained in more detail below). These detention centres were remote and isolated. For instance, the Curtin detention centre was located outside the town of Derby (population 3,000) in the West Kimberly, Western Australia, which is approximately 2,643 kilometres north of the state capital Perth. Similarly, the town of Woomera (population 500) sits in the Simpson Desert, South Australia, about 487 kilometres north of the state capital Adelaide. It is accessible only via air taxi or a drive that takes between five and eight

to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the country.” While a refugee is a person who has already been assessed as satisfying this definition, an asylum seeker is a person who has not yet been identified as a refugee but who is applying to have his or her status as such officially recognised. In the period between 2000 and 2005, more than 85 percent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat were recognised as refugees, hence this thesis tends to employ the terms interchangeably. While this is not common practice in legal circles, it is more common in cultural studies where it is read as a gesture of inclusiveness (see Pugliese “Penal” for instance). 10

hours, depending on conditions. The centre on Nauru was even less accessible, because the government there consistently refused to grant visas to lawyers, journalists, or activists seeking to access detention centres.

Figure 1. View from outside the external perimeter fence into Woomera Detention Centre, 8 January 2003. Photo Damian McDonald, National Library of Australia

Beyond being isolated, these detention centres were also physically gruelling places. From the outside, one parliamentary committee commented: “members were shocked by the harsh picture presented by the exterior of some of the centres: double gates, large spaces between high fences topped with barbed or razor wire” (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Report 31).7 From the inside, it was obvious that the buildings had been hastily and sometimes shoddily constructed. Often the buildings had no heating or air-conditioning, meaning that detainees were extremely cold in the winter and hot in the summer, particularly in desert locations where temperatures routinely go above 45ºC. In addition, the centres were often overcrowded. In Curtin, detainees were initially housed in tents and when 1,800 asylum seekers arrived at Woomera within two weeks, there were only eight toilets and

7 To be clear, all government reports are authored by the Commonwealth of Australia so in the list of Works Cited this report is listed first under the Commonwealth and then under the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. 11

two washing machines in operation (Briskman, Latham, and Goddard 116–17). On the island of Nauru, water was so scarce generally that there were reports of detainees only having access to it for one hour per day, during which time 1,000 people were supposed to shower (117). There were also numerous reports of insufficient or culturally inappropriate food as well as limited access to proper health care. On some occasions, asylum seekers would be forced to wait in the sun for four or five hours in order to obtain basic supplies such as sanitary pads or drugs such as paracetamol (116). Sadly such material hardships were nothing when compared to the emotional and mental suffering that detention wrought. Until the Flood Report in 2001, detainees were called by their registration numbers (composed of three letters and a number) rather than their names (Flood par. 10.30.11). When the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention visited Woomera in 2002, they “observed that most of the detainees who came forward introduced themselves by their registration numbers,” adding that “this practice is felt to be a loss of the detainees’ identity” (UNESC 13). Indeed, children in the Curtin centre told the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission that they felt “like animals” and “like you have a cow tag or something on you” (Last 388). Like cattle, asylum seekers were subject to at least four “musters” or headcounts per day, including one at night. When they were not being counted, they were often working as kitchen hands and cooks, gardeners, cleaners, and hairdressers for little or no pay (roughly one dollar per day). Yet arguably the most difficult aspect of detention was its duration—the refugee determination process could take many months and sometimes years, as an understaffed and overworked department fell further and further behind and appeals crawled through the courts. The combination of displacement, detention, and duration gave rise to a complex constellation of traumas in asylum seekers—structural, historical, social, and medical. First, because they are subjects, asylum seekers are survivors of “structural trauma,” which Dominick LaCapra defines as “the separation from the (m)other, the passage from nature to culture, the eruption of the pre-oedipal or presymbolic in the symbolic, the entry into language, the encounter with the ‘real,’ . . . [and] the constitutive nature of originary melancholic loss in relation to subjectivity” (Writing 77). Hence, “[e]veryone is subject to structural trauma,” according to LaCapra, and it “appears in different ways in all societies and all lives” (79, 77). Second, because they are refugees, many—if not most—have survived “historical trauma,” which is “related to particular events that do indeed involve losses” (80). Such events, in LaCapra’s 12

account, include slavery, the Shoah, the dropping of the atom bomb, and war more generally. The majority of asylum seekers during this period were escaping the Iran of the Ayatollahs, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and the Afghanistan of the Taliban, and many had survived persecution and torture. Obviously, different types of trauma are deeply entangled and each trauma does not simply add to a prior trauma but rather multiplies it. So while structural trauma inaugurates subjectivity and tips the subject into language and into the social, historical trauma annihilates subjectivity and tips the subject out of language. Indeed, the reason historical trauma may have such impact is that it redoes or redoubles the original, originary, violence of structural trauma but at the same time undoes its subjective effects. That is, it returns a shattered subject to the real or at the very least the referential, as opposed to the symbolic or semiotic realms. The subject is reduced to their base bodily functions and they find themselves in an adult body but with an infantile sense of agency. When those around them also lack agency, these structural and historical traumas become social not only because this trauma is “socialised” through what Lenore Terr calls the “contagion” of trauma but also because the bonds of the social itself are broken (“Remembered”). To paraphrase Kai Erikson, trauma damages the tissues and textures of community, often “forc[ing] open whatever fault lines once ran silently through the structure of the larger community, dividing it into divisive fragments” (189). This damage then goes to create “social climates [and] communal moods, that come to dominate a group’s spirit” (190). This is precisely what happened to asylum seekers held in detention, who felt isolated and betrayed by the world, and often turned against one another, particularly when one group or nationality seemed to be given priority in processing. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention noted that there seemed to be a “collective depression syndrome” (UNESC 12), thus confirming what the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade had noted: the emergence of an “immigration detention syndrome” (Report 104). These terms are part of a larger body of work documenting the medical trauma, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, that detention caused or exacerbated in asylum seekers and refugees. One of the earliest accounts appeared in 2001, coauthored by Aamer Sultan, an Iraqi doctor who had been held in Villawood detention centre from May 1999, and Kevin O’Sullivan, a clinical psychologist who had recently completed a 12- month contract at the same detention centre. They estimated that 85 percent of 13

detainees had chronic depressive symptoms and that 65 percent had pronounced suicidal ideation. Several exhibited signs of psychosis, “including delusional beliefs of a persecutory nature, ideas of reference and auditory hallucinations” (Sultan and O’Sullivan). Moreover, when compared to other refugees, who had not gone through the detention system, their mental health was significantly worse. In short, though asylum seekers were often diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there was nothing “post” about their condition and the trauma of detention exacerbated whatever prior historical trauma they had endured.8 Even when asylum seekers were recognised as refugees and were finally released from detention, they were often granted only temporary protection. Previously, asylum seekers who were recognised as refugees were granted permanent protection and immediate access to social security, education, settlement support, family reunion, work, and language training. However, in October 1999 the government introduced a class of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs), which granted refugees between three and five years of protection only, after which time they had to reapply for refugee status. TPV holders were ineligible for support services and were forbidden from applying for family reunion visas. If they chose to leave the country, they were forbidden from reentering. Worse than all of this, however, was the constant threat of forcible repatriation. Indeed TPVs completely reconfigured the temporality of trauma and as a result rendered conventional treatments irrelevant. One study, by psychologist Zachary Steel, stated: “standard treatments such as imaginal exposure or testimony therapy appear to have a core assumption of safety . . . With TPVs, however, the future threat they face is real and represents a likely outcome” (17). For these refugees, conventional therapies produced “a future oriented constellation of PTSD symptoms,” leading Steel to coin the term “anticipatory traumatic stress” (17–18). In an interview, he stated: “instead of having ‘flashbacks’ as veterans do, [these] refugees have ‘flashforwards’ . . . their post-traumatic reactions [are] not about the past . . . they [are] about the future” (Sexton). Here, medical and theoretical reformulations of trauma merge, as Steel starts to echo Jacques Derrida, who said in the wake of September 11: “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with’” (qtd. in Borradori 97, original emphasis).

8 There is now a vast literature on the health impacts of detention centres, too large to list here. For a comprehensive bibliography, with detailed annotations, see the La Trobe Refugee Research Centre’s Refugee Health Bibliography: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/larrc/documents-larrc/research/larcc-refugee- health-bibliography.pdf 14

Each of these traumas—structural, historical, social, and medical, past, present, and future—was made worse by the sense that it was going unseen. In other words, for all their testimonial witnessing, and their ongoing traumas, asylum seekers lacked any spectatorial witnesses. Indeed, asylum seekers had remained—and still remain—largely invisible to the Australian public not only because they were detained in physically remote locations but also because of the strict government controls surrounding these detention centres. The government had banned journalists from photographing or interviewing asylum seekers and since the privatisation of detention centres, in 1997, much information had been suppressed on the basis that it was “commercial in confidence” (Mares, Borderline 76–90). In addition to this physical and visual disappearance, asylum seekers also disappeared linguistically behind bureaucratic acronyms and idiomatic insults. Legislation became littered with acronyms such as OEP (offshore entry person), PII (potential illegal immigrant), PUA (possible unauthorised arrival), SUNC (suspected unauthorised non-citizen), TP (transitory person), UA (unauthorised arrival), UBA (unauthorised boat arrival), UAM (unaccompanied minor), and UNC (unlawful non-citizens). Similarly, public discourse was dominated by derogatory terms such as “economic migrants,” “forum shoppers,” “illegal immigrants” or simply “illegals,” “queue jumpers,” “smuggled people,” and “these people.” Sensing their own absence from the public sphere, and feeling increasingly desperate about the delays in their applications and the conditions in which they were living, asylum seekers staged a series of protests from 2000 onwards. In February 2000, a small group of asylum seekers in Curtin detention centre stitched their lipes together in protest, though the event went largely unreported (Mares 9–16). In June 2000, detainees in Woomera protested for three days before pushing their way through a perimeter fence and marching into town. For the most part, the protest was peaceful but several detainees sustained injuries, as did three officers and a guard, who was punched to the ground. When both their emotions and their options were exhausted, the asylum seekers reluctantly negotiated their return to the detention centre (Mares 47–48). Two months later, in August 2000, detainees protested again, rioting, setting fire to buildings, and pushing fences. This time, however, the authorities were prepared and when detainees pushed at the fence they were repelled with a water cannon. In November 2000, detainees went on another hunger strike. Throughout 2001, protests continued in Curtin, Woomera, Port Hedland and elsewhere. Then, in January 2002, 15

asylum seekers in Woomera stitched their lips and went on a hunger strike for more than two weeks. This time, the media paid attention, describing the action as “gruesome” (Jackman 2), “brutal” (Madigan 1), and “ghastly” (Farr 5). The reason that these protests were reported in 2002, and not 2000, had to do with the increasing visibility of asylum seekers through a series of events in 2001. First, on August 13 2001, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation screened a report titled “The Inside Story,” which showed what was happening within detention centres. Stories Figure 2. Detainees holding up a cross over a barbed wire fence, to draw attention from of abuse and images of depressed protestors rallying outside Woomera Detention detainees, particularly of a six- Centre, 2002. Photo Tony Reddrop, National Library of Australia year-old boy who had stopped eating, drinking and speaking, shocked the nation. So too did the Minister for Immigration’s callous response to the boy when, in a television interview the following day, he repeatedly referred to the child as “it.” Less than two weeks later, on August 26 2001, the government caused a major international incident when it broadcast a call to ships to go to the aid of a small asylum seeker boat that was sinking and then refused to let the rescuing ship—called the Tampa—land in Australia. What followed was a five-day face-off between the Australian government, the captain of the Tampa, the shipping company, and the Norwegian government. When the captain declared his vessel in distress and finally 16

entered Australian waters, despite the governments instructions not to, the ship was boarded by SAS commandos whose orders were to commandeer the Tampa.9 While the asylum seekers were transferred from the Tampa to the HMAS Manoora, and arrangements were made to move them to New Zealand and elsewhere, Prime Minister John Howard started crafting his so-called “Pacific Solution” (later renamed the “Pacific Strategy” after numerous commentators pointed out the disturbing echoes of Hitler’s “Final Solution”). In essence, the Pacific Solution consisted of three central strategies: (1) excision; (2) interdiction; and (3) deflection. Excision was the legislative process of removing thousands of islands from Australia’s “migration zone.” This meant that people who landed on these islands had not reached Australia and therefore could not apply for protection as a refugee. The government then established Operation Relex, a naval operation designed to indict asylum seeker boats at sea and turn them back to Indonesia. Finally, with the assistance of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, the Australian government established an offshore processing system whereby asylum seekers who were intercepted en route to Australia and could not be returned to Indonesia, were removed to third countries where they would be processed as “offshore entry persons.”10 In the middle of this hasty legislative effort, the events of September 11 2001 unfolded. With panic rising and the issues of border protection, national security, and terrorism starting to merge in the public’s mind, Howard called an election for November 10. During the first week of the campaign, on October 7, the Minister for Immigration announced that the navy had intercepted another asylum seeker boat, the SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 4, and that while doing so the asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard “in a clearly planned and premeditated” attempt to force their way into the country. Two days later, on October 9, Howard stated: “I certainly don’t want people of that type in Australia, I really don’t” (Mares, Borderline 135). When journalists demanded further proof, the Minister for Defence, Peter Reith, released photographs of children floating in the sea, which he presented as evidence that they had been thrown into the water. In the aftermath of the election it was established that no children were thrown overboard and that the photographs were actually taken on October 8, when the SIEV 4

9 This is a necessarily truncated version of events. For a more detailed and nuanced account of the Tampa affair, see David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s Dark Victory. 10 For more information on the Pacific Solution, see Future Seekers II: Refugees and Irregular Migration in Australia (Crock, Saul, and Dastyari 115–31). 17

sank and almost everyone on board had to be rescued from the sea. It was also established that in making their claims, all three ministers had relied on a third-hand report of a phone call which had taken place between the naval commander and a senior officer in Canberra at a particularly high point of the operation. The Senate Select Committee for an Inquiry into A Certain Maritime Incident concluded that there were a number of operational “irregularities” in how the SIEV 4 was handled, all of which “point to the likelihood that the Government had decided to make an example of SIEV 4” (xxv).11 Unlike the SIEV 4, the SIEV X never received an entry number because it apparently never came to the attention of the navy. Whereas other asylum seekers oscillated between invisibility and hypervisibility, the asylum seekers aboard the SIEV X failed to appear at all, slipping through the vast surveillance safety net and into oblivion. Through the accounts of the survivors, and the investigative work of former diplomat Tony Kevin, we now know that on October 18 2001, a wooden vessel left Indonesia carrying 397 passengers. On the afternoon of October 19, about 30 hours into the journey, the boat’s engines failed and it capsized in the ocean swell. Up to 200 people were trapped inside the upturned hull, unable to escape. Others were cast into the water and clung to planks that drifted past from the rapidly disintegrating vessel. Some survivors say that as they clung to the wreckage during the night a large boat appeared nearby. Searchlights shone into the water and then the boat moved away again, without offering any assistance. Roughly 18 hours later help arrived via an Indonesian fishing boat which had followed a trail of floating luggage until it encountered the survivors. In total, 353 people drowned and 44 people were rescued.12 In this sense, asylum seekers emerged as both invisible and hypervisible, both spectral and spectacular, and, in the words of Diana Taylor, “[t]he spectacle of the specter makes the spectator” (Archive 157). But what sort of spectators were we? For the most part, Australian spectators existed in the state of what Taylor has called, in the context of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” “percepticide” (Disappearing). She defines percepticide as “the self-blinding of the general population” or “the assassin[ation] of

11 For more detail on the SIEV 4, see the Select Senate Committee for an Inquiry into A Certain Maritime Incident’s report A Certain Maritime Incident, especially Chapters 3 through 7. See also Marr and Wilkinson’s Dark Victory, especially Chapters 13 to 15, and Patrick Weller’s Don’t Tell the Prime Minister. 12 For further information on the SIEV X, see Chapters 8 and 9 of the Senate Select Committee’s report A Certain Maritime Incident. See also Marr and Wilkinson’s Dark Victory, especially Chapter 17, and Tony Kevin’s book A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of SIEV X. Survivor accounts can be found here: http://sievx.com/articles/disaster/KeysarTradTranscript.html 18

insight and perception that results in the spectators’ diminished capacity for recognition and understanding, their inability to differentiate, their loss of memory” (Disappearing 123, 245). Though the comparison between Argentina’s “Dirty War” and Australia’s “age of asylum” is obviously imperfect, it nevertheless hints at how the public looked at asylum seekers briefly, but preferred to look away. Perhaps another way of framing it is through Michael Taussig’s notion of the “public secret” (Defacement). Taussig defines the public secret as “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated” or, even worse, that which we “kno[w] not to know” (Defacement 5–6, original emphasis). We do not so much keep a public secret, as we are kept by it. This is certainly how detention centres functioned during this period—conditions were widely known, but rarely articulated. These policies, events, and public secrets constitute an era that I have come to think of as the “age of asylum.” There are several reasons why the phrase seems appropriate. First, it refers to the particular difficulties of asylum seekers who applied for protection onshore rather than those who, like Ateny and Wal, arrived as refugees. Second, the phrase seems appropriate because detention centres resemble asylums in the sense that they are “total institutions” as defined by Erving Goffman: “place[s] of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Asylums xiii). Finally, the phrase conjures the public panic, the prolonged moment of national madness that took hold. However one frames the numbers, whether relative to Australia’s overall population (roughly 19 million in 1999, now at 22 million in 2010), relative to its average yearly intake of migrants (roughly 70,000 per year in 1999, now at roughly 140,000 per year in 2010) or relative to other countries’ asylum seeker applications (in 1999 Australia had 9,450 applications for asylum while the United Kingdom had 71,150), it is clear that the public reaction to 9,500 asylum seekers who arrived by boat was out of proportion, beyond reason, and only barely under our emotional control.13

13 National population and migration figures are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. International statistics on asylum applications are from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Refugees 89). 19

Theatrical Contexts: A “Growing Genre”

Only through performance can disappearance be rendered visible. —Diana Taylor

Taking their cue from Taylor (Archive 205), Australian theatre practitioners sought to render the disappearance of asylum seekers visible through performance, in order to give “voices to the voiceless, faces to the faceless.” In the period between 2000 and 2005, there were more than 30 performances made by, with, and about asylum seekers, leading the Sydney Morning Herald critic Stephen Dunne to comment in 2004 that “[r]efugee theatre is a growing genre in this country” (“Clarion”). This genre incorporated everything from performance art to contemporary devised performance, physical theatre, agit-prop, circus, comedy, fictional drama, and autobiographical monologues. However by far the most dominant form of the period was a form that I call “testimonial theatre,” broadly defined as a form of theatre that both depends on and depicts subjects testifying to, or speaking about, their experiences of trauma. In this way, testimonial theatre operates as an overarching term for verbatim and documentary theatre as well as autobiographical performance. Verbatim theatre was both the earliest and the largest subgenre of “refugee theatre” to emerge during this period. Derek Paget first defined the form as a type of theatre “firmly predicated upon the taping and subsequent transcription of interviews with ‘ordinary’ people, done in the context of research into a particular region, subject area, issue, event, or combination of these things” (317). He adds that “[t]his primary source is then transformed into a text which is acted, usually by the performers who collected the material in the first place” though not always (317). In the space of five years no fewer than seven verbatim plays made by and with asylum seekers appeared on the Australian stage, including: Manufacturing Dissent (2000); Asylum (2001); Club Refuge (2002); Citizen X (2002); Something to Declare (2003); Through the Wire (2004); and In Our Name (2004). The first of these, Urban Theatre Projects’ Manufacturing Dissent, was devised by its ensemble and performed at the Performance Space in Sydney in November 2000. Of the ensemble, five were Vietnamese (all former refugees), one was Cambodian (also a former refugee), and two others were from Serbia and Lebanon. Hence the performance reflected on their experiences as well as those of current refugees. Six months later, in 20

May and June 2001, one of the performers in Manufacturing Dissent, Claudia Chidiac, directed another Urban Theatre Projects performance called Asylum. Four of the five performers were recent refugees from Iran, Kurdistan, and Algeria and the show told their stories of arriving in Australia as asylum seekers (Talbot et al. 3). Following the events of 2001, these creative efforts started to gather more momentum. In 2002, the Melbourne-based activist group Actors for Refugees premiered one verbatim play, Club Refuge, and participated in another, Kan Yama Kan, with the Fitzroy Learning Network (an asylum seeker resource centre in Melbourne). In Sydney, Sidetrack Theatre staged Citizen X, which featured three actors reading letters from asylum seekers who were held in detention centres, as well as the testimony of a nurse who had worked in Woomera. The following year, in June 2003, Actors for Refugees staged another play, Something to Declare: True Stories of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Australia, which was based on interviews with asylum seekers and interspersed with facts about when various detention centres opened, who owns them, and how many people are currently being held there. In 2004, these efforts started to move to the mainstream. In January, the Sydney Festival staged another verbatim play, Through the Wire, as a work-in-progress (this play is examined in more detail in Chapter 4). Three months later, in April 2004, Sydney’s second-largest theatre company, Company B Belvoir, staged In Our Name, a play developed by director Nigel Jamieson in collaboration with the Al Abbadi family, an Iraqi family who spent three-and-a-half years in detention before finally giving up and finding protection in New Zealand. Then, in October 2004, Through the Wire was restaged at the Sydney Opera House, before touring for six weeks in early 2005. While these verbatim plays were made by and with asylum seekers, the documentary play CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) was made about them or, more accurately, it was made about representations of asylum seekers. While documentary theatre is typically defined as a form of theatre in which “staged acting, film clips, photographs, and other ‘documents’” work in concert in order to “attest to the veracity of both the story and the people being enacted,” CMI took a slightly different tack (Martin, “Bodies” 9). Though the play was based on the transcripts of the Senate Select Committee Inquiry into A Certain Maritime Incident, which was established in the wake of the 2001 election in order to investigate the “children overboard” incident and border protection policies more broadly, the performance did not necessarily aim for authenticity. On the contrary, the play often worked to undermine the very notion of 21

authenticity, by pointing to the absurdity of the original utterances; through repeating the banal words of politicians, the performers rendered them ridiculous. Nevertheless, the play—considered more closely in Chapter 6—finished with testimonies from the survivors of the SIEV X. Here it is worth noting that there is some confusion over how, or even whether, to distinguish between documentary and verbatim theatre. In part, this confusion is historical, since Paget first defined verbatim theatre as “the latest manifestation of documentary theatre” (317). In addition, it is also cultural: in the United States scholars tend to incorporate both into the broader category of documentary while in the United Kingdom and Australia scholars still distinguish between the two (Martin, “Bodies” 13– 14). More recently, however, and more significantly, the debate over the distinction between verbatim and documentary theatre has also become epistemological. For example, Janelle Reinelt states that she “dislike[s] the term ‘verbatim’ because it needlessly ups the ante on the promise of documentary” (“Promise” 13). She adds that: “‘Verbatim’ as a category over-extends what [is] a sufficiently rich and proximate archive . . . [and] risks a perception of documentary failure, since it inevitably falls short of the technical truth” (14). Similarly, Carol Martin argues that: “‘Verbatim’ can . . . be an unfortunately accurate description of documentary theatre as it infers great authority to moments of utterance unmitigated by an ex post facto mode of maturing memory. Its duplicitous nature is akin to the double-dealing of television docudramas” (“Bodies” 14). In contrast, I argue that verbatim and documentary are both constructive terms and that it is necessary—where possible—to distinguish between the two practices because they are often doing different kinds of cultural work. Indeed, as will become apparent in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, during the age of asylum verbatim plays were often writing a subaltern history of the period (by interviewing those who had been absented from the public record) while documentary plays were writing a subversive history of the period (by re-reading publicly available documents “against the grain”). More significantly for the purposes of this project, verbatim and documentary theatre model, enact, and facilitate different modes of spectatorial witnessing. Even as verbatim and documentary plays were being produced with and about asylum seekers, there were also three autobiographical performances that were more actively produced by asylum seekers. Like Deirdre Heddon, I define “autobiographical performance” as “performanc[e] that take[s] personal material as [its] primary source” 22

(12). This was the last and perhaps the smallest subgenre of “refugee theatre” to emerge. Indeed, it only became possible when former refugees decided to speak to the situation of current refugees, as in the case of Afshin Nikouseresht, or when current refugees were released from detention, as in the cases of Shahin Shafaei and Towfiq Al- Qady. Nikouseresht arrived in Australia from Iran in 1994 at the age of 10 however his play, There Is Nothing Here, depicts a 16-year-old boy who escapes from Afghanistan. The play premiered in June 2002, before being restaged in November 2003. In the interim, another Iranian, Shahin Shafaei, premiered his play Refugitive in Sydney in January 2003. This play, which is the focus of Chapter 5, depicts an asylum seeker who is on a hunger strike and in his starvation-induced delirium starts to recall some of his time in detention. With the assistance of activists from the Refugee Action Coalition and Rural Australians for Refugees, the show then toured to more than 40 towns and cities around Australia over a period of six months (Stephen, “Alex”). The following year, in April 2005, Iraqi artist and refugee Towfiq Al-Qady devised and performed (with the assistance of Leah Mercer) Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee’s Story in Brisbane. More explicitly autobiographical than Refugitive, Al-Qady nevertheless constructed “a fluid, unstable subjectivity, performing as and speaking about his mother, lover, daughter and his child and adult selves, as well as speaking for other communities with which his experience connects” (Cox, “Intersubjective” 194). Beyond these verbatim, documentary, and autobiographical plays, which both depended on and depicted subjects testifying, there were also several other performances that employed a testimonial aesthetic or what Ernst van Alphen calls “testimony as a trope” (Caught 20). For example, Bagryana Popov’s devised performance Subclass 26A incorporated movement, dance and words from found texts such as academic works on refugees, letters from refugees themselves, application forms for protection visas, and letters advising unsuccessful applicants (Richardson, “Subclass”). Similarly, Ben Ellis’s fictional play These People featured a section in which a character by the name of Lyn Bender addressed the audience about her experience of working as a psychologist in Woomera. Reviewer Colin Rose remarked: “Since a psychologist named Lyn Bender is thanked in the author’s program note, I assume this passage . . . is verbatim” (“No”). Both of these authors, and numerous others, buttressed these authenticating gestures with interviews in which they stated that they had read hearing transcripts, visited detention centres, and talked with refugees as well as lawyers, social workers, detention centre staff, and current and former 23

employees of the Department of Immigration (Betts “Inside”; Verghis “Lifting”). In doing so, these productions created what James Young calls “the texture of fact, suffusing the surrounding text with the privilege and authority of witness” (59–60). The dominance of testimonial theatre and aesthetics within the genre of “refugee theatre” is not limited to Australia. Indeed, Julie Salverson argues that it has become the default mode for devising performance by, with or about refugees in Canada, remarking: “Theater making that engages with people’s personal stories has become mainstream, almost trendy” (“Change” 119). In the United States this trend emerges in the popular work of Ping Chong, particularly his performance Children of War, in which former refugees are cast as themselves to tell their stories on stage. Similarly, in the United Kingdom verbatim theatre has also proved popular, with Alison Jeffers listing at least five verbatim plays that have been devised with and performed by asylum seekers in the years from 2002 to 2006 (“Looking” 95). If one reason for focusing on testimonial theatre is that it is the most common form of “refugee theatre,” another is that it raises—perhaps more acutely than any other form of theatre—the important issues of trauma, testimony, and repetition both in its production and reception. What are the ethics of interviewing refugees who may have already been through several immigration interviews? What happens when refugees testify on stage, as in Manufacturing Dissent, Asylum, Through the Wire, and Refugitive? Do directors risk reproducing them as spectacle or is it possible for theatre to create a space of “ethical visibility”? How does Horin have Shafaei tell his story in Through the Wire and how does he tell it himself in Refugitive? How do we in the audience respond on each occasion and who is this “we”? What sorts of spectatorial witnessing do these performances model, enact and enable? These are some of the questions that drive this thesis. While the theatre of this period has received some critical attention, these efforts are scattered across several books and journals. For instance, Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo discuss some of these plays in a chapter of their book Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (186–206). Likewise, Joanne Tompkins has analysed some of these productions in her book Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (115–26). Elsewhere Hilary Glow has provided a cursory account in her book Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda (137–59). The situation in journals is similar. In 2008, Helen Gilbert and Sophie Nield edited a special issue of Research in Drama Education, which was 24

devoted to “Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Community,” and featured an overview of the era by Tom Burvill (“Politics”), as well as articles on Nothing But Nothing (Cox, “Intersubjective”), Refugitive (Hazou, “Refugitive”), Through the Wire (Wake, “Through”), and CMI (Williams “Performing”), among others. In addition, Edward Scheer has published on the performance art of the period in his article “Australia’s Post-Olympic Apocalypse?” in PAJ: Performance Art Journal and Rea Dennis has written about playback theatre with refugees in Brisbane (“Refugee”). Significantly, there is, as yet, no book-length study on the theatre of this period; this thesis is one of the first.14 The absence of a large discourse on this body of work is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there are no orthodoxies with which to contend, no star scholars to offend, no prevailing wisdoms. On the other hand, there are few guideposts. For this reason, there are a number of theoretical discourses that could be brought to bear on, or better yet into conversation with, this body of work. Indeed, I seem to have stumbled through most of them along the way. Gilbert and Lo, for instance, consider these performances in terms of cosmopolitanism. For her part, Tompkins analyses these performances in terms of space, place, and displacement. Equally, there is an emerging discourse on “exilic theatres” that might have helped here (Jestrovic). Likewise the vocabulary of performance ethnography could have been deployed. However, it is the language of witnessing to which I have found myself returning again and again. This is not simply a matter of imposing the framework of witnessing onto a series of case studies. On the contrary, it is clear that both the producers and spectators of this work understood it in terms of witnessing. For instance, one of the founders of the activist and performance group Actors for Refugees wrote to the Sunday Age in Melbourne to say: “We in Actors for Refugees share the testimonies of refugees with schoolchildren; and then we are witness to the sort of response from our youth that we would dearly like to hear from the general community” (Greentree, “Children’s”). Similarly, the actor Anne Phelan stated: “We don’t actually take on a role. We don’t act as the people, we just tell their story. We go into it as though we are giving testimony in a witness box” (qtd. in McArthur “Staging”). On the other side of the stage, reviewer

14 Two other theses in the area were completed in 2008: Rand Hazou’s Acting for Asylum: Asylum Seeker and Refugee Theatre in Australia 2000–2005, in which he examines this body of work principally through theories of political performance, and Emma Cox’s Affect, Belonging, Community: Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Performance and Writing in Post-2001 Australia, in which she considers theatre, as well as novels and poetry, in terms of their “affective work” across culture, language, and community. Neither has been published yet. 25

John McCallum wrote of the play Through the Wire, “it is much too long for an effective theatre piece. . . . But for now what is important is to bear witness” (“Brutalisation”). Even within these three short citations, there are several types of witnessing going on here—testifying, retestifying, and listening for a start—suggesting that the performances of this period offer a particularly rich, complex, and productive site in which to develop a theory of performing witness. In order to develop this theory I will first place it in the context of current developments in theatre, performance, and trauma studies.

Theoretical Contexts: Witnessing in Theatre, Performance, and Trauma Studies

If the issue of witnessing first becomes significant through the political and theatrical contexts of the period, then it becomes even more important through the theoretical contexts of the past two decades. Over the past twenty years the language of witnessing has become increasingly popular in both theatre and performance studies. Theatre studies is a discipline or “site at which cultural problems, performed by cultural actors, are studied and investigated through critical theatrical production[s]” (Dolan, “Geographies” 418). Within this discipline, all sorts of productions have been described and analysed in terms of witnessing, from the contemporary dance of Les Ballets C de la B and Urban Bush Women (Albright xxi) to the autobiographical performances of Spalding Gray, Bobby Baker, Linda Montano, Tami Spry, and Linda Park-Fuller (Heddon 54–55). In addition, Karen Malpede lists at least 20 playwrights who have written at least one play “in the tradition of theatre of witness” (“Theatre” 278; “Teaching” 177). However, the language of witnessing has been most closely associated with the rise of documentary and verbatim theatre and the newly reinvigorated discourse on these practices. Indeed, some scholars have come to call these practices the “theatre of witness” (Malpede, “Theatre”; Schaefer, Theatre), the “theatre as witness” (Farber) or the “theatre of testimony” (Salz), while others have described it in terms of “performing testimony” (Salverson, Performing). In these accounts the emphasis tends to fall on testimony, first on how to solicit it and second on how to stage it. In this context, the witness is typically defined as an interviewee, an interviewer (writer or facilitator), or an actor. In contrast, within performance studies the conversation about witnessing has focused almost exclusively on the spectator. Emerging in the 1960s, performance 26

studies is an interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary field that combines “anthropology, theatre studies, and the visual arts” (Taylor, Archive xvii).15 In this way, performance studies grants itself a wider range of “objects” or case studies than theatre studies might. Work within performance studies tends to fall into two streams, broadly defined by Richard Schechner as the is and the as (Performance Studies 30–32). The former focuses on events or practices that are historically, socially, and culturally recognised to be performances (30). These events might include theatre, music, and dance as well as sporting events, liminal rituals, and cultural ceremonies. The latter analyses events or practices as performance, for instance gender, sexuality, ethnicity, identity, and politics. This split has also been described as the difference between examining performance as an object and employing performance as a method, which is to say performance as ontology as against performance as epistemology (Taylor, Archive 2–3).16 Following this division, performance studies tends to define witnessing in two ways: narrowly, as a mode of spectatorship associated with performance art; and more broadly, as a mode of social spectatorship. In the former category, Tim Etchells defines witnessing through the performance artists Chris Burden, Ron Athey, and Stelarc, who stage “the body in pain, in sexual play and in shock [and so] demand repeatedly of those watching—‘be here, be here, be here . . . ’” (18). In the latter category, Taylor defines witnessing as “an involved, informed, caring, yet critical form of spectatorship” (Disappearing 25). Writing about Argentina’s “Dirty War,” Taylor posits the witness as a “resistant spectator” who “examine[s] the politics of looking, ‘just looking,’ dangerous seeing, and percepticide . . . [in order] to make visible again, not the invisible or imagined, but that which is clearly there but not allowed to be seen” (21, 27, original emphasis). Perhaps the point of connection between the two strands in performance studies is violence, however the injured subject signifies differently on stage and off: on stage, the tear in the flesh functions as a metonym for the tear in the social fabric; off stage, the tear in the flesh is the tear in the fabric. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I have overstated the division between theatre and performance studies somewhat and the situation is inevitably more complicated

15 Nevertheless, I would argue that performance studies finds itself approaching disciplinary status with the publication of textbooks such as Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies: An Introduction and readers such as D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera’s edited volume The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies and Henry Bial’s edited volume The Performance Studies Reader. In addition, the peak disciplinary body, Performance Studies international (PSi), is hosting its seventeenth annual conference in May 2011. 16 I would add that there is also a metatheoretical strand devoted to defining and redefining the field of performance studies. 27

than this. There is a good deal of overlap between the two and for those of us who are trained and conversant in each field, both are indispensable. In fact, the emphasis on spectatorial witnessing (as opposed to the witnessing of the writer or actor) within performance studies is indicative of a wider reemerging interest in spectatorship across both theatre and performance studies. Since the flurry of activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was associated with feminist theory and semiotics alike, interest in issues of spectatorship has subsided somewhat and there have been few monographs on the topic. However, over the past two years, this has started to shift with the publication of Monica Prendergast’s Teaching Spectatorship: Essays and Poems on Audience in Performance (2008), Dennis Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (2009), Helena Grehan’s Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Age (2009), Alison Oddey and Christine White’s edited volume Modes of Spectating (2009), and the special issue of the journal About Performance on “Audiencing: The Work of the Spectator in Live Performance” (2010). Surprisingly, only Grehan considers the current trend for describing the spectator as a witness, meaning that there is much more work to be done in order to bridge the gap between theories of spectatorship and witnessing. The increased interest in witnessing within theatre and performance studies reflects the increased interest in witnessing within the humanities more broadly and the emergence of trauma studies more specifically. Like performance studies, trauma studies is not so much a discipline as a postdiscipline or interdiscipline.17 Emerging in the early 1990s, trauma studies came out of psychoanalysis, poststructuralism (specifically deconstruction), and Holocaust studies. In one sense, trauma studies represents poststructuralism’s attempt to come to terms with psychoanalysis and vice versa. In another sense, trauma studies represents an attempt to reintroduce the referent into contemporary, deconstructive criticism. This effort can itself be placed in the wider

17 Nevertheless, like performance studies, trauma studies now finds itself approaching disciplinary status with the appearance of edited anthologies such as Traumatizing Theory (Ball) and several journals devoting special issues to the topic in recent years. See for instance (in chronological order): Karyn Ball, ed. Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects, spec. issue of Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 1–297; Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds. Testimonial Cultures, spec. issue of Cultural Values 5.1 (2001): 1–130; Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic, eds. Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Experience, spec. issue of Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001): N. pag.; Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Pellegrini, eds. Public Sentiments, spec. issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online 2.1 (2003): N. pag.; Nicholas Chare, Rowan Bailey, and Peter Kilroy, eds. Witnessing Theory, spec. issue of Parallax 10.1 (2004): 1–124; Anne Cubilié and Carl Good, eds. The Future of Testimony, spec. issue of Discourse 25.1-2 (2004): 4–303; Stephen K. Levine and Paul Antze, eds. Re-Imagining Trauma, spec. issue of Poiesis 6 (2004): 1–199; Nerea Arruti with Bob Plant, eds. Trauma, Therapy and Representation, spec. issue of Paragraph 30.1 (2007): 1–120. 28

context of what has come to be called the “ethical turn” within the humanities. Work within trauma studies tends to fall into five strands: (1) studies of how the subject responds to trauma; (2) studies of how subjects represent trauma; (3) studies of how subjects respond to these representations; (4) a more historical strand that writes about the history of trauma; and (5) a more metatheoretical strand that considers trauma studies as a field, discourse, and emerging discipline. The diversity of work taking place in the enormous tent called trauma studies means that there is an abundance of witnesses in circulation, arguably an overabundance. Indeed, if we were to compile a preliminary roll call it might look something like this: the acousmatic witness (Hallas 41–43); the active witness (Peters 709; Douglass and Vogler 4); the actual witness (Kear 134); the witness by adoption (Hartman, Longest 8); the artistic witness (Douglass and Vogler 33); the belated witness (Levine); the bystander witness (Felman and Laub 207); the complete witness (Levi, Drowned 63); the co-witness (Kacandes and Hirsch 18); the cultural witness (Felman, Juridical 8, 24); the direct witness (Hartman, “Shoah” 37); the ethical witness (Agamben 151); the eyewitness (Douglass and Vogler 34); the executioner as witness (Zulaika 91); the false witness (Oliver 107–32); the fictionalised witness (Kear 134); the witness by imagination (Hartman); the impossible witness (Bernstein 143); the intellectual witness (Hartman, “Shoah”); the media witness (Frosh and Pinchevski); the mediatized witness (Douglass and Vogler 9); the metawitness (Derrida); the moral witness (Margalit); the partial witness (Bernstein 143); the passive witness (Peters 709; Polchin 210); the precocious witness (Felman and Laub xx, 52; Felman, Juridical 97); the prosthetic witness (Saltzman 30, 41); the proxy witness (Gubar 23); the pseudo- witness (Agamben 34, 120); the pure witness (Rosenbaum 493); the reader as witness (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 15); the secondary witness (Apel); the second-degree witness (Felman and Laub 213; Levine 20); the secondhand witness (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 8, 16); the second-generation witness (Wasserman 160; Hartman, Longest 8); the subsequent witness (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 6); the surrogate witness (Sundquist 68, 79); the survivor witness (Douglass and Vogler 10, 38); the sublime witness (LaCapra, History 175); the synthetic witness (Westwell 144); the trauma witness (Felman and Laub 58); the true witness (Levi, Drowned 63; Sundquist 66); the virtual witness (Feldman 163); the voluntary witness (Hartman, “Shoah” 40); the voyeur witness (Douglass and Vogler 36); the wit(h)ness (Ettinger); and the witness to or of the witness (Felman and Laub 213). 29

Obviously, some of these terms are redundant and some duplicate each other. For instance, the term belated witness risks tautology, since numerous theorists agree that the nature of witnessing is fundamentally belated. Likewise, there are surely some similarities between the witness by adoption and the witness by imagination. For this reason, I have grouped these witnesses into four categories—zero-degree, primary, secondary, and tertiary witnesses—which will be elaborated on in more detail in Chapter 1. Though I am using a numerically based nomenclature, such a system of classification is not supposed to introduce what Michael Berenbaum has called a “calculus of calamity” (32). Nor is it designed to suggest that each witness is of diminishing importance. This is where I differ from someone like Stephen Smith who states:

If we consider the witness of the witness as the first link in the chain of witness, each “generation” becomes less authoritative with each link in this chain. The survivor bears witness to the death of the true witness of the “Final Solution”, as an eye-witness of inevitable and ultimate death. The story is in turn witnessed by a third party observer. This personal testimony is then re-told or re-presented in alternative forms, such as film or literature [or performance], to be in turn re- witnessed by an audience for which personal contact with a survivor may not be possible. The chain of witnesses results in subjecting the eye-witness of the individual who was there to the opinion or re-representation who were not. (qtd. in Bigsby 23)

Unlike Smith, I am less pessimistic about the possibilities of tertiary witnessing. Instead, like Peggy Phelan, I think “[w]e need to develop an ethics whose first allegiance may not be to the empirically true, an ethics that requires a radical conception of what it means to remain ‘alive to’ the event, even when the wire service, the original source of the information, has ceased” (“Performance and Death” 119). Indeed, I would not be writing a thesis about witnessing, theatre, and performance if I did not think that theatre and performance can and do produce witnesses. While witnessing in general is important within trauma studies, spectatorial witnessing (as opposed to testimonial witnessing) is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. Take, for instance, the closing session of the December 2008 Interrogating Trauma conference, where Susannah Radstone, Felicity Collins, Janet Walker, and Rosanne Kennedy all agreed that issues of audience and spectatorship needed to be examined in more detail (Radstone et al. 1–6). Radstone suggested that trauma studies needs to start pluralising its approach to spectatorship, both in the sense that it needs to 30

“look elsewhere,” e.g. at anthropology, and in the sense that it needs to consider the possibility of plural responses to a single film (2–3). For her part, Collins suggested that trauma studies should look to film theory of an earlier era as well as to media studies and critical geography (3). Walker advocated investigating spectatorship through notions of “vicarious trauma” while Kennedy raised the issue of genre and audience (5). Tellingly, though the panel canvassed the possibilities of psychology, anthropology, human geography, social science and media studies, no one thought to refer to theatre and performance studies. It is the identification of this blind spot within the field of trauma studies itself that constitutes one of the significant contributions of this thesis. In fact, it is somewhat unfair to single out Radstone, Collins, Walker, and Kennedy, as theatre and performance have been conspicuously absent from the trauma “canon” since its inception. Indeed, in their seminal text Testimony Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub seem to analyse everything but, drawing on literature (Camus and Dostoevsky), poetry (Mallarmé and Celan), psychoanalytic texts (Freud), critical texts (de Man), documentary film (Shoah) and video testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Likewise, in her monograph Unclaimed Experience Cathy Caruth investigates psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), philosophy (de Man, Kant, and Kleist), and film (Hiroshima mon amour). Even more recent volumes such as Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler’s Witnessing and Memory: The Discourse on Trauma and Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas’s The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture decline to deal with performance or to draw on the perspectives offered by performance studies. Yet, theatre and performance—not to mention their siblings theatricality and performativity—actually underpin many accounts of testimony and witnessing. Indeed, Felman herself defines testimony as “the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else” (Felman and Laub 206, original emphasis). Similarly, in his articulation of the concept of “intellectual witness,” historian Geoffrey Hartman states:

The position of those implicated in this way can also be compared to that of a spectator in the theater. This analogy, though it may seem offensive, is challenging and suggests how intrinsic art is to moral perception. Spectators go to see a tragedy and their judgement remains active despite the sympathetic imagination provoked by what unfolds on stage. The distance between spectator and tragic action is bridged, if at all, without psychological transvestism 31

(permitted and even necessary for the actors); yet most viewers, while they might not feel pain, would not admit taking pleasure from a suffering that is known to have been actual rather than imaginary. In fact, we find it so difficult to value the feeling of pleasure, or seeming mastery, that comes from the ability to face painful events through thought or mimesis, that we justify this voluntary witnessing as a kind of labor. (“Shoah” 39–40)

Yet despite this dependence on notions of theatre and performance, trauma studies often continues to overlook them. Even more strangely, it sometimes displays a distinctly “antitheatrical prejudice” (Barish) and Hartman’s concern that his analogy is “potentially offensive” is only one such instance where theatre is simultaneously relied upon and rejected.18 This thesis argues that trauma studies would do well to turn to theatre and performance as theoretical “objects” and theatre and performance studies as theoretical fields in order to refine some of its ideas about witnessing in general and spectatorial witnessing in particular. More specifically, it draws on theories of liveness and copresence in order to argue that it is possible to become a witness to an event without necessarily being spatiotemporally copresent. In doing so, I argue that this means radically reconfiguring theories such as Smith’s (above) and revising some of the current hierarchies at work within trauma studies. In addition, I argue that theatre might enable trauma studies to rethink issues of repetition. Currently the discipline tends to define repetition in relation to trauma and more specifically in relation to the repetition compulsion. However, this thesis insists that repetition must also be thought through in relation to testimony. It asks: What is to testify and retestify? What is it to repeat someone else’s testimony? What is it to retestify for someone else? And what is this ambiguous for? On behalf of, in favour of, or in front of (Derrida, Sovereignties 88– 89)? In order to answer these questions, this project will investigate several different instances of repeating testimony: the refugee determination process, which compels refugees to retestify in order to gain protection; a verbatim play in which a refugee was cast as himself alongside other non-refugees who repeated the testimony of asylum seekers; an autobiographical performance in which a refugee chose to retestify, albeit in an indirect and abstract mode; and a documentary play in which actors repeated the testimony of witnesses to a Senate inquiry.

18 There are too many to mention but see, for example, Felman’s praising of Paul de Man, when she writes: “This witness, unlike a confession, is not personal; it is not directed, in the exhibitionistic way a theatrical (confessional) performance would be, toward an audience” (Felman and Laub 160). Or when Hartman, again, admires the video testimonies of the Fortunoff Archive for having “[n]o theatricality or stage-managed illusions” (Longest 123). 32

The mention of refugees reminds the reader that while this thesis mainly intervenes in theatre, performance, and trauma studies, it also intervenes in refugee studies. This is a result not only of its subject matter, but also of trauma studies’ profound entanglement with refugee studies as a result of their mutual origins in World War II. Since then the increase in refugees internationally has also played a role in the increasing scholarly interest in witnessing and trauma. More recently, refugee studies has intersected with trauma studies to produce such books as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition and Anne Cubilié’s Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights. To write a thesis about refugees performing witness both on and off the stage is thus to write at the intersection of theatre, performance, trauma, and refugee studies. Unsurprisingly, such an interdisciplinary project demands a multiplicity of methodologies.

Witnessing Methodologies: The Ethics of Repetition

No one has ever worked through an injury without repeating it: its repetition is both the continuation of the trauma and that which marks a self-distance within the very structure of trauma, its constitutive possibility of being otherwise. There is no possibility of not repeating. The only question that remains is: How will that repetition occur, at what site, juridical or nonjuridical, and with what pain and promise? —Judith Butler

Studying the performance of this period of history places scholars in something of a double bind, particularly in relation to the issues of images and interviews. In both instances, we find ourselves confronting what I have come to think of, after Butler, as the “ethics of repetition” (Excitable 102). On the one hand, to reproduce images of the Tampa or of the “children overboard” affair risks reproducing refugees as spectacle; on the other hand, not to reproduce these images risks absenting asylum seekers yet again from the public sphere. In the end, I have decided to reproduce images from the period, despite the risks, in order to provide international readers with a clearer sense of context and local readers with a reminder of what the age of asylum looked like. In selecting these images, I have attempted to choose images in which asylum seekers are identified and in which they have agency, i.e. images where they have provided explicit permission (e.g. as Shahin Shafaei did during his promotional activities for Through the Wire and Refugitive). In other words, I have attempted to ensure that asylum seekers 33

are not represented through “anonymous corporeality” or as “speechless emissaries” (Malkki, “Speechless” 388). Similarly, in regards to interviewing asylum seekers, it seems that do so would risk reinterrogating the always already interrogated since refugees go through a minimum of two interviews with the immigration officials, as well as numerous interviews with case workers, lawyers, journalists, activists, and sometimes artists. On the other hand, not to interview asylum seekers risks silencing the always already silenced including in relation to this project, since the government has placed strict limitations on accessing detention centres and interviewing and photographing refugees. Nevertheless, in view of its emphasis on spectatorship as well as anecdotal evidence that the refugee population is becoming “over-researched”—but at the risk of further silencing refugees—this thesis does not seek to interview asylum seekers. Instead, this thesis pursues a three-pronged approach to this material, employing the following complementary methodologies: (1) archival research; (2) close formal and comparative readings of the artworks; and (3) discourse analysis. In the first instance, I have visited archives and examined scripts, two of which are publicly available, another of which is available in a subscription database, and another that has yet to be published.19 Second, I have analysed these theatrical performances by drawing on my memory of the shows, viewing archival footage, analysing the script, and critical responses. I also draw on any existing analyses of the plays, where possible. Third, I have considered the discussion that happened around these performances, such as pre-show publicity (radio and newspaper interviews), newspaper reviews and articles, as well as any funding controversies (such as that surrounding the play Through the Wire). Through an analysis of these articles, this thesis examines the way in which these artworks functioned individually and in concert to shift public opinion (or not). This is not to say that the project advances a simplistic argument about the subversive power of art. On the contrary, it also considers the ways in which these performances inadvertently reproduced and reinforced these policies. For example, it argues that by asking asylum seekers to tell their stories yet again, theatre practitioners risked being the latest in a long line of interrogators. Similarly, when directors cast asylum seekers as themselves, they risk reproducing the refugee as a spectacle, as someone to be looked at and authenticated, rather than as a fellow artist and collaborator.

19 I am grateful to John McCallum for first contacting Ros Horin on my behalf and to Ros herself for her permission to cite her manuscript of Through the Wire. 34

More radically, this thesis will consider the way in which performance not only responded to these policies but was also implicated in them. For example, it will examine how screening interviews turn on the utterance of the performative phrase “I seek asylum” and how the Department of Immigration literally scripts its primary interviews. It also looks at what happens when then Refugee Review Tribunal asks a person to recite a prayer or to perform a Falun Gong exercise. In essence, this thesis asks: “If the figure of the ‘asylum seeker’ is produced in and through cultural performance, then how can theatrical performance respond to and represent asylum seekers?”

Chapter Outlines: Scenes of Witness

In its entirety, this thesis sits at the intersection of theatre, performance, trauma, and refugee studies, however individual chapters fall at various points on this grid, depending on where the “scene” at issue is located and which particular question the chapter is pursuing. For example, Chapter 1 sits at the intersection of theatre and performance studies, and to a lesser extent trauma studies. This chapter focuses on Bertolt Brecht’s famous “Street Scene,” as well as Tim Etchells and Freddie Rokem’s reading of it, in order to ask: “How have theatre and performance studies theorised spectatorial witnessing and how might trauma studies shift these theories?” The second chapter is a mirror image of the first. In this chapter I focus on Shoshana Felman’s “Classroom Scene,” as well as various critics’ readings of it, in order to ask: “How has trauma studies theorised spectatorial witnessing and how might theatre and performance studies shift these theories?” For the remainder of the thesis I pursue one question across a series of sites: “What sort of witnessing do we find in performance?”20 In Chapter 3, I examine the cultural, social, and bureaucratic performance that is the refugee determination process. More specifically, I analyse the screening and primary interviews where I argue that we

20 I first came to formulate my research questions after reading Judith Butler’s contribution to the TDR comment “Concerning Theory for Performance Studies,” in which she wrote: “any book that sought to think about critical theory for performance would have to really start with a different beginning: What does performance bring to critical theory?; and, Where do we find performance within critical theory?; and, indeed, my favorite, What form of critical theory do we find in performance?” (“If” 23). It should be clear then that my questions reformulate her first and third questions. Initial drafts of this thesis also attempted to pursue a version of the second question, along the lines of “Where do we find performance in theories of witnessing?”, however it soon became clear that the answer requires a thesis in itself. Nevertheless, the issue is discussed in passing in Chapter 2 and the Conclusion. 35

find a form of ambivalent witnessing. Chapter 4 considers one of the period’s most awarded, and yet least studied, verbatim plays Through the Wire. Through an analysis of the play’s script, production, and reception as well as the funding controversy surrounding it, this chapter argues that Through the Wire produces of form of witnessing which I call mimetic witnessing. In Chapter 5, I examine Shahin Shafaei’s autobiographical monologue, or monopolylogue, Refugitive. Though I analyse the script and its staging, I emphasise the Question and Answer sessions that Shafaei conducted after every performance. It is through these post-performance discussions in particular, that Shafaei performs and produces what I call antiphonic witnessing. Finally, Chapter 6 analyses the documentary play CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). In reading the play’s script, staging and reception, I argue that CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) performs a form of false witnessing. In sum, this thesis presents the reader with the following: (a) two theoretical scenes of witness, one set in theatre and performance studies, the other set in trauma studies; (b) a scene of witness set in a cultural performance context; and (c) three theatrical scenes of witness, one a verbatim play, another an autobiographical play, and the last a documentary play. In each instance, the aim is to bring the fields of theatre, performance, and trauma studies into conversation so that we might widen and deepen our understanding of witnessing, particularly spectatorial witnessing. For what is it to watch? What is it to witness? And where does the uncertain line between witness and spectator lie? 36

Chapter 1

The Accident and the Account Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies

One of the most famous witnesses in theatre and performance studies is Bertolt Brecht’s eyewitness, who stands on the street corner giving an account of how a traffic accident has just happened. The eyewitness appears in Brecht’s essay “The Street Scene” as well as his poem “On Everyday Theatre.” In the essay, he argues that epic theatre:

can be seen at any street corner: an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may “see things a different way”; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. (“Street” 121)

While Brecht refers to only one eyewitness, it strikes me that there are, in fact, several witnesses within the Street Scene: the eyewitness-demonstrator; the driver; the victim; the bystander who “sees things a different way”; and, perhaps, the bystander who sees nothing but hears it all. Similarly, rather than one scene, I see two scenes here: the accident and the account. Within the scene of the accident, witnessing is a mode of seeing whereas within the scene of the account, witnessing is not only a mode of seeing but also of saying and, for the bystanders, a mode of listening. In this way what starts as a small and simple scene with one eyewitness, rapidly becomes two scenes, each dense with many witnesses and many types of witnessing. Yet despite the diversity this scene, or scenes, represent(s) for modes of witnessing in theatre and performance studies, we still have only one word at our disposal—witness. While Brecht was writing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was not until the mid-1990s that the term witness gained currency in theatre and performance studies. Within theatre studies the term has been associated with the reemergence of documentary and verbatim theatres and the newly reinvigorated discourse on these practices. Indeed, some scholars have renamed these genres the “theatre of witness” (Schaefer, Theatre) or the “theatre of testimony” (Salz, Theatre), while others have described them in terms of “performing testimony” (Salverson, Performing). Within 37

performance studies, however, the term has been associated with performance art and its spectators. Together, the two disciplines have used the term to describe practically every participant involved in the process of making and watching theatre: the writer; the actor or performer; the character; the dramaturg; and the spectator.1 Hence currency has not necessarily created clarity; indeed I argue that it has caused considerable confusion. This confusion has been compounded by the fact that as these witnesses multiply, the claims about them amplify. The theatre itself is increasingly being positioned as a place, or medium, with a particular ability to witness and to produce others as witnesses. For instance, Diana Taylor argues that “the theatre, like the testimony, like the photograph, film, or report, can make witnesses of others” (Archive 211). Similarly, Freddie Rokem states that “the theatrical medium has an inherent tendency to create situations where some kind of witness is present. I would even claim that all theater performances contain some form of direct or implicit witnessing, or transformations of witnessing” (“Witnessing” 180). More radically, Karen Malpede argues that the “theatre of witness increases the individual’s and the society’s capacity to bear witness” (“Theatre” 277). In short, there is a growing sense that the word witness is becoming a generalised, semi-sacralised term that scholars employ when trying to emphasise the historical import or emotional impact of a particular performance without thinking through the significance of the term itself. The emergence of the witness in theatre and performance studies coincides with the appearance of witnessing within the humanities more generally and with the emergence of trauma studies more specifically. The seminal texts of trauma studies were all published in the early and mid-1990s: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History was published in 1992; Cathy Caruth’s edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory was published in 1995 and her monograph Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative,

1 For accounts of the writer as witness see for instance Karen Malpede (“Teaching”; “Theatre”) and Diana Taylor (Archive; Disappearing). For accounts of the actor or performer as witness see for instance Tim Etchells (Certain), Malpede (“Teaching”; “Theatre”), Melissa Salz (Theatre), Karine Schaefer (“Spectator”; “Hare”), and Freddie Rokem (Performing; “Witnessing”), and Belarie Zatzman (“Monologue”). For accounts of the character as witness see for example Malpede (“Theatre”), Rokem (“Witnessing”), Salz (Theatre), and Schaefer (“Spectator”; Theatre). This entire chapter examines accounts of the spectator as witness, specifically those of Etchells (Certain), Rokem (Performing; “Witnessing”), Phelan (“Marina”; “Performance and Death”; “Performing”), Taylor (Archive; Disappearing), and Govan (“Witnessing”). In addition, please see the work of Ann Cooper Albright (Choreographing), Vivian Patraka (Spectacular), and Schaefer (“Spectator”). The dramaturg is the newest addition to this list, first appearing in Richard Hancock’s posting to the SCUDD list on 6 October 2008. The email invited people to “The Witness as Dramaturg” symposium. I have yet to see any scholarly work on the dramaturg as witness. 38

and History in 1996. Perhaps more than any other field, according to Peggy Phelan, it is trauma studies that has structured performance studies’ conception of witnessing (“Performing” 13). Certainly the presence of Caruth in Phelan’s own work, along with the citations of Felman and Laub in the pioneering work of Malpede and Taylor would support this claim.2 With the recent proliferation of witnesses as well as the increasingly ambitious claims being made about the witnessing power of theatre and performance, the time seems ripe for a return to trauma studies.3 This chapter, then, is part summary, part cartography, and part taxonomy— charting the discourse as it currently stands and in doing so developing a preliminary taxonomy of spectatorial witnessing in theatre and performance studies. In order to establish this taxonomy of spectatorial witness I synthesise the twin vocabularies of theatre and performance studies; in order to refine it I draw on some of the distinctions at work within trauma studies. Using Brecht’s Street Scene as both an anchor and an allegory, I argue that there are currently two distinct ideas of witnessing at work within theatre and performance studies: one that positions the witness at the scene of the accident and another that positions the witness at the scene of the account. To put it in the terms of trauma studies, while some scholars conceive of the spectator as a primary witness, others consider him or her as a secondary witness. Beyond providing a more precise vocabulary, this taxonomy also encourages us to reconsider two of the truisms of theatrical witnessing: that witnessing is a mode of “active” spectatorship and that witnessing is a mode of “ethical” spectatorship. Constantly referred to and rarely defined, the concept of active spectatorship is causing witnessing theory to stall. For instance, Taylor repeatedly refers to the “active spectator or witness” (Disappearing xii, 27, 261), as does Rokem who argues that witnessing “transforms the passive theatre-goer into an active spectator” (“Witnessing” 170). Similarly, Vivian Patraka states that “witnessing is an active process of spectatorship rather than a passive consumption of a pre-narrated spectacle” (Spectacular 124) and Emma Govan describes witnessing as “an active mode of readership” which suggests a

2 For Phelan on Caruth see Mourning Sex (22, 95). For Malpede on Felman and Laub see the articles “Teaching Witnessing” (177) and “Theatre of Witness” (269). For Taylor on Felman and Laub see Disappearing Acts (27, 213) and The Archive and the Repertoire (205, 210). 3 Conversely, I would argue that the time is also ripe for a turn away from trauma studies towards media studies, film studies, and legal studies, among other disciplines. This lies outside the scope of this chapter however it seems necessary to engage broadly as well as deeply with other disciplines in order to continue to shape and sharpen our own language of witnessing. To this end, I draw on film and media theory in Chapter 2, refugee and legal studies in Chapter 3, ethnography in Chapter 4, cultural studies in Chapter 5, and philosophy in Chapter 6. 39

“different level of [audience] engagement” (53). I am not exempt from this criticism, having used this habitual formulation in previously published work, where I argued that the spectator “is transformed from a passive watcher into an active witness” (“Through” 188). Such statements assume three things: (a) that there is such a thing as passive spectatorship; (b) that active and passive spectatorship are clearly distinguishable; and (c) that active spectatorship is, by definition, superior to passive spectatorship. Yet theories of spectatorship, which are strangely and conspicuously absent from the discourse on witnessing, have roundly rejected all three of these assumptions. Take, for instance, Jacques Rancière’s article “The Emancipated Spectator,” where he writes:

The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with many other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him. She participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about the story that is in front of her. (277)

When the spectator is understood as active and spectatorship is understood as an activity, then the notion of “passive” spectatorship reveals itself as a contradiction in terms. Once this first assumption comes undone the second soon follows, for if spectatorship is defined as an activity then “active” spectatorship (witnessing) becomes an active activity, which is to say, a tautology. Finally, the third assumption falls away as well, since it is impossible to say whether a tautology is superior to an oxymoron or vice versa. The absence of Rancière’s name is indicative of a wider failure of witnessing theory to engage with spectatorship theory, which has lead to the absurdity of defining witnessing as “active” spectatorship. Instead of asserting that witnessing is a mode of active spectatorship, we need to shift the terms of the debate and ask: “If spectatorship is an activity, then what sort of spectatorial activities are specific to witnessing?” I argue that this taxonomy helps us to see that the word witnessing currently refers to a range of spectatorial practices or activities. Like active spectatorship, “ethical” spectatorship is a constant refrain in witnessing theory. For example, Etchells states that “to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way” (Certain 17). Similarly, Taylor describes the witness as a “responsible, ethical, participant rather than [a] spectator to crisis” (Archive 243). Rokem goes so far as to say that the meta-theoretical function of 40

witnessing theory is to “introduc[e] a moral as well as an ideological perspective into the seemingly neutral arena of the theory of signs” (“Witnessing” 167). Yet, in the same way that theories of spectatorship trouble the first truism of the discourse, theories of trauma trouble the second. Trauma studies indicates that while witnessing can be an ethical mode of spectatorship, it is not necessarily so. Take, for instance, the person who sees the Street Scene and who says nothing about it. Wandering off into the distance, lost to history or at least to Brecht, there is a witness whose actions are not necessarily ethical. It is precisely this not necessarily that we have yet to come to terms with in theatre and performance studies and this chapter argues that in order to nuance our understanding of witnessing, we need to look for the ethical nuances as well. Finally, and more radically, I posit that theories of witnessing might actually move the conversation away from notions of activity and ethics towards notions of temporality. More than anything else, trauma studies reminds us that witnessing always involves temporal delay. That is, we are spectators in the moment but witnesses in and through time. In essence, when witnessing a performance the spectator experiences a sort of “after affect” rather than simply experiencing affect during the performance or the after effects of that affect. The affect itself does not arrive during the performance but afterwards.

The Accident: The Spectator as Primary Witness

In his book Certain Fragments, writer and theatre director Tim Etchells states: “The art- work that turns us into witnesses leaves us, above all, unable to stop thinking, talking and reporting what we’ve seen. We’re left, like the people in Brecht’s poem who’ve witnessed a road accident, still stood [sic] on the street corner discussing what happened, borne on by our responsibility to events” (18). Initially, it seems as if Etchells is simply agreeing with Brecht—he is arguing that theatre should aspire to have the same sort of impact on its audience that an accident has. However, it may be that Etchells in fact misreads the accident (though it has proven to be a productive misreading to be sure). For Brecht very clearly states: “The street demonstrator’s performance is essentially repetitive. The event has taken place; what you are seeing now is a repeat. . . . There is no question but [sic] that the street-corner demonstrator has been through an ‘experience’, but he is not out to make his demonstration serve as an ‘experience’ for the audience” (“Street” 122). In contrast, an “experience” seems to be 41

precisely what Etchells is aiming for, as evidenced by the performers he references as well as the more explicit definitions of witnessing he offers. The first performers he refers to include Chris Burden, Ron Athey, and Stelarc. Variously shooting, piercing, mutilating, and suspending themselves, these three artists produce “events in which extreme versions of the body in pain, in sexual play and in shock demand repeatedly of those watching—‘be here, be here, be here . . .’” (Etchells 18). However, Etchells does not limit witnessing to extreme events, elsewhere he refers to Alistair MacLennan, Brian Catling, and Bobby Baker, whose “ritualistic slowness,” “simple presence,” and “durational performances” invite the spectator “to be here and be now, to feel exactly what it is to be in this place and this time” (18). In all of these performances, the witness is someone who is spatiotemporally present at an event or, more accurately, spatiotemporally and self-consciously present at an event. Etchells confirms this in his more explicit statements on witnessing, where he asserts that “to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker” (17). In other words, the spectator experiences this event as event rather than as a “repeat” of a prior event. To put it otherwise, although Brecht argues that theatre should give an account of the accident, Etchells suggests that theatre should aspire not to give an account of the accident, but to be the accident itself. For Etchells, the performance event should function in the same way as the accidental event does—as a type of trauma that renders us speechless, then garrulous. In positioning the spectator at the scene of trauma, Etchells’ account echoes that of Peggy Phelan. In her discussion of Marina Abramovi’s performance House, Phelan says: “I do not think I have begun to approach what really occurred in the performance, primarily because I was a witness to something I did not see and cannot describe” (“Marina” 576). Phelan’s missing of the event recalls Caruth’s description of trauma as “an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Unclaimed 4). Like the subject’s experience of trauma, Phelan’s experience of Abramovi is premature (“I do not think I have begun to approach what really occurred”), unforeseen, even unseen (“I was a witness to something I did not see”), haunting and repetitive (“I attended the performance on two different days, gave a talk about it . . . and have written about it here and elsewhere”) (“Marina” 576). For Phelan, as for Etchells, the performance 42

event is a traumatic event, rendering her voiceless then voluble. In this way, their witnessing—in the seeing, speaking, writing, and rewriting of the event—comes to resemble a sort of acting out whereby the subject is “haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes—scenes in which the past returns . . . the tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene” (LaCapra, Writing 21). Though they do not use the phrase, it seems clear that both Etchells and Phelan understand the spectator as a primary witness. I am borrowing the term primary witness from trauma studies where it signifies, in essence, someone who is present at the scene of the traumatic event. In the words of Jacques Derrida, the witness is “the one who will have been present. He or she will have been present at, in the present, the thing to which he [sic] testifies. The motif of presence, of being-present or of being-in- presence, always turns out to be at the center of these determinations” (Sovereignties 74, original emphasis). Yet although presence is always a condition of being a primary witness, the subject’s degree of self-presence can differ according to the witness’s position within the event. In general, trauma theorists distinguish between three positions or three types of primary witnesses: the victim; the perpetrator; and the bystander (Felman and Laub 207).4 The victim is presumed to lack self-presence during the traumatic event. For example, Dori Laub states:

Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction. . . . While the historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma—as a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of. (Felman and Laub 57)

In other words, experiencing trauma means that the subject is not fully cognisant of what is happening, how it has happened or why. In contrast, another primary witness at the scene, such as the bystander, is presumed to be both present and self-present. This is partly why, according to Giorgio Agamben, the testimony of the bystander is

4 From the roll call in the introduction, the category of the victim incorporates the terms the active witness (Peters 709; Douglass and Vogler 4), the actual witness (Kear 134), the ethical witness (Agamben 151), the moral witness (Margalit), the survivor witness (Douglass and Vogler 10, 38), and the trauma witness (Felman and Laub 58). In contrast, there are few other terms for the perpetrator. The category of the bystander has recently expanded to include the bystander-at-a-distance, for example the media witness (Frosh and Pinchevski) and the mediatized witness (Douglass and Vogler 9). It is also worth noting that some theorists regard the primary witness—whatever their position on the grid—as a false witness since they have survived what others have not. Hence the category also includes the false witness (LaCapra, Representing 46; Oliver 107–32), the proxy witness (Gubar), and the pseudo-witness (Agamben 34, 120). 43

preferred to that of the survivor in court since the survivor is “not neutral enough” (17). It is also why, according to Derrida, a witness can only claim to have been present at an event “on the condition of being and having been sufficiently self-present as such . . . sufficiently conscious of himself, sufficiently self-present to know what he is talking about” (Sovereignties 79, original emphasis). It is on the issue of self-presence that Etchells and Phelan diverge somewhat. For his part, Etchells insists that despite their shock, spectators retain their self-presence and their consciousness of where they are—“be here, be here, be here,” “be here and be now”—and what they are doing—“to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them” (18, 17). In contrast, Phelan seems to suggest that she was not self-present during the performance of House and that she only recovered her self-presence in the aftermath. In other words, while Etchells aligns the spectator with the bystander to the accident, Phelan aligns the spectator with the victim or survivor of the accident.5 Theories of primary witnessing problematise the notion that witnessing is a mode of active spectatorship in several ways. First, theories of traumatic witnessing blur the line between activity and passivity. Take, for instance, the viewing experience of the survivor or the victim in the Street Scene. On the one hand, it is arguable that this is an example of passive spectatorship since trauma involves being without agency, being objectified, and acted upon. On the other hand, the survivor’s viewing experience can be read as an instance of absolute activity, an immersion so intense that it results in the

5 In arguing that witnessing is something that happens by accident, indeed through the accident, Etchells and Phelan suggest an interesting link between the primary witness and Richard Schechner’s “accidental audience.” Schechner defines this audience in contradistinction to the “integral audience,” writing: “An accidental audience is a group of people who, individually or in small clusters, go to the theater—the performances are publicly advertised and open to all. On opening nights of commercial shows the attendance of critics and friends constitutes an integral rather than an accidental audience. An integral audience is one where people come because they have to or because the event is of special significance to them. Integral audiences include the relatives of the bride and groom at a wedding, the tribe assembled for initiation rites, dignitaries on the podium for an inauguration” (Performance Theory 220). Initially, it seems as if Schechner is arguing that the accidental audience is extraneous and that the integral audience is closer to being a witness (at a wedding, an inauguration etc.). Indeed, this is precisely how Monica Prendergast interprets this passage when she writes: “Witnesses are necessary, not extraneous, to the processes in which they are implicated; a witness in the theatre context is integral, not accidental” (“From” 95, original emphasis). However, it is arguable that it is the accidental audience member who most closely resembles the witness, at least as described by Etchells. Schechner would seem to confirm this when he states: “Interestingly, the behavior of people as spectators differs greatly depending on whether these individuals comprise an integral or accidental audience—and this difference is not what one would expect. By and large, the accidental audience pays closer attention than does an integral audience” (Performance Theory 221–22, original emphasis). In other words, there is a purity of focus and an intensity of engagement that is specific to the accidental audience or, in Etchells’ words, the witness. While it is impossible to analyse the concept of accidental spectatorship in depth here, it obviously deserves further discussion thus providing yet another reason for witnessing theory to engage more fully with existing theories of spectatorship. 44

dissolution of subjectivity. In the words of Rancière, “you can change the values given to each position without changing the meaning of the oppositions themselves” (277). Here each of the three assumptions underpinning the definition of witnessing as a mode of active spectatorship come undone: (1) it is not clear that this actually is active spectatorship; (2) if it is active spectatorship then it is not clearly distinguishable from passive spectatorship; and (3) it is not clear that it is a superior mode of spectatorship. Rather than establishing or reinforcing the distinction between active and passive spectator, I argue that theories of primary witnessing actually point to different modes or degrees of activity in spectatorship. For the spectator positioned as victim or survivor, witnessing is an unconscious, unregulated activity (as Phelan explains). For the spectator positioned as a bystander, however, witnessing is both a conscious and self-conscious activity (as Etchells explains). Particularly adept productions may move the spectator through a range of primary witnessing positions including survivor, bystander, or even perpetrator.6 In addition, theories of primary witnessing problematise the notion that witnessing is a mode of ethical spectatorship. If we become witnesses in and through the accident, then we need to ask: what exactly is ethical about watching an accident? The answer is not clear-cut. Indeed, there are strong cultural taboos around looking inappropriately at an accident or “rubbernecking.” Furthermore, what exactly is ethical about watching a “deliberate accident,” such as Burden’s shooting, Athey’s piercing, or Abramovi’s starving? More broadly, what does the term “ethical” actually mean here? Even Phelan admits that although “staging a body in extreme pain [can], in and of itself, solicit spectators’ compassion. . . . compassion is not necessarily ethical and pain voluntarily endured is a different act than, say, torture” (“Performing” 13, emphasis added). In our eagerness to promote the ethical potential of performance, it is precisely this not necessarily that we have yet to come to terms with in theatre and performance studies. Though primary witnessing is implicated in the ethics of vision and visibility, it is not necessarily an ethical mode of spectatorship. Nor does it follow that the performance being witnessed is inherently ethical or, indeed, that it has any links to notions of ethics. In fact, it may be precisely the ethical ambiguity of a performance that provokes the audience; that causes them either to be self-consciously present at the event or

6 I am thinking here of a play such as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis or a performance such as Mike Parr’s Punch Holes in the Body Politic. On the former, see Alicia Tycer’s article (“Victim”); on the latter, see Jacqueline Milner (“Mike”) and Edward Scheer (“Australia’s”). 45

unconsciously absent from it. It is this provocation—i.e. what is it to watch (or listen), what is it to watch pain, what is it to watch the performance of pain, what is it to have pain performed for your benefit?—that causes the spectator to miss the event, rehearse the event, and recover the event in an attempt to finally redeem the (ethically ambiguous) event.7 In short, scholars who theorise the spectator as a primary witness place the spectator at the scene of the accident or at the scene of trauma. Unsurprisingly, then, this type of witnessing is often associated with performance art, as the names in this section (Burden, Athey, Stelarc, Abramovi) suggest. In Michael Kirby’s terms, primary witnessing is associated with not-acting rather than acting and attempts to move the spectator beyond the “matrices of pretended or represented character, situation, place, and time” (99). Paradoxically, this not-acting of the performer produces a sort of acting (out) in spectators, as they repeat the scene internally and verbally, again and again. In a way, primary witnessing is almost an Artaudian mode of spectatorship—an attempt to dissolve representation, an approach to towards the real. In this obsessive pursuit of the impossible referent, of what Phelan calls the “Real-real,” the primary witness to trauma and performance are one and the same (Unmarked 3).

The Account: The Spectator as Secondary Witness

While Etchells conceives of the spectator as Brecht’s eyewitness-demonstrator, Rokem conceives of the spectator as one of the bystanders. Indeed, in his book Performing History, Rokem explicitly states that “the actor performing a historical figure on the stage in a sense also becomes a witness of the historical event. . . . in order to make it possible for the spectators, the ‘bystanders’ in the theatre, to become secondary witnesses” (9). He repeats this formulation in his more recent article “Witnessing Woyzeck” where he argues that “the spectators in the auditorium are, in a sense, ‘second-degree’ witnesses, one step removed from the fictional world” (169). Though he does not define the terms “second-degree” and “secondary” witness, Rokem employs

7 Here my thinking about the ethical ambiguity of the traumatic event has been influenced by Helena Grehan’s thinking about ambivalence (Performance). It is also, in a sense, a rewriting of Claire Bishop’s argument in her article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” through the lens of trauma studies. In this article Bishop argues that it is precisely the ethically ambiguous work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra that provokes the audience into thinking ethically and further, into thinking about the category of the “ethical” itself. The notion of ambivalent or ambiguous ethics—the terms are used interchangeably in this thesis—is examined in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4. 46

them in the same way that trauma studies scholars do. In trauma studies the secondary witness is typically defined as someone who is “a witness to the testimonies of others . . . [a participant] not in the events, but in the account given of them . . . as the immediate receiver of these testimonies” (Felman and Laub 75–76). In a later chapter of the same book, Felman refers to “second-degree witnesses (witnesses of witnesses, witnesses of the testimonies” (213, original emphasis). More generally, Dora Apel defines the secondary witness in general terms as someone who “cannot recall events themselves, [but can only] recall their relationship to the memory of the events” (21).8 Hence the secondary witness is best described as a witness to an account of the accident rather than to the accident itself, a witness to testimony rather than a witness to trauma. This is precisely how Rokem and a range of other theorists, such as Diana Taylor and Emma Govan, theorise the spectator as witness. Indeed, in her book Disappearing Acts, Taylor cites Laub’s definition and reiterates that she understands the witness to be “the listener rather than the see-er” (27, original emphasis). That is, she understands the witness as someone who listens to testimony about a traumatic event rather than someone who sees the traumatic event itself. Writing about the work of Yuyachkani, Taylor argues that a performance that produces witnesses “engages history without necessarily being a ‘symptom of history’” and that the best performances “enter into dialogue with a history of trauma without themselves being traumatic. These are carefully crafted works that create a critical distance for ‘claiming’ experience and enabling, as opposed to ‘collapsing,’ witnessing” (Archive 210). Similarly, in her account of Laurie Anderson’s Happiness and the Atlas Group’s My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair, Govan argues that the spectators become “witness[es] to the artist’s act of witnessing and, as such, are actively engaged with the material but in a way which allows space for reflection” (58). She calls this “layered witnessing” and argues that it can be “an effective way in which to negotiate traumatic material” (58). Unlike the category of primary witness, the category of secondary witness is less splintered and there are few, if any, subcategories such as victim, perpetrator, or bystander. Yet theories of secondary witnessing offer theatre and performance studies something besides a welter of subtle distinctions. First, by identifying Rokem, Taylor,

8 The term secondary witness incorporates the terms the co-witness (Kacandes and Hirsch 18), the second-degree witness (Felman and Laub 213; Levine 20), the second-generation witness (Wasserman 160; Hartman, Longest 8), the secondhand witness (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 8, 16), and the subsequent witness (Sundquist 68, 79) as well as the witness to the witness (Felman and Laub 213) and the metawitness (Derrida, Sovereignties). 47

and Govan’s theories of witnessing as implicit theories of secondary witnessing it becomes clear that their versions of spectatorial witnessing conflict with Etchells’ version. Indeed, they are almost completely contradictory. Whereas Etchells argues that to be a witness in the theatre is to experience an event, Taylor and Govan argue that to be a witness is to hear an account of events. Whereas Etchells aims for immersion, Taylor and Govan aim for “critical distance” and “space for reflection.” Whereas Etchells and Phelan state that witnessing produces a sort of acting out in the spectator, Taylor and Govan are adamant that theatre should enable a sort of working through. Of course, theatre and performance can do both but Taylor and Govan prefer the individual performance to act out so that the spectator can work through; they do not want performance to cause the spectator to act out too. Theories of secondary witnessing, like theories of primary witnessing, problematise the notion of the “active spectator.” On the one hand, listening is passive since we often have no choice but to listen. On the other hand, as anyone who has tuned out of a lecture will attest, the best listening is active, involving intense concentration. Once again, as Rancière suggests, the values are easily inverted and the conversation easily stalled (277). Rather than clarifying the difference between active and passive spectatorship, perhaps what theories of witnessing actually do is to point to different modes of activity. Whereas primary witnessing is principally a visual activity, secondary witnessing is mainly an auditory activity. In shifting the emphasis from seeing to listening, theories of secondary witnessing also shift the emphasis from the ethics of visibility to what Alice Rayner has termed the “ethics of listening” (“Audience”). In addition, secondary witnessing implicates the spectator in the ethics of repetition.9 Would it be ethical to stand demonstrating how an accident has happened while the victim is haemorrhaging on the pavement? Would it be ethical for the eyewitness to get into a car and run over another pedestrian in an attempt to demonstrate exactly how the accident happened? Would it be ethical for the spectator to stand by and let the demonstrator flatten additional pedestrians? Our instincts suggest not—the repetition of the accident should not reinjure its survivors nor should it injure those who listen to the account—and the timing and type of repetition becomes crucial in these calculations.

9 Here it becomes apparent that we probably need a taxonomy of ethics to sit alongside a taxonomy of witness since the concept of ethics—like the concept of witness—is often deployed rather indiscriminately. This lies outside the remit of this thesis but nevertheless points to further work to be done. 48

While it is easy enough to agree with Taylor and Govan that theatre should not reenact the traumatic event or reproduce the experience of trauma in the spectator, the ethics of repetition deserve further interrogation for it is not at all clear what the ethics of retestifying (as opposed to simply testifying) are. Indeed, there are immense cultural anxieties around testimony being repeated—hence accusations in court of having “rehearsed” the witness and the many rules around hearsay. Nor are these anxieties limited to the courtroom, as evidenced by Vivian Patraka’s concerns about Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965), a documentary play derived from the transcripts of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Using the actual words of actual survivors on stage, according to Patraka, “may well impugn the genre of survivor testimony itself” (Spectacular 102). Though she does not elaborate on these concerns in much detail, her anxiety seems to stem from the fact that the actor becomes a sort of false witness, a term I am borrowing from Dominick LaCapra. He defines the false witness as someone who takes up a subject position which does not belong to them, writing: “Certain statements or even entire orientations may seem appropriate for someone in a given subject- position but not in others. (It would, for example, be ridiculous if I tried to assume the voice of Elie Wiesel or of Saul Friedlander. There is a sense in which I have no right to these voices.)” (Representing 46). In short, the false witness appropriates an inappropriate subject position. When actors present themselves as primary witnesses, then they are doing precisely this, though—depending on the type of acting they are doing—it may explicitly signalled as an “inappropriate appropriation.” This, in turn, risks producing the spectator as a false witness, encouraging them to think that they are hearing this testimony first-hand when in fact it is second-hand at best.10 Presumably Patraka would prefer it if the survivors themselves were present on the stage to tell us their stories. Yet this is not necessarily more ethical. Indeed, having to testify repeatedly may actually retraumatise the primary witness. For instance, Julie Salverson relates the story of a former refugee who testified to his experiences on stage,

10 Of course, there is an important sense in which even the primary witness is a false witness, as both Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben have pointed out. Levi writes “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. . . . We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy” (Drowned 63–64). Likewise, Agamben—who draws heavily on Levi—argues that “the witness, the ethical subject, is the subject who bears witness to desubjectification” (151). Since it is impossible for the subject to testify to his or her own desubjectification, even the primary witness is necessarily false. The problem of false witnessing is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. 49

only to find himself retraumatised by the experience rather than reaffirmed (“Performing” 184–88). In such cases, says Salverson, primary witnesses can find themselves “caught recycling a story they may wish they had never remembered” (188). It is hard to see how watching traumatised subjects retraumatise themselves for the purpose of performance can be called ethical. Paradoxically, it may be that the practice of false witnessing is more “ethical” since it relieves the primary witness of the burden of repetition and reduces the risk of retraumatisation. Once again, the ethics of witnessing in the theatre emerge as more ambiguous than we might care to admit. In sum, secondary witnessing involves listening to an actor or performer deliver their own primary testimony (as in the case of Laurie Anderson) or deliver testimony on behalf of a prior primary witness (as in the case of most verbatim theatre). Theorists of secondary witnessing argue that repeating testimony is more ethical than reenacting or reproducing the traumatic event because it does not reinjure the participants in the accident, nor does it injure the addressee of the account.

The Accidental Account: The Spectator as Primary and Secondary Witness

Inevitably, the differences between primary and secondary witnessing have been overstated and like any binary it begins to undo itself almost immediately. Indeed, the attentive reader will have noticed that whereas I categorised bystanders as primary witnesses, Rokem categorised them as secondary witnesses. But is it possible to be both a primary and secondary witness to an event? Within trauma studies, Laub argues that it is, describing himself as both a primary witness to the Holocaust (a child survivor) and as a secondary witness to it (a witness to the testimonies of other survivors) (Felman and Laub 75–76). Following Laub, we can say that within the Street Scene the bystander who sees things differently and then listens to the eyewitness- demonstrator’s account of the event is both a primary witness (present at the scene of trauma) and a secondary witness (present at the scene of testimony). But though Laub suggests that it is possible to shift witnessing modes after the event, is it possible to shift witnessing modes during the event? Rokem suggests that it is in his account of Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa. In a performance he calls “both extreme and exciting,” he argues that the actress, Semadar Yaron-Ma’ayan, starts her performance as the character Selma in a testimonial mode but eventually moves into a mode that is more traumatic (Performing 66). Set in a museum, she starts the 50

performance as a tour guide, explaining how the ghettos were established and pointing to various objects, documents and photographs. However, as the show progresses over five hours, she slowly sheds this character while washing the floors, singing Nazi and Israeli songs, and suspending herself from the ceiling. Spectators see footage of her having a number tattooed on her arm, just like those which can be seen on survivors, and eventually find her completely naked on the table in the posture of the starving “Muslim” wrenching a piece of bread from her vagina. Here “the borders between character and actress break down” (72) and the performance goes beyond an imitation of the real towards the real itself (as Burden, Athey, and Stelarc do). In Michael Kirby’s terms, what starts as a matrixed performance slowly sheds any reference to the matrices of time and place until the actress is involved in task-based performance only, though the tasks are truly hideous. For this reason, Rokem argues that “the witness- actress . . . transforms the spectators of the performance itself into the witnesses of human suffering” (74). Rebecca Schneider describes something similar, though not identical, in her reading of Karen Finley’s monologues, specifically The Constant State of Desire (1987). What starts as a testimonial account becomes increasingly agitated, to the point where the testimony becomes an ordeal in itself:

More like testimony or religious/political witnessing than aesthetic performance, Finley’s monologues, both by the ribald content and her testimonial style, disallow conventional distance by which a spectator sits back and suspends disbelief or “appreciates” art. Rather, disbelief is the constant question that bangs at the door of the viewer—I dare you to disbelieve, Finley seems to say, when I’m shoving this material squarely in your face. (Explicit 100–01)

Here, as in Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa, the secondary witness is not allowed to remain distanced, but is dared, enticed, and then finally dragged closer—too close— in order to become a primary witness. What remains unclear in these accounts is whether the same performance can produce some spectators as primary witnesses and others as secondary witnesses. The possibility of multiple responses raises yet more complications for the claims that witnessing is, by definition, an active and ethical mode of spectatorship. It also challenges any attempt to develop a taxonomy of spectatorial witness and yet it is only in and through this taxonomy that I have been able to identify and describe these shifts in spectatorial response. In the words of Salverson: “Without a language that brings together questions of ethics, mimesis, and testimony we are left 51

with an atmosphere of mystification and cannot clarify how performances operate to educate, to envision, to relieve pain, or simply to reinscribe stories of victimization” (“Change” 120). Similarly, without a wider language of witness we cannot articulate how particular performances produce their spectators as witnesses.

The Account of the Account: The Spectator as Tertiary Witness

While most theorists implicitly define the spectatorial witness as a primary or secondary witness, there are some who position the spectator as a sort of tertiary witness.11 Typically, they propose one of two ways in which a spectator can become a third party to the witnessing encounter: either spatially or temporally. In spatial configurations of tertiary witnessing, the spectator is neither a witness to trauma, nor an addressee of testimony, but a third party to the witnessing encounter as it takes place between the primary and secondary witness. That is, the spectator is a spectatorial witness to the testimonial witness as well as the other spectatorial witness, a witness to “the act of witnessing as it takes place between characters” (Malpede, “Theatre” 275). This process allows the audience to see:

how witnessing affects all parties to the tale, and their position outside the dialogue allows audience members to move between empathic identification with the body of the one whose testimony is being offered and the one whose body is being entered by the testimony. The audience becomes not only witness to the testimony, but witness to the witness of the testimony. (275)

This mode of spectatorship or, more accurately, meta-spectatorship, also appears in Rokem’s article “Witnessing Woyzeck” in which he argues that witnessing occurs when the spectator watches a character or actor watching the action on stage. This on-stage spectator “serves as a mirror image, a kind of filter or lens, or focalizer for the real spectators watching the performance” (168). In turn, this “invitation, or sometimes even seduction, subliminally induces the spectator to reflect or react to his or her own role and experience as a spectator” (170). Here, then, witnessing involves watching someone watching and through this becoming aware of our own specular habits. In this sense, Rokem’s latest version of witnessing resembles one of Phelan’s earliest, where

11 The category of the tertiary witness incorporates the terms the witness by adoption (Hartman, Longest 8), the belated witness (Levine), the cultural witness (Felman, Juridical 8, 24), the fictionalised witness (Kear 134), the witness by imagination (Hartman), the intellectual witness (Hartman “Shoah”), the precocious witness (Felman and Laub xx, 52; Felman, Juridical 97) and the virtual witness as well as the wit(h)ness (Ettinger). 52

she imagines witnessing as a mode of “publicly performed spectatorship” (“Performance and Death” 119). This type of meta-spectatorship could not be more different to the type of traumatic (non-)spectatorship described by Phelan more recently. If Malpede and Rokem triangulate the witnessing relationship spatially, then Schneider triangulates the relationship temporally. In doing so, she proposes a slightly different version of tertiary witnessing, albeit one that more closely resembles trauma studies’ understanding of the term. Trauma studies tends to define the tertiary witness as the last in the “chain of witnesses,” as seen in this previously cited passage from Stephen Smith:

If we consider the witness of the witness as the first link in the chain of witness, each “generation” becomes less authoritative with each link in this chain. The survivor bears witness to the death of the true witness . . . The story is in turn witnessed by a third party observer. This personal testimony is then re-told or represented in alternative forms, such as film or literature, to be in turn re-witnessed by an audience for which personal contact with a survivor may not be possible. This chain of witnesses results in subjecting the eye-witness of the individual who was there to the opinion or re-representation of those who were not. (qtd. in Bigsby 23)

Smith sees the repetition of testimony as a sort of degradation for both the primary witness and their testimony. However, performance studies scholars see possibilities in this scenario. For Schneider, trauma studies encourages us “to articulate the ways in which performance, less bound to the ocular, ‘enters’ or begins again and again, as Gertrude Stein would write, differently, via itself as repetition—like a copy or perhaps more like a ritual—as an echo in the ears of a confidante, an audience member, a witness” (“Archives” 106, original emphasis). Though she does not say it explicitly, Schneider’s distinction between the audience member and the witness implies that the witness can potentially be someone who did not see the performance at all. This mode of tertiary witnessing recalls the sort of witnessing that Etchells asks of his readers (or rather Phelan asks on his behalf): “to become a witness to events that you may encounter only here on the pages of this book” (Phelan, “Performing” 12). It also recalls the phantasmic witnessing of Sarah Kane’s play Blasted, which was, as Simon Hattenstone notes, “performed in front of barely more than 1,000 people . . . But, like the first Sex Pistols concert, it has caused a strange form of false-memory syndrome. Many people believe they were there, and confidently tell the stories to prove it” (26). In both instances, we have a very literal missing of the event and a very imaginative 53

recovery of it. Sometimes it is only in retrospect, with the benefit of time and hindsight, that we can see or recognise the impact of a particular performance. In our absence, we wish that we were present and sometimes we wish with such force and such imagination that for a moment we might really believe that we were witnesses. Writing about the age of terror, Phelan argues that this “condition of witnessing what one did not (and perhaps cannot) see is the condition of whatever age we are now entering” (“Marina” 577). Like theories of primary and secondary witnessing, theories of tertiary witnessing complicate notions of the active spectator. For spatially triangulated witnesses, witnessing is an activity that operates mainly through identification. For temporally triangulated witnesses, witnessing is an activity that operates mainly through imagination.12 This, in turn, problematises claims that witnessing is a mode of ethical spectatorship since neither identificatory nor imaginative processes are especially ethical. Elin Diamond, for instance, contends that identification is “a fantasy assimilation not locatable in time or responsive to political ethics” (Unmaking 106). The tertiary witness who is temporally distanced is particularly problematic, since their imaginative, assimilative recovery of the event comes dangerously close to concepts of false witnessing. Here again, theories of witnessing would do well to (re)turn to theories of spectatorship and to (re)consider the role of ethics.

Towards a Theory of Spectatorial Witness

Even as these distinctions undo themselves, they also offer several possibilities for future directions in the discourse on spectatorial witnessing. First, these categories and subcategories of witnesses—primary, secondary, tertiary—enable scholars to speak more precisely when they refer to the spectator as a witness. Moreover, this taxonomy may prompt scholars to reconsider when, where and why they invoke the term witness. Occasionally, they may even decide that: “One probably cannot and should not always claim or try to witness” (Cubilié 218). In addition, this taxonomy highlights the insufficiency of our current definition of the witness as an “active spectator” and the lack of interaction between theories of witnessing and spectatorship more generally. Looking at accounts of primary, secondary, and tertiary witnessing it becomes clear that

12 Of course, identification and imagination overlap constantly. The statement is simply meant to suggest the emphasis of each activity, not to establish a new binary. 54

there are many modes of activity—self-conscious seeing, unconscious seeing, listening, identifying, imagining—currently being classified under the practice of witnessing. Likewise, each of these activities is implicated in a slightly different set of ethics: primary witnessing is implicated in the ethics of vision and visibility; secondary witnessing is imbricated in the ethics of listening and repetition; tertiary witnessing is entangled in the ethics of identification and imagination. This, in turn, hints at the lack of precision in our articulation and application of the notion of ethics. More than ethics, perhaps what witnessing theory does is to (re)introduce notions of temporality into theories of spectatorship. This is particularly the case with primary witnessing. While theories of secondary witnessing are more conventional in their conception of temporality (the traumatic event precedes the theatrical event which the produces a response in the spectator), theories of primary witnessing radically disrupt our current versions of temporality in two ways. First, they introduce the notion of belatedness into spectatorship, meaning that these theories do not presume that the spectator’s response is immediate and contemporaneous with the performance. To put it otherwise, perhaps we are spectators in the moment and witnesses in and through time. This is what Phelan hints at when she writes about Marina Abramovi. Watching in 2003, writing in 2004, rehearsing a theme she has been thinking about since at least 1999, “re-remembering” a performance she has written and spoken about before, witnessing is a durational process for Phelan. And why not? If witnessing in the theatre can be a “conscious, albeit belated, response to the messy truths” of a prior event, as Phelan suggests (“Performing” 13), then why would our response to the theatrical event be any faster or tidier? Why wouldn’t our response to the traumatic, testimonial, theatrical event also be belated and messy? In truth, we already know this is the case—it is why we still think and write about performances we saw years ago and it is why we feel compelled to write about some performances more than once. Perhaps it is also why we try and write about theatrical events we never saw and not only when writing theatre history. In this way, as for the (non-) spectators of Blasted, the event comes into being through our imaginary, indeed originary, repetition of it. Here the radicality of the temporality of primary witnessing reveals itself further—for it is the theatrical event that becomes the original and the “actual” event the repetition. In Phelan’s words:

witnessing a shooting on the street is framed by our many rehearsals of witnessing shootings in the cinema, on the television news, and indeed, in theatre itself. Performance employs the concept and experience of the live event as a way to rehearse our obligations to the scenes we witness in realms usually labeled the representational or the mediated. (“Performing” 10)

In short, it is the theatre that precedes life. This is precisely why theories of theatrical witnessing are so fraught and so important. When we represent trauma in theatre and performance, we are rehearsing it. We are doing nothing less than attempting to rehearse the accident; we bring it on to head it off; we play at it so that when it arrives we feel prepared. Yet, of course, we are not prepared, for we cannot be prepared. Like the fort-da game, theatre rehearses loss and like the fort-da game, theatre rehearses the departure of the mother, only to miss her death.

Taxonomy, Theory, Temporality

This tipping of temporality inevitably tips this chapter slightly too and it becomes clear that even as the chapter claims to be a cartography and taxonomy, it also aims to be a prophecy of sorts—both a prediction and a provocation about where we might take witnessing theory next. Of course, theorists of primary witnessing tell us that we cannot plan to be primary witnesses, that it happens accidentally. Even when we are primary witnesses, we are not always aware of the fact. Indeed, in primary witnessing the event is only imbued with meaning in retrospect. Nevertheless, as theorists of secondary witnessing will attest, one can intentionally become a witness by consciously deciding to listen to another witness. Perhaps it is this mode of intense listening that ought to be our model for future discussions of witnessing. However we proceed, it is clear that witnessing cannot be distilled or contained within a taxonomy such as this. Even so, perhaps these distinctions will remind us about what is at stake when we call the spectator a witness. The accident cannot be created or rehearsed, it cannot be planned, it cannot be predicted, and it cannot be repeated—that is what makes it an accident. Yet performance can be created and rehearsed, it can be planned, it can be predicted and it can (at least to some extent) be repeated—this is what makes it a performance. It is the impossible paradox of the “rehearsed accident” that makes witnessing in the theatre so impossible and ridiculous, so important and miraculous. 56

Chapter 2

The Ethical Potential of the Recording Regarding Video Testimonies and the Complexity of Copresence

To be absent in both space and time but still have access to an event via its traces is the condition of recording: the profane zone in which the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain. —John Durham Peters

[P]erformance provides a useful starting point for the development of an ethics of witnessing that understands the challenge of keeping spectators responsive to and responsible for events we see, even if our witnessing happens via celluloid rather than via the fantasy we continue to call real life. —Peggy Phelan

In her now famous essay “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” Shoshana Felman gives an account of how a graduate class she taught in 1984 fell into and eventually out of crisis. The crisis was brought about by the screening of a video testimony from the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and Felman remembers the scene in some detail:

The tapes were screened in the informal privacy of an apartment, with the students sitting on the carpet, all over the floor. During the screening some were crying, but that in itself is [sic] not an unusual phenomenon. When the film was over, I purposely left the floor to them. But even though this class, throughout the course, had been particularly literate and eloquent, they remained, after the screening, inarticulate and speechless. They looked subdued and kept their silence even as they left. That in itself is [sic] not unusual either. What was unusual was that the experience did not end in silence, but instead, fermented into endless and relentless talking in the days and weeks to come. (Felman and Laub 47, original emphasis)

During these “days and weeks,” one of her students observes that “Until now and throughout the texts we have been studying . . . we have been talking (to borrow Mallarmé’s terms) about ‘the testimony of an accident.’ We have been talking about the accident—and here all of a sudden the accident happened in the class, happened to the class. The accident passed through the class” (50, original emphasis). Eventually, perhaps inevitably, the class passed through—worked through—the accident, with Felman addressing them prior to the second screening, rehearsing their responses to the 57

first screening and exhorting them to see their final assignment as a type of “precocious testimony” to their experience of “assuming the position of the witness” (52). Felman herself claims to assume this position, as witness both to and of the class, and offers her paper to the reader as her “own testimony to an accident” (52, original emphasis). This account of what we might call the accident in the classroom, as opposed to the accident on the street, has now been published in three seminal trauma studies texts: in 1991 as a journal article in a double issue of American Imago, edited by Cathy Caruth (13–73); in 1992 as the opening chapter of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, the book that Felman co-authored with Dori Laub (1–56); and in 1995 as a chapter in Caruth’s edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory, which was based on the American Imago issues (13–60).1 In addition, the scene has been cited in the work of Linda Belau, Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra. In other words, like Brecht’s Street Scene in theatre and performance studies, Felman’s “Classroom Scene” has come to function in trauma studies as a focal point for debates about spectatorial witnessing. Though each critic has a slightly different perspective on the scene (considered in more detail later), the central point of contention seems to be that by calling her students witnesses Felman has stretched the term too far. Like John Durham Peters in the chapter’s

1 No doubt there is a minor article to be written comparing and contrasting these three versions. For example, the American Imago version includes a passage of Felman’s address to the class about how testifying is a “reverse process to the Nazi process” (64, original emphasis), which is absent from the Testimony version but reappears in the Trauma version (53, original emphasis). Similarly, there is a passage in Imago about the anxiety of the class ending (65–66), which does not appear in either of the later versions. More significantly, the Imago and Trauma articles do not include any images whereas the Testimony version includes eleven, two of which are childhood photographs of the survivors whose testimonies were screened. One of the photographs is then reproduced in Testimony’s next chapter, written by Dori Laub, but neither the authors nor the images refer to this fact. (On this point see Marianne Hirsch “Projected” 17–21.) Strangely enough, although the survivors are identified by both their names (Helen K. and Menachem S.) and their tape numbers (HVT-58 and HVT-152 respectively) in Testimony, they remain completely anonymous in Imago, where not even their tape numbers appear. Trauma seems to split the difference by identifying their tape numbers but not their names. In addition, the temporal framing of events in Testimony and Trauma is somewhat vague, so that one has the impression of an ongoing crisis over a period of weeks. However in Imago it is clear that there is only a week between the first and second video screenings (60) and in all three versions students submit their papers “a few weeks” after that (Imago 67; Testimony 52; Trauma 55). Finally, Laub seems more fully present in the Imago and Trauma versions than he does in the Testimony version. Indeed, it is not at all clear in Testimony that Laub was present at the first screening. Yet both Imago and Trauma include the following sentence in Felman’s address to the students: “You will recall Dr. Laub’s comment right after we viewed the tape, suggesting with elliptical abruptness, that ‘“who she was” was precisely her testimony’” (Imago 64, original emphasis; Trauma 53, original emphasis). In other words, Felman was not alone in facing a class that had apparently lost its ability to speak. Though the Imago version of the paper is probably the longest and most detailed, the Testimony version is the most widely cited, which is why I cite it throughout this chapter. 58

epigraph, these critics understand the recording as the “profane zone in which the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain” (720). In the same year that Felman was screening the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Ronald Reagan was supposedly telling another survivor, Simon Wiesenthal, that he had seen and photographed the concentration camps during the Second World War. It was not the first time Reagan had made such a claim; the previous year, in 1983, he had told the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir the same story. In fact, Reagan did not leave the United States during the Second World War and if he did see the concentration camps, then he did so while processing and editing raw footage of the camps for newsreels. Needless to say, Reagan’s many critics argued—once again like Peters—that viewing a recording of the concentration camps did not constitute witnessing. In contrast, Phelan takes a more generous approach, arguing that rather than automatically dismissing Reagan’s response as an instance of “false witnessing,” we should see it as a scene, which is to say as a performance. This performance, as she remarks in the second of the chapter’s epigraphs, “provides a useful starting point for the development of an ethics of witnessing that understands the challenge of keeping spectators responsive to and responsible for events we see, even if our witnessing happens via celluloid rather than via the fantasy we continue to call real life” (“Performance and Death” 119). To put it another way, the incident asks us to elaborate “an ethics whose first allegiance may not be to the empirically true, an ethics that requires a radical conception of what it means to remain ‘alive’ to the event, even when the wire service, the original source of information, has ceased” (119). Such an ethics becomes all the more pressing as survivors of the Second World War pass away and the event becomes “known and remembered only through second-order witnessing, through the agency of representations—from films, CD-ROMs, museums, and other public memorials” (119). In fact, such an ethics becomes pressing because the same fate awaits every traumatic event. Through her suggestive reading of this scene, Phelan makes a case for shifting the emphasis of our theoretical efforts away from the ethics of representation (how a particular image represents an event) towards the ethics of response (how spectators respond to a particular image and what they do with this response). In this sense she anticipates LaCapra, who two years later would call for “an ethics of response for secondary witnesses—interviewers, oral historians, and commentators” (Writing 98). 59

Whether or not he might add video viewers to the list is the topic of this chapter, but he assures us that “[s]uch an ethics would at least become a force or consideration in a larger force field” (98). Obviously there are important differences between these two examples, chief among them the fact that Felman’s students were viewing a mediated scene of testimony, which she claims becomes a scene of trauma in its own right, while Reagan was viewing a mediated scene of trauma, which he claims as an unmediated scene of trauma. It is also worth noting that the students were watching videos, while Reagan was watching and also editing film footage, i.e. both the mediums and the methods of their engagement differ. In addition, whereas the gap between Felman’s experience and her writing about it is approximately seven years, the gaps between Reagan’s experience(s) and Phelan’s writing about them are many and lengthy: she is writing in 2000 about claims that he made in 1983 and 1984 and these claims in turn refer to events that occurred roughly 40 years ago. Nevertheless, in placing these two scenes— one from trauma studies, the other from theatre and performance studies—alongside one another we can begin to see how theatre and performance studies might extend trauma studies’ understanding of liveness, mediatisation, and spectatorial witnessing. To put it another way, while the previous chapter suggested that trauma studies might further illuminate the Street Scene, this chapter argues that theatre and performance studies might provide new insights into the Classroom Scene. Theatre and performance studies bring new perspectives to the spectatorship, or more accurately the spectatorial witnessing, of video testimonies for three principal reasons. Historically, theatre and performance scholars have only ever been able to access the “original” event through its traces such as programs, reviews, and more recently audio and video recordings, meaning that they see such recordings as a residue of the embodied event that both is and is not an accurate representation of it. More recently, the disciplines have had to rethink the relationship between theatre, performance, and the media. In part this is because we live in an increasingly media- saturated culture, in which theatre is no longer as dominant as it once was, and in part it is because theatre itself has become increasingly “mediatised,” meaning that it often incorporates audio and video recordings, live feeds, and complex interactive technologies (Auslander, Liveness 5–7). Finally, these two themes—historical and technological—have coincided in the work of Philip Auslander, who has begun to think about the way in which recordings of performances might themselves produce another 60

sort of performance, which is to say another kind of encounter for their spectators, who may or may not have seen the so-called “original” event (“Performativity”). In short, theatre and performance studies have a history of thinking through various modes of absence, presence, and copresence and how they work with and against each other in different settings. Drawing on this theory and vocabulary of presence and copresence, this chapter argues that the debate over whether Felman’s students can be called witnesses, and if so what sort of witnesses, indicates that trauma studies currently conflates spatial, temporal, and emotional copresence. To put it another way, this chapter argues that trauma studies limits itself to physical copresence while disregarding more subtle, less tangible forms of copresence. Rereading the Classroom Scene through the lens of theatre and performance studies, I offer two complementary, though slightly contradictory, interpretations. First, I draw on Philip Auslander’s theory of liveness in order to argue that although the video testimonies are not live, spectators can nevertheless experience a sense of spatial and/or temporal copresence that is typical of liveness. Second, I draw on media scholar Shanyang Zhao’s distinction between spatiotemporal modes of copresence and emotional copresence, in order to suggest that even when spectators do not experience a sense of liveness, or spatiotemporal copresence, they can nevertheless experience a sense of emotional copresence. This second scenario opens up the possibility of tertiary witnessing and the last section of the chapter canvasses an ethics of response as well as the ethics of non-response. If we cannot respond to the primary witness in any way, and we cannot alleviate their suffering, do we have a right to watch?

Producing Video Testimonies

In 1979, Laurel Vlock and Dori Laub established the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, “based on the premise that the medium of video could be used successfully to document the personal memories of Holocaust witnesses” (Fortunoff, “History”). In 1981, it moved to Yale University, where it has been ever since. The Fortunoff website states that although there were already substantial collections of written and audio testimony, they believed that the combination of the “television image . . . [and] an open-ended, free-flowing interview process, [could] disclos[e] expressive details about the day-to-day experience of the survivors with a force that [could] hardly 61

be exaggerated” (Fortunoff, “Concept”). The archive now holds thousands of these interviews, all of which are numbered and catalogued according to the name of the witness (a first name and initial), the names of the interviewers, the year of recording, as well as any particular places or events that are mentioned in the interview.2 In many ways, these interviews resemble therapeutic encounters, in the sense that a primary witness sits with a secondary witness and testifies to a traumatic event. Indeed, Laub states that he finds “the process that is set in motion by psychoanalytic practice and by the testimony to be essentially the same, both in the narrator and in myself as listener (analyst or interviewer)” (Felman and Laub 70). Reading Laub’s description of these encounters, we can discern at least three sorts of presence and copresence, which both do and do not align with what he calls the “three separate, distinct levels of witnessing” (75). “The first level,” according to Laub, is “that of being a witness to oneself” (75). In his case, this “proceeds from my autobiographical awareness as a child survivor” of the Holocaust (75). He states that he has concrete and detailed conscious memories of events as well as memories “that happened on another level, and [were] not part of the mainstream of the conscious life of a little boy” (76). This is what we might call self- presence or the degree to which the subject is conscious of him- or herself. For the primary witness this self-presence may exist in the current moment but it may not extend to the past since “trauma precludes its [own] registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (57). Indeed, the very purpose of therapy is to retrospectively enable this registration and to restore the primary witness’s sense of self-presence; in testifying to an external witness the subject can begin to recover their internal witness (85). For the secondary witness, self-presence involves being aware of his or her subject position in relation to the traumatic event, as well as his or her conscious and unconscious memories of it. In addition to the self-presence of the individual witnesses, there is also the fact of their spatiotemporal copresence—they are in the same place, at the same time, as the primary witness testifies and the secondary witness listens. This form of copresence correlates roughly with Laub’s second level of witnessing. He writes:

The second level of my involvement in the process of witnessing is my participation, not in the events, but in the account given of them, in my role as the

2 For a more detailed history of the archive see Joanne Weiner Rudof’s article “A Yale University and New Haven Community Project,” which is available from the Fortunoff website. 62

interviewer of survivors who give testimony to the [Fortunoff] archive, that is, as the immediate receiver of these testimonies. My function in this setting is that of a companion on the eerie journey of the testimony. As an interviewer, I am present as someone who actually participates in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event. I also become part of the struggle to go beyond the event and not be submerged and lost in it. (76)

Yet although spatiotemporal copresence is central to the encounter, it is also clear from this passage that it is not enough in and of itself. Laub reinforces this point when he writes that in order “[f]or the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears” (70, original emphasis). In other words, there needs to be what we might call emotional copresence as well as spatiotemporal copresence. Here I am borrowing from media scholar Shanyang Zhao, who argues that copresence “consist[s] of two dimensions: copresence as mode of being with others, and copresence as sense of being with others” (“Towards” 445, emphasis added). In other words, copresence consists of “both the physical conditions in which human individuals interact and the perceptions and feelings they have of one another. Whereas the physical conditions constitute the mode of copresence, perceptions and feelings constitute the sense of copresence” (446, emphasis added). Since other theorists often use the terms mode and sense interchangeably, I use the terms spatiotemporal and emotional copresence to distinguish between the two. Though the concept of spatiotemporal copresence is clear enough, the meaning of emotional copresence is less so. What sort of “feelings” does Zhao associate with this form of copresence? For the purposes of this chapter, I take him to mean a feeling of empathy, which is itself “a way of both feeling for and feeling different from” another subject (Landsberg 135). Or, as Jill Bennett puts it, empathy is “grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something [or someone] irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (10, original emphasis). This is precisely the sort of feeling that Laub demands of the secondary witness, who “has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony” and yet remain “a separate human being” (Felman and Laub 58). Though the experiences of the primary and secondary witnesses overlap to an extent, the secondary witness “nonetheless does not become the victim—he preserves his own 63

separate place, position and perspective” (58). In short, the secondary witness needs to be both spatiotemporally and emotionally copresent. Finally, the third level of witnessing is about how spatiotemporal and emotional copresence coincide or collide. Laub writes: “The third level is one in which the process of witnessing is itself being witnessed. I observe how the narrator, and myself as listener, alternate between moving closer and then retreating from the experience— with the sense that there is a truth that we are both trying to reach, and this sense serves as a beacon we both try to follow” (76). When spatiotemporal and emotional copresence work in concert, the secondary witness’s spatiotemporal copresence can reinforce their emotional copresence. For example, if the primary witness becomes distressed the secondary witness can steer the conversation elsewhere. Likewise, he or she can extend a hand or offer a tissue—small corporeal gestures that can restore or reinforce the emotional copresence that exists between primary and secondary witness. When spatiotemporal and emotional copresence work at cross purposes, and the secondary witness sits and listens to a primary witness without empathy, he or she risks “annihilat[ing] the story” and with it the primary witness (68). In summary, then, the secondary witness is not simply someone who listens but someone who listens with a degree of self-presence; someone who is not only a receptive presence but also a responsive presence; someone who responds to the primary witness and, just as importantly, to the process of witnessing; someone whose dynamic spatiotemporal copresence can either reinforce or undermine their emotional copresence. Though Laub emphasises the similarities between the therapeutic and testimonial encounters, he nevertheless concedes that there are “obvious and perhaps irreconcilable differences” between the two settings (70). Perhaps the most obvious difference is the presence of the camera and microphone, which immediately multiplies the number of witnesses both in and beyond the room. To put it another way, think of John Durham Peters’ point that “people can be witnesses in media (the vox pop interview, ‘tell us how it happened’), of media (members of studio audiences), and via media (watching history unfold at home in their armchairs)” (707, original emphasis). Using Peters’ scheme, we can see that there are witnesses in the video testimony (the survivor and the interviewer who are indeed telling us “how it happened”), of the video testimony (the co- interviewer, the camera operator and any other technicians present, the survivor’s spouse or any other family member, who constitute a studio audience of sorts), and via the video testimony (watching the testimony in the archive or in class). 64

For the witness in the video testimony, and more specifically the primary witness or survivor, the presence of the camera and others alters the testimonial encounter in several ways. First, the binary analyst-analysand relationship becomes triangulated by the presence of another interviewer, who is called the co-interviewer. This triangle rapidly becomes a rectangle once the camera operator, archivist, and any other technical support staff are factored in. Indeed, the website states that “Each tape is made under the supervisions of a professional and supportive team” (Fortunoff). In addition, there may be family members present who may sit alongside the witness or elsewhere, outside the frame but close by.3 In other words, as Thomas Trezise points out, whereas “psychoanalytic practice typically involves a single listener . . . the interview may well include . . . more than one listener” (23). Beyond being spatially triangulated, these testimonies are also temporally triangulated since they are being recorded in anticipation of another audience of researchers, educators, and students. The degree of public exposure is even greater now that excerpts of the some of these testimonies are available online on the Fortunoff website.4 Though the public and private are always in tension in any psychoanalytic encounter, being videotaped while testifying can produce a particularly self-conscious sort of public privacy. Writing about a moment in Barbara T.’s testimony, where she seems to slide “back there,” Lawrence Langer suggests that she is “[i]ntensely aware of the exclusive and inclusive privacy of that moment, which she inhabits simultaneously alone and in the presence of the interviewer (to say nothing of a potentially larger audience of viewers)” (17–18, original emphasis). If the public nature of the archive alters the way in which these stories are told, it also alters the purpose for telling them. The purpose of storytelling in the therapy room is clear: to repair the traumatised subject and ideally to enable them to move from acting

3 Lawrence Langer indicates that family members rarely attend interviews, to the relief of the many interviewers who indicate a preference for interviewing the primary witness without family members present, even if that family member is another survivor. Langer, for instance, interviewed Max and Lorna B. in 1980, together and in the presence of their son and daughter, only to reinterview them separately eight years later in order “to give them a chance to tell their stories more fully” (x). Robert Kraft also believes that “many survivors are more likely to reveal guarded information to a prepared stranger than to friends or even family” (312). 4 Hartman anticipated this possibility back in 1996, when he wrote, “Popularization disseminates but also trivializes. . . . What if we can soon tap into thousands of such witness accounts through an access technology that allows video-on-demand?” (Longest 12). More recently, Oren Baruch Stier has said of the Visual History Foundation’s efforts to place video testimonies online: “The VHF will therefore offer Shoah-on-demand to a new age of cyber-surfing data samplers, a full technological generation beyond the intended audience of the Yale archive. The danger is that these new ‘witnesses’ will be less committed to the co-creative processes of watching and listening to videotestimonies and less well versed in the necessary context for their own witnessing” (100). 65

out to working through. However, video testimony relies on the subject having done a degree of acting out beforehand so that by the time they are being interviewed they are well on their way to working through. In Trezise’s words, “The testimonial interview . . . can be said to ‘break the framework’ of psychoanalysis [itself] to the extent that, in keeping at once with its public character and with its documentary and educational purpose, it must presuppose on the part of the narrating witness a relatively unimpaired capacity for objective cognition” (23). Of course, this is not entirely possible and indeed the most riveting part of any particular testimony may be the moment in which the witness lapses into silence, where they are in effect acting out. However, whereas the analysand can sit in silence for an entire session if need be, tape stock may be at a premium and, in any case, the archive has little interest in recording 10,000 hours of silence. In other words, speech must start again and the witness must continue to testify. While the public nature of the interview shifts the role of the primary witness, it also shifts the role of the secondary witness or interviewer. Whereas the psychoanalyst’s sole responsibility is to their patient, in the video testimony the interviewer also has a responsibility to the archive and indeed to history itself. Langer conceives of the interviewer “as [a] surrogate for a larger audience” (60) as does Trezise, who states that “the role of an interviewer for a video archive is to represent other listeners” (24). This may mean pushing for certain concrete details that a psychoanalyst might otherwise leave aside. While much work has been done on the witnesses in the video testimonies, little seems to have been done on the witnesses of the video testimonies. Indeed, there is almost no literature on these additional secondary witnesses, if we can call them that— but can we? In the case of the camera operator and sound recordist, yes and no. On the one hand, they are obviously spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness. On the other hand, they may not necessarily be emotionally copresent with the primary witness; they may be too busy concentrating on the lighting or worrying about the tape running out to offer any meaningful or sustained engagement.5 Indeed, becoming too emotionally involved may prevent them from doing their job properly. In the case of a spouse or family member, the answer is similarly ambiguous. Once again, it obvious that they are spatiotemporally copresent with the primary

5 Dori Laub tells Mary Marshall Clark that when the archive first opened, “the videocassettes were twenty minutes long; therefore they had to be changed every twenty minutes” (Clark, “Holocaust” 273). 66

witness. In addition, they are almost always emotionally copresent. However, this emotional copresence may become so acute that they may have to remove themselves from the room. Take, for instance, Moses S.’s wife (herself a survivor) who at one point “says: ‘I think it’s time to stop. He’s getting upset. We should stop.’” (Langer 28). “But,” notes Langer, “he’s been perfectly calm throughout his testimony and insists on continuing” (28). Moses S. continues to tell a story about two hundred Mauthausen inmates who were wrapped in soaking blankets and left in a freezing room to die. Langer writes:

When he finishes, his wife gets up slowly, says, “I can’t listen to this any more,” and walks off camera. The drama of avoidance initiated by so many of these testimonies thus radiates in many directions, not only toward the audience. . . . Shortly after the wife leaves, one of the interviewers says to the witness, “This is a nice place to stop.” Then we hear whispering off camera. Meanwhile, Moses S. is saying to himself aloud, “And more, and more, and more. Do you want to hear more?” One of the interviewers replies: “No. Let’s end here.” He insists, “One more story.” She persists, “No, no. We’ll stop here.” But he over- rides her objection and tells the story of the prisoner choked to death by a Kapo for having eaten his friend’s bread. And here the interview ends—but it is the interviewer’s choice, not his. (28)

Here the witness of the video testimony—Moses S.’s wife—has become so emotionally involved that she has to insert some physical distance between herself and the primary witness. (In fact, it may be that she is reliving her own trauma and hence becoming a primary witness as well.) In doing so, she inevitably intervenes in the testimonial encounter and effectively becomes another witness in as well as a witness of the video testimony. The other witnesses in the video testimony, the two interviewers, are then left to deal with a series of competing responsibilities—to Moses S., to his distressed wife, to the archive, to the future audience, even to each other—as they weigh up whether to conclude the interview and how to do so. Robert Kraft recounts a similar instance when he “happened to be with the survivor’s son out of sight in the control room. While listening to his father’s testimony, the son became agitated and within five minutes said, ‘This is not what we came to tell about. Why is he talking about this?’” (312). Standing outside the frame or in the control room, can the wife of Moses S. or the son of the survivor still be called secondary witnesses? If we insist that secondary witnesses must be spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness, then perhaps not; if, however, we insist on emotional copresence, then perhaps so. 67

These tentative answers become more so when we start thinking about the terms themselves. Where does spatial copresence end and spatial distance begin? Do secondary witnesses have to be within reach, within view, or within shouting distance of the primary witness? In other words, are we dealing with the haptic, optic, or acoustic horizon? Can there be presence-at-a-distance? Can we cleave spatiotemporal and emotional copresence? If one of the witnesses in the video testimony (the interviewer) can be called a secondary witness, and various witnesses of the video testimonies can be called secondary witnesses, then what of the viewers who become witnesses via video testimonies? That is, what of Felman’s students? Can they also be called secondary witnesses or is this stretching the term too far? Where do they fit into this complicated knot of presence and copresence?

Regarding Video Testimonies

Like the Street Scene, the Classroom Scene is arguably two scenes or even a series of scenes. In the initial instance, Felman screened the testimony of Helen K. at an apartment, after which the students were apparently subdued and silent. In the wake of this speechlessness, the students then became garrulous—accosting fellow students, obsessing over the testimony in other classes, and always talking, talking, talking, though they found language somehow insufficient. When Felman realised that the class was in crisis she consulted with Laub, the interviewer of Helen K. and founder of the Fortunoff Archive. Together they determined that “what was called for was for [Felman] to reassume authority as the teacher of the class, and bring the students back into significance” (Felman and Laub 48). In the second scene, then, Felman addressed the class for half an hour, reflecting back to them their compulsive responses to the first session, before screening the second video testimony. Looking back at the initial incident, Felman likens it to “an accident” (52). In doing so, she positions both herself and her students as primary witnesses who were present at a scene of trauma. Within the wider category of the primary witness, she implies that her students are victims, writing that the video testimony brought about “such an encounter with the real that the class, all of a sudden, [found] itself entirely at a loss, uprooted and disoriented, and profoundly shaken in its anchoring world views and its commonly held life-perspectives” (xvi). Indeed, she even goes so far as to compare 68

her students’ experience to that of Holocaust survivor and poet Paul Celan, telling them that:

the significance of the event of your viewing of the first Holocaust videotape was, not unlike Celan’s own Holocaust experience, something akin to a loss of language; and even though you came out it with a deep need to talk about it and to talk it out, you also felt that language was somehow incommensurate with it. . . . I will suggest it is this loss Celan precisely talks about, this loss that we have all been somehow made to live. You can now, perhaps, relate to this loss more immediately, more viscerally, when you hear the poet say that language was “all that remained.” Here again is Celan’s language, that remains: lost and regained again through the videotape experience. (50, original emphasis)

If she positions her students as the victims of the accident, then she positions herself as a bystander to the accident, writing that “I became, in fact, myself a witness to the shock communicated by the subject-matter; the [narrator] of how the subject-matter was unwittingly enacted” (7, original emphasis). (It does not seem to occur to her that she might also be seen as the perpetrator of this particular accident.) If the first screening session is the scene of the accident, then the second might be called the scene of the account. In this session, Felman—like Brecht’s bystander- demonstrator—stands in front of the class, explaining what just happened and how. There are several ways in which to read this scene. Felman indicates that she sees herself as a witness to the class, which is to say as a secondary witness who listens to and later reads the testimonies of the primary witnesses. In other words, Felman becomes a sort of analyst and her students analysands (54). However, it is arguable that when she is addressing the class she is in fact testifying to her own traumatic experience as well as theirs, meaning that the witnessing positions may well be reversed: she is the primary witness and the students are the secondary witnesses. In addition, of course, the class also watches another video testimony, that of Menachem S., before submitting their assignments the following week. Whether we regard the Classroom Scene(s) as one scene or many, Felman has been criticised for essentially two reasons: (1) viewing video testimonies is not, and indeed should not be, a traumatic encounter; and (2) viewing video testimonies is not necessarily a testimonial encounter either. In other words, Felman’s critics contend that her students are neither primary nor secondary witnesses. On the first point, LaCapra says simply: “it is blatantly obvious that there is a major difference between the experience of camp inmates or Holocaust survivors and that of the viewer of the 69

testimony videos” (Writing 102–03). That is, no matter how disorienting, overwhelming or even distressing viewing these video testimonies may be, it cannot be compared to the experience of enduring the Holocaust. In making such a comparison, argues LaCapra, Felman takes the term trauma too far (102). Like LaCapra, Linda Belau also disagrees with Felman’s use of the term trauma, however she takes a slightly different approach. For Belau, Felman’s faults are two- fold. On the one hand, Felman fetishises trauma, “invit[ing] a dangerous elevation of traumatic experience to the level of an ideal” or even a “transcendental ideal” (Belau par. 1, 32). In this way, “victims or survivors of trauma . . . may [come to] be seen as ambassadors of an exceptional realm, bearers of a higher (albeit more terrible) knowledge than is available to the rest of us” (par. 1). On the other hand, Felman— according to Belau—fundamentally misunderstands and thus minimises trauma and its impact upon the subject. By implying that trauma is an experience, albeit a “limit experience,” that can happen one week and then be accounted for and basically recovered from the next, Felman would seem to belittle trauma. Belau puts it succinctly when she says, “in Felman’s classroom . . . trauma is not an experience without return” (par. 35). In this version of trauma, students “emerg[e] from their crisis experience shaken but better for the experience—becoming nicer people or wiser scholars, perhaps” (par. 35).6 In claiming it for the classroom, contends Belau, Felman simultaneously elevates and evacuates the concept of trauma.7 If the first scene is not a scene of trauma then it follows that the second cannot be a scene of testimony, since there is no trauma to which to testify. If, however, we take the two scenes together—as a single event—and we agree that the Classroom Scene

6 Intriguingly, both LaCapra and Belau use the language of theatre to articulate their criticisms. Belau, for instance, argues that “Felman inserts herself into the position of the analyst, her class seemingly playing the role of the traumatized analysand” (par. 34, emphasis added) and that “Felman plays the guru who is able to return to the class something essential, some prohibited content that representation cannot seem to muster” (par. 36, emphasis added). In the same way, LaCapra states that “the extreme traumatization of a class through a process of unchecked identification with victims would obviously not be a criterion of success in the use of survivor videos. And it would be preferable to avoid or at least counteract such traumatization—or its histrionic simulacrum—rather than to seek means of assuaging it once it had been set in motion” (Writing 102, emphasis added). He also accuses Felman of an “objectionable self-dramatization” (102) and repeats the phrase when he states that she is “somewhat self- dramatizingly . . . anxious about the effects of trauma in a class” (107). This language betrays an ambivalence about theatre and performance, as well as its siblings theatricality and performativity, which permeates much of trauma studies. Though it lies outside the scope of this chapter, and indeed of this thesis, there is much work to be done in this area. It is remarkable that there is no trauma studies equivalent of Samuel Weber’s article “Psychoanalysis and Theatricality” in which he traces the different sorts of theatricality at work in Freud’s thinking. 7 Here, of course, I am echoing Hal Foster’s observation that “In trauma discourse . . . the subject is evacuated and elevated at once” (168). 70

does not amount to a traumatic encounter, could we nevertheless say that it does constitute a testimonial one? In other words, even if the students are not primary witnesses, could we say that they are at least secondary witnesses to the testimonies of Helen K. and Menachem S.? For the most part, Felman’s critics do not think so, principally because she fails to consider the issues of medium and mediation. In the words of Guerin and Hallas, Felman “treats the video image as a transparent document of the testimonial event, rather than a medium with its own potential dynamics of witnessing” (11). To borrow Peters’ terms, she does not distinguish between the witnesses in media, of media, and via media and in effect she conflates the witnesses via media (her students) with the witnesses in media (the survivors). To put it in the terms of this chapter, Guerin and Hallas, through not phrasing it as such, are asking Felman to consider the fact that she is dealing with a recording of a testimonial encounter, meaning that she and her students are dealing with the image of the primary witness, not the primary witness per se. In essence, they are asking her to consider her modes of presence and copresence. In fact, LaCapra has articulated his criticisms in precisely these terms, arguing that because Felman and her students are not spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness, they cannot be called secondary witnesses. For example, he states:

It is plausible to think secondary trauma is likely in the case of those who treat traumatized victims or even in the case of the interviewers who work closely with victims and survivors. But it may be hyperbolic to argue all those who come into contact with certain material, such as Holocaust videos, undergo at some level secondary or muted trauma. (Writing 102)

Similarly, he is adamant that “the academic (as academic) is not—and is not entitled simply to identify with—a therapist working in intimate contact with survivors or other traumatized people. Reading texts, working on archival material, or viewing videos is not tantamount to such contact” (98). Even if Felman were to frame it as a scene of testimony rather than a scene of trauma, he “raise[s] doubts about an academic’s tendency to identify with a therapist in intimate contact with traumatized people as well as about the identification of a class with trauma victims and survivors” (101–02). The language of contact—“work closely,” “come into contact,” “intimate contact,” “not tantamount to such contact,” and “intimate contact” again—is striking and it indicates that in order for LaCapra to call someone a secondary witness, they have to be 71

spatiotemporally copresent with, which is to say in touch with (con “with” and tangere “touch,” hence contact), the primary witness. LaCapra’s argument is indicative of a wider school of thought that worries that the term witness is being overextended. Writing about the Holocaust, Geoffrey Hartman has asked: “should the term ‘witness’ still apply, three generations and over fifty years from the event?” (“Shoah” 38). Hartman is not sure that it should. However, whereas LaCapra’s concerns are structured around concepts of spatiotemporal copresence, Hartman’s concerns centre on notions of genetic “contact” or contiguity. He argues that the expression “second generation witness,” which he uses to refer to the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors, has expanded too far, writing:

the phrase [has] broadened to embrace what Terence des Pres and Lawrence Langer name “secondary witness”—a concept without generational limit. It includes all who could be called witnesses because they are still in touch with the first generation or who look at the Shoah not as something enclosed in the past but as a contemporary issue requiring an intensity of representation close to eyewitness report. (37–38, emphasis added)

For Hartman, the secondary witness should be someone either in touch with the first generation or still in the midst of the Shoah in some sense. That is, they must be spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witnesses or—and here he starts to resemble Felman—still at the scene of trauma. Here it becomes apparent that although they are arguing for different propositions, Felman and her critics are in fact arguing from the same foundation. They are all dealing with trauma studies’ tendency to conflate spatiotemporal and emotional copresence; they simply resolve the impasse differently. For her part, Felman argues that the students become primary witnesses because they themselves go through trauma; she does not claim that they become secondary witnesses to the primary witnesses on the videotape. For his part, LaCapra argues that the students cannot become secondary witnesses to the primary witnesses because they are not analysts or interviewers (though he later modifies this opinion, as we shall see). Underpinning each argument is the assumption that the viewer of the video testimony cannot be a secondary witness to the primary witness on the videotape because they are not spatiotemporally copresent. Perhaps another way of framing the problem would be to say that each theorist is trying to negotiate trauma studies’ tendency to rank witnesses or to place them in a hierarchy. In order to emphasise the effect that the video testimonies had on her 72

students, Felman feels compelled to call them primary witnesses, in the process somewhat overstating her case. Likewise, in order to advance his argument, LaCapra compares the students to other secondary witnesses, “ranking” them against analysts and interviewers before concluding that they are “lesser” witnesses because they are not spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness. Similar calculations are evident in the Stephen Smith passage, already cited in both the Introduction and Chapter 1, where he states that a secondary witness is “less authoritative” than a primary witness and suggests that to reproduce or represent the primary witness’s testimony is to “subject[t] the eye-witness . . . who was there to the opinion or re-representation of those who were not” (qtd. in Bigsby 23). This attitude is also evident in Avishai Margalit’s statement that the “paradigmatic case of a moral witness is one who experiences the suffering— the one who is not just an observer but also a sufferer” (150). In other words, though the bystander can serve as a witness, the “moral witness” is the victim or survivor. Such claims neglect the fact that sometimes a secondary witness (such as a psychoanalyst) or an “intellectual witness” (such as an historian), might in fact be more authoritative that the primary witness, in the sense that they may have a better understanding of the event in its entirety than the primary witness possibly ever could. Laub, for example, recalls listening to the testimony of a woman, whom he deduced must have been in the Canada commando, though she had never heard of the term (Felman and Laub 60). More significantly, these claims implicitly rank witnesses according to their spatiotemporal proximity to the traumatic event. It is surprising that the practice persists, especially given that other such arithmetic, for example the comparison of traumatic events, has rightly been criticised for encouraging a “calculus of calamity” (Berenbaum 32). Finally, such hierarchies leave no room for those who inherit the world in the wake of such catastrophes. Significantly, even as Felman’s critics disagree with her characterisation of the Classroom Scene and therefore doubt her understanding of witnessing, they nevertheless agree the video testimonies are affecting. LaCapra for instance writes: “Viewing these videos has effects on people. The sounds of the voices, the often agonized looks on the faces have a powerful, at times an overwhelming, effect, and the impression may remain with the viewer long after the actual event” (Writing 92). He even concedes that “the viewing of videos may have different subjective effects on different people . . . and the possibility of secondary trauma cannot be discounted” (103). More recently, he has attempted to resolve the issue by distinguishing between 73

the traumatic event and the traumatic experience (History, 112). In doing so, he argues on the one hand that “a person may take part in the event without undergoing the experience of trauma” (112–13) and on the other that “one may experience aspects of trauma or undergo secondary traumatization . . . without personally living through the traumatizing event to which such effects are ascribed” (114). Seemingly modifying his slightly stricter views in Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra states: “Secondary traumatization may even occur in those reacting only to representations of trauma” (114). Yet even as he extends the term trauma, it is not clear if LaCapra is extending the term witness. Did students who went through secondary traumatisation also become secondary witnesses? Or were they primary witnesses to their secondary trauma? The answer is not immediately apparent. How can theories of witnessing account for such responses? Or, more interestingly, how might these responses shift our theories of witnessing?

Liveness and Copresence

Like trauma studies, theatre and performance studies have also privileged liveness and copresence in their theorisations of witnessing. Indeed, these are often at the heart of claims that theatre, as both a site and a medium, has a particular ability to witness and to produce others as witnesses. For instance, Peggy Phelan states that:

the possibility of mutual transformation of both the observer and the performer within the enactment of the live event is extraordinarily important, because this is the point where the aesthetic joins the ethical. The ethical is fundamentally related to live art because both are arenas for the unpredictable force of the social event. (“Marina” 575, emphasis added)

Whereas in film and video, or what Phelan terms “pre-recorded” performance more generally, the actor is fundamentally “indifferent to the response of the other” (575), in theatre the spectator and actor are spatiotemporally copresent. For this reason the event is more truly “intersubjective,” more dangerous but also more glorious, and finally more ethically, aesthetically, and socially potent (574).8 Similarly, Karen Malpede argues:

8 Phelan also writes “the particular force of live performance concerns the ethical and the aesthetic tout court” (575) and “If Levinas is right, and the face-to-face encounter is the most crucial arena in which the ethical bond we share becomes manifest, then live theatre and performance might speak to philosophy with renewed vigor” (577, emphasis added). For an excellent analysis of liveness and its relation to witnessing in Phelan’s work, see Geraldine Harris (“Watching”). 74

By putting the witnessing action and its crises before us, alive in time and space, the theatre of witness provides its audience with the knowledge, the courage, the time, and the community in which to contemplate and affirm its engagement in actual, private and public acts of witness. Those for whom witnessing might be a daily job . . . are affirmed in the validity of their tasks, and receive the energy that live theatre can transmit when it gives shape to actions that resonate inside the body. (“Theatre” 277, emphasis added)

In other words, the spectator who is live (spatiotemporally copresent) becomes “alive” (emotionally copresent), and hence becomes a witness. It is not clear whether the theatre of witness differs from theatre per se, but perhaps this is precisely the point; for Malpede, as for Rokem, “the theatrical medium has an inherent tendency to create situations where some kind of witness is present” (Rokem, “Witnessing” 180).9 Yet in making these claims, Malpede and Phelan overlook their own disciplines’ recent insights into the nature of liveness and copresence. The seminal text in this area is Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. In this book he argues that “the relationship between the live and the mediatized is one of competitive opposition at the level of cultural economy” rather than at the level of any intrinsic differences (11). That is, the difference between the live and the mediatised is historical and ideological rather than ontological. Historically, liveness has only become perceptible because of mediatisation. Indeed, Auslander goes so far as to say that “the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around” (51). More specifically, liveness is an effect of television and the advent of the live broadcast. What had previously been defined in terms of spatiotemporal copresence became defined in terms of temporal copresence only, so that we now understand television as live and experience it as intimate, immediate, and interactive. Even as television has colonised our cultural understanding of liveness, live events themselves have become increasingly mediatised so that we now see large television screens at live sporting events and rock concerts (24–25). Ideologically, this means that despite the increasing mediatisation of culture, or probably because of it, liveness now functions as a kind of cultural currency so that “being able to say that you were physically present at a particular event constitutes valuable symbolic capital— certainly, it is possible to dine out on the cachet of having been at Woodstock, for example” (57). In short, liveness has become an “effect” not unlike Roland Barthes’s

9 Malpede also writes that the theatre of witness derives its power from putting “the bodies of live actors across a stage in front of an assembled audience” (“Theatre” 269, emphasis added). 75

“reality effect” and this effect is no longer the property of any specific medium such as theatre (Rustle 141–48). Indeed, the “use of the phrase ‘go live’ . . . to describe the initiation of websites suggests that we are now prepared to extend the concept of liveness to non-human entities (websites) with which we nevertheless interact in real time” (Auslander, “After” 97–98). What Auslander’s argument does is to add another category, or subcategory, to Zhao’s scheme of spatiotemporal copresence and emotional copresence; effectively splitting spatiotemporal copresence into spatial and temporal copresence. Hence we can speak of three sorts of copresence—spatial, temporal, and emotional—and define liveness as a mode of spatial distance, temporal copresence, and emotional copresence. In fact, this is how media scholars have already theorised witnessing: as a mode of contemporaneous, emotionally engaged spectatorship from a distance. In the words of Peters, “Liveness is a key characteristic of televisual witnessing, including the morally problematic witnessing of violence and carnage” (708), adding that “presence-at-a- distance is precisely what witnessing a media event claims to offer” (717). Likewise, John Ellis says “Separated in space yet united in time, the co-presence of the television image was developing a distinct form of witness. . . . Television sealed the twentieth century’s fate as the century of witness” (33). Yet there is an important difference between what Peters calls “televisual witnessing” and the witnessing of video testimonies. Televisual or media witnessing (Frosh and Pinchevski) is typically defined as the “spectatorship of suffering” (Chouliaraki) or, more accurately, as the spectatorship of “distant suffering” (Boltanski), a mode of “regarding the pain of others” (Sontag) or of “[b]eing a spectator of calamities taking place in another country” (Sontag 16). In essence, the media witness is a “world spectator” (Silverman), who sees violence, carnage, suffering, pain, and calamity. That is, the media witness is a witness to trauma, albeit spatially distant trauma or, in the terms of the first chapter, the media witness is a bystander from afar.10 In contrast, the viewer of the video testimony is exactly that: a spectator of testimony rather than the traumatic event itself. This is not to suggest that testifying is not traumatic, rather it is to acknowledge—as Hartman does— that these videos, like classical tragedies, do not depict scenes of killing, wounding, or

10 There is however a substrand of media scholarship that theorises witnessing in relation to commemorative and ceremonial events. See for example Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. 76

suffering, but rather describe them (though they may depict something like aphanisis) (Longest 129). In the terms of the first chapter, the viewer of the video testimony is akin to someone watching a video recording of the eyewitness-demonstrator speaking about an accident that happened fifty years ago. For this reason, many media theorists would hesitate to call Felman’s students witnesses at all. Peters, for example, states that “if one sees it on tape, one is no longer a witness, but rather the percipient of a transcription” (719). He elaborates:

Of four basic types of relations to an event, three can sustain the attitude of a witness. To be there, present at the event in space and time is the paradigm case. To be present in time but removed in space is the condition of liveness, simultaneity across space. To be present in space but removed in time is the condition of historical representation: here is the possibility of a simultaneity across time, a witness that laps the ages. To be absent in both space and time but still have access to an event via its traces is the condition of recording: the profane zone in which the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain. (720)

Seemingly unwilling to consider the ethical potential of the recording, the “profane zone” is where media studies reaches and reveals its limits. This is why, somewhat surprisingly, we cannot turn to media studies to make sense of the Classroom Scene. However, this is also where theatre and performance studies can offer something back to trauma studies. Not only do the latter disciplines have a recent history of theorising liveness, they also have a longer history of thinking through issues of recording and documentation since, unlike film and media scholars, those working in theatre and performance are unable to return to the primary “text.” They cannot rewind and hit play again. Instead, they are forced to access the performance event through its traces—programs, reviews, and more recently photographs and video recordings—and to think deeply about how these documents and recordings differ from the performance itself. More intriguingly, they have also started to think about the ways in which these documents produce another sort of performance, another kind of encounter. Here I am thinking of Auslander’s 2006 article “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” where he argues that:

the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly originary event: perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological. . . . It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and 77

authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience. (9, original emphasis)

Not only does the photograph document a prior, “original,” performance, it is also capable of producing a performance itself. That is, the document (photograph or video) is capable of producing the same sense of “presence, power, and authenticity” (9). It is a performance, an event, an encounter in its own right. Together, Auslander’s arguments suggest two alternative readings of Felman’s Classroom Scene. The first reading argues that although the videos are not live, spectators can nevertheless experience them as live or at least experience a liveness effect. That is, they can feel a sense of temporal, spatial and emotional copresence. For this reason, we might be able to call them secondary witnesses since it is arguable that they exist with the complex web of copresences at work in the making of the video testimonies. The second reading takes a slightly more literal tack, arguing that the videos are not live and that spectators do not experience them as such. However, this is not to say that they do not produce a sort of encounter or event in their own right. Indeed, the evidence suggests that despite their spatiotemporal distance, spectators can nevertheless feel emotionally copresent and can therefore be called witnesses. Whether or not they can be called secondary witnesses is doubtful, however they might be classifiable as tertiary witnesses.

The Spectator as Secondary Witness

[I]n the video testimony it becomes more than eye-witness, because it’s a presence and it’s an experience. —Jennifer Ballengee

There is ample evidence to suggest that viewers of the video testimonies experience them as live; that is, they experience a sense of temporal copresence with the testimony of the primary witness. For instance, Langer states that “Oral survivor testimony unfolds before our eyes and ears; we are present at the invention of what, when we speak of written texts, we call style” (58). James Young also has a sense of unfolding, writing that the video testimony documents “the witness as he makes his testimony” (159). Young’s use of the present tense, “as he makes his testimony,” rather than the 78

imperfect tense “as he was making his” or the perfect tense “as he made,” suggests that he feels as if he is temporally copresent—there “at the same time as” the witness testifies. This impression is reinforced by Young’s later statement that: “We watch as experience enters speech: that point at which memory is transformed into language, often for the first time. . . . We are witness to the speaking and to the not speaking, to the choice of whether to go on or not” (161). Once again, in the phrases “We watch,” “We are witness to,” Young indicates that he experiences the witnessing ordeal as live, even though it may have taken place some time ago. This temporal slippage is also apparent in Hartman’s account when he states that “videotestimonies make a double claim: they convey ‘I was there,’ but also ‘I am here’—here to tell you about it, to take that responsibility despite trauma and pain, despite the divide between present and past” (Longest 91). In fact, it is arguable that video testimonies make the double claim “I was there” (during the Shoah) and “I was there” (at Yale), however the use of the present tense once again indicates that for the spectator, in this case Hartman, these videos are experienced as live. This sense of temporal copresence with the primary witness may be encouraged by what Langer calls the “cotemporality” of the accounts themselves (3). He states that the primary witness often “report[s] not a sequence but a simultaneity” (95, original emphasis). Oren Baruch Stier also comments on the spatiotemporal confusion in the accounts, stating that “In survivor testimony, time and space often distort and conflate, so that presence in this temporal frame can quickly become presence in that spatial frame, there rather than here” (78, original emphasis). For Hartman, too, the witness seems to “slip into ‘back there’” (“Humanities” 257). Elsewhere he has commented how “in video testimonies (or ‘testimonial video’ generally) there is nothing between us and the survivor; nor, when an interview really gets going, between the survivor and his/her recollections. The effect, therefore can be extraordinarily intimate—it is hard not to cry” (Longest 140). Here, Hartman hints at how the temporal collapse within the account (“there is nothing between the survivor and his/her recollections”), coincides with or creates a spatial collapse, a feeling that “there is nothing between us and the survivor” despite the fact that there is (an interviewer, a camera, a frame, a lens, a screen). This spatial collapse produces, in turn, a kind of emotional collapse so that the spectator feels “extraordinarily intimate” and can find it “hard not to cry.” If the sense of temporal copresence is created by the cotemporality of the accounts themselves, then it is strengthened by the sense of spatial copresence that the videos 79

work to create. This spatial copresence is created in several ways: through the strict protocols around accessing the videos; through the setting in which one watches these videos; and through the intimate framing of the primary witness’s face. First, the Fortunoff Archive insists that scholars come to the archive in order to view any videos.11 In her interview with Hartman, Ballengee observes that the Fortunoff Archive “seems to monitor its dissemination of tapes very carefully. . . . Is this careful administration of the testimonies’ dissemination a way of preserving the specificity and humanity of each testimony? Or preserving the ‘reality’ of it, so to speak?” (Ballengee 223). To which Hartman replies, “The short answer is, yes!” before adding that “we never touch the original tapes. The original tapes are always in pristine form. And you can see them in full. Nor do we let them out even overnight. You have to come to the archive to see the entire tape. I think a person should make that effort” (223–24, emphasis added). For Ballengee at least, this has the desired effect: “Certainly, the experience of viewing the tapes in the archival/special collections section of the library reinforces the particular ‘place’ of the testimonial memory” (223). In the case of Felman’s students, however, recall that the tapes were screened in an apartment (Felman and Laub 47). Though they may not have been spatially copresent with the primary witness to the extent that Ballengee was—“They were here, I am here”—the students may nevertheless have felt as if they were in an intimate, domestic space. Indeed, it may have been precisely the lack of a formal or institutional frame that initially set the students off balance. However the testimonies are framed institutionally (or not), it is clear that the filmic framing of the witnesses also works to create a strong sense of spatial copresence. Over and over again, writers employ words such as “immediacy,” “intimacy,” and “presence,” suggesting that not just students but also very skilled, possibly even hardened, scholars feel as if they are spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness. Indeed, almost every commentator who has written about the archive feels compelled to comment on the embodiment of the witness and the sense of proximity they feel. For instance, LaCapra states: “In the videos one has the embodied voices of witnesses and survivors who typically have been overwhelmed by the excess of traumatizing events and the experience of them” (Writing 91–92, emphasis added). There is slippage here, from the interviewer to the viewer. While the interviewer has

11 It is not clear how or why Felman had her students view the testimonies in “the informal privacy of an apartment” (47). 80

the embodied primary witness, the viewer in fact has the image of the primary witness—a magnetic stripe on a videotape rather than a “magnetic” presence in the same room. Elsewhere Hartman makes a similar slip, only to catch himself and put the word in inverted commas. For example, he states that they favoured video over audio “because of the immediacy and evidentiality it added to the interview. The ‘embodiment’ of the survivors, their gestures and bearing, is part of the testimony” (Longest 144). Here, even though he uses words such as “immediacy” which suggest a sense of copresence, Hartman hints that there is a difference between the mode of embodiment in the interview and the mode of “embodiment” (in inverted commas) in the screening room. Similarly, Patricia Yaeger describes this sort of embodiment as “ephiphanic” or illusory, but this does not seem to dim the emotional effect (“Testimony” 416). Indeed she says “we have the illusion of direct address: the survivor, facing the camera, seems to be speaking to me. He or she tells a horrifying story, until the feeling of being-with, of being-there, is quite intense” (416).12 For Yaeger, this is the essence of “intimacy, nearness, entanglement, that deep sense of sharing someone’s suffering that we call compassion” (419). The body part that is most privileged is, of course, the face. For instance, Langer comments on the “mobile, anguished face before us” (83). In his reading of Langer, Young comments that “the animate faces . . . see[m] so immediate that they knoc[k] the critic off balance” (170). Young himself feels that the “images and pictures of faces, in particular, affect us viscerally, evoking emotional, parasympathetic responses over which viewers have little control: that is, we respond to pictures of people as if they actually were people” (163–64). Yaeger, too, seems fascinated by faces, describing one witness—Paul D.—and the “clouds of sweat that sway across his face” in great detail (“Testimony” 417–18).13 Stier is similarly spellbound by the “slightly perspiring face” of Edith P., which “fills and even overflows the screen, so that her chin and forehead are cut off” (79). Reading these rapturous descriptions one recalls Roland Barthes on Garbo, whose face for him “represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which

12 Stier agrees that the framing of the witness “gives the illusion (partially true) that the witness is speaking directly to us, the viewers. This illusion is beneficial, for it lends a sense of immediacy to the testimonial proceedings” (74). 13 In another passage, Yaeger lingers over Hanna K.’s face in the same way that the camera does and obsesses over Bessie K.’s tongue and teeth, “the facticity of her flesh” (“Testimony” 418–19). Towards then end of her article she comes back to Paul D’.s face, which “becomes luminous; it grows so bright that the camera cannot encompass it” (421). 81

could be neither reached nor renounced” (Mythologies 56).14 Spectral, spectacular, and yet somehow achingly actual, such a face hails the spectator into a small and intimate space.15 More often than not, this sense of spatiotemporal copresence also seems to produce a sense of emotional copresence, to the point where they become indistinguishable, such as when Stier says: “Because they show us ‘live’ images of the survivors in the ‘present,’ they restore to presence, life, and wholeness . . . the static, lifeless images from the past that continue to haunt us” (107–08). Though the speech marks around “live” and “present”—like those around Hartman’s “embodiment” and Young’s use of the subjunctive “as if” as well as Yaeger’s “illusion” of direct address and her phrase “epiphanic embodiment”—indicate that spectators realise that the videos are not live, it is not hard to see how temporal, spatial, and emotional copresence coalesce to produce a liveness effect.

The Spectator as Tertiary Witness

Sitting alongside this first reading of the Classroom Scene, I would like to offer a second, which is both complementary and slightly contradictory. Rather than assuming that the spectators of video testimonies experience a sense of spatiotemporal copresence, and therefore of emotional copresence, this reading considers the possibility that spectators do not experience spatiotemporal copresence but that they nevertheless experience emotional copresence. Because they are both spatially and temporally distanced, these spectators cannot be called secondary witnesses. However, I contend that they can still be called witnesses or more precisely tertiary witnesses. In advancing a theory of tertiary witnessing, I am arguing that spatiotemporal copresence is not a necessary precondition for the emotional copresence that is central to spectatorial witnessing. In fact, spatiotemporal distance may mean that emotional copresence is

14 Recall also Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that, “There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face, but the face precisely in so far as it has destroyed its triple function [of individuating, socialising, and communicating] . . . The facial close-up is both the face and its effacement” (99–100). 15 The precise nature of that space varies according to when the testimony was filmed. Hartman admits that “among the almost two hundred testimonies initially recorded, I now see inspired but also, at times, irritating camera work. Wishing to project the act as well as the narrative of witness, we often sought what one of the project’s founders, adopting a legal term, called ‘demeanor evidence.’ The result was excessive camera movement. The supposedly ‘imperturbable’ camera (Kracauer’s word) zoomed in and out, creating Bergmanesque close-ups. Eventually we advised that the camera should give up this expressive potential and remain fixed, except for enough motion to satisfy more naturally the viewers’ eye” (“Memory.com” 8). 82

even more keenly felt. To put it plainly, this section argues for nothing less than the ethical potential of the recording. When watching these videos at a distance, the spectator becomes acutely aware of the fact that they cannot influence the testimonial encounter in any way, shape or form. In Kraft’s words: “When I study testimony, the survivors are unaffected by my changing moods or my appearance or my facial expressions or my spontaneous, unintentional remarks” (313). Though this can be inconvenient as Kraft notes—“As I watch the testimony, my questions sometimes go unanswered . . . and I cannot pursue interrupted insights or clarify what confuses me” (313)—it can also be deeply distressing. Hailed as a secondary witness, but unable to respond as such, tertiary witnesses find themselves in an excruciating double bind. This is precisely the predicament LaCapra points to when he writes about

the ethically induced feeling that one may not be responding with sufficient empathy, a reaction that increases the anxiety one feels both because of the evident, often overwhelming pain of the survivor recalling and even returning to the position of helpless victim and because of one’s own helplessness in doing anything about what is being recounted or relived. (Writing 92, emphasis added)

For the tertiary witness, then, emotional copresence does not coincide with spatiotemporal copresence. Indeed, it is arguable that it is all the more intense because of the spatiotemporal distance. In the words of Yaeger, spectators to the videos:

ache to be close, proximate, intimate, to understand. But even as the words reach out to us in video testimony, the speaker’s body is often going away. It may ask us to follow, and we may feel compassion for the speaker in the present, our present. But in its way, the speaker’s body has already disengaged from us, has taken its own journey into the past—or into some other valence where we are no longer its listeners. (“Testimony” 420)

In fact, the speaker’s body escapes us twice: they are already in the past (whether by five years or thirty) and within that past, they are retreating to yet another, private past. In this way, tertiary witnesses not only miss the traumatic event, they miss the testimonial event as well. It is precisely this double missing, this re-missing—and feeling remiss at having done so—that can reproduce the effect of trauma (defined as the missing of the event) in the tertiary witness. To put it otherwise, it is the spatiotemporal distance that causes emotional copresence. If the spatiotemporally distant witness complicates current notions of spectatorial witnessing, then it also complicates calls for “an ethics of response for secondary 83

witnesses” and, I would add, tertiary witnesses (LaCapra, Writing 98). Since the tertiary witness is defined by their inability to respond, we need to start thinking about the ethics of non-response or, more radically, the ambiguous ethics—the non-ethics or the un-ethics—of the non-response. Can there be such an ethics? Writing about a photograph of a war veteran whose face has been shot away, Susan Sontag says:

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. (37–38)

Though she is writing about images of violence, rather than videos of testimony, Sontag raises an interesting point for the advocates of these videos. Unable to alleviate the traumatic suffering of their past, unable to intervene in the testimonial encounter of their present, do we have a right to look? Like Sontag, we can justify the looking by saying that we are learning, but what exactly are we learning? What can we find out from our inability to respond?

The Ethics of Tertiary Witnessing

[F]ormerly dominant discussions of the practical and ethical dimensions of recording testimonies—what is the impact of testifying on the witness? what is the responsibility of the archive and of the listener to the survivor?—must now yield to questions concerning the future of the archive. —Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark

Though much has been said about the ethics and aesthetics of these video testimonies, little has been said about the ethics of spectatorial response. Instead, writers tend to focus on the ways in which the videos themselves respond to and represent the primary witness. In responding to the primary witness, these videos are praised for their methodology of letting the witness take the lead. In representing the primary witness, these videos are praised for their “balance of realism and reticence” (Hartman, Longest 156). On the side of realism, the videos are admired for refusing the consolation of abstraction, and for depicting the survivors as they are now, rather than as they were when depicted by the perpetrators of the war (Young 163). On the side of reticence, the videos are applauded for refusing the temptations of mimesis. In the words of Hartman, the video testimonies are “countercinematic: a talking head, another talking head, a few 84

awkward questions by an interviewer, are all that appears on the screen. No theatricality or stage-managed illusions” (Longest 123). For Hartman and Young, then, these video testimonies are ethical because they practise what Phelan has called elsewhere “an ethics of the visible” (“Performance, Live” 296). That is, the videos bestow a visibility upon the primary witness, which neither denies them representation nor reinjures them through representational violence. More intriguingly, some writers praise the video testimonies for uniting the witness and their testimony. For instance, Young says:

Unlike the case in audio or literary testimony . . . in video testimony the speaker remains united with his story. . . . Rather than becoming separated from his words, the speaker reinvests them with his presence, his authority, and the link between a survivor and his story is sustained in video as it cannot be in literary narrative. (169)

In this passage, Young seems to confuse the video testimony with the testifier; for while the videos do not separate the image of the witness from their testimony, they do in fact separate the witness from their image, and as a result from their testimony. Indeed, this is precisely the point and purpose of video testimonies. In Aleida Assman’s words, the function of the video testimony is:

to transform the ephemeral constellation of an individual voice and an individual face into storable information and to ensure its communicative potential for further use in an indefinite future. Due to its transcription onto a material carrier, the video testimony “survives” the survivor and has the capacity to address numberless viewers and listeners. It stabilizes the individual testimony and transforms it into storable and retrievable information. (270)

Or in Kraft’s words: “Videotaped testimony can then be studied by those who did not provide it and those who did not collect it” (313). To put it otherwise, the ethical potential of the video testimony lies precisely in the recording, not despite it. Contra Young, I am arguing that the ethical potential of the video testimony lies in the fact that it does separate the testimony from the witness. This separation does three things: first, it enables the video to “witness for the witness” and in doing so it relieves the primary witness of the burden of repetition; second, it provides a space in which spectators can have an ethically ambiguous, even dubious, response without injuring the primary witness; and third, it produces a space in which spectators can convert their non-response into what we might call an “ur-response.” To put it another way, because it relieves the primary witness of the burden of repetition, yet enables the 85

tertiary witness to listen to testimony several times if necessary, it enables a mode of repetition and therefore enables rehearsal. The first way in which this separation functions ethically is that it permits the video to “witness for the witness.” Here, I am thinking of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Paul Celan’s poem “Aschenglorie,” and more specifically the lines “Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen” or “No one / bears witness for the / witness” as it is translated in English. Having rehearsed the Greek, Latin, French, German, and English etymologies for the word witness, Derrida eventually concludes that rather than witness it is actually für that is “at the same time the most decisive and the most undecidable word in the poem” (Sovereignties 90). There are three ways, according to Derrida, in which we can interpret this for: (1) it is “about bearing witness on behalf of someone (I bear witness for you, I bear witness on your behalf, I am a witness for the defense, etc.)”; (2) it is “about ‘bearing witness for’ the other in the sense of ‘in the place of’ the other’”’; or (3) it is about “bear[ing] witness ‘for’ someone not in the sense of ‘on behalf or’ or ‘in the place of’ but ‘for’ someone in the sense of ‘in front of’ someone” (88–89). The video testimonies perform all three of these fors by bearing witness on behalf of and in place of the primary witness and finally, by bearing witness in front of the viewer. It is this last for that seems particularly significant, since it is one of the few passages in trauma studies to consider the relationship between testimony and repetition. Whereas the relationships between trauma and repetition, and trauma and testimony for that matter, have been thoroughly theorised, few scholars have given much thought to the matter of retestifying. Though retestifying can be therapeutic for the primary witness—though not necessarily cathartic—it can also become an ordeal in and of itself. That is, it can become another scene of trauma. On the other hand, retestifying risks “cementing” testimony, as Primo Levi notes: “a memory that is recalled too often and that is expressed in verbal form tends to set as a stereotype—a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, and adorned—which settles in the place of the raw record and grows at the expense of the original memory” (“Memory” 130–31). What the video testimony does is to relieve the primary witness of the burden of repetition. Rather than trooping from class to class, the primary witness can testify once and once only. Not only does separating the witness and their testimony relieve the witness of the burden of repetition, it also provides a space in which spectators can act out and, hopefully, work through any ethically ambiguous responses; responses that may be 86

inappropriate, aggressive, defensive. In this way, spectators can work through these responses without placing the primary witness in additional distress. This protects both the students and the primary witness: students are able to voice inappropriate questions or opinions without wounding the primary witness and the primary witness, as Kraft notes, is not affected “by how much time [or how little] I spend with each person” (313). Finally, perhaps what is ethical about these video testimonies is that they provide the space in which to convert a non-response into an ur-response. By this I mean that because these videos enable repeated “interrogations,” without injuring the primary witness, they also enable rehearsal. For instance, Kraft notes that although he is occasionally confused or frustrated by a witness, “With repeated viewing . . . it is possible to complete the survivors’ elliptical sentences and to establish the referents of seemingly disconnected statements—an episode told twenty minutes earlier, a general lesson revealed much later” (313). In other words, it is possible to practise listening and, most importantly, to improve. Here, repetition enables Kraft to learn how to hear silence, to complete ellipses, to connect disconnected episodes, and to extrapolate general principles from particular instances. That is, in performing tertiary witness he has rehearsed the role of the secondary witness. In shifting the emphasis from representation to repetition, tertiary witnessing not only changes our understandings of ethics, it also changes our notions of response. Perhaps what is ethical about watching these videos is not the spectator’s response, or non-response, to the past but rather his or her response to the future. By viewing these videos, spectators can experience emotional copresence without the complications, implications, and responsibilities of spatiotemporal copresence. That is, they can rehearse the testimonial encounter and when the testimonial encounter itself is repeated, which is to say when the subject finds themselves confronted with a primary witness who feels compelled to testify, they have rehearsed their role. When Felman’s students (and it is strange that none of them seem to have published on this famous class) are faced with a primary witness who feels compelled to testify, they have, in some small way, rehearsed this role. They are, in some small way, prepared. 87

Chapter 3

Interviewing Asylum Seekers Performance, Ambivalence, and the Witness in the Refugee Determination Process

For how much longer do I have to be a stranger? —Hassan Sabbagh

The burden to resolve ambivalence falls, ultimately, on the person cast in the ambivalent condition. —Zygmunt Bauman

The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as:

A person who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UNHCR, Convention 16)

In order to be recognised as such, an asylum seeker must go through what is called the “refugee determination process.” Though the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides guidelines on how to conduct this process, it can vary from country to country. When applying in Australia, it involves a series of interviews, forms, and sometimes appeals. The precise process depends on how asylum seekers arrive (whether by air or by boat), when they apply (immediately or some time after entering on another visa), and whether or not they have to appeal their case. For the purposes of this chapter, I am focusing solely on the process as it was, and largely still is, for asylum seekers who arrive by boat and who apply for protection immediately. For these asylum seekers, the refugee determination process begins with a brief “biodata interview,” which is conducted when they are intercepted at sea and simply establishes their name, date of birth, and nationality. Once they arrive at a detention centre, they then go through a “screening interview” (also called an “initial interview” or “detention interview”), in which an immigration officer asks the asylum seeker a series of questions in order to determine whether they have a prima facie case for 88

protection. If not, then an asylum seeker is “screened out” and deported to their country of origin as soon as practicable. If they are “screened in” then they are allowed to lodge an application for protection by filling in Form 866 Application for a Protection (Class XA) Visa (currently 39 pages), Form 80 Personal Particulars for Character Assessment (8 pages), Form 26 Medical Examination for an Australian Visa (8 pages), and Form 160 Radiological Report on Chest X-Ray of an Applicant for an Australian Visa (6 pages). Having submitted these documents, they then wait to be called for the somewhat misleadingly named “primary interview.” Though the Department of Immigration aims to conduct these interviews as soon as possible, applicants can and have spent several months in detention while waiting for their primary interviews. If, after this interview, their application is accepted, they are then granted a protection visa. If their application is rejected, then they may appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Federal Court, the full Federal Court, and the High Court, and then to the Minister him- or herself, though these rights have been severely restricted in recent years. Such a system demands that the asylum seeker testify on numerous occasions to numerous secondary witnesses. As Erica Caple James has remarked of humanitarian practices in Haiti, “the suffering of the victim is confessed to physicians and psychiatrists, lawyers, activists, the clergy, and other human rights observers. These trauma narratives are documented in affidavits and other written testimonials and verified through physical examinations and psychological tests” (131). Similarly, within the refugee determination process in Australia, suffering is confessed to the screening officer, the interpreter, the assessing officer, the lawyer or migration agent who assists the asylum seeker to fill in the many forms, the officer who conducts the primary interview, another interpreter, and the various doctors who assess the applicant’s health. Potentially, this suffering is also confessed to additional caseworkers, the tribunal member, the judge, and the Minister, not to mention activists, journalists, and—as we shall see in the next chapter—theatre practitioners. In this way, “[r]efugees are required to produce their traumatic experiences [repeatedly and] on cue” (Parsley 66). In other words, the refugee determination process depends almost entirely on the ability and willingness of the asylum seeker to perform witness. While the refugee determination process has previously been analysed by scholars working in refugee studies, legal studies, and linguistics, it has yet to be analysed by 89

anyone based in cultural, theatre or performance studies.1 This is somewhat surprising given that cultural studies scholars have examined almost every aspect of the asylum seeker experience in Australia. Joseph Pugliese, for instance, has analysed the architecture of asylum (“Tutelary”), the production of the asylum seeker as post-human (“Event”), the protesting and self-harming actions of asylum seekers (“Subcutaneous”; “Penal”), as well as the traumatic temporality of the Temporary Protection Visa (“Incommensurability”). Numerous other scholars have felt compelled to reply to the silent speech of lip-stitching, which they interpret as an address to the community, indeed to the very concept and possibility of community (Diprose “Community”; “Hand”), as an aggressive assumption of bare life (Edkins and Pin-Fat), and as a particularly gendered mode of protest (Cox and Minahan). Taking this one step further, theatre and performance studies scholars have analysed how lip-stitching protests have been represented on stage. For example, Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo have compared and contrasted the plays The Waiting Room (2002), where a performer sewed a teddy bear’s mouth shut, There Is Nothing Here (2003), where a performer sat with his back to the audience, lit in silhouette so only the pulling of the thread was visible, and In Our Name (2004), where a performer described the procedure in graphic detail (198–202). Similarly, Edward Scheer has analysed Mike Parr’s performances Close the Concentration Camps (2002) and Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture) (2003), where Parr not only stitched his lips but also his ears and eyebrows in what Scheer describes as “an expanded gesture of empathy with the detainees” (Infinity 117). Yet no one has considered the performances that preceded these more public and spectacular instances of performing witness despite the fact that the interviews within the refugee determination process are arguably the most crucial performances of all—literally a matter of life and death. Such an oversight is not an indictment of the scholarship that precedes this chapter. On the contrary, this epistemic blind spot must be seen as structural rather than accidental and there are several structures at work. First, there are political structures, such as the strict government protocols prohibiting journalists from entering detention centres or speaking to detainees. In some instances, the government has issued explicit

1 Within refugee studies and legal studies (there is great deal of overlap between the two fields), see for example Quentin Dignam’s article “The Burden and the Proof: Torture and Testimony in the Determination of Refugee Status in Australia” or Connal Parsley’s article “Performing the Border: Australia’s Judgment of ‘Unauthorised Arrivals’ at the Airport.” Within linguistics, see Diana Eades’ article “Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases.” 90

instructions not to publish “personalising or humanising images” of asylum seekers (Senate Select Committee, Certain 24).2 These repressive strategies have been accompanied by more aggressive strategies to focus public attention on asylum seeker arrivals and protests, rather than on administrative processes and specifically the problem of due process. These political structures overlap with legal strictures that prevent the proper supervision of the refugee determination process, particularly the screening interviews. Previously transcripts of screening interviews were released to an asylum seeker’s migration agent or lawyer, however since 2000 the Department has declined to do so (Crock, Seeking 120). Finally, and more perniciously, there are also social structures at work. The refugee determination process has functioned as one of Australia’s “public secrets,” which Michael Taussig defines as “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated” (Defacement 5, original emphasis). Even though the public knows about the refugee determination process, they also “know what not to know” (6). To put it another way, the refugee determination process exists in one of the blind spots of the public sphere. It is part of a broader process that Diana Taylor calls “percepticide,” whereby the population turns a blind eye to what is happening, in a sense, in plain view (Disappearing 123). Hence, when academics attempt to analyse this economy of visibility, we inadvertently reinforce it, in the sense that we focus on the spectacular at the expense of the invisible but potentially lethal performances that are happening behind closed doors. Of course, in attempting to perceive percepticide, to articulate the public secret, and to analyse these unseen scenes of witness, I also risk confirming their ultimate unknowability. Unlike the interviews examined in the previous chapter, the screening and primary interviews examined here are not always recorded and even when they are, they are not publicly available. To recall the distinctions of John Durham Peters as they were deployed in the previous chapter, this means that while there are witnesses in the screening and primary interviews (“tell us what happened”), there have been very few witnesses of these interviews (members of a studio audience), or via these interviews (watching these interviews from afar) (707). This in turn means that any analysis of these interviews depends on the accounts of lawyers and refugees, as well as the reports of the few professional spectators—usually inspectors from other government

2As stated in the introduction, all government reports are authored by the Commonwealth of Australia. Hence this report is listed in the Works Cited first under the Commonwealth of Australia and then under the Senate Select Committee. 91

agencies—who have been permitted to sit in on these interviews. In other words, even before it begins, this analysis is necessarily dependent on testimony. Beyond testimony, this analysis is also dependent on hearsay, in the sense that it cites anonymous comments made to me by lawyers who work within the system but who declined to be named for fear of the professional repercussions. Unfortunately this is not unusual in this line of investigation. For instance, legal scholar Savitri Taylor had to complete a large portion of her doctoral thesis on the basis of anonymous comments, because government officials and others would not agree to speak with her otherwise (“Informational”). Similarly, when some colleagues contacted the Department of Immigration requesting that representatives address an academic conference, they found that no one was willing to do so. Privately, officials indicated that they feared that anyone who spoke to academics would be treated as an example and professionally disciplined. The use of hearsay recalls Joseph Roach’s remarks in his book Cities of the Dead, where he writes: “The status of the evidence required to reconstruct performances depends on the success of two necessarily problematic procedures—spectating and tattling. This is not a disclaimer. Often the best hedge against amnesia is gossip” (30). Following Roach, I too have included the occasional piece of “gossip” however I have also backed up these comments with published evidence and I have not pursued this problematic methodology beyond this chapter. It is worth remembering, too, that this is only one form of gossip and that there is another form of tattle to which I do not have access—the rumours, hearsay, and informal words of advice that circulate among asylum seekers in detention centres every time news of a decision from the inscrutable department comes through. If the first chapter asked: “How have theatre and performance studies theorised spectatorial witnessing and how might trauma studies shift those theorisations?” and the second chapter asked the inverse, then this chapter asks: “What form of witnessing do we find in performance?” More specifically, it investigates what sort of witnessing is at work within the social, cultural and bureaucratic performance that is the refugee determination process. Through an analysis of both the screening interview and the primary interview, I argue that we find a form of ambivalent witnessing. This is a form of witnessing that is characterised by an “inability to choose between alternative actions” (Bauman), a “duplicity of feeling” (Trezise), and the constant negotiation between the “necessity and impossibility of witnessing” (Oliver).

The Refugee Determination Process, Performance, and Ambivalence

The move to analyse the refugee determination process as a performance is itself an ambivalent manoeuvre given government and media strategies that deploy the language of performance in order to dismiss the authenticity of asylum seeker testimonies and protests. For instance, the Refugee Review Tribunal has frequently refused applicants on the basis that their testimony is “coached,” “rehearsed,” or “recited” (discussed in more detail later in the chapter). Similarly, when writing about protests in Curtin detention centre in April 2002, journalist David Penberthy suggested that footage of the protests “could perhaps be titled Kabul’s Craziest Home Videos and set to a Benny Hill soundtrack” (“How”). Declaring that he was “bored to tears by boat people . . . [and their] endless drama,” Penberthy argued that previous arrivals “have never gone for the theatrics of this troubled batch of humanity” and dismissed the protestors as “performance artists who tried to hasten the processing of their visas by banging their heads against the wall” (“How”). Like the Refugee Review Tribunal, then, Penberthy deploys the language of performance to suggest that these are not “real” protests (or testimonies in the case of the tribunal) and therefore these people are not “real” refugees. In one sense, these are banal examples of what Jonas Barish has called the “antitheatrical prejudice” (Antitheatrical). In another, however, they present something of a problem for theatre and performance studies scholars, for, faced with such vocabularies and strategies, how are we to reply? Is there any way in which we can redeem the language of performance in this context? The history of performance, and more recently of performativity, suggests that we can. Writing about the reappropriation and resignification of hate speech, Judith Butler argues that such “speech can be ‘returned’ to its speaker in a different form, that it can be cited against its originary purposes, and perform a reversal of effects” (Excitable 14). More intriguingly, she suggests that this “return” can happen via performance, stating:

An aesthetic enactment of an injurious word may both use the word and mention it, that is, make use of it to produce certain effects but also at the same time make reference to that very use, calling attention to it as a citation, situating that use with a citational legacy, making that use into an explicit discursive item to be reflected on rather than a taken for granted operation of ordinary language. Or, it may be that an aesthetic reenactment uses that word, but also displays it, points to 93

it, outlines it as the arbitrary material instance of language that is exploited to produce certain kinds of effects. (99, original emphasis)

Though Butler is referring to rap, film, photography, and painting, it may well be that writerly (re)enactments, even theoretical (re)enactments, can also do similar work. In fact, scholars outside theatre and performance studies have already begun this work. For example, legal scholar Connal Parsley has analysed the screening interviews conducted at airports in terms of performativity, arguing that they “perform” the border in three related ways (“Performing”). First, they perform a judgement of, or as he puts it “on,” the asylum seeker; second, through these judgements, these interviews also perform and indeed instantiate the border; and third, through performing the border, these interviews also perform and produce the nation itself. Similarly, cultural studies scholar Pugliese has pointed to the performativity of asylum seekers’ lip stitching protests, even as he signals his reservations about doing so (“Event”). Building on Parsley and Pugliese, I want to analyse the refugee determination process not only in terms of performativity but also in terms of performance for, as Elin Diamond notes, “as soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects, all become discussable” (“Introduction” 5). Moreover, the terms themselves, performance and performativity, and the relationship between them also become discussable. Most importantly of all, analysing the refugee determination process as a performance might also facilitate a discussion about the distribution of performativity within these scenes. It may be that while the refugee determination process is performative for the state and its agents, it is more akin to a performance for asylum seekers. For the agents, the process is performative both in the sense that it is iterative and in the sense that their words carry illocutionary force. For asylum seekers, however, the process is probably not iterative, since they are not likely to have sought asylum before, nor will their words always carry illocutionary force. There are, then, at least three ways in which we can understand the refugee determination process as a performance: as a social drama; as a cultural performance; and as an organisational or bureaucratic performance. The social drama, according to Victor Turner, occurs in four phases: (1) the breach, or social rupture and violating of the norm; (2) the crisis, whereby the breach broadens and deepens; (3) the redressive ritual, which seeks to confine and control the crisis; and (4) the reintegration or the recognition of schism (From 70–71). In the case of what we might call the “social 94

drama of seeking asylum,” the drama varies according the participant’s perspective. For the asylum seeker, their departure may in fact be the fourth stage of a prior social crisis in their country of origin, such as a civil war, which has resulted in a permanent schism. In the eyes of the UNHCR, however, it may be that their departure from their country of origin constitutes the initial breach, their journey and arrival constitutes one long crisis, and the refugee determination process is one long redressive ritual or series of redressive rituals. Yet, for the nation state it is the arrival of the asylum seeker that constitutes the initial breach and crisis. Right from the outset then, the refugee determination process is beset by ambivalence as contradictory interpretations abound, rebound and ricochet: asylum seekers and the government have distinctly different understandings of where asylum seekers are in the social drama and how exactly it will play out. When asylum seekers protest, it is arguably a type of redressive action against the government, however the government may think of it as another moment of crisis that requires yet another redressive, and punitive, action. In this way, the government and asylum seekers get caught in a vicious cycle of crisis and redress. In other words, an essential part of this social drama is the battle over where we are within it. What settles the final shape of the social drama is who has access to the performative language of the law, which “enacts or produces that which it names” (Butler, Bodies 13). In this case, it is the government which decrees that the entry of the asylum seeker is both a breach and a crisis. The refugee determination process is then designed to address, or redress, that crisis and the outcome of that process then produces reintegration, i.e. the asylum seeker is accepted as a refugee, or permanent schism, i.e. the asylum seeker is rejected and returned to their country of origin (though from the point of view of the government this may also be a reintegration, as the nation reasserts and reassembles itself). If the refugee determination process can be seen as a social drama, then the interviews within it might be seen as cultural and social performances. Here I am thinking of Milton Singer’s definition of cultural performance as having a “limited time span, or at least a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion” (71). Though Singer refers to theatre, dance, concerts, recitations, religious festivals, weddings, and other such occasions, interviews might just as well be called cultural performances since they satisfy all of Singer’s criteria, as we shall see. Moreover, the cultural performance of 95

the interview often demands additional cultural performances, e.g. the asylum seeker may be asked to recite a prayer, sing a song, or perform a dance. While the interviews may be cultural performances for both the interviewees and the interviewers, it is likely that they are social performances for the immigration officers only. Turner defines social performance as the ordinary, day-to-day interactions of individuals as we move through social life (32–33). For the asylum seeker, however, the interviews are anything but ordinary or everyday. Elaborating on Turner, D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera argue that “[s]ocial performances are not self-consciously aware that their enactments are culturally scripted,” adding that they are “most striking when they are contrasted against different cultural norms, e.g., greetings, dining, dressing, dating, walking, looking, and so forth” (xvii). Once again, the participant’s experience within these interviews depends on their access to performativity. For immigration officers, these interviews are social performances because they are performative, i.e. they are not singular acts but rather repetitions and rituals which are so familiar as to be experienced as “natural” (Butler, Gender xv). For asylum seekers, however, these interviews are, precisely, singular and they are experienced as unfamiliar, unnatural, and—crucially—unrepeatable. Finally, it is clear that these interviews and their outcomes are also instances of what we might call bureaucratic or executive performance. This notion builds on the concept of “organisational performance,” as articulated by Jon McKenzie in his book Perform or Else, which “includes the manual tasks of blue-collar workers; the cognitive tasks of white-collar managers; the collaborative efforts of workers and managers in small teams, departments and large divisions; as well as the overall coordinated activities of human and technical systems that compose entire organizations” (82). If you have been through a “performance review,” then you have participated in at least one aspect of organisational performance. More recently, McKenzie has combined this concept with Judith Butler’s concept of “sovereign performativity” in order to propose a theory of “executive performativity” (“Abu”). Writing about the practice of indefinite detention, albeit in the context of Guantanamo rather than Australia, Butler states:

The future becomes a lawless future, not anarchical, but given over to the discretionary decisions of a set of designated sovereigns . . . who are beholden to nothing and to no one except the performative power of their own decisions. They are instrumentalized, deployed by tactics of power they do not control, but this does not stop them from using power . . . These are petty sovereigns, unknowing, to a degree, about what work they do, but performing their acts 96

unilaterally and with enormous consequence. Their acts are clearly conditioned, but their acts are judgments that are nevertheless unconditional in the sense that they are final, not subject to review, and not subject to appeal. (Precarious 65, original emphasis)

Building on Butler, McKenzie argues that executive performativity “suspends long- standing traditions of deliberative, highly rationalized bureaucratic decision-making and violates or suspends laws, contracts, and professional codes of practice, whether governmental or nongovernmental” (“Abu” 339). In this way, “[e]xecutive performativity represents a devolution of sovereign power at the same time as its resurrection in contemporary organizations” (339). Once again, the subject’s experience of a bureaucratic performance depends on the distribution of performativity: for those who have access to executive performativity, the performance is no doubt intoxicating; for those who do not, the performance is no doubt infuriating. Beyond this academic definition of bureaucratic performance, it is clear that the bureaucracy itself understands these interviews as performances that are also potentially performative, as evidenced by its obsession with “coaching” and “rehearsing.” Indeed, the threat of evenly distributing performativity is one of their key justifications for the government’s practice of separating new arrivals from other detainees. In the words of the Department of Immigration, separation detention is necessary in order to ensure “the integrity of Australia’s visa determination process” by providing the department “with the assurance that any claims by unlawful non-citizens to remain in Australia are put forward by detainees without the embellishment or coaching of others” (qtd. in HREOC, Last 240, emphasis added). The issue of coaching also comes up in the Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s bizarrely titled report Not the Hilton, where they state that separation detention “is designed to prevent the new detainees being coached by those with recent experience of the DIMA processes” (18, emphasis added). In the same report, the parliamentary committee also laments the fact that the facilities for separation detention did not exist when Woomera opened, writing that:

In view of the opportunity that the mixing of new arrivals with other detainees offers for the fabrication of misleading stories, the Committee considers that separation detention should have been used from the beginning of the Woomera operation. It is important for the accuracy of the decision-making process at the primary interview that the information provided by the detainees has been subject to minimal rehearsal and coaching. . . . It is also important subsequently that those with experience of the DIMA interview process do not provide feedback to those yet to be interviewed. (33, emphasis added) 97

In other words, the practice of holding detainees incommunicado is rationalised through performativity. If asylum seekers learn the social, cultural and bureaucratic script, they may be able to rehearse for it. This preoccupation with rehearsal, as Peter Mares points out, “suggests that there is little official confidence in Australia’s much-vaunted refugee-determination procedures, or in the capacity of departmental delegates to distinguish between a genuine story of persecution and one quickly stitched together after a few quick words of advice” (45–46). In other words, the department simultaneously overestimates the asylum seeker’s performance ability while underestimating the ability of their own agents. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission notes: “This argument somewhat contradicts another assertion by the Department, namely that unauthorised asylum seekers are coached by people smugglers. If people coached asylum seekers in what to say, it would not matter whether or not they were separated from other detainees on arrival because they would already have the relevant information” (Last 240). Even while its status as a performance is ambivalent, the refugee determination process can also be seen as a performance designed to manage the ambivalent status of the asylum seeker. The stranger, according to Zygmunt Bauman, is the very embodiment of ambivalence and yet the asylum seeker is not just any stranger (61). Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed has criticised Bauman, among others, for “elid[ing] the substantive differences between ways of being displaced from ‘home.’ ‘The stranger’ when used in this way works to conceal differences; it allows different forms of displacement to be gathered together in the singularity of a given name” (5–6). To counter this concealment, “we need to consider how the stranger is an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities” (6). In other words, we need to examine the “embodied encounters” and “political processes whereby some others are designated as stranger than other others” (6, original emphasis). This is precisely the function of the screening interview, where the state issues an ambivalent interpellation to the asylum seeker in which Althusser’s “Hey you!” is followed by a baffled “Who are you?”

Screening Interviews

Screening interviews were introduced in 1994, by the then Labor government, in an effort to reduce the number of people who entered the refugee determination process 98

and to reduce the cost to the taxpayer. On both of these measures the screening process has “succeeded.” In its 1998 report, The Management of Boat People, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) stated that in the years before screening interviews were introduced, specifically 1989 to 1994, 85 percent of boat arrivals entered into the refugee determination process. However, in the years immediately after the screening process was introduced, from 1995 to 1996, only 2 percent of arrivals entered the system (Management 73). In doing so, the ANAO estimated that the Department of Immigration had saved an estimated $62 million over several years (73). When an asylum seeker is “screened in” he or she is moved to the main part of the detention centre while they await their primary interview. When they are “screened out” they remain in separation detention and are deported to their country of origin as soon as possible. For asylum seekers who arrive by air, those screened in are placed on a bridging visa while those screened out are simply placed on the next available flight to their country of origin. Typically this happens within two to four hours and it almost always happens within 72 hours (Parsley 59). Unsurprisingly, given the rapidity and opacity of the process, there have been serious concerns about the screening interviews. Indeed, the ANAO noted: “There is a risk to DIMA that the screening process will be perceived as a de facto refugee determination system which lacks important features of the actual refugee determination system such as the provision of assistance to the applicant and the availability of administrative and judicial review” (Management 74). In view of this risk, screening interviews have been scrutinised by a number of government agencies including the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC), the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Commonwealth Attorney (also called the Attorney General), the Australian National Audit Office (also called the ANAO or Auditor General), as well as various parliamentary committees such as the Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM), Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee (SLCAC), and the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee (SLCLC). From their reports, we can begin to piece together what happens during this performance. In the HREOC’s report from 2004, titled A Last Resort?, the Department of Immigration is cited as saying that the screening interview is a fairly simple process:

It is one where . . . people are invited to simply tell their story. That can often be a time consuming interview, sometimes several hours, so it is not one where we 99

are attempting to limit people’s opportunity, quite the reverse—[we] give them as much opportunity as possible to explain what their circumstances are. (239)

However, while this report gives the impression of an informal and infinitely patient department, earlier reports suggest otherwise. For instance, in 1998 the Auditor General stated: “To ensure consistency, DIMA interviewers are provided with a standard interview. The ANAO, with the agreement of DIMA and the boat persons being interviewed, observed four initial entry interviews. The standard format for the interview was followed” (Management 67). What this standard format might be is unclear. The Auditor General stated that arrivals are asked about their “reasons for leaving his or her country of origin; why he or she chose to come to Australia; and whether there are any reasons why the boat person does not wish to return to his or her country of origin” (67). However, in the same year, the HREOC asserted:

At the preliminary interview boat people and other unauthorised arrivals are asked to identify themselves, present any identifying documents and explain how they arrived in Australia’s migration zone and by what route. They are asked why they came to Australia and whether there is anything they wish to advise the authorities about their country of origin. (Those 24)

Two years later, in the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s (SLCAC) report A Sanctuary Under Review, the department affirmed that one of the questions is “Is there any reason why you couldn’t be returned home?” (116). Yet in Peter Mares’ book, he states: “Interview questions will focus on how a person got to Australia, what assistance was provided by people-smugglers and how much money was paid” (6). Elsewhere, immigration officials have told researchers that the purpose of the interviews is to “elicit personal details, travel history, and whether or not they may evoke Australia’s protection obligations” (qtd. in Parsley “Performing” 59). There are some subtle but significant differences here. The question “Is there any reason you do not wish to return to your country of origin?” is slightly different to “Is there anything you wish to tell me about your country of origin?” In the first instance, the question is directed specifically at the person, thereby increasing their chances of producing an answer likely to trigger Australia’s protection obligations. The second question is much more general and therefore much more likely to produce a vague and generalised response that does not refer to the person’s particular circumstances and therefore is unlikely to engage Australia’s protection obligations. In other words, the type of testimony produced in this moment depends on the formulation of the question. 100

Indeed, one of the Kingsford Legal Centre’s many concerns about the screening interview is: “There is no indication as to the nature of the interview technique (e.g. leading, inquisitorial)” (qtd. in SLCAC, Sanctuary 119). Similarly, asking for information about an asylum seeker’s travel history increases the likelihood that the applicant will divulge information about having stayed in a third country before arriving in Australia (almost inevitable given the country’s geographical location). This, in turn, decreases the likelihood that they will be screened in and offered protection. While we may not know exactly what detainees are asked, we do know what they are not asked. In the words of the HREOC, “They are not asked specifically whether they are applying for refugee status or whether they wish to see a lawyer” (Those 24). Yet despite not being directly asked about their desire to apply for protection, interviewees are expected to produce particular phrases such as “I seek asylum” or “I am a refugee.” Both refugees and officials refer to these as the “magic words” and the phrase comes up again and again throughout government and agency reports. When asked about the issue of “magic words” in a Senate hearing, an immigration official had this to say:

Mr Sullivan—They are fairly magic words. A few do, although in recent times many who arrived on aeroplanes just say, “I am a refugee.” Boat people generally do not use that language. They do not use the language of asylum protection refugeness [sic]. What we look for is the language of “I fear going home. I left because I’m being hounded. It’s not fair what they have done.” That sort of language is what we are looking for. Senator BARTLETT—But if someone uses the magic words then you— Mr Sullivan—The magic words are very compelling. In respect of onshore protection reviewing, if someone said to us immediately, “I am a refugee,” we may ask what they mean by “a refugee.” But I am not aware of a case where a person has used that word where we would find that they had not raised concerns which would initiate our protection processes. Senator BARTLETT—Is that magic word issue, for want of a more intellectual phrase, a reasonable part of your concerns with the whole issue that the legislation is trying to address—that is, basically the sealed information can come in that just says “Make sure you say these magic words and you will be in the system,” so to speak? (SLCLC, Hansard 28 January 1999, 10) 3

While the immigration official insists that they are not listening for the “magic words,” and that “the threshold is very low, and we err on the side of making sure that we have a good look at people who might even possibly be invoking our protection obligations,”

3 For other instances of refugees and lawyers referring to the “magic words,” see also Professor Mary Crock in SLCLC, Hansard 29 January 1999, 68–69; SLCAC, Sanctuary 124; and HREOC, Last 243. 101

there is evidence to suggest that they were setting the bar particularly high during this period (SLCAC, Sanctuary 116). For instance, in 1997 five North African refugees were screened out despite explicitly stating that they feared being killed (HREOC, Those 27–29). When the ANAO audited the Department of Immigration in 1997, they found that in 112 out of 113 cases the department had determined that the boat person had not engaged Australia’s protection obligations (Management 66). More than magic words, then, these are performative words, phrases that both state and make a claim for protection. The presence of such a performative phrase gestures towards the performativity of the entire encounter. In the same way that theatrical performances are reviewed, so too are these cultural performances. When the interview is complete, the interviewing officer writes a summary of the interview and sends it to an assessing officer at the Onshore Protection Branch of the Department of Immigration.4 The Kingsford Legal Centre has outlined numerous problems with these summaries including the facts that:

There is no evidence that interview notes are a simultaneous record; There is no indication as to whether the applicant was informed that the interview may be relied on at a later date and that adverse inferences may be drawn; There is no indication as to the nature of the interviewing technique (e.g. leading, inquisitorial); and There is no indication as to the independence and suitability of the interpreters used in the interview. (SLCAC, Sanctuary 119–20).

Despite this, the summary inaugurates what James has called an “economy of trauma,” whereby the “experience of suffering is appropriated and alienated from the subject and transformed into . . . the trauma portfolio—the aggregate of documentation and verification which ‘recognizes’ or transubstantiates individuals, families, or collective sufferers into ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’” (131, original emphasis). In this way, the asylum seeker’s testimony begins to function as a currency. For the asylum seeker, this “portfolio of trauma can resemble a portfolio of economic investments: it may become a symbolic index of [one’s] worth or one’s holdings, as well as a material representation of one’s victim identity” (132). For the assessing officer, this portfolio is one of many and as James points out, “the trauma portfolios of some nations, communities, and individuals can be devalued” (132). Comparing such portfolios, the assessing officer determines “whose trauma . . . should be recognized as legitimate and why” (132).

4 Other accounts report that the content of the interviews is related over the phone and a decision is made on that basis (Savitri Taylor, “Should” N. pag.). 102

Performing Ambivalent Witness

Clearly the screening interview is a scene of witnessing, where the asylum seeker is cast as the primary witness who testifies to a traumatic event and the interviewer is cast as the secondary witness who listens to the primary witness’s testimony. Yet the way in which the encounter is structured conspires to produce ambivalence both within and between its participants. Hence, the form of witnessing that emerges in the screening interview is a form of ambivalent witnessing. For their part, asylum seekers may initially experience ambivalence in the classic psychoanalytic sense of the word, meaning that they may feel “a single impulse [which] contains both love and hate for the same person,” object or, I would add in the context of the screening interview, nation (Laplanche and Pontalis 26). That is, they experience conflicted feelings not only about having left their country of origin, but also about having arrived in Australia. This emotional ambivalence is often overlooked in accounts of the screening interviews, which tend to assume that asylum seekers are desperate to come to Australia. In fact, Australia is often last on the list, as evidenced by the fact that it is often the cheapest fare (Manne with Corlett 6). Even if it is not the cheapest, it is often the fastest. One asylum seeker explained to Peter Mares that he was “offered passage to England, but told that it would take several months to organise, whereas an opportunity to go to Australia was available immediately” (Borderline 198). Similarly, the characters in the play Through the Wire state that they had originally planned to go to elsewhere. Shahin, for instance, states that he originally intended to apply for asylum in Germany, but could not enter the country on an Iranian passport and so decided to go to Malaysia. There he decided that Australia was the probably the closest and easiest option (Horin 9). Another Iranian, Mohsen, says:

MOHSEN: I didn’t even want to come to Australia, I wanna [sic] go to England and the smuggler lied to me, he told me we are going to England. . . . At the airport, Immigration asked me “Why you choose Australia?” I’m looking behind myself, and turn back again. [I’m thinking] “Who is he talking to?” And he asked again, “Why you choosing Australia?” I’m thinking “Maybe he’s talking with my interpreter.” And the interpreter “Sorry Mohsen he’s talking with you.” “I’m in England,” I say. “No, you’re in Australia.” “No, I’m in England.” That’s when I got frightened. (Horin 11)

103

In repeatedly asking “Why did you choose or why have you chosen Australia?” the immigration official does not allow for the fact that the asylum seeker may not have chosen Australia at all. This lack of choice recalls another form of ambivalence, identified by Bauman as “the acute discomfort we feel when we are unable to read the situation properly and to choose between alternative actions” (1). This inability to choose between alternative actions, which we might term contextual ambivalence, is not simply an inability to decide, rather it is to be faced with two non-choices or what Lawrence Langer has called in the context of the Holocaust “choiceless choices” (26). In this way, contextual ambivalence resembles Bateson’s double bind, which Bateson in fact specifically aligns with paradox and ambiguity (Bateson et. al 34). The double bind is characterised by a primary negative injunction, a secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level (and like the first enforced by punishments or signals which threaten survival), and a tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field (9–10). In the case of the screening interview, the primary injunction indicates that if asylum seekers do not testify to the state then they will be screened out. The secondary injunction states that if they do testify, then they may also be screened out since in reality the state is listening for the phrase “I seek asylum.” Yet this phrase on its own is not enough since it is not sufficiently detailed (“we may ask what they mean by ‘a refugee’”). Parsley puts it elegantly when he says:

The disorder that gives basis to a refugee’s claim clashes with “the ordered identity that they need to present”, and with the already waiting, smooth procession of questions issued forth from the interviewer’s form. Speech becomes impossible, except on limited terms, and yet essential. (66)

In essence, then, asylum seekers cannot truly testify since the state and its agents are not truly listening. Yet they cannot not testify, for if they fail to testify, to perform testimony, then they will be screened out and deported. There is a sense in which the double bind experienced by asylum seekers is actually an acute instance of what I call testimonial ambivalence. This third type of ambivalence, though the three types obviously overlap and underpin one another, comes about in three ways: (1) through the ambivalent appearance of the trauma symptom itself; (2) through the ambivalent relationship between that non-linguistic symptom and its linguistic expression as testimony; and (3) through the ambivalent relationship between testimony and repetition or, more broadly, testimony and performance. 104

First, testimonial ambivalence comes about because the trauma symptom itself emerges as what Bryoni Trezise has called an “ambivalent apparition,” which is to say as a symptom that “both inscribes an act of becoming (or appearing) and a state of being (or seeming to be)” (“Apparitions” 100). To put it another way, the trauma symptom is ambivalent because it oscillates between “two prefixes the ‘re’ and the ‘un’” (Trezise and Wake 1). In other words, trauma only ever emerges through repetition and yet it is constantly figured as a missed or “unclaimed” event. For example, Dori Laub defines trauma as “an event that has not yet come into existence” (Felman and Laub 57). Similarly, Cathy Caruth defines trauma as an “unclaimed” event, “an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares of the repetitive actions of the survivor” (Unclaimed 4). She adds: “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance— returns to the haunt the survivor later on” (4). In sum, trauma is at once unexpected, unknown, unavailable, unlocatable, unconscious, unclaimed, and unassimilated as well as repetitive, recurring, and returning. If the traumatic symptom is itself ambivalent in terms of its becoming and unbecoming or appearance, disappearance and reappearance, then testimony is an ambivalent response to and representation of that symptom. In Trezise’s words, testimony embodies and enacts the “torsion between the repeatable and the unspeakable” (“Bereavements” 3). Indeed, Leigh Gilmore states:

Survivors of trauma are urged to testify repeatedly to their trauma in an effort to create the language that will manifest and contain trauma as well as the witnesses who will recognize it. Thus the unconscious language of repetition through which trauma initially speaks (flashbacks, nightmares, emotional flooding) is replaced by a conscious language that can be repeated in structured settings. Language is asserted as that which can realize trauma even as it is theorized as that which fails in the face of trauma. This apparent contradiction in trauma studies represents a constitutive ambivalence. For the survivor of trauma such an ambivalence can amount to an impossible injunction to tell what cannot, in this view, be spoken. (Limits 7)

In its attempt to contain the traumatic symptom, testimony inevitably betrays the event that it purports to represent. Indeed, even as Caruth argues that trauma must be converted to testimony, she also argues that this conversion causes traumatic memory to 105

lose its precision and force, and “beyond the loss of precision there is another, more profound, disappearance: the loss, precisely, of the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (“Recapturing” 154, original emphasis). Or, in Phelan’s words, “[t]he unworded is sentenced to meaning” (Mourning 17). In this way, testimonial ambivalence emerges as both the ambivalent symptom (trauma) and the symptom of that symptom (testimony). Finally, testimonial ambivalence comes about through testimony’s own ambivalent relationship to repetition or more broadly to performance. For their part, trauma and performance have an easy affinity: like trauma, performance is an event that is both defined and experienced in terms of the “re” and the “un.” On the one hand, scholars such as Richard Schechner and Joseph Roach argue that performance is restorative, reiterative, and repetitive. For instance, Schechner defines performance as “restored behavior” or “twice-behaved behavior” (Between 36). “The paradox of the restoration of behavior,” according to Roach, “resides in the paradox of repetition itself: no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance” (Cities 29). Roach is perhaps the bridge between Schechner’s view on the one hand, and Peggy Phelan’s on the other, for whom performance emerges as an “unmarked” event. In perhaps her most famous formulation, Phelan argues that “performance’s being . . . becomes itself through disappearance” (Unmarked 146). She adds “performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” (148). In other words, like trauma, performance is at once unmarked and unconscious as well as restorative, reiterative, and repetitive. While the relationship between trauma and performance might seem like a natural fit, the relationship between testimony and performance is less clear. Current theorisations of testimony that refer to performance tend to conceive of performance as a one-off. For instance, Felman asks: “What does testimony mean, if it is the uniqueness of the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else?” (Felman and Laub 206). Later she states that testimony is “an irreplaceable historical performance, a narrative performance which no statement (no report and no description) can replace and whose unique enactment by the living witness is itself part of a process of realization of historic truth” (255). In other words, Felman emphasises the originality of performance 106

over its citationality, which is to say the “un” over the “re.” In doing so, she not only diminishes performance, she also diminishes testimony itself, ignoring the role of genre and the way in which social and cultural structures shape testimony’s articulation and reception, as well as preempting the possibility of testimony travelling. Here it becomes clear that the relationship between repetition and testimony has yet to be fully theorised. Though we may understand what happens when the primary witness testifies, what happens when they retestify? In the case of the refugee determination process, as will become apparent in the next section, the testimony in the screening interview becomes an event in its own right. That is, the asylum seeker’s testimony is no longer simply the trace of a prior, primary event—it becomes its own event. To put it another way, the screening interview comes to function as the “un,” which is to say the original utterance, by which all later “re’s”, or later utterances will be judged. Making this all the more ambiguous, the asylum seeker is unaware of this at the time since, as the Kingsford Legal Centre points out: “There is no indication as to whether the applicant was informed that the interview may be relied upon at a later date and that adverse inferences could be drawn” (SLCAC, Sanctuary 120). Like the primary witness experiencing trauma, though to a lesser extent, asylum seekers can only ever become aware of the event’s significance after the fact. That is, it is not until they are in the primary interview that they become aware of the importance of their initial testimony. There they are asked not only about their testimony but also about the history of their testimony—why there are gaps, discrepancies, and differences. In short, they are asked about both their history and their historiography. Clearly, asylum seekers become ambivalent witnesses in several ways: they may feel emotional ambivalence about their arrival in Australia; they may face contextual ambivalence, in the sense that they may be in a double bind, unable “to choose between alternative actions”; and they may experience testimonial ambivalence, in the sense that they are negotiating the ambivalence both of and between trauma, testimony, and repetition. Finally, asylum seekers become ambivalent witnesses because they become spectators to their own testimony, when the interviewing officer summarises their testimony for them and passes it on, either via fax or telephone, to an assessing officer in either Sydney or Canberra. In this way, the screening interview reproduces the splitting of the self and the loss of agency that is experienced in trauma. This, in turn, pushes our thinking about the relationship between trauma, testimony, and witnessing. In terms of testifying, ambivalent witnessing troubles the assumption that testifying is 107

an inherently healing practice. To an extent, ambivalent witnessing undoes the distinction between trauma and testimony, for here is a trauma that is constituted through testimony. More specifically, here is a trauma that comes into being, in part, through the constant and insistent demand to testify. While the interview is fraught with ambivalence for asylum seekers, for the immigration officers the system is designed precisely to reduce any emotional ambivalence. Though LaPlanche and Pontalis describe ambivalence as a single but contradictory impulse or affect, Trezise (drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) describes it as a double impulse or affect, indeed almost a meta-affect. For Trezise, ambivalence “engages a duplicity of feeling such that one ‘can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy’” (“Bereavements” 1). It is not hard to imagine that immigration officers might experience such duplicity of feeling—even feelings of duplicity—as they summon a story from an asylum seeker even as they withhold basic information about their rights. However, in the same way that detention centre guards are rotated every six weeks in order to ensure that “they take an essential break from the stress of the job . . . [and] to prevent staff from identifying too closely with the detainees’ position,” the screening process is also designed to mitigate any feelings of ambivalence by separating the interviewing and determination processes (JSCM, Not 10). Thus the interviewing officer assesses the live performance while the screening officer assesses the document, which is to say that the interviewer assesses the witness but the adjudicating officer assesses their testimony. Moreover, this testimony is not the original testimony of the primary witness; it is the secondary witness’s abbreviated version of the primary witness’s testimony. Based on this disembodied, twice-removed piece of testimony, the department decides whether or not the asylum seeker has engaged the nation’s protection obligations. Such a decision is an almost exemplary instance of Jon McKenzie’s “executive performativity” (“Abu”). Here, any ambivalence in the secondary witness is short-circuited by making them a spectator to their own actions, rendering a potential perpetrator simply a spectator. Of course, as I will go on to discuss later in the chapter, it is precisely the absence of spectators that makes such executive performativity possible. Since the screening interview creates ambivalence within and between its participants, the encounter itself—though it is designed to manage ambivalence—is itself beset by ambivalence. If the stranger is an effect of processes of exclusion, as Sara Ahmed suggests (6), then I would suggest that the asylum seeker is an effect of being 108

excluded from the process of exclusion itself. Indeed, this is precisely the function of the screening interview—to have an asylum seeker apply to apply. It is the process by which the asylum seeker is excluded from the proper process. In this way, the screening interview functions not only to identify the stranger but also to designate the asylum seeker as a particularly “strange stranger” (Ahmed 6). “In the political realm,” says Bauman, “purging ambivalence means segregating or deporting strangers” and yet the screening process goes even further (24). The practice of separation detention means that potential asylum seekers are separated from actual asylum seekers, who are themselves only potential refugees. In this way, the screening interview functions to produce and then to purge the ambivalent figure of the asylum seeker.

Primary Interviews

Once asylum seekers have been “screened in,” they are then moved into the main part of the detention centre. In theory, the primary interviews were, and still are, supposed to happen as soon as possible. In practice, however, an overworked and understaffed department has sometimes struggled to interview people in good time. In some instances, asylum seekers have waited several months for their primary interviews. As mentioned previously, the name primary interview is something of a misnomer since most detainees will have had at least two interviews since their arrival. Nevertheless it is the primary interview in the sense that it is the main interview and certainly the most thorough that the department conducts during the determination process. Indeed, the Commonwealth Ombudsman states that the primary interview “is the main (if not the only) point at which [asylum seekers] get direct contact with the people who will decide their future” (Final 20).5 Unlike the screening interviews, primary interviews are audio taped and the applicant is given a copy. Moreover, it is possible to access a copy of the pro forma interview template online through a database legendcom, though this is available to subscribers only (typically law schools and migration agents, and organisations such as the Refugee Advice and Casework Service). The pro forma interview is conducted in

5 The word “contact” is used advisedly here since, in some instances, these interviews are actually conducted via video or telephone conferencing. This practice raises another set of issues not only around contact through technology but also contact with technology, which I cannot fully address here. Suffice to say that: “For asylum seekers in remote detention centres, these arrangements can be impossibly alienating, given that many claimants come from countries with little experience of such technology” (Crock, Saul, and Dastyari 70). 109

several stages: the introduction; the initial courtesies; the legalities; the interview itself; background questions; case specific questions; and closing. Instructions for the interview indicate that the initial courtesies should be conducted in the foyer. Decision makers are instructed to “complete formal introductions with all persons accompanying the applicant; establish who is to be present at the interview; and ask the persons not involved to wait in the reception area” (Department of Immigration, “Pro Forma,” N. pag.). Once in the interview room, the decision maker should “outline the purpose of the interview and its format; explain the requirements for tape recording and resolve any difficulties; clarify the role of the interpreter; resolve any concerns raised etc.” The legalities are then spelled out in significant detail, with the beginning of the script reading:

(Start tape recorder and turn on microphone.) The following is a record of interview held on ___ [Day, Month, Year]. The interview is commencing at ___. It is being held at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship offices at ___. Present are ___ an officer of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and ___, an applicant for a Protection Visa. This interview is conducted using the interpreting services in the ___ language of Translation and Interpreting Service interpreter identity ___. Also present is the applicant’s representative ___ of ___. (To the person being interviewed:) All information given by you during this interview will be treated as confidential. It will not be available to authorities in the country of claimed persecution. I am tape recording this interview. This interview is tape recorded to make sure the department has an accurate record of the interview. It may be used for linguistic analysis. Do you have any objection to the interview being tape-recorded?

From here, the language becomes increasingly impenetrable:

It is important that you understand that Australia’s immigration laws contain provisions which provide for penalties against a person found to (obstruct, hinder, deceive or mislead) an officer in the course of duty. The law also provides penalties against a person found to have provided (false or misleading information in a material particular) in connection with entering or remaining in Australia. The maximum penalty is imprisonment of ten (10) years. [Statement translated] The information you provide at this and any further interviews may be used or disclosed as the basis for checks with authorities in countries through which you have passed or in which you have resided since you left your country of origin and checks with international humanitarian agencies. [Statement translated] 110

It may also be disclosed to Australian Government agencies including those involved with security and law enforcement matters. [Statement translated] The tape of this or any future interview may be disclosed to language experts contracted by the Australian Government to assist in verifying your place of origin. [Statement translated] Do you understand? [Statement translated] Please explain in your own words what you understand this to mean. [Statement translated] (If you prevent me from doing my job, or if you lie or mislead me about a matter important to the assessment of your case, you may be liable for penalty.)6

The script goes on to detail the Section 501 Character Test, which provides that an applicant must be of good character in order to be granted a protection visa. If the applicant cannot provide a penal clearance certificate from any country in which they have lived for twelve months or more since they were 16, or in the last 10 years, then they may sign a statutory declaration to this effect. Having signed this declaration, the interview proper then gets underway. Strangely, though perhaps inevitably, this is precisely where the script peters out. Under the heading “Case Specific Questions,” the script simply states “(It is at this point that specific questions, in particular relating to the applicant’s credibility and identity and nationality, can be asked).” What these questions might be is apparently left up to the interviewing officer. Yet again, we are left to reconstruct what we can from various formal and informal reports of the process. In the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Final Report to the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs of Investigation of Complaints Concerning Onshore Refugee Processing, migration agents complain about “patchy performances” from some interviewers “where the interviews are conducted in an attacking manner, are disjointed, jumping from year to year and confusing the client and appear to be an exercise in trying to ‘catch the applicant out’” (9, original emphasis). However, migration agents also cite examples of “good practices which incorporated desirable elements of a ‘good, professional interview’” (9, original emphasis). These elements include clear introductions which indicate the likely duration of the interview (interestingly this is not specified in the script), a non-threatening approach to make the applicant feel comfortable, clear explanations, fair and relevant questions, adverse questions put in a non-threatening manner, and a conversational manner and body language.

6 The pauses for translation do not appear on the pro forma interview however they do appear in Crock’s transcription of an interview tape (Seeking 138). Nevertheless, these pauses may vary from interview to interview, so it is important to note that my insertions are indicative rather than conclusive. 111

Evidently the primary interview, like the screening interview before it, is literally and tightly scripted. However, it is also socially and culturally scripted. Indeed, one lawyer remarked to me: “In Australia, there’s a familiarity with interviews—we’re an interview society and we are familiar with being interviewed about our experiences and recounting our experiences in that way. But in many other countries, especially totalitarian countries, the approach to authority is strategic. It’s about survival, it’s about telling the authorities what you need to in order to get what you need to survive. There’s very little allowance for that in the Australian context.” Similarly, the Commonwealth Ombudsman noted: “The system is seen to favour those with western style skills in marshalling arguments and debate; for example, women who are used to being silent may be disadvantaged” (Final 8). Intriguingly, this cultural performance demands and produces other cultural performances such as singing, dancing, praying, reciting dates, and drawing maps. For example, in one case that Crock examines, “a child with a very limited education (and even less understanding of topology) was asked to draw a map of his area, a task he was unable to complete because ‘I didn’t write maps before’” (142). In another case, an illiterate boy from rural Afghanistan was asked to recite the names of the months of the Afghan calendar. When he could not do so, he was accused of being from Pakistan. Yet, as Crock points out, “month names are less culturally significant . . . Seasonal markers of time and religious holy days would have been more appropriate determinations of time to the young man” (142). The existence of such authenticating practices is confirmed by reading the publicly available decision summaries of the Refugee Review Tribunal, the body to which asylum seekers can appeal if they fail to gain protection at the primary interview. In one case, the tribunal, which despite its name actually consists of a panel of one, asked an applicant who claimed to be Catholic to recite a prayer, to repeat that prayer, to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and then to explain the significance of baptism, confirmation, and communion (0904468 [2009] RRTA 705 (13 July 2009)).7 In other cases, the tribunal has asked applicants to name and perform Falun Gong exercises. For example, in one case, the decision summary states:

The Tribunal discussed with the applicant his understanding of Falun Gong and asked him to demonstrate some of the Falun Gong movements. The Tribunal

7 These cases are all listed under the Refugee Review Tribunal in the Works Cited. 112

checked the accuracy of the movements by consulting Chapter II: Illustrations and Explanations of the Exercise Movements (www.falundafa.org/book/eng/ dymf-2.htm). The applicant demonstrated sound knowledge of Falun Gong beliefs and he accurately performed the movements. (060612338 [2006] RRTA 169 (17 October 2006))

It is hard to imagine a more surreal scene than a tribunal member sitting and watching an asylum seeker perform religious rituals, all the while checking their performance against an Internet printout. When dealing with applicants who are applying on the basis that they are gay, and therefore members of a “particular social group,” the tribunal runs into trouble. On some occasions, tribunal members have admitted the Spartacus International Gay Guide (a travel guide for gay men) as evidence and used it to assess an asylum seeker’s claim of persecution on the basis of sexuality (Dauvergne and Millbank). On other occasions, tribunal members appear to have grilled an applicant about the name and location of a gay nightclub, the entry fee paid, the attire worn, whether the clubs had saunas, and whether patrons were given a ticket or a key (e.g. N97/16114 [1998] RRTA 4882 (2 November 1998) and N05/50659 [2005] RRTA 207 (17 May 2005)). Taken to their logical conclusion, such authenticating performances lead desperate applicants to offer to perform sexual intercourse in front of a witness, as happened recently in an ongoing case involving two gay men from Bangladesh. In an application to the tribunal, they stated: “We are prepared to have an adult witness view us engaged in an act of homosexual intercourse and then attest before you to that fact” (Byrnes, “We’ll”). This followed a hearing in 2007, at which the tribunal had asked one of the two men “if he and the second applicant have sex in the morning” and “if they used a lubricant.” When one of the men felt “too embarrassed to answer the personal questions,” his refusal was used as proof that he was not a credible witness (Byrnes, “We’ll”). In such instances, the asylum seeker’s statement simultaneously becomes testimony (in form), pornography (in content), and currency (in function), lending new and devastating meaning to the term “money shot.”8

8 On the money shot, see also Laura Grindstaff’s chapter “Producing Trash, Class, and the Money Shot: A Behind-the-Scenes Account of Daytime TV Talk Shows,” where she describes the money shot as “that moment of raw emotion, from the angry denunciation to the tearful confession, the display of rage or sorrow or joy or remorse” (168–69). She adds: “Like pornography, daytime talk is a narrative of explicit revelation where people ‘get down and dirty’ and ‘bare it all’ for the pleasure, fascination, or repulsion of viewers. Like pornography, daytime talk exposes people’s private parts in public. It demands external, visible proof of a guest’s inner emotional state, and the money shot—the dramatic climax when the lie is exposed, the affair acknowledged, the reunion consummated—is the linchpin of the discourse” (169). I discuss this emotional money shot again in Chapter 5. 113

Performing Ambivalent Witness, Again

Like the screening interview before it, the primary interview produces the asylum seeker as an ambivalent witness in several ways. First, asylum seekers are “unable to read the situation properly and to choose between alternative actions” (Bauman 1). Take Halimi, for instance, a girl from Afghanistan who was asked during the course of her primary interview what sort of music she liked. Crock transcribes the following exchange:

Halimi: They haven’t got electrical appliances, like radio or cassette, but we singing without any assist among . . . (Interpreter speaks, indicates that Halimi responds with nod or shakes her head) Interviewer: You can’t sing? I can’t sing, I’m hopeless. Alright, what’s your favourite thing to do? (141)

To the interviewer, this was likely to be a preliminary question, of little relevance or consequence and designed simply to put Halimi at ease. To Halimi, however, this was not at all clear. Indeed, when Crock asked Halimi about this exchange, she indicated that she thought she was being asked to sing something (141). In other words, even with the interpreter at her side, Halimi had misconstrued the conversation. Unable to read the situation Halimi then finds herself unable to choose between two alternative actions, to sing or not to sing. That is, Halimi finds herself in a double bind. She tells Crock: “They asked me to sing a song but we can’t sing because it’s Muharram” (141). Muharram, as Crock explains, “is a solemn festival to mourn the martyrdom of the revered Hazrt Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. It is not considered appropriate to sing in a time of mourning” (141). In fact, even if it were not Muharram, it is rarely, if ever, appropriate for a woman’s singing voice to be heard in public in Afghanistan generally and in Hazara culture particularly (141). With typical understatement, Crock says: “Asking a young girl who has lived under the Taliban to demonstrate her ethnicity through her knowledge of songs was problematic because, as she put it to the researchers, ‘If you sing the Taliban will kill you’” (141). Here, the demand for an authenticating performance—even if the asylum seeker has incorrectly inferred the demand on this occasion—places the asylum seeker in a double bind. On the one hand, if Halimi does sing, she risks blasphemy. On the other hand, if she does not sing, she risks jeopardising her claim to protection. Indeed, the Refugee Review Tribunal has routinely dismissed claims partly on the basis 114

that the applicant has refused to perform a particular song or prayer or on the basis that they have performed it unsatisfactorily. Though she could conceivably have articulated this predicament to the interviewer, it is likely that Halimi was too confused, distressed, and possibly even traumatised, to do so. However she responds to this contextual ambivalence, Halimi is likely to experience emotional ambivalence in the sense that she is likely to feel a single, contradictory impulse towards the interviewer. Sometimes she may feel relieved, obliged, and obliging; other times she may feel anxious, afraid, and furious. In all likelihood, she will experience these affects simultaneously rather than successively, finding herself awash in a sea of emotions that will not and cannot come to rest. On other occasions, she may experience emotional ambivalence as the “duplicity of feeling” described by Trezise. If she sings, she may feel complicit in her compliance, profaned by her profanity, ashamed of her shame. If she does not sing, she may feel reluctant about her reluctance and obstructed by own obstruction. In moments of nauseous insight, she may realise that she is going to be refused by and through her refusal. Even as the primary interview produces contextual and emotional ambivalence in asylum seekers, it also produces testimonial ambivalence, which again manifests itself in three ways. First, it manifests through the “ambivalent apparition” of the trauma symptom itself, which has in all likelihood been exacerbated and exaggerated by detention. When the traumatic symptom becomes less stable, the relationship between trauma and testimony becomes even more elusive and unsteady. The ambivalent “torsion of the repeatable and the unspeakable,” becomes tighter, tauter, perhaps even torn. Most significantly of all, testimonial ambivalence appears because asylum seekers are once again forced to negotiate the vexed and complicated relationship between testimony and performance, specifically repetition. If performance is characterised by the tension between citationality and originality, then performing witness involves embodying and enacting this paradox. For asylum seekers, their testimony has to be citational in the sense that it has to address one of the five “grounds” for protection, i.e. it has to detail persecution on the basis of “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” In this way, their testimony comes to resemble every refugee’s testimony. Yet, their testimony also has to be original, a one-off, the only one of its kind. One of the paradoxes of refugee law is that it is not enough if your country of origin is in the 115

midst of a civil war—that simply means that everyone is at risk. The threat for seeking protection must be against you specifically and it must be on the basis of one of the five grounds for seeking protection. This tension between reiteration and revision is arguably an exacerbation of the process of applying for a visa more generally. In an almost apocryphal story of applying for visas in the United States consulate in Madras, India, Abraham Verghese writes: “One morning, the visa officer turned down six consecutive doctors and told the seventh . . . ‘Spare me the crap about coming back with specialized knowledge to serve your country. Why do you really want to go?’” (qtd. in Kumar 21). The seventh doctor, when asked why he really wanted to go, gave a brief but impassioned speech about working in a safe and functional hospital, paying taxes, making a good living, driving a big car on decent roads, and never coming back to Madras. The consul gave him a visa. The eighth applicant, forewarned, tried the same tactic but was turned down (Kumar 21). Like these visa applicants, asylum seekers have to achieve a balance between reiteration and revision in order to produce a statement that is neither too original, nor too citational. Not only does an asylum seeker’s testimony have to resemble that of other refugees, it also has to resemble the testimony they gave during the screening interview, for when there are discrepancies between the two accounts, interviewers start to doubt the credibility of the witness. Of course, this may not be a problem because by this stage in the refugee determination process, having been through the screening interview as well as having filled in the many forms, asylum seekers may have recited their story numerous times. Yet, given the government’s anxiety around coaching and rehearsal the asylum seeker must also deliver this testimony “as if” for the first time. Like the actor heading out onto stage, the asylum seeker must remember that for this audience, it is the first time that they have heard this story. This is particularly obvious when reading the summaries of the Refugee Review Tribunal, which are littered with reports of applicants presenting “rehearsed,” “coached,” or “recited” narratives. For instance, in a 2003 case, the Tribunal stated the applicant’s account “closely resembles the statements of the other applicants in ways that could not reasonably be called corroborative; rather, they appear coached or concocted with the help of a common source of assistance, the only apparent one being their migration agent” (N02/41663 [2003] RRTA 196 (4 March 2003)). In another, more recent case, the Tribunal stated: “The applicant appeared to have memorised her written statement, which she constantly 116

recited, while she had difficulty giving evidence on other matters” (0909759 [2010] RRTA 171 (25 February 2010)). Once again, theories of ambivalent witnessing ask us to reconsider the relationship between testimony and repetition. Though we may have theorised what it is to testify, we need to ask what it is to retestify? What happens to a primary witness when they retestify? Do they find it retraumatising, relieving, or exasperating? And what happens to the testimony itself? Does it find a form and crystallise, does it continue to morph and mature, or does it disintegrate? In Crock’s account: “there was considerable variation in the ability of the participants to articulate their stories and protection claims. This was so, even after the young people had been through the status determination process and were being asked (yet again) to tell their stories for the purposes of this project” (144). Crock’s own sensitive observation about having to ask refugees to repeat their stories yet again, raises another set of issues. Is there any way in which we can come to terms with the refugee determination process without reinterrogating refugees? If not, then what happens when we interview a primary witness about being interviewed? It sounds as if Crock’s interviewees reproduced their testimonies as well as producing meta-testimonies. Is producing this meta-testimony any less painful for primary witnesses and are meta-interviewers any more ethical than other interviewers?9 Clearly the primary interview positions the asylum seeker as an ambivalent witness, however it also produces the interviewer as an ambivalent witness in several ways. First, they find themselves cast in the contradictory roles of secondary witness and bureaucrat. The role of secondary witness, as we saw in the previous chapter, requires both spatiotemporal and emotional copresence. In the words of Dori Laub: “For the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, an intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of the one who hears” (70). The role of the bureaucrat, however, prohibits such emotional copresence. Instead, the pro forma interview indicates that interviewers should remain “neutral”. Similarly, the UNHCR training module “Interviewing Applicants for Refugee Status” recommends that interviewers avoid “appearing judgmental or aloof” or being “overly sympathetic” (Training 8). Beyond being neutral, however, interviewers must also be—at least to a

9 On this point, see also Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkosky’s paper in which they interview several Holocaust survivors who have been interviewed several times for various oral history projects, museums and archives about being interviewed (“When”). 117

certain extent—sceptical. That is, they must be willing to say: “This does not make sense. This cannot be true. I do not believe you.” To borrow a reference from Laub, who is himself referring to Haim Gouri’s film in which a man narrates the story of his suffering in the concentration camps only to have his audience disbelieve him, the interviewer must be willing to land the 81st blow (Felman and Laub 68). This contradictory casting may, in turn, promote a duplicity of feeling. Indeed, in another context Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey have stated: “[t]he demand to match the testimonial moment with the appropriate witness response may produce ambivalent and conflicted reactions: sympathy, terror, relief, recognition, empathy, anger, resentment, denial, disbelief” (1). For some interviewers this duplicity of feeling might manifest as “acute discomfort” (Bauman 1) or perhaps as discomfort at their discomfort, embarrassment at their embarrassment, shame at their shame. When listening to the recordings of four primary interviews Crock comments that “both the style of questioning and the tone of the interview suggest that some interviewers are not particularly comfortable with the inquisitorial process” (143). The “overwhelming impression” for her “is that the process is excruciatingly difficult for both the interviewer and the interviewee” (141). Similarly, a migration agent told Crock:

What struck me was just how much the DIMA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs] officers were floundering. They knew they should not be doing what they were doing. It was just ridiculous. It was, like, they hadn’t been trained. They were uncomfortable . . . It struck me that the officers were feeling frustrated themselves, that they hadn’t had the training themselves to deal with the process. They were uncomfortable and unsure as to how to deal with the minors. (119)

Though Crock’s cases are particularly complicated because they involve interviewing unaccompanied minors, they are nevertheless indicative of the more general tension experienced by interviewers. On the one hand, they must listen with empathy and compassion. On the other hand, they must test the case being presented to them. While some interviewers may experience emotional ambivalence as a doubling of feeling, others may experience it as a splitting, which is to say as a type of dissociation or emotional distance. Indeed, one UNHCR worker told James Dawes: “At some point as an interviewer, you get very cynical. You hear the same stories again and again” (88). Within the Australian context, migration agent Michael Walker told Crock:

118

The one enduring memory I have is that, even with the most experienced DIMA case officers, they ran to a script. And the script was “I don’t believe you.” They wouldn’t always say that but many did. In other words, “You prove to me you are who you say you are.” . . . When I say script, there was a methodology in their interrogation. (145)

This detachment from asylum seekers reached its apotheosis when the department accidently deported an Australian citizen, Vivian Alvarez Solon, to the Philippines. Though she was born in the Philippines, Solon had lived in Australia since the early- 1980s and had been naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1986. In February 2001, she was found in a park, beaten and disoriented, and taken to hospital. While in hospital a social worker contacted the Department of Immigration on the suspicion that Solon was an illegal immigrant. Officers from the department did not conduct proper background checks and so proceeded on the basis that she was indeed an illegal immigrant. In July 2001, the police escorted Solon, who had a history of mental illness and was still in a wheelchair, onto a plane to Manila. There she was handed over to Qantas ground staff, who eventually placed her in a Catholic hospice. Two years later, in July 2003, the Queensland police contacted the Department of Immigration with an inquiry about a missing person by the name of Vivian Solon. When an Immigration officer made the connection, they told their supervisor but the supervisor failed to take any action. It was not until media reports in 2005, that the matter became public and Solon was brought back to Australia and eventually awarded compensation (believed to be $4.5 million). In its Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Vivian Alvarez Matter, the Commonwealth Ombudsman concluded that: “For some DIMIA officers, removing suspected unlawful non-citizens has become a dehumanised mechanical process” (31). In other words, these agents had become so emotionally distanced from their work that the effects of their actions failed to register. This simultaneous splitting and doubling of feeling reflects the broader testimonial ambivalence of the primary interview. Whereas for the asylum seeker, testimonial ambivalence is about the relationship between testifying and repetition, for the interviewer it is about the relationship between listening and repetition. For the interviewer, the primary interview is probably a reiteration of every other interview they have ever conducted. Indeed, it may be a repetition of the two other interviews they have already conducted that week; on average, case officers conduct three interviews per week and write decision summaries for each that are approximately eight pages long 119

(ANAO 80). Such repetitive work can create what Dawes calls “chronic psychic friction” or a sort of emotional “repetitive strain” injury (88). In an effort to reduce this repetitive strain, or to hurry a particularly draining and time-consuming interview along, it may be that interviewers not only hear the same story again and again, but also that they help to produce it by providing prompts, clarifications, and suggestions to the asylum seeker. Indeed, in her analysis of the Belgian refugee determination process, Katrijn Maryns suggests that rather than asylum seekers producing what she calls “rehearsed narratives,” it is the interviewers who do so (Asylum 268). In the three cases she examines in detail, Maryns discerns a distinct pattern at work within the interview, particularly when asylum seekers lapse into silence. In order to breach this silence, the interviewing official typically formulates a question (“What happened? Why did you leave your country?”), the applicant begins an answer but remains vague (“Why I left my country because victim of war, a lot were killing people etc.”), the official then completes the information for the applicant (“So you were in the house with your parents”), and the applicant then confirms the official’s account (“Yes, uhum”) (277). Maryns demonstrates how this process renders three very different testimonies from women who are from different parts of Sierra Leone, and even a different country on the other side of the continent in the case of Sudan, essentially identical. In effect, each testimony is reduced to fourteen points: there is war in my country; they were killing people, fighting, shooting everywhere; I was at home with relatives; soldiers attacked; I ran away, everybody was running away; I lost my family, I don’t know where they are; I met a stranger, a black man; he helped me and brought me across the border to a white man; I cried; the white man asked me why; I explained to him why I was afraid and that I needed help; the white man put me on a boat and bought the ticket; he then brought me to Belgium; you have to help me, help to find somebody (289–90). Though there are additional complexities in the Belgian context, principally because the participants are negotiating the differences between European and African English, it would not be surprising if Australian officials also resorted to such narrative steering, especially if they were tired, bored, or jaded. Yet even as they listen to and sometimes help to reproduce the “same stories again and again,” interviewers are also bound to consider each case on its merits—to proceed on a “case-by-case” basis in bureaucratic parlance. That is, interviewers must find it in themselves to listen as if for 120

the first time. In other words, even as interviewers are inured to testimony through repetition, they may yet be injured by it. If the primary interview can produce contextual ambivalence (cast as a bureaucrat, cast a secondary witness), emotional ambivalence (a doubling of feeling, a splitting of feeling), and testimonial ambivalence (inured to testimony, injured by testimony), what can we extrapolate from this example? That is, what is the relationship between ambivalence and secondary witnessing more generally? What is the relationship between listening and repetition? On the evidence of this primary interview in Australia’s refugee determination process, it may be that listening to testimony is not as straightforward as we imagined. There are different types of listening besides the therapeutic listening modelled by Laub, among others. Secondary witnesses can listen with resistance, scepticism, and even scorn. When asked to listen to the same, or similar, testimony yet again, they may feel fatigued or have a flattened affective response. Or, they may feel that simply listening is enough, that they cannot and will not do more than that. (The relationship between secondary witnessing and listening is examined in more detail in Chapter 5.) Finally, if the primary interview positions both asylum seekers and interviewers as ambivalent witnesses, then it also positions the migration agents, caseworkers, and lawyers who accompany them as ambivalent witnesses. This happens in a rather more literal sense, since it appears as if the system has not allocated them a clear role. The Commonwealth Ombudsman stated: “There appears to be some uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the role of the representatives in the interview process as far as both the applicants and the representatives are concerned” (Final 13). For their part, representatives “feel they have an active stake in their client’s application and that they deserve recognition for their contribution to the process” (14). In addition, they “believe they are present at the interview to assist the process, to highlight information and questions that might not have been covered” (14). However there is little room for them to do so, beyond an opportunity to talk privately with the applicant at the end of the interview when the tape recorder is turned off and the interviewer exits the room. Hence “the applicant can often feel under attack, very vulnerable and even abandoned by the representative who [themselves] may be feeling powerless to intervene in proceedings” (14). Like the bureaucrat who conducts the screening interview but does not determine whether an asylum seeker will be screened in or out, the asylum seeker’s advocate is displaced or alienated from his or her anticipated witnessing position. 121

However, instead of reducing ambivalence, as it does for the screening officer, this displacement increases the contextual, emotional, and testimonial ambivalence of the advocate. Though they imagine themselves as additional secondary witnesses, they become, in effect, tertiary witnesses—witnesses to “the act of witnessing as it takes place between characters” (Malpede, “Theatre” 275). That is, they become spectators to the testimonial encounter.

The Spectatorial Witness

The mention of the spectator leads us to the last, absent, ambivalent participant in this encounter: the spectatorial witness. What sort of spectatorial witnessing does the refugee determination process call for, facilitate or produce? In the first instance, the refugee determination process facilitates a form of non-spectatorship, a missing of the event so complete that initially one is not even aware of having missed it. Unlike a public performance which “plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present— and [then] disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” this performance never became fully visible in the first place, which is precisely how it has eluded even conscious regulation and control (Phelan, Unmarked 148). Hence to witness the refugee determination process is to witness “what one did not (and perhaps cannot) see” (Phelan, “Marina” 577). This “condition of witnessing” is, according to Phelan, “the condition of whatever age we are now entering”—what she calls the age of terror but what might also be called the age of asylum (577). Despite this invisibility the refugee determination process became just visible enough—through rumour and the occasional report—for the spectator to see something out of the corner of their eye and to begin to suspect that they had missed something. Like the viewers of the video testimonies in Chapter 2, spectators to the refugee determination process missed both the traumatic and the testimonial event, the accident and the account. Even worse, they missed the testimonies about the testimonies, the accounts of the accounts that have been published in the numerous government reports over the past few years. This delayed realisation recalls Phelan’s definition of witnessing as a “conscious, albeit belated, response to the messy truths” of a prior event (“Performing” 13). 122

With this belated response comes a belated sense of responsibility. This recalls Helena Grehan’s account of ambivalent spectatorship, which she defines as a moment of “radical unsettlement, an experience for spectators engaged with the other, within the work, and with responsibility and therefore in an ethical process, long after they have left the performance space” (Performance 22). Elsewhere she has stated that ambivalence is “a productive trope that triggers reflection, consideration and an emotional dis-ease for the spectator, and this dis-ease allows the performance to ‘prick’ his or her ethical imagination in ways that more didactic or straight forward work might not” (89). For Grehan, then, the ambivalent moment is the theatrical version of Roland Barthes’s punctum, which he defines as the “element which rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow and pierces me” or a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice” (Camera 26–27). Significantly, he adds that the “punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). But can one be pricked by an accident one did not see, even in a photograph? More accurately, in the case of the refugee determination process, can one be bruised by an account one did not hear? Probably not, but perhaps this is what makes it poignant—the missing. In this instance, it is not the hole within the performance that produces the ambivalent moment (as it is for Grehan), but rather the hole of the performance, its absence from the public sphere, that produces the emotional dis-ease, radical unsettlement, and belated sense of responsibility in the spectator. This double missing, which is to say the missing of both the traumatic and the testimonial event and then feeling remiss at having done so, not only recalls the tertiary witness’s experience discussed in the previous chapter it also recalls Trezise’s definition of emotional ambivalence as a “duplicity of feeling.” It is precisely this discomfort at our discomfort that prompts spectators to search for these long lost performances. In this way, the spectatorial witnessing called for by the refugee determination process resembles Barbie Zelizer’s version of media witnessing. In her article “Finding Aids to the Past,” Zelizer argues that witnessing happens when spectators respond personally to traumatic public events. More specifically, it happens when we interact with the media in ways that are “out of the ordinary,” such as when we “hoard and store newspapers from events of days long past . . . compile personal videotape archives of television news broadcasts . . . [or] allow time to stand still as [we] search for a way to respond to the trauma that [has] unfolded” (697). Similarly, it is by trawling various government websites, downloading and reading reports, and ploughing through parliamentary 123

debates that belated spectators come to witness the refugee determination process. However, unlike Zelizer’s witnesses, who seek to confirm what they saw, spectators to the refugee determination process seek to confirm what they did not see. That is, they seek to perceive their own percepticide or to puncture the public secret, albeit briefly. In this way, they become witnesses “to events that [they] may encounter only here in the pages of this book” (Phelan, “Performing” 12). Such a reconstruction of these scenes of witness also recalls Ronald Reagan’s scene of witness, in the sense that our witnessing emerges through our imaginations (though unlike Reagan I do not claim to have be spatiotemporally copresent, in any capacity, during the refugee determination process). Perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that this is witnessing as a mode of meta-spectatorship, drawing as it does on the accounts of the few spectators who have seen the refugee determination process. In reconstructing the event, I have come to experience another mode of ambivalence through the oscillation of identification. Here I am drawing on both Trezise and Freddie Rokem. In her analysis of Holocaust tourism in the city of Budapest, Trezise argues that ambivalence occurs when the audience identifies with both the perpetrator (the waxwork figure of the soldier) and the victim (the empty shoes across the river) (“Bereavements”). Similarly, Freddie Rokem argues in his account of Rina Yerushalmi’s staging of Woyzeck that:

The witnesses on stage give rise to an ambivalent spectatorial position that at least initially oscillates, on the one hand between an identification with Woyzeck, the victim who is submitted to the medical examinations which gradually become more and more grotesque and cruel, and on the other, with the rationality and order represented by the Doctor and his students. (“Witnessing” 179)

In contrast to Rokem’s example, it is precisely the absence of a spectator that gives rise to my spectatorial ambivalence as I alternate between identifying with the asylum seekers and their interviewers. On the one hand, I identify with the asylum seeker and (mis)remember my own interview with Australian immigration authorities when applying for citizenship (received March 2001). On the other hand, I find myself identifying with the interviewers, imagining them as middle-class and tertiary-educated like me. Then again, I also identify with the migration agent as a concerned but impotent onlooker. Finally, I identify with the “I” who knows and the “I” asked to participate in the public secret. In this way, I am at once victim, perpetrator, and 124

bystander, and yet none of the above. Perhaps I am more akin to the spectator who arrives at Brecht’s Street Scene, hearing accounts of the account of the accident. Finally, the refugee determination process calls for—though it does not necessarily facilitate—a mode of publicly performed spectatorship. There seems to be little point in being an invisible spectator to an invisible performance; having finally reconstructed some of the refugee determination process, and endured the ambivalent feelings it engenders, I want to record this encounter. Of course this record is itself ambivalent and I cannot conclusively say what happens in the screening and primary interviews. The mise-en-scène remains a mystery, as do the pro forma screening interviews and their summaries as well as the nuances of the primary interview and the inner workings of the Refugee Review Tribunal. Like Phelan, “I was a witness to something I did not see” and “I do not think I have begun to approach what really occurred” (“Marina” 576). Perhaps another way of putting it is to say that while I have not become a witness to the refugee determination process, I have become a witness to the fact that I did not see. In other words, I have perceived the percepticide in which I participated; I have for a brief moment articulated the public secret. Yet what prompted this brief moment of perception, this puncturing of the public secret? The answer, of course, is theatre. The screening and primary interviews first became visible to me through theatrical performances that represented them, such as Through the Wire. In this way, the theatrical performance became the “original” by which these reconstructions have been judged. To reiterate the phrase of the first chapter, it is the theatrical event that becomes the “real thing” and the “actual” event becomes the repetition. Yet still another issue arises: how did these accounts emerge? How was Through the Wire’s writer and director, Ros Horin, able to reconstruct and represent the refugee determination process? Inevitably, like Crock, she had to conduct interviews. In other words, such plays—as we shall see in the next chapter—not only represent the economy of testimony, they also perpetuate it in the sense that they too rely, yet again, on the asylum seeker performing witness. 125

Chapter 4

To Witness Mimesis Likeness, Closeness, and the Ethically Ambiguous in Through the Wire

To witness mimesis, to marvel at its wonder or fume at its duplicity, is to sentiently invoke . . . history and register its profound influence on everyday practices of representation. —Michael Taussig

In the space of five years no fewer than seven verbatim plays made by and with asylum seekers appeared on the Australian stage, including: Manufacturing Dissent (2000); Asylum (2001); Club Refuge (2002); Citizen X (2002); Something to Declare (2003); Through the Wire (2004); and In Our Name (2004). The first of these, Urban Theatre Projects’ Manufacturing Dissent, was devised by its ensemble and performed at the Performance Space in Sydney in November 2000. Of the ensemble, five were Vietnamese (all former refugees), one was Cambodian (also a former refugee), and two others were from Serbia and Lebanon. Hence the performance reflected on their experiences as well as those of current refugees. The show started with a satirical tutorial: the performers sat at a desk, shuffling papers, and reading out snippets of texts from the great theorists of political theatre. Soon, however, they were interrupting each other with songs, small parodies of political performance, and then a series of stylised executions. Finally, the show finished with a man, who had been sitting in a barbed wire enclosure the entire time, coming forward and testifying to his experience of becoming a refugee. While the reviews and the company’s annual artistic report indicate that the performance did not realise its full potential, Keith Gallasch nevertheless praised it for “the topicality of the refugee issue in Australia, [and] the directness, humour and anger with which it was addressed” (“Degrees”). Six months later, in May and June 2001, one of the performers in Manufacturing Dissent, Claudia Chidiac, directed another Urban Theatre Projects performance called Asylum. Four of the five performers were recent refugees from Iran, Kurdistan, and Algeria. Initially, Chidiac had intended

to create a work utilising contemporary performance strategies, rather than adopt story-telling approach. However this desire was not shared by the performers, 126

and the work developed around a series of four narratives based on the performer’s [sic] personal experiences of arriving in Australia as asylum seekers. (Talbot et al. 3)

The show consisted of three parts: the first part, in which the audience explored the installations in the foyer; the second part, in which they passed through two border guards who yelled at them in Farsi, Kurdish, and Arabic while randomly admitting some spectators and refusing others; and the third and main part, in which a large wire fence was erected between the audience and the performers, so that the spectators sat watching through the screen while “each of the performers recount[ed] their experiences, as they [were] challenged, interrogated, and interviewed by the other performers” (Talbot et al. 4). In his review, Gallasch remarked that the play’s “more familiar assemblage of monologue tales of the refugee encased in a fragile narrative nonetheless had power and poignancy because of the great strength of some mature performers and the immediacy of the political situation” (“Sydney”). Following the events of 2001, these creative efforts started to gather more momentum. In June 2002, the Melbourne-based activist group Actors for Refugees premiered their play Club Refuge, which was described in a review as “a loose collection of separate stories and letters often read or performed by actors who have written based on their own experiences” (Hagan “Refugee”). In July 2002, some of the members of Actors for Refugees participated in another verbatim play Kan Yama Kan, which was developed by the Fitzroy Learning Network (an asylum seeker resource centre in Melbourne). The show featured eight refugees and three actors telling their own stories as well as those sourced by the five writers on the project. Then, in September 2002, Sydney’s Sidetrack Theatre staged Citizen X, which featured three actors reading letters from asylum seekers who were held in detention centres, as well as the testimony of a nurse who had worked in Woomera. The following year, in June 2003, Actors for Refugees staged another play, Something to Declare: True Stories of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Australia, which was based on interviews with asylum seekers and interspersed with facts about when various detention centres opened, who owns them, and how many people are currently being held there. Later that year, in December, Deckchair Theatre restaged Citizen X in Fremantle, Western Australia. In 2004, these efforts started to move to the mainstream. In January, the Sydney Festival staged another verbatim play, Through the Wire, as a work-in-progress. Like her predecessors, writer-director Ros Horin developed the play by interviewing four 127

young male asylum seekers who had been held in detention, two female activists who had become involved in their cases, and a female nurse who had worked within the system. Three months later, in April 2004, Sydney’s second-largest theatre company, Company B Belvoir, staged In Our Name, a play developed by director Nigel Jamieson in collaboration with the Al Abbadi family, an Iraqi family who spent three-and-a-half years in detention before finally giving up and finding protection in New Zealand. Then, in October 2004, Through the Wire was restaged at the Sydney Opera House, before touring for six weeks over March, April, May in 2005. Rather than analysing all seven of these plays, this chapter will focus solely on Through the Wire in order to consider the relationship between the testimonial witnessing that happens on stage and the spectatorial witnessing that may or may not happen off it. Or, as Karine Schaefer puts it in her analysis of the verbatim play Binlids, this chapter situates itself at “the intersection of . . . the ‘character-as-witness’ play, or the testimonial drama,” and “the spectator-as-witness phenomenon” (“Spectator” 7). This selection has been made on the basis that Through the Wire is among the most significant and the most imperfect exemplars of the genre. Significant because it was the first play to bring the issue to the mainstream and it was also one of the few plays of the era to tour, playing in 10 venues across regional New South Wales as well as Canberra and Melbourne. This tour was all the more remarkable for the fact that the Federal Government had refused to fund it, in rather controversial circumstances. In addition, the play featured Shahin Shafaei, one of the most accomplished artists to emerge from detention during this period. Finally, the play is significant because it won its writer-director, Ros Horin, the 2004 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award along with a special commendation in the 2005 Louis Esson Prize for Drama, part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Despite these achievements, the play also exemplifies the risks of the genre of verbatim theatre. Like most verbatim plays of the era, Through the Wire claimed to give a “voice to the voiceless, face to the faceless,” without necessarily thinking through how these voices were emerging and precisely whose faces were being employed, literally and figuratively, to stand in for absent asylum seekers. In fact, the phrase itself indicates two further issues with the play and its philosophy, for it implies a potentially problematic politics both of voice and of visibility. Finally, like most plays of the era, Through the Wire sought to emphasise its authenticity by minimising its theatricality, embracing a realist aesthetic, casting former and current refugees as detainees, and 128

declaring in the pre-show publicity, the program, and the play itself that it was based on the “real words of real people” (Horin, N. pag.). The end result was an occasionally, and rather oddly, anti-theatrical piece of theatre. Despite its emblematic significance, Through the Wire has received relatively little critical attention, both in the sense that it received few negative reviews at the time and in the sense that it has received only two theoretically inflected analyses since. Within the mainstream press, the play was widely—if predictably—praised. For example, Helen Thomson of The Age called it “[a]n extraordinary work of compassion, wit and moral urgency” and praised it for its “amazing stories” (“Alrekabi”). Similarly, Kate Herbert wrote in the Herald Sun: “[t]he production is compelling because of the richness and authenticity of the stories it tells” (106). Writing in the Melbourne Weekly, David Crofts said: “Unlike so many pieces of theatre about refugee issues, Through the Wire neither carps nor preaches. Instead, it allows the truth of each story to speak for itself” (qtd. in Performing Lines 4). The few reviewers who did criticise the play did so on the basis of plot or character, rather than politics.1 When they did criticise the play, they were always careful to preface their analysis with comments such as “It would be a hard-hearted person who was not affected by the men’s stories” (Longworth, “Insights” 57) or “It’s not hard to empathise with the fear these men endured in their own countries and the misery of detention here in Australia” (Rose S29), as if by criticising the play they would somehow be criticising the refugees themselves. Only Colin Rose, writing for the Sun Herald, criticised the play’s broader aims and actions. Under the headline “Refugee Tale Is Harrowing Indeed, But Where Do We Fit In?” he wrote: “I wish Horin had also underlined just what’s at stake here politically and socially, weaving these individual experiences into the broader fabric of Australia’s response to the refugees” (S29). This is usually where academic scholars step in, yet within academic circles the play has suffered a sort of benign neglect, receiving a couple of pages in Gilbert and

1 For example, when writing about the play’s first outing in January 2004, John McCallum stated: “it is much too long for an effective theatre piece, as if writer-director Ros Horin and her team were so involved that they couldn’t bear to leave anything out” (“Brutalisation” 15). Writing about the revised version in October 2004, Colin Rose agreed that: “Four stories are too many and the play is baggy and lacks a clear focus” (“Refugee” S29). Newcastle Herald critic, Ken Longworth, also stated: “Horin jumps from story to story in such a way that the tales do not build momentum. She has also chosen not to tell the stories on a linear basis, so that the most moving episodes, the accounts of why they were forced to leave come at the midpoint” (“Insights” 57). He also thought there was “a do-gooding artificiality” to the women in the play. Melbourne critic Catherine Lambert said: “The play is too long—two hours without a break—and much of the information, sentiment and plot is repetitive. A decent trimming could have conveyed the same messages with much more power” (“Other” E23). 129

Lo’s Performance and Cosmopolitics (194–97) and a 2,000 word treatment in my own article in Research in Drama Education (Wake, “Through”). Perhaps scholars have not bothered with Through the Wire because of its realist aesthetic; realism is currently out of critical favour, for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because of its supposedly simplistic and conservative politics. However, it is precisely this realism—this mode of mimesis—that fascinates me, that causes me to “marvel” and “fume,” in Taussig’s evocative words, and makes me wonder whether there might not be something more here (Mimesis xviii). Between being praised by mainstream critics and ignored by academic ones, it seems as if the play has yet to be seriously assessed. More significantly, the response to the play has yet to be analysed. One of the aims of this chapter is to rectify this oversight by providing a detailed reading of the play as well as a discursive analysis of the public and governmental response to it. If the first aim of this chapter is to address a gap in the historical record, then its second is to extend the vocabulary of witnessing developed over the past three chapters. Like the previous chapter, this chapter asks: “What form of witnessing do we find in performance?” This time, however, I focus on a theatrical performance rather than a cultural one, which is not to say that the theatrical performance does not include or represent aspects of cultural performance, simply that is it not framed as such. To restate it in slightly narrower terms, this chapter wonders: “What form of witnessing do we find in verbatim theatre, specifically within Through the Wire?” This is not simply a matter of imposing witnessing theory onto the play. On the contrary, it is clear that both the producers and spectators of this play understood it in terms of witnessing. For instance, when writing about its first staging, John McCallum described it as “a piece of verbatim theatre [that] us[es] the testimony of four detainees (and three of their supporters)” and though he criticised it for being too long, he also added that “for now what is important is to bear witness” (“Brutalisation”). Similarly, Catherine Lambert argued that while “[i]t may face the challenges of testimonial-style theatre . . . it works” (“Other”). For her part, Helen Thomson also agreed that it was the “power of giving witness” that drove the production (“Giving”) and that the “power of testimony is irresistible” (“Alrekabi”). Even within the four short citations above, it is clear that there are at least two types of witnessing at work: “giving witness” or testifying; and “bearing witness” or watching, and listening to a primary witness testify. Yet there is almost an ipso facto quality to the argument here, and within theatre studies more broadly, which seems to run—it is a verbatim play, constructed from testimonies, 130

therefore it produces witnesses. But how does it produce witnesses? Through what mechanisms? And for what purpose? These questions need pursuing. This chapter argues that the form of witnessing we find in Through the Wire—and in verbatim theatre more generally—is a form of mimetic witnessing. The phrase refers to both the witnessing of mimesis, as in Taussig’s epigraph and as in the spectatorship of realist theatre, and to a mode of witnessing that operates mimetically, which is to say through illusion, imitation, and identification. This is a paradoxical and problematic form of witnessing, since witnessing is often defined in contradistinction to illusion, imitation, and identification. Within trauma studies, for instance, Geoffrey Hartman argues that video testimonies are effective because there is “[n]o theatricality or stage- managed illusions” (Longest 123). Similarly, when writing about theatrical representations of the Holocaust, Claude Schumacher states that:

theatre—theatre which has true integrity and the highest artistic standards—does not try to create an illusion of reality (that cheap kind of mimeticism found in cinema or television), and it is precisely in the absence of mimetic trompe l’œil that the real strength of theatrical performance lies. True theatre affords the spectator a heightened experience “liberated from the lie of being the truth.” (4)

Though they each blame the “other” medium, both Hartman and Schumacher reject mimesis, and specifically the illusions of realism, as the way in which to produce spectatorial witnesses. Similarly, both disciplines reject identification. For example, in her analysis of Alicia Partnoy’s work, Diana Taylor argues that “[r]eaders in testimonios are asked not to identify but to act as witness to the events” (Disappearing 165). In other words, witnessing is defined in contradistinction to identification. Where identification is permitted, it is a particular type of identification, which is to say identification with rather than identification as the primary witness, as if identification were so easily and consciously controlled.

Likeness and Closeness: The Aesthetics of Mimetic Witness

Through the Wire dramatises the story of four male asylum seekers (Shahin, Farshid, and Mohsen from Iran, and Rami from Iraq), two female activists (Suzanne and 131

Doreen), and one female nurse who used to work in detention centres (Gaby).2 Like many verbatim plays, Through the Wire consists of “short, choppy scenes” which alternate between “narrative reminiscences about and enacted re-creations of . . . events” (Schaefer, “Spectator” 9). Initially, the play also alternates between asylum seekers and activists, starting with stories from Shahin and Farshid (Prologue and Scene 1), then introducing Suzanne and Doreen (Scene 2), then going back to the two refugees (Scene 3), and so on. However, in Scene 5, which is to say roughly one third of the way through the play, these two threads start to intersect as the characters begin to interact, i.e. Mohsen and Suzanne explain how they first met, Rami and Doreen talk about their first encounter, and Shahin and Gaby talk about their initial interactions (only Farshid is not paired in this way). In Scenes 6 and 7, the play stages several interviews. While this serves to tell the asylum seekers’ stories in more detail, it also has the odd effect of making the play double back on itself. Indeed, Shahin and Farshid’s stories in this scene are very like the ones they tell in the opening scenes. Then, in Scenes 8, 9, and 10, the play gathers momentum as the asylum seekers start to protest against their apparently endless detention. Finally, each asylum seeker describes the moment he was released from detention and re-emerged into the world. Before all of this, however, the actor who plays Doreen (Katrina Foster) comes downstage to announce: “The stories you are about to hear are all true. They are spoken in the real words of the real people who are the characters in this play.”3 From the beginning, then, the play claims a closeness, a proximity, a contiguity even, with reality. Within these two sentences we can see the two strategies of mimetic witness: the strategies of likeness and closeness. I am borrowing these phrases from Taussig, who defines mimesis as both a “copy and contact, image and bodily involvement of the perceiver of the image” (21, original emphasis). Drawing on the work of James Frazer, Taussig argues that mimesis works through the “Law of Similarity” and the “Law of Contact” (44–58). The law of similarity, also called the law of imitation, works by creating a copy or likeness of someone or something, the “original,” whether it be an image, an icon, or an effigy (47–52). The law of contact holds “that things which have

2 In January 2004, Stephen Dunne’s review refers to Mohsen, Farshid, Shahin and Daniel (“Hard”). But by 2005, reviews refer to Mohsen, Farshid, Shahin and Rami. In view of the fact that most of the reviews refer to Rami, I am doing the same here. 3 These precise words do not appear in the script but have been transcribed from the DVD of the Melbourne production, which was staged in May 2005. Nevertheless, the front page of the script states: “From the true stories as told in interviews by the real people who are the ‘characters’ in this play” (Horin 1). 132

once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contract has been severed,” for instance, hair, fingernails, teeth, or abject fluids (Frazer qtd. in Taussig 52–53). Inevitably, similarity and contact are not clearly distinguishable, as in the case of the fingerprint, which is “a stunning instance of imitation blending so intimately with contact that it becomes impossible to separate image from substance in the power of its final effect” (53). Though adapting Taussig’s work for the purposes of analysing a play may seem to counteract his move to retrieve mimesis from the grip of realism, it nevertheless offers new ways to think about realist theatre in general and verbatim theatre in particular.4 Of course, strictly speaking, verbatim theatre is not a form of realism or at least not in the mode of Strindberg, Ibsen or Chekov. Indeed, most scholars define it as a form of documentary theatre and therefore as a descendent of Erwin Piscator, who rejected psychological realism.5 However this genealogy neglects how closely the practice of recording the voices of “ordinary” people in order to place them on stage resembles the early practices of realism and naturalism. Think for instance of the practice of Sekundenstil, or the “second-by-second” style of dramatists such as Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf as well as Gerhart Hauptmann, who sought to bring the odd but perfect poetry of everyday speech—the slang, the leaps, the loops, the pauses—onto the stage (Osborne 44). Moreover, distinguishing verbatim theatre from realist theatre also ignores the fact that the casting practices for verbatim plays are increasingly realist rather than epic. In Through the Wire, for instance, there is no cross casting and actors play one character only. Similarly, British verbatim playwright Alecky Blythe has also stated that her productions have “become more naturalistic” and that as she has moved towards smaller projects with fewer characters, she has also “moved towards casting to type” (Blythe

4 Of mimesis and realism, Taussig writes: “Today it is common to lambast mimesis as a naïve form or symptom of Realism. It is said to pertain to forced ideologies of representation crippled by illusions pumped into our nervous systems by social constructions of Naturalism and Essentialism. Indeed, mimesis has become that dreaded, absurd, or merely tiresome Other, that necessary straw-man against whose feeble pretensions poststructuralists prance and strut. I, however, am taken in by mimesis precisely because, as the sensate skin of the real, it is that moment of knowing which, in steeping itself in its object, to quote Hegel, ‘consists in actualizing the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts’” (Mimesis 44). 5 For example, Derek Paget defines verbatim theatre as “the latest manifestation of documentary theatre” (“Verbatim” 317). He also argues that the form came about, in part, because of a “sudden realisation that the theatre of Brecht and Piscator was relevant in a British context” (319). Janelle Reinelt takes a slightly different approach by arguing that there is no need to distinguish between documentary and verbatim theatre because “the term ‘verbatim’ . . . needlessly ups the ante on the promise of documentary” (“Promise” 13). She adds: “‘Verbatim’ as a category over-extends what was a sufficiently rich and proximate archive . . . without the need of the additional labels” (14). 133

98).6 In other words, theatre scholars would do well to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre is a form of documentary or epic theatre and instead consider it in terms of realism, neorealism, or even what film scholars are calling “avant-garde realism” in their attempt to come to terms with the dramaturgy of digital cinema (Rombes). Regardless of whether verbatim theatre can be called realist, it can certainly be termed mimetic according to Una Chaudhuri’s definition that “mimetic theatre strives to blur the distinction between the realms of theatre and reality” (42). Moreover, it can be defined as an instance of “classical mimesis,” which according to Elin Diamond “posits a truthful relation between world and word, model and copy, nature and image . . . reference and sign in which potential difference is subsumed by sameness” (Unmaking iii). The question that remains is “How does verbatim theatre blur the boundary between theatre and reality?” or, in Diamond’s terms, “How does it posit this truthful relation?” How does it collapse the space between signifier, signified, and referent? Like mimesis more generally, I argue that verbatim theatre—specifically Through the Wire—works through the strategies of likeness and closeness. Moreover, I argue these two strategies facilitate spectatorial witnessing. Through the Wire produces likeness in several different ways. First, the characters themselves seem similar, principally because their stories are very alike. For example, Farshid tells the story of working in a pathology lab and conducting an unauthorised test on a urine sample believed to belong to an Ayatollah. Soon afterwards, his co-conspirator was arrested. Then, Farshid’s father was arrested and tortured, at which point Farshid was forced to flee to a family farm, where he hid for almost a year. During this time, his collaborator was executed and the clinic’s technician and nurse “disappeared.” Finally, Farshid decided to escape (Horin 16–19). Similarly, Mohsen tells his story of working in a corrupt Iranian court, where a notorious murderer had consistently, and rather suspiciously, avoided prosecution. When Mohsen raised his concerns, he was promptly promoted far beyond his experience and abilities. Further concerned, he proceeded to publish his allegations in a journal, at which point the secret police issued a death warrant. When he phoned his mother to say that he was coming to retrieve some files he had hidden in her house, it

6 She states: “In earlier, ensemble pieces, the most memorable characters tended to be the ones who were played by an actor of a different colour or gender from the interviewee: the contrast between what they were saying and how they appeared subverted stereotypes and challenged the audience’s preconceptions. . . . In fact, the actors would usually be cast against type. When each actor is only playing one character, though, cross-gender and cross-race casting is less attractive because it can interfere with the naturalism of the production” (98–99). 134

was already too late—the police were there and had destroyed every file. His mother gave him some money and he promptly escaped (19–21). Shahin also tells a similar story: the authorities had banned him from writing for the theatre but he could still continue to act. When he won an acting prize he allegedly shook the hand of a female presenter, though he denied this, and was banned from the theatre altogether. Nevertheless, he continued to collaborate with a friend who was doing a doctorate in drama and who wanted to stage one of Shahin’s plays. When the secret police raided one of the rehearsals, they took all the actors and the director in for interrogation. It was at this point, when he knew they would torture his friends for his name, that Shahin decided to depart (21–22). Just as their stories of persecution start to resemble one another, so too do their stories of escape. Farshid paid money to a people smuggler, sneaked over the Iranian border into Pakistan and then flew to Malaysia. Though he tried to get to England, the people smugglers told him that it was not possible at that point in time, and suggested that he go to Australia (7–8). Similarly, Mohsen escaped over the Iranian border to Turkey, from where he flew to Malaysia and then to Perth (though he was told that he was flying to England) (11). Shahin flew out of Iran on his own passport, went to Malaysia, tried to get to Germany but failed, and then went to Australia by boat (8–10). To borrow Katrijn Maryns’ tactic from the previous chapter, these stories can be summarised as: I crossed the authorities; I was warned; I crossed the authorities again; a collaborator was arrested and tortured; I had to escape; I escaped from Iran; I arrived in Malaysia; I tried to seek asylum elsewhere; I failed; I tried to seek asylum in Australia (289–90). However, such patterning is hardly the fault of the play. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, it is likely to be a function of the refugee determination process itself, whereby vastly different stories are all forced to fit into the same generic shape. In fact, Scene 6 illustrates precisely this aspect of the refugee determination process, by staging the emergence of each story identically. In each case, the asylum seeker is ushered into a chair that faces the audience. They speak nervously into the microphone and address a video camera. Framed by a tight white spotlight, the heat is intense enough to make most of the actors sweat. This image is then displayed as a live-feed on a large screen at the back of the stage. 135

Not only do these testimonies start to resemble each other, through the use of video they start to resemble every other video testimony we have ever seen, such as those at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies or any other museum. Presumably, if these video testimonies are like those video testimonies, then they must be just as authentic. This scene also implies, or more accurately the audience infers through its ignorance, that this scene is also like the actual screening and/or primary interviews. In fact, the following scene troubles this assumption. Suddenly, Farshid says forcefully “But I couldn’t tell my story like that to Immigration. No, not at all!” (Horin 24). In a Figure 3. Shahin Shafaei, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr rapid-fire scene with several overlapping voices, the actors hit their chests with the hands to make a sound like a heartbeat and the video screen switches to rapid rotating images: black and yellow stripes of a road sign, lights, and a gun. Stripes, lights, gun, stripes, lights, gun.

MOHSEN, RAMI, and FARSHID: I was in the small room at the airport. ALL: I was frightened. MOHSEN: I was cold. RAMI and FARSHID: I was hot. ALL: I was shivering . . . FARSHID: My mind was in panic. ALL: I tried to answer his questions . . . FARSHID: I was telling my story from one part to another and I’d try to make a link . . . it was all in my mind . . . but I couldn’t manage my mind . . . ALL: To just tell my story in order. FARSHID: I mean the Immigration—they pick you up on . . . DOREEN: You didn’t say that part first . . . GABY: Now you’re saying this . . . SUSAN: So you didn’t mean that . . . DOREEN: This is not adding up. FARSHID: I mean they don’t really realise how nervous are the people who just arrived. DOREEN: When you come from that sort of intimated [sic] environment . . . FARSHID: You don’t know how much to say or not . . . MOHSEN: We have never had trust in officials in our life . . . RAMI: Maybe that man works for the secret police! (24, original ellipses) 136

Even as this frantic scene undermines the reality of the prior scene, it also reinforces the reality claims of the play more broadly. Here, it becomes clear that the previous scene was not an imitation but an invention; the interview as the refugees would have had it, not as it was. For a moment, then, the copy had attained the power of the represented, the power of the original; for the duration of the previous scene, spectators thought they were seeing an accurate recreation of the original. These scenes act as an analogy for the play itself as a whole, for the play aspires to obtain the power of the original testimonies or, in fact, more power than the original testimonies since the real testimonies did not impact upon public discourse. The presence of the video projections, this “mimetic machine,” sets off its own series of likenesses and associations: the image looks like the actor, the actor looks like the character, the character is like the asylum seeker, therefore the actor has to be like the asylum seeker (Taussig, Mimesis 24). The play’s paratexts also work hard to reinforce this line of thinking. More specifically, the play’s program provides extensive autobiographical information about the actors, especially those playing asylum seekers. For instance, Ali Ammouchi “the son of Lebanese immigrant parents, is a 2003 graduate of the NIDA actor’s course. Ali is thrilled to Figure 4. Ali Ammouchi, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr be working on a project that is so socially and politically important and resonates with his own life” (Performing Lines 5). Likewise, Hazem Shammas—who plays Rami—is described as “a Palestinian born in Israel who speaks fluent Arabic. He graduated from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2001” (6). Even the set designer is described in terms of his ethnicity—Seljuk Feruu “was born in Turkey where he trained at the College of Fine Arts and Design in Ankara” (6)—as is musician Jamal Alrekabi, who is constantly described in terms of his refugee status, in pre-show publicity, in the program, and in the reviews. In contrast, the actors who play the activists are described as such: “Rhondda’s theatre credits include,” “Katrina is an actor and writer of many years experience,” or “Eloise is a recent NIDA graduate whose acting credits include” (5). The information about the actors who play asylum seekers 137

is supported by realist casting strategies—there is no cross casting or role doubling, nothing to prevent the spectator from identifying the actors with their characters. Together, the play’s program and casting combine to imply that the actors are very like their characters. In other words, the play encourages the spectator to conflate the character and actor, primary witness and secondary witness. In his account of acting as witnessing, Freddie Rokem suggests that “the borders between character and act[or] break down” only when the actor goes through a physical ordeal that is similar to that of the character (Performing 72). For instance, in the performance Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa, actor Semadar Yaron-Ma’ayan has a concentration camp number tattooed onto her arm (72). However, the experience of Through the Wire suggests that this blurring of character and actor can happen in far more mundane ways, in this case through a combination of autobiography, casting, and cultural ignorance. These strategies worked with almost alarming success in Through the Wire and the reviews are full of slippages from actor to character. Kirsten Krauth, for example, observes that “audiences sometimes have difficulty differentiating the actors from the characters” (“Refugees”). Wadih Dona, who plays Farshid, tells her about “a little old lady who approached him after a performance and said tenderly: ‘I really hope you get to stay in Australia’” (“Refugees”). Errors such as these are not solely the

province of old ladies and there are Figure 5. Wadih Dona, Through the Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr similar mimetic slippages in other accounts such as when the Canberra Times writes “there’s a dignity conferred especially by the closeness of the Iraqi and Iranian players to their material” (“Brutal”). Since none of the players are Iraqi and only Shafaei is Iranian—Dona and Ammouchi are Lebanese and Shammas is an Israeli-born Palestinian—one can only assume that the author has conflated the actors with their characters. More generally, given that reviewers are relatively experienced spectators, one can only assume that other spectators have made a similar mistake, meaning that this slippage is symptomatic of a more general cultural blindspot. 138

Chelsea Clark confirms as much when she makes an even wilder slip, reporting that “the production was initiated by . . . Ros Horin who rediscovered her Islamic heritage in the course of her research” (“Numbers”). In fact, Horin is on the record on numerous occasions discussing her Jewish heritage. For both the Canberra Times and the Daily Telegraph, then, anyone outside the Anglo-Celtic norm is both utterly other and utterly interchangeable. In this way, cultural ignorance combines with a snippet of autobiographical information, and spectators conflate the character and actor even in the absence of a physical ordeal to “guarantee” the reality of the performance.7 The close identification of the actors with their characters encouraged numerous commentators to declare that Through the Wire had given a “face to the faceless.”8 For instance, Herbert stated that the play “puts a face to the refugee and enables even the sceptics to feel a connection to the victims of our detention centres” (“Through”) and Longworth wrote, “Ros Horin has given a human face to the asylum seekers who continue to be held in Australian detention centres” (“Insights”). Likewise, Peter Kohn said: “By giving them a face, a voice and an intimacy with her audience, Horin removes the distance the detention process has driven between the refugees and the Australian public” (qtd. in Performing Lines 4). Yet, it is surely more complicated that this. Rather than giving a “face to the faceless,” Through the Wire granted what I can only call “faceness to the faceless.” Though I coined the term myself, further research reveals that “faceness” is also employed in medical literature, particularly in the study of neonates. In one study, researchers showed newborns a series of images with varying degrees of faceness, which they define in terms of “the number of appropriately positioned facial features,” in order to determine whether the infants were responding to the image’s “resemblance to the human face” or simply the stimulus (Haaf and Bell 893–94). In another study, faceness was defined as a “facelike stimulus” which has “selected elements of the face:

7 Jonathan Kalb relates a similar, though not identical, instance of likeness when watching a production of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation. He writes: “One of the most unforgettably immediate experiences I’ve had in the theater was a staged reading of that work in Germany in 1988 (memorializing the ﬁftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht) that was cast exclusively with actors in their seventies and eighties—that is, with actors who had literally been witnesses. Several days afterward, however, it occurred to me that neither I nor most of the other spectators really had any idea whether those actors had been in Germany during the Holocaust or whether they’d been Nazis or not” (21). 8 To be clear, it is the spectators who seem to identify the actors with their characters; the actors may or may not do so. Indeed, actor Wadih Dona said in an interview: “Words are words . . . it does not matter to me what their origin is. I don’t believe in psyching myself up in order to get into a certain emotional state to tell Farshid’s story . . . it’s just like surfing to me. You go on the wave of the story and hope you can ride it to the end! Just commit to the role and don’t worry where you want to take it” (Krauth). 139

two eyes, a single eye, or a mouth” (Easterbrook et al. 17). In both studies, the researchers concluded that while the babies were responding to both faceness and stimulus, faceness had the greater influence and impact on their response. Putting aside the amusing image of researchers waving what look like badly decorated paper plates at two-day-old infants, the notion of faceness is nevertheless constructive. Faceness refers to the vague and generalised humanity that an audience grants asylum seekers when they see a face that looks—to them at least—like what an asylum seeker’s face might look like. In this way, faceness is indistinct, indiscriminate, and somewhat sentimental, as evidenced by comments such as “the characters are never less than endearing,” as if being endearing were one of the five grounds for protection as a refugee (Lambert, “Other”). Though the tactic of substituting a like face for an absent face effectively mobilises empathy, it also risks erasing or collapsing difference, as the anecdote about the old lady and the reviews of the Daily Telegraph and the Canberra Times attest: Iraqis, Iranians, Lebanese, Arab-Israelis, and Kurdish-Turks are apparently all the same. In the words of Diamond, “becoming or inhabiting the other on stage and in spectatorial fantasy, I stand in for her, act in his place. Such acts are distinctly imperialistic and narcissistic: I lose nothing—there is no loss of self—rather I appropriate you, amplifying into an authoritative ‘we’” (“Violence” 390). In the end, it is hard not to agree with her when she states: “Naturalizing the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism’s project is always ideological, drawing spectators into identifications with its coherent fictions. It is through such identifications that realism surreptitiously reinforces (even as it argues with) the social arrangements of the society it claims to mirror” (393). While the law of similarity works through identification and illusion, the law of contact often disrupts both of these. Instead, the law of contact works through a chain of copresence. The clearest example of contact occurs in the final scene, when the actors turn to face the audience. Here, the seven characters stand in a line across the stage, facing the audience. In the background, on the screen, is an image of a tree in silhouette. The image is reminiscent of Christian Boltanski’s work: a photo so blurred through repetition that it seems simultaneously over- and under-exposed and almost appears to glow in the dark. Standing beneath the screen, on centre stage, is Gaby, who says:

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GABY: Sometimes when I look back on it I feel very guilty. Guilty that I was involved . . . And I feel that some people are judgemental when they know that I worked there in that capacity. Mostly though, I would just love to go back and see some of the people. (She starts to become teary.) I think about the kids a lot. I think about the kids probably most of all. And also people who have been deported—I just think about what’s happened to them. And what would their life be, what would the difference be if they were released here. And I think about the people that are still there. I feel like that we’ve just left them and forgotten them—and they are still suffering. (Horin 53)

When she finishes speaking, the screen fades to black, the music softens, and a silence comes over the auditorium. In the darkness, the actors turn to face the screen, with their backs to the audience. When the lights come up again, an image of the real Farshid appears on the screen and the actor who plays him, Wadih Dona, turns to face the audience. This happens for each character: Farshid (Dona), Mohsen (Ammouchi), Suzanne (Cropper), Gaby (Bell), Rami (Shammas) and Doreen (Weaver).9 The scene is similar to the final scene in Schindler’s List, in which the image of the film actors dissolves into the real Schindler Jews, who walk across the screen to place stones on Schindler’s actual grave. Of course the principle function of this gesture is to reinforce the “reality effect” (Barthes, Rustle 141–48) of the film however, in Alison Landsberg’s reading, it also functions to model the mechanisms of memory and the possibility of what she terms “prosthetic memory” (Prosthetic). Landsberg defines prosthetic memories as “memories that originate outside a person’s lived experience and yet are taken on and worn by that person through mass cultural technologies of memory” (19). She adds that these memories “are thus neither essentialist nor socially constructed in any straightforward way: they derive from a person’s mass-mediated experience of a traumatic event of the past” (19). In the case of Schindler’s List, she argues that this final scene:

introduces the possibility of transmitting memory from real survivor to both actor and spectator. This transmission is not predicated on an essential connection between Schindler Jew and actor, or Schindler Jew and spectator; the transmission is meant to take place across ethnic lines, across chasms of difference. (126)

9 In fact there have been three cast constellations since the first performance of Through the Wire. In January 2004, at the Sydney Festival, the cast featured Shafaei, Ali Ammouchi (Mohsen), Wadih Dona (Farshid), Hazem Shammas (Rami), Lucy Bell (Gaby), Jacki Weaver (Doreen), and Linda Cropper (Suzanne). In October 2004, in the Studio at the Sydney Opera House, the cast remained the same except that Deidre Rubenstein replaced Weaver as Doreen and Heather Mitchell replaced Cropper as Suzanne. When the play toured to regional New South Wales, Canberra, and Melbourne, the actors playing the asylum seekers again remained the same but the actors playing the other characters were replaced by Eloise Oxer (Gaby), Katrina Foster (Doreen), and Rhondda Findleton (Suzanne). 141

Though it may not be predicated on an essential, or essentialist, connection, it is nonetheless predicated on a connection of some description and that connection is contact. In other words, the film works to establish what we might call a chain of contact or copresence. It is not clear that the actors are copresent with the survivors, however it is clear that they have been in the same place: on the rocky soils of Israel. Thus, they are copresent in space if not time (recall the complexity of copresence in the second chapter). The spectators, in their turn, are spatiotemporally distant but emotionally copresent with both the survivors and the actors through watching the film. This transfer along the chain of copresence is arguably intensified in the theatre, where the spectators are spatiotemporally copresent with the actors. In placing the image of the asylum seeker alongside the actor who plays him, alongside us in the audience the play establishes a similar chain of copresence. In the same way that Jonathan Kalb thinks to himself while watching Anna Deavere Smith:

“[t]his woman actually sat with Figure 6. Eloise Oxer, Through the Wire. Photo both Reginald Denny and the Heidrun Löhr unapologetic brother of the man who beat him almost to death” (19), so too the spectators of Through the Wire are encouraged to entertain the thought that these actors sat with these asylum seekers and then delivered their words to us. It is not until later that it occurs to me that the actors may not have met with the interviewees at all, and that they may not feel any particular responsibility in delivering those words—as we have since found out about Dona.10 Still, this is clearly what the play is aiming for and initially at least, it works. We are copresent with the actors who were copresent with the refugees. In this way, the actors come to possess “a certain secondary ‘authenticity’ as witnesses of witnesses” (Kalb 19). In other words, the audience is not asked to identify the secondary witness with or as the primary witness; instead they are asked to place the two alongside each other, to acknowledge the surrogate as surrogate and to see themselves as next in the chain.

10 See Footnote 8 above. 142

Of course, the laws of similarity and contact are not entirely separable. Indeed, Taussig points out that they are often deeply entangled and mutually reinforcing. This becomes apparent in Through the Wire in the final moment of the final scene, when an image of Shahin appears on screen and the actor playing him turns around to face the audience—the two are one and the same. While some spectators were aware of this, particularly if they had read pre-show publicity, others were not. Indeed, there were audible gasps on the night that I attended and you can also hear them on the documented version of the Melbourne season. Such a moment performs what I call the “traumatic reveal,” or the “traumatic re(ve)al,” whereby the theatrical convention of the “reveal” coincides with what Hal Foster calls the “return of the real” (Return). Examples of the traumatic reveal include the aforementioned scene in Schindler’s List, where the fictionalised world of the film finally gives way to, or reveals, the reality upon which it is based. “Here are the true survivors,” the film seems to say, “here is the actual place.” Here, in short, is the traumatic real. Similarly, Ari Folman’s animated film Waltz with Bashir, about an Israeli veteran coming to terms with his role in the 1982 Lebanon War, finishes with archival footage of the Sabra and Shantila massacres. In the final one-and-a-half minutes of the film, the animation dissolves, the documentary image appears, and we see a woman sobbing and screaming at the camera.11 Suddenly, the sound drops out and we sit in silence as we see a pile of bodies, another pile, and a man stepping gingerly between the two. There is a low drumbeat as we see a close-up of another bloodied body of indeterminate gender, and above that body the tiny face of a tiny boy, before the screen fades to black. Once again, a fictionalised (and in this case animated) film finishes by revealing the traumatic real, which the film has pointed towards but also screened from view.

11 Though the final scene is heart stopping, it is nonetheless problematic since she is the only subject in the film who is not subtitled (she is speaking in Arabic while other characters speak a combination of Hebrew, German, and English). In this way, her shouts become incomprehensible and thus, despite their volume, inaudible. Here then is another instance of faceness, where a subject is granted a generalised humanity, but denied individuality and a distinct voice. In an effort to recover this voice, one online translation states that she shouts “my son, my son,” pleading “take photos, take photos,” and asking, “where are the Arabs, where are the Arabs?” (Antoun). In another translation, she shouts, “Where are the Arabs? Why is it only foreigners here?” and tells the camera operator, “Film this, film this” (“Waltz”).

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In the final scene of Through the Wire, the revelation of Shahin Shafaei functions similarly—here is a real refugee, the play seems to say, and as a result the audience can say that they have been in his presence. This instance of contact and similarity coinciding works to reinforce both strategies, so that we are encouraged to see the other asylum seekers and actors as identical to each other, and to feel that we have been in the copresence of both. To frame it another way, the presence of Shafaei as a primary witness encourages us to believe that all of the other actors are also primary witnesses.

The revelation of Shafaei prompts me to Figure 7. Shahin Shafaei, Through the reflect on other ways in which the traumatic Wire. Photo Heidrun Löhr real might reverberate throughout the play. I wonder how Shafaei feels about repeating his story on stage? I wonder how Farshid, Rami, and Mohsen feel about watching actors repeat their stories on stage? Moreover, I wonder how these stories emerged in the first place? Presumably, Horin had to interview the asylum seekers, but just how did she do so? For all its effort to reveal the interviewing methodology of the government, the play is strangely reticent about its own. Unlike other verbatim plays such as the Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, where the writers insert themselves into the text, or David Hare’s The Permanent Way, where he leaves himself in when an interviewee says something like “But then you work on from there, David” (26), Through the Wire shows no traces of the interviewing process or the interviewer. This absence, in a play that insists on presence and copresence, makes me curious and demands further investigation.

Risk and Repetition: The Ethics of Mimetic Witness

Further research reveals that Horin’s interviewing practices are, perhaps, problematic. In promotional interviews, she continually insists that she “began by being forensic 144

about who were ‘genuine’ refugees and who were ‘economic’ refugees seeking better lives for families” (Morgan, “Acting”). Nine months later, in an article by Diana Simmonds, the word “forensic” appears again when she states that: “I wanted to ask: who are these queue jumpers? . . . I’m not a bleeding heart; it’s quite forensic” (“Arts”). Five months after that, she is in the Canberra Times “stress[ing] that she doesn’t see herself as a bleeding heart who set out to undermine the Government’s immigration policy. She acknowledges the need for border protection: ‘I’m always being told that I have the forensic mind of a lawyer rather than one that’s simply emotional. So I was questioning rather than bleeding’” (“Staging”). Most troublingly, she tells Michael Anderson and Linden Wilkinson:

I didn’t come in with a point of view. I came in with a healthy degree of scepticism. How do I know these people are genuine refugees? I thought I had to go through that—to convince an audience, I have to really convince myself. So I was rather forensic in my questioning. Why? What had happened? What got you into trouble? So what? Couldn’t you have lived there with that? Why did you have to get out? What would have happened if you’d stayed? What were the political ramifications? So I guess I drew out from them very detailed stories of that moment that changed their lives forever—the event that made them have to flee. (160–61)

No doubt Horin conducted her interviews with compassion and grace, but statements like this suggest that in her effort to be accurate her interviews were almost as aggressive as those conducted by immigration officials. Indeed, it is almost as if she finds herself imitating the officials. She even says “I went through the process of how do I know these people are telling the truth. . . . I was asking the same question the Government has put in front of us” (Morgan, “Arts,” emphasis added). Where Horin falters is in her failure to incorporate an acknowledgement of how her interviewing process inadvertently, and perhaps inevitably, comes to resemble that of the government. Think back to Mary Crock’s admission in the last chapter, where she said about her subjects: “the young people had been through the status determination process and were being asked (yet again) to tell their stories for the purposes of this project” (Seeking 144). Or, consider journalist Ken Longworth’s approach, where he acknowledges the parallels between what he is doing and what the bureaucracy does. He writes: “The day I spoke to Iranian actor and writer Shahin Shafaei he had already done an interview that was possibly the most crucial in his life. . . . Last Wednesday, he was called to an interview about the application with an 145

Immigration Department official” (“Inside”). With two simple sentences, Longworth acknowledges that he and any other interviewer—whether they be journalist, academic, activist, or theatre practitioner—risks being the latest in a long line of interrogators who demand that these subaltern subjects give an account of themselves—account for themselves—and explain who they are and why they are here. To put it otherwise, Longworth recognises that as a secondary witness, his witnessing is always contingent; dependent on the primary witness’s willingness and ability to testify and, more importantly, retestify. Unlike Crock and Longworth, however, Horin offers no indication that she appreciates the parallels between the government’s practice and her own or that she has modified her behaviour as a result. Here it becomes clear that in attempting to give “voice to the voiceless,” the verbatim playwright also risks reinterrogating the always already interrogated. The one redeeming feature of Horin’s interviewing practice is that she interrogates as few people as possible. In her own words:

There were only four refugees I interviewed. I did not do a survey of thirty or forty refugees. I just followed my nose and got to know these four people and their stories were so gripping and dramatic and extraordinary that they were enough for me. I can only assume that if I had met another four, their stories would have been just as amazing. (Anderson and Wilkinson 160)

In doing so, she adeptly avoids what we might term “double silencing,” which occurs when a playwright solicits a story from a “silenced” subject only to exclude it from the final version of the play, thereby inadvertently silencing the subject yet again. For a secondary witness to call forth a primary witness, only to ignore their testimony risks redoubling the traumatic injury. Like her interviewing practices, Horin’s writing practices are also ethically ambiguous. For example, the front page of the script reads “Written by Ros Horin” and she alone is listed as the recipient of the Rodney Seaborn and Louis Esson prizes, including the $10,000 in prize money for the former (though to her credit she ploughed all of that money straight back into the tour) (“Ros”). Nevertheless, listing herself as the sole author stands in contrast to the common practice of acknowledging the collaborative nature of such plays. Indeed, other verbatim plays produced during the period take care to list all contributors. For example, the Actors for Refugees website says about Something to Declare, “the script was compiled by Michael Gurr” (“AfR,” emphasis added) and the media release for In Our Name lists the names as follows 146

“Written and Directed by Nigel Jamieson, In association with The Al Abaddi family” (Company B, 1, original emphasis.). When compared with these careful and generous credits, and combined with her ethically ambiguous interviewing practices, Horin’s own authorship risks looking more exploitative than collaborative. If Through the Wire’s interviewing and writing practices are ethically ambiguous, then so too are its casting practices. With the best of intentions, Horin invited all of the asylum seekers she had interviewed to audition to play themselves. In the end, only Shahin Shafaei—previously an actor and playwright in Iran—was cast. There are at least four risks immediately apparent with this practice: it risks wounding those who are not cast as themselves; it risks reactivating trauma in those who are cast as themselves; it risks reproducing the refugee as spectacle; and it risks limiting the response of the spectatorial witness. Initially, and most obviously, Horin risks wounding those who were not cast as themselves, as in the case of Farshid, examined here as an example. In an interview with Kirsten Krauth, the actor Wadih Dona reveals that though he did not realise it at the time, he auditioned for the part of Farshid alongside the real Farshid. Dona states:

He was the real guy so you can imagine how I felt in hindsight. I didn’t actually know that it was him in the room. I thought it was some exotic actor that [Horin] had selected to read as well. Later I put it all together when I met him onstage after we did opening night at the Sydney Festival. [I thought] Shit, that’s Farshid! Oh my god that was the guy from the audition! (Krauth)

In actual fact, it is hard to imagine what Dona felt, though the account above gives us a glimpse into his surprise and perhaps remorse. It is harder still to imagine the indignity of having to audition to play oneself or the smarting feeling when a trained actor is deemed as more adept at playing you than you are. This might leave refugees feeling that their story is of more value than they are, that their story has more of a future or a “right” to remain than they do, and despite the fact that it is theirs, they cannot tell their story as well as an actor can. Finally, it is hard to imagine what Horin was thinking when she constructed this scenario; having so adeptly avoided “doubly silencing” anyone during the interviewing process, she then seems to do precisely this during the casting process by soliciting the participation of the primary witnesses and then refusing it. Even as she risks hurting those who were not cast as themselves, Horin also risks hurting, even retraumatising Shahin Shafaei, who was cast as himself. Dona states that 147

in the first reading “Shahin couldn’t even finish his story. He got up crying and left the room” (Krauth). Shafaei himself confirms this in a newspaper interview with Harbant Gill, where he says that he found rehearsals difficult because it was “very hard for me to reveal every personal detail of my life” (“Wired”). It seems as if collapsing the borders between himself and his character proved too much for Shafaei. Julie Salverson relates a similar story about casting a refugee as himself and inadvertently retraumatising him. She concludes that when cast as themselves, refugees can become “caught recycling a story they may wish they had never remembered” (“Performing” 188). That is, when primary witnesses are cast as themselves they may find retestifying becomes retraumatising. This risk is arguably exacerbated in the case of asylum seekers, for whom trauma has in part been constituted in and through the constant testifying of the refugee determination process. Paradoxically, even though this conflation of interviewee, character and actor can prove too much emotionally, it can prove too little theatrically. Shafaei told a symposium in Sydney:

I could never be myself, to tell you the truth, and I had to find a distance between myself and that character that I was acting on stage because there was so much [of my own] personal story in that play that [if] I was going to be emotional about it, I would really damage the whole performance. . . . I can say that [in] around one- ninth of the performances, the ones where I was emotionally attached to the text, you can easily say that they were the most flat performances and you would not be able to connect with the audience because as soon I would go emotional and flat, I would affect six other actors on stage and it would [all] go completely flat. But I tried in the rest, the eight-ninths of them, to really make the distance and to really be able to tell this story, because I was a narrator there and I wanted to be able to communicate this story. (Shafaei, “Aesthetic” 29)

In other words, in order to function as an actor Shafaei had to separate the roles of primary witness and actor witness and become a secondary witness to his own testimony. The reviews confirm that he managed to achieve this distance, though the reviewers themselves are unsure as to how to interpret this. Keith Gallasch, for instance, says Shafaei is “the least theatrical and therefore the most effective” (“Darkness”) but Krauth says “The first time I see Through the Wire I am least engaged by Shahin’s performance” (“Refugees”). However, she also adds: “This unsettles me for weeks but when I go the second time I realise this man tells his story with the distance and abstractions of a writer/actor through necessity” (“Refugees”). In sum, the 148

spectators seem to recognise that Shafaei has inserted a “critical caesura between the related subjectivities of performer and refugee” (Gilbert and Lo 196–97). The third problem associated with this casting strategy is that it “risks reproducing the refugee as spectacle” (Gilbert and Lo 196), a risk compounded by promotional interviews and critical reviews, practically all of which are agog at the possibility of Shafaei’s possible deportation. This risk is exacerbated by the fact that Shafaei is the only asylum seeker on stage and is this therefore forced to function, almost by default, as a signifier of authenticity. Like Julie Salverson at a community play in Canada, we find ourselves “looking out at some exoticized and deliberately tragic other” (“Change” 122). There were, in fact, several ways around what Salverson calls this “aesthetic of injury” (122). Similar to Claudia Chidiac and Urban Theatre Projects in their play Asylum, Horin could have committed to casting refugees as themselves, regardless of their theatrical training or lack thereof. Or, like Nigel Jamieson in In Our Name, she might have decided that she would not cast any of the interviewees in the play. Had she wanted to include Shafaei, on account of his abilities and training, then she could have cast him as someone else, rather than as himself. Indeed, he could have played an Australian character, as Iraqi actor Majid Shokor did in Club Refuge. In each of these instances, primary witnesses have been included or excluded equally. Finally, having a primary witness on stage may also stifle the response of the spectator witnesses. Karine Schaefer argues that when characters within a play are already performing witnesses then spectators may resist performing witness themselves because the characters leave little “room for the audience to find their own interpretation of the event. Essentially, the characters are undertaking the interpretive work for them” (“Spectator” 17). She argues that this tendency is exacerbated by auto- performance in particular:

To watch a living witness is to watch someone who has taken responsibility for a historical event, and agreed to be a storyteller. Because one knows that . . . these witnesses will continue their existence even after the production ends, one may assume that in some sense they will continue to shoulder for the community some of the burden of remembrance. (18)

Certainly, this impression is reinforced in Through the Wire by the fact that Shafaei was the only person besides Horin to remain with the project from beginning to end. It is also reinforced by the fact that Shafaei does more interviews than any other cast 149

member by far.12 For this reason, Gilbert and Lo suggest that audiences attended plays such as Through the Wire in order to “to publicly enact their shame” at the nation’s treatment of asylum seekers rather than to witness their stories (204). The ethical ambiguities of Through the Wire provide a necessary corrective to the currently popular notion that verbatim theatre is inherently healing and redemptive for interviewees, actors, spectators, and indeed the nation. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that verbatim theatre can be a painful experience for the primary witnesses involved, whether as interviewees, actors, or as spectators. Nevertheless, it is precisely the ethical ambiguities of this production that pricked my conscience in the first place and that prompted me to research the play in more detail. This recalls Grehan’s argument that an ethically “ambivalent” performance can produce a moment of “radical unsettlement” in the spectator. This unsettlement, in turn, “triggers reflection, consideration and an emotional dis-ease for the spectator, and this dis-ease allows the performance to ‘prick’ his or her ethical imagination in ways that more didactic or straight forward work might not” (“Testimony” 89). It also recalls Claire Bishop’s argument in her article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” in which she argues that it is precisely the ethically ambiguous work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra that provokes the audience into thinking ethically and further, into contemplating the category of the “ethical” itself. In contrast to Hirschhorn and Sierra, however, Horin does not seem to have constructed this ambiguity deliberately; indeed, her play is clearly intended as an ethical intervention into the government’s refugee and asylum seeker policy. Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the accidental (that word again), unethical nature of the play, it has caused me to think through the category of the ethical. In doing so, I have also come to wonder about Elin Diamond’s phrase “political ethics,” which appears in her definition of identification as “a fantasy assimilation not locatable in time or responsive to political ethics” (Unmaking 106). But are politics and ethics one and the same? Though some theorists have suggested that “ethics has become the new politics” (qtd. in Harris 1), others insist that they are different. Indeed, the reception of Through the Wire suggests that though it was ethically suspect, it was politically successful, if by that we mean that it provoked a government response, attracting both national and international attention.

12 By my count, Shafaei has done at least 11 interviews with both print and broadcast outlets. In contrast, Horin has done eight, musician Alrekabi has done two, and the actors Dona, Oxer, and Lucy Bell have done one each as well as has interviewee Farshid Kheirollahpoor. 150

Sensuous Struggle, Body Back: The Politics of Mimetic Witness

Though mimetic witnessing may be ethically ambiguous, the reception history of Through the Wire suggests that it may also be politically efficacious. More specifically, the “passionate mimesis” of identification (Diamond) provides a point of entry for those spectators who are not yet politicised and a point of assembly for those who already are. More broadly, the play works through a process that film scholar Jane Gaines has termed “political mimesis,” a mode of mimesis “that assumes a mimetic faculty on the part of its audience—the ability to ‘body back,’ to carry on the same struggle” (“Political” 100). Writing about images of protest in documentary films, she says that “This idea of documentary as having the capacity to produce political mimesis assumes a faculty on the part of its audience that is only narrowly analytic. It assumes a capacity to respond to and to engage in sensuous struggle, in the visceral pleasure of political mimesis” (100). In other words, political mimesis supposes that the spectator will respond to the images by recreating them in another time and place. Recently, Janelle Reinelt has extended the concept of political mimesis to documentary plays, arguing that by “replaying” trials, tribunal plays encourage the audience to engage not only in the trial but also in the social crisis, or traumatic event, that produced the trial in the first place (“Promise” 12). In Gaines and Reinelt’s examples, political mimesis functions as an oppositional or radical force, however the reception of Through the Wire suggests that political mimesis is a politically neutral structure that can also function to galvanise the conservative side of the “sensuous struggle.” In the previous section, I argued—following Diamond—that identification is ethically suspect because it is potentially coercive, colonising, and collapses difference. In this section, however, I draw on another aspect of her argument in order to suggest that although identification is ethically suspect it can also be politically constructive. Specifically, I am thinking of Diamond’s argument that “[t]hough identification seems to promote the annihilation of difference—and thus violence to the other—it may also suggest the problematizing of models that support such violence” (“Violence” 390). Moreover, she argues that if we conceive of identification as a process that destabilises the subject rather than cements it, then we begin to see the possibility of producing change in the subject through identifications. In Diamond’s words, “Because it bridges the psychic and the social, identification has political effects” (391). 151

The argument that identification might have political effects resonates with Andreas Huyssen’s in his chapter “The Politics of Identification” (After 94–114). Here, he argues that the reason the television show Holocaust caused such an emotional response when it was screened in West Germany in 1979 was that it enabled empathy, and specifically empathy with the victims of the Holocaust, in a way that earlier stage and television productions had not. He states that:

In post-war German drama, the socio-psychological need for identification with the Jews as victims clashed to varying degrees with the dramaturgic and narrative strategies of avant-garde and/or documentary theater. The historical evaluation of dramatic form and the canon of political educators emphasizing the document, rational explanation, and social theory had bypassed the specific needs of spectators. (After 114)

In other words, where artists were keen to avoid identification, their audiences craved it, and in its absence, they resisted engaging with the subject, which is to say both the Jewish self and the topic of their near obliteration. Building on Huyssen, Vivian Patraka argues that “Where the audience is applying realism’s normalizing concepts of what it means to be ‘human’ to a particular ‘category’ of humans, the form can assimilate a group that the audience resists acknowledging” (“Fascist” 341). In the context of Australia, this means assimilating asylum seekers (and not just asylum seekers). This form of recognition is far from ideal, as Patraka acknowledges, stating that “the group is inevitably assimilated from the point of view of the group’s victimization and the suffering entailed in an intense desire to be ‘just like us,’ where ‘us’ is hegemonic” (“Fascist” 342). But it nevertheless represents a beginning. In other words, it provides spectators with a point of entry into the world of the primary witness. If the first political function of identification is to provide a point of entry to spectators who are not involved in the struggle, then the second is to reaffirm those who are. Once again Horin succeeds, stating that

Perhaps 80 percent of people who came had some interest, but it has been able to change people from a theoretical interest to a gut and heart response, absolutely engaged. They have come out of the performance and said, “I am going to go to the detention centres; I am going to lobby a member of parliament; I am going to join Amnesty.” Groups of schoolkids are writing to refugees. It has been fantastic in the way it has produced action. (Anderson and Wilkinson 166)

152

Here Horin confirms Karen Malpede’s more general claim that the theatre of witness can support and encourage those who are already witnesses. Or, as she puts it, “Those for whom witnessing is a daily task . . . are affirmed in the validity of their tasks, and receive the energy that live theatre can transmit” (“Theatre” 277). While these moments of identification might be characterised as moments of political mimesis, in the sense that they encourage the spectator to join the sensuous struggle, they also produced a larger and more literal moment of political mimesis when the Federal Government itself joined the struggle by refusing to fund a national tour. In 2004 Performing Lines, a touring and production company, applied to Playing Australia, the Minister for the Arts’ national touring program, to tour the production to 22 venues across the country. In the words of Wendy Blacklock, the general manager of Performing Lines: “That amount of interest from presenters normally gets you across the line . . . But the Playing Australia advisory committee argued that there hadn’t yet been a fully-fledged production, so we didn’t qualify” (“Staging”). David Marr confirmed the published version of his Philip Parsons lecture in 2004, where he stated that:

The fate of Through the Wire is a cause of speculation and distress across the theatre industry. The story can still only be partly told because the people directly involved won’t talk. They have to survive. What appears to have happened at the meeting of Playing Australia last year was this: despite the show having a very high score on applications, the minister’s representative persuaded the committee not to recommend it for funding—on the basis that it was not yet a fully fledged production. Other shows were rejected at the same meeting on the same— unexpected—ground. That’s where the story stands for the moment. In the industry there’s little doubt that Canberra was simply not going to back a politically unpalatable show. (Marr, “Wallet”)

Eventually the play was funded by the NSW Ministry for the Arts, which funded eight weeks of what was originally an 18 week tour. With the help of private donors, the play was also able to travel to Melbourne. What this incident suggests is that while political mimesis is typically thought of in oppositional terms, it can also operate to galvanise the conservative side of the sensuous struggle. Here, again, mimesis works in mysterious ways as the copy obtains the power of the original, or arguably even more power than the original. Once again, Through the Wire produces another repetition. In refusing to fund the play, the government effectively censored it since it is almost impossible to tour Australia—with its vast distances and small population—without subsidy. This censorship of the play 153

echoes the censorship in the play, when Shafaei testifies to how he ran afoul of the ruling Ayatollahs and had his plays banned. The funding struggle off the stage meant that beyond being a repetition of a prior event, Through the Wire became an event in its own right or, more accurately, a non- event, though not in the way we typically understand the term. Instead, the play became a missed event; one might even say a sort of trauma. Incredibly, even people who were never likely to see the play also became aware of it as a missed event when the New York Times reported on the issue. In an article titled “From Australia’s Holding Pen,” the newspaper told its readers that:

Actions by the Howard government have limited the number of Australians who will see Mr. Shafaei perform and, through him and the others, learn of the plight of these asylum-seekers [sic]. In a country of only 20 million people and vast distances, government financing is critical if ballet, symphony and theater companies are to travel beyond a few big cities. Twenty-three cities applied to the federal arts council to have ‘Through the Wire’ performed for their residents, and the government initially provided money for a 17-week tour. Then, unexpectedly, it cut its support, and the play will tour for only six weeks, to eight cities. And there are still several hundred men, women and children in the detention centers and on Nauru. (Bonner)

Through its (non-)appearance in the New York Times, Through the Wire arguably made its greatest achievement—though it was seen by hundreds of spectators, it was knowingly missed by thousands more. Even as it repeated a past event and became a missed event in the present, there was also a sense in which the play rehearsed for a future event. This is the final way in which Through the Wire produces political mimesis, encouraging spectators to continue the sensuous struggle. In his review, McCallum notes: “When the refugee equivalent of the Wilson inquiry into the stolen generations takes place [in the future] . . . shows such as these will be important sources” (“Brutalisation”). In fact, shows such as these arguably paved the way for the Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s Inquiry into Immigration Detention, which was established in June 2008 and concluded in August 2009. In other words, this theatre of justice prepared the ground for the parliamentary theatre of justice that eventually followed. Perhaps another way of putting it is to say that play enabled a kind of cultural acting out, which will eventually lead to a working through. As a naturalistic representation of the economy of testimony, the play emerges as a kind of cultural symptom of the economy of testimony rather than a subversion of it. This acting out 154

caused the government, in turn, to act out its paranoia and to perpetrate again the acts that caused the primary witnesses trauma in the first place. To say that Through the Wire is a cultural symptom is not to say that it fails. Rather, it is to say that it succeeds in ways that we did not understand at the time. At the time, it seemed as if its success lay in the fact that it allowed asylum seekers’ testimonies to circulate. In retrospect, it is clear that the play was altogether more complicated, implicated and ethically ambiguous than it appeared at the time. It is precisely the ethical ambivalence, and the labour that thinking through this ambivalence enables and requires, that produces witnessing. In this way, mimetic witnessing, as with witnessing more generally, emerges as an after effect of spectatorship, not simply as a mode of spectatorship.

The Example, the Copy, and the Critic

[C]an’t we say that to give an example, to instantiate, to be concrete, are all examples of the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented? —Michael Taussig

This chapter has worked through the example, the instance, the concrete being of Through the Wire in order to develop a wider theory of mimetic witnessing. In doing so, it has, as Taussig suggests, performed its own kind of mimetic magic, produced its own sort of witnesses (Mimesis 16). So what can we glean about mimetic witnessing from Through the Wire? In aesthetic terms, it is clear that mimetic witnessing works through the strategies of similarity and contact, illusion and identification, and that within this aesthetic model, the actor’s mode of witnessing does not necessarily relate to the spectator’s. Perhaps another way to put is to say that in the strategy of likeness, verbatim theatre encourages the spectator to see the actor, or secondary witness, as if they are the asylum seeker or activist (or primary witness). In the strategy of contact, verbatim theatre encourages the spectator to see themselves as a tertiary witness, who is spatiotemporally copresent with an actor (secondary witness) who has been spatiotemporally copresent with a refugee or activist (primary witness). When the two strategies coincide, as in the case of Shahin Shafaei, verbatim theatre encourages contact to read as likeness, and the spectator to read all secondary witnesses as if they were primary witnesses. 155

In ethical terms, it is clear that mimetic witnessing is a deeply ambiguous practice that risks reinterrogating the always already interrogated, thereby perpetuating the economy of testimony rather than subverting it. These interviewing practices are exacerbated by casting strategies that either silence the primary witness again (as in the case of Farshid) or potentially reinjure them (as in the case of Shafaei). The casting strategies also risk reproducing the refugee as spectacle and encourage the spectator to elide difference rather than come to terms with it. In political terms, mimetic witnessing operates through what Gaines and Reinelt have termed political mimesis. This in turn produces a kind of cultural acting out that will eventually enable a later working through. The political efficacy of Through the Wire reveals that the politics and ethics of mimetic witnessing are not one and the same; that they may strain against each other and that what may be ethically ambiguous might be politically effective and what is politically effective is often far from ethical. Finally, what this retrospective reading of Through the Wire reveals is that witnessing itself takes place retrospectively. More than anything else, perhaps, mimetic witnessing is a temporally delayed mode of spectatorship—experienced as a blindspot in the moment, and a belated moment of insight some years later. 156

Chapter 5

Listening to Testimony The Poetics and Politics of Antiphonic Witnessing in Refugitive

But I [am] sure this time someone will hear it . . . I believe there are still ears for listening to reality. —Shahin Shafaei

The performances of these [refugees] in no way indicate that they are victims, nor do they suggest anything to confess. These characterizations . . . are asking for a different kind of listening, a different kind of response. —Julie Salverson

I am suggesting a politics and practice of listening as a necessary complement to the politics of testifying. I am suggesting a politics that does not valorize the act of speaking in and of itself: a politics that listens to a person’s speech or silence and then grapples with the question of how to respond to it. In other words, I am suggesting a politics that begins, rather than ends with, the speaking subject, that begins with the other who addresses us with her speech or silence. —Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

In the same period that Through the Wire and six other verbatim plays produced about asylum seekers appeared on the Australian stage, another three plays by asylum seekers also appeared. This is, at this stage, the last and perhaps the smallest subgenre of “refugee theatre” to emerge. Indeed, it only became possible when former refugees decided to speak to the situation of current refugees, as in the case of Afshin Nikouseresht’s There Is Nothing Here (2002), or when current refugees were released from detention, as in the case of Shahin Shafaei’s Refugitive (2003) and Towfiq Al- Qady’s Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee’s Story (2005). Intriguingly, all three plays were monopolylogues, a theatrical form in which “one performer plays several parts or characters” (Peterson 14). Rather than analysing all three of these monopolylogues, this chapter focuses solely on Refugitive in order to examine the relationship between the testimonial witnessing of the primary witness on stage and the spectatorial witnessing of the secondary witnesses off it. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between the listening performed onstage and the listening produced off it. Like Jill Dolan’s analysis of Anna Deavere Smith, Danny Hoch, and Lily Tomlin’s monopolylogues, I 157

am interested in how this performance “address[es] its audienc[e]—that is, how [it] locates the act of listening, for performer and spectator, in different spheres with different inflections” (Utopia 66–67). Or, to put it in Julie Salverson’s terms, I am concerned with how representing “a different kind of listening” might produce “a different kind of response” (“Transgressive” 49). The choice to focus on Refugitive has been made for reasons both practical and philosophical. On the practical side, it is the only one of the three plays that I saw live: There Is Nothing Here was staged in Melbourne and Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee’s Story in Brisbane. On the philosophical side, Refugitive is the only play to have been devised, performed and directed solely by a refugee (Nikouseresht collaborated with Dave Kelman and Al-Qady with Leah Mercer). Though Shafaei had assistance from producer Alex Broun in order to tour the show, he maintained complete creative control. This touring is, in fact, the second reason for Refugitive’s significance—along with Through the Wire it was one of the few productions of the period to travel. The play toured to more than 40 cities in four different states—New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Victoria—over a period of six months. One count puts the number of performances at 200 (Yeomans 56), while another puts it at 250 (Longworth, “Inside”). Shafaei’s own, however, puts it at “nearly 300” (“Aesthetic” 28). Taking the most conservative numbers, say 200 performances and an average audience of 50, estimates put the total audience at approximately 10,000 people (Yeomans 55). Taking the most optimistic numbers, the audience would be around 15,000 people. In either case, this would make Refugitive one of the most widely seen productions of the period. Finally, the play is significant because although it is often framed in reviews and interviews—and in fact by its accompanying program and publicity—as an autobiographical performance, it actually avoids the confessional style of performance that so many plays of the period adopted. Indeed, when compared with the way in which Shafaei’s story is told in Through the Wire, Refugitive is remarkable for its reticence, its resolute refusal to disclose. Despite its significance, the play has received a minimal amount of critical attention. While there were numerous contemporaneous reviews, none were especially insightful and many were rather dismissive. For example, the Canberra Times stated that the play “suffer[ed] from theatrical naivety” and found “the expression of continual physical anguish” far from “palatable” (“Theatrical”). Bill Perrett stated that, “while there is no doubting the serious nature of [Shafaei’s] subject, or the claims his plight has 158

on our sympathies, this play and its execution are inadequate representations of them” (“Theatre”). He added:

his account is simplistic and predictable. Where one might hope for a personal insight into the detention experience there is nothing but warmed-over media shots of what goes on. The depiction of the Department of Immigration official is of a trite demon—he refers to the inmates by numbers, he is underlit in red. The production is clunky, using a lighting design that very quickly becomes stale. There is without doubt a compelling account of the detention centre experience to be made, but unfortunately this isn’t it. (“Theatre”)

Likewise, one could reply, there is without doubt a compelling critique of Refugitive to be made, but unfortunately this isn’t it. Indeed, Perrett’s comments betray his ignorance: detention centre officials did in fact refer to inmates by numbers until the Flood Report in 2001. In contrast, Rochelle Smith clearly understood the issues but nevertheless agreed that, “there is a problem with Shafaei’s intensity. It is very worthy and appropriate, but unfortunately loses impact because there is no light and shade, just full bore” (“Review”). More generously, Patrick McDonald wrote, “the work is a little literal, but Shafaei gives a highly physical, compelling and emotive performance” (“Fringe”). Shafaei has spoken of his frustration with such responses, commenting that:

I would sometimes get annoyed that nobody would review Refugitive on theatrical issues: that it was a one man show; that one actor provides seven different characters; that it is a very traditional Persian narrative kind of theatre mixed with a very European, Russian style of theatre, physical acting, and all those things. . . . I never got that kind of review. (“Aesthetic” 44)

More recently, academic scholars have begun to address these shortcomings. The most detailed reading to date is Rand Hazou’s, in his article “Refugitive and the Theatre of Dys-appearance.” In fact, Hazou offers two parallel readings of the play. First, he draws on Drew Leder’s notion of dys-appearance, whereby the body appears to the subject through pain (from the Greek prefix dys- meaning “bad” or “ill”). In the case of the hunger strike, the “pain induced . . . can serve to locate the detainee, drawing attention back into the body, and effectively resisting the disembodiment of detention” (183). In other words, the “dys-embodiment” produced by hunger resists the disembodiement produced by detention. Second, Hazou draws on the notion of “corporealisation,” whereby a subject becomes withdrawn, passive and helpless and in doing so comes to “resembl[e] a corpse, or a dead person” (183). Hazou reads the hunger strike as an assertion of agency against the corporealisation that detention 159

induces. Thus, through its depiction of the hunger strike and the experience of disembodiment and corporealisation, Hazou argues that Refugitive “makes the invisibility of asylum seekers apparent. This is . . . a theatre of dys-appearance” (185). Though it is elegantly argued and theoretically accomplished, Hazou’s reading falters for two reasons. First, there is some slippage in his account between the actual hunger strikes and Shafaei’s representation of them. Indeed, one of things that occurred to me when watching the performance, which left Shafaei puffing and sweating, was that there was no way that someone on a hunger strike could sustain this sort of physical effort. It was not the performance’s authenticity but rather its inauthenticity that struck me and I was acutely aware that I was not witnessing a hunger strike, but rather a representation of a hunger strike. To put it otherwise, I was a non-witness to the non- event of the non-hunger strike. More significantly, even though Hazou is careful to argue that the play makes “the invisibility of asylum seekers apparent” rather than simply making them visible, there is a risk that by framing the play in terms of visibility his reading reproduces and thus reinforces the economy of visibility (185). That is, his reading does not shift the terms of the debate, nor does it attend to the ways in which the performance itself shifted the terms of the debate. The word attend, in its archaic sense of “to direct the ears” or “to turn one’s ears to; to listen to,” is crucial to the way in which I understand Refugitive (Oxford). For me, the play worked precisely by disrupting this economy of visibility. Indeed, it is arguable that with nothing but a bare stage, a small mattress and a sheet for props, and a static lighting plot, the play was actually rather boring visually. Rather than reading this as a failure, however, for me this shifted the emphasis away from visibility towards audibility. Even more significantly, it created a space in which testimony was not only audible it was listened to, even witnessed. This is not to force the framework of listening and witnessing onto the play. On the contrary, it is clear from the play itself that listening is key, such as when the Man says to his stomach: “But I sure this time someone will hear it, don’t make fun of me, I believe there are still ears for listening to reality, you should only find a way to get it to them . . . Of course a way without any filters” (Shafaei, “Refugitive” 16). Moreover, it is clear that despite their reservations or criticisms, reviewers still understood the play in terms of witnessing. For instance, Rochelle Smith wrote: “The power of theatre to inform and educate was realised last Friday night in an extraordinary presentation that touched deeply all those fortunate enough to witness it” (“Review”). What remains unclear about Refugitive—and I would 160

suggest testimonial theatre more generally—is when and where listening and witnessing intersect. Often there is, as I commented in the last chapter, an ipso facto quality to the argument: one listens to testimony therefore one becomes a secondary witness. Once again, we have to ask: But how exactly? Through what mechanisms? For what purpose? And for whose benefit? Like Chapters 3 and 4 before it, this chapter wonders: “What form of witnessing do we find in performance?” That is, it asks: “What form of witnessing do we find in Refugitive and in monopolylogues more generally?” In response, I argue we find a form of antiphonic witnessing, a phrase I am borrowing from Allen Feldman (“Memory” 174), who is himself borrowing from ethnographer C. Nadia Seremetakis (Last 99– 125). This is a form of witnessing that operates through the acoustic, social and juridical structure of antiphony, which is to say the performance of call and response. To put it more generally, it is a mode of witnessing that emphasises listening over speaking or seeing. Within the performance itself, the monopolyloguist performs the call and response by embodying several different characters and enacting their conversations. In doing so, the actor also models, enacts, and enables several different sorts of listening. Most remarkably of all, Shafaei not only performs antiphonic witnessing but also enables his audience to do so by facilitating lengthy post- performance discussions. Once again, it would seem that witnessing occurs after the main event.

Performing the Call: The Poetics of Antiphonic Witnessing

Refugitive unfolds as a conversation between an unnamed asylum seeker (“The Man”), who is on his eighth day of a hunger strike, and his stomach. Like Through the Wire, the play consists of “short, choppy scenes” which alternate between “narrative reminiscences about and enacted re-creations of events” (Schaefer, “Spectator” 9). We follow the Man as he remembers and then reenacts the first time he met immigration officials, his confrontations with the detention centre guards, the protests he staged alongside other detainees, and his attempts to write letters to the United Nations. Throughout the course of the play, Shafaei performs as and speaks about several other asylum seekers, immigration officials, and detention centre staff. In the final scene, the Man imagines writing a film called Refugitive but cannot do so because he has no pen 161

and paper. Instead, he rises to his feet and recites W.H. Auden’s poem “Refugee Blues.” It is arguable that Shafaei performs antiphonic witness even before he speaks, in the sense that he is presumed to speak about and for a wider community of asylum seekers. This is how Allen Feldman defines antiphonic witnessing in his analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he states that witnesses would present themselves not “as atomized traumatized victims, but as representatives and embodied signifiers for the disappeared and the dead” (176). In other words, these witnesses performed as metonyms for their community. In addition, Feldman also describes testifying with the community within the courtroom through “call and response and call-outs, choral singing and . . . dancing . . . as other survivors in the audience supported the witnesses through the public expression of feeling” (175). In this way, antiphonic witnessing emerges as a practice of testifying with, for and to a community that exists both in and beyond the courtroom. In some respects, Feldman’s phrase antiphonic witnessing risks tautology since witnessing is already embedded within Seremetakis’s definition of antiphony. In her book The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, she states:

Antiphony has been described as a prevalent pattern in Greek lamentation from antiquity to the present. . . . [I]t has been understood by commentators as an aesthetic device and a literary genre. . . . [A]ntiphony is (1) the social structure of mortuary ritual; (2) the internal acoustic organization of lament singing; (3) a prescribed technique of witnessing, for the production/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of truth; and (4) a political strategy that organizes the relations of women to male-dominated institutions. (100)

Significantly, Seremetakis does not limit antiphonic witnessing to the courtroom, but instead insists that it is a memorial and juridical practice that can exist outside—and in opposition to—the courtroom as well within it. In short, antiphonic witnessing is an acoustic structure (call and response, silence and speech), a social structure (the soloist and the chorus, the actor and the audience, the minority and the mainstream), and a juridical structure (the speaker and the listener, the primary and secondary witness). In the case of Refugitive, Shafaei is cast—even before he steps on stage—as a soloist carrying a chorus of asylum seekers and addressing another chorus of activists and concerned citizens. That is, he is a minority subject addressing a mainstream audience (though it is arguable that this audience is itself a minority within the mainstream, since opinion polls of the period indicated overwhelming public support 162

for the government’s actions). In part, this is simply an effect of how subaltern speech is heard. However, it is also an effect of the pre-show publicity as well as the production process itself. When organising the tour, producer Alex Broun sent out emails to the Refugee Action Committee (RAC), a loose association of activists from around the country. In his letter to RAC members, Broun wrote: “We are currently hoping to organise a tour for this important performance to rural areas and cities across Australia and we need help from the Refugee Support Groups to host the event. . . . Basically you get the venue and the crowd and we do the rest. . . . This is a moving and educating performance, perfect for spreading the message for Refugees [sic]” (qtd. in Yeomans 55–56). In other words, the pre-show publicity explicitly positioned Shafaei as an antiphonic witness, which is to say as a primary witness who would witness for (on behalf of, in place of) other primary witnesses and for (the benefit of) secondary witnesses such as ourselves. However, it was not only Shafaei who was cast as an antiphonic witness by the pre-show publicity. In addition, the recipients of the email were also cast as antiphonic witnesses, as addressees of the call, who were expected to respond. Remarkably, more than forty groups responded and as a result the play was able to tour the country without government funding. Hence, even before it had appeared on stage, Refugitive had already inaugurated the antiphonic social relations that it planned to represent in performance and then reproduce in the post-performance discussions. Nevertheless, when the performance itself began, it was clear that Shafaei was performing and facilitating a much more complex form of antiphonic witnessing than had been enacted through these earlier email exchanges, which had proceeded relatively smoothly. That is, it became clear that he would not only speak as and about multiple subjects, he would also listen to multiple subjects. In doing so, he would perform and facilitate multiple forms of listening for the audience. Refugitive begins with the Man being flung into a small cell, where he lies whimpering on the floor. When at last he is able to stand, he says:

THE MAN: Lovely India compound, the cave of loneliness, with its lovely single bed . . . you are hungry I know, but I’m hungry as well . . . you have already told me one thousand time[s] that I’m guilty for this; but never gave me or even showed me any other choice, maybe you too didn’t find any other alternative. You know during this last ten months we have tried all the possible ways; but never get any answer and this is the last one . . . the last escape . . . escape from . . . You know how close you are to my heart so 163

believe me I don’t want to annoy you or myself, but this is the last chance, the last try, maybe to win. (Shafaei, “Refugitive” 11)

With this insistent use of the second-person, the spectator is not so much called as interpellated, hailed, even summoned as a secondary witness. However, such an interpellation is neither stable nor singular and there are at least three ways in which we might hear this insistent “you.” First, it is possible to hear this “you” as an instance of the Man talking to himself. This is what John Capecci, in his taxonomy of the second-person in performance, calls the “Disguised-I You” where “the ‘you’s’ are essentially treated as ‘I’s’ . . . [as the] character talks about and to [him- or] herself, remembering the recent past events or reliving them” (50). In this sense, the Disguised-I You resembles the “more familiar first-person direct interior monologue” (46). When we hear a character talking to themselves, whether in the first- or second-person, it is as if we are overhearing an inner deliberation, a diary entry or even a confession. In other words, it is as if we are eavesdropping. The relationship between eavesdropping and witnessing has previously been remarked upon by Freddie Rokem in his book Performing History, where he describes eavesdropping as a form of “secret witnessing” (204). More specifically, he states that eavesdropping occurs in what he calls “screen-scenes,” where one of the fictional characters is secretly spying on one or several of the other characters” (203). More generally, eavesdropping occurs when a character “intentionally takes a position outside the direct action” (203–04). In doing so, these characters serve as models for spectators in the theatre, since the “audience is also ‘secretly’ watching the action on the stage” (204).1 In Rokem’s scheme, the spectator becomes an eavesdropper by watching an eavesdropper on stage. Typically, the spectator identifies with the onstage eavesdropper as another “secret witness” to the action, however this identification dissolves if the eavesdropper is discovered, drawn back into the action, or punished (or all three) (202– 04). This “symbolic sacrifice,” says Rokem, “activates a number of very complex

1 More recently, however, Rokem has distinguished between the practices of eavesdropping and witnessing, stating: “[t]he difference between watching or eavesdropping, on the one hand, and witnessing, on the other, is that the former are intentional, while the latter seems to be more accidental” (“Witnessing” 168). However, he does not hold hard and fast to the distinction, acknowledging that they are “not always clearly separated” (171). What Rokem’s analysis opens up is the possibility that there are different sorts of eavesdropping, such as deliberate eavesdropping (e.g. through surveillance or spying) and accidental eavesdropping (e.g. through the inadvertent overhearing that is a part of everyday life, particularly since the advent of the mobile phone). While this point is addressed to some extent in the next section, much work remains to be done. 164

processes for the spectators . . . creat[ing] identification and involvement as well as distance from the eavesdropper, finally releasing the spectator from the ‘fear’ of being punished for having secretly violated the privacy of the characters in the fictional world of the performance” (204). In the opening scene of Refugitive, however, spectators become eavesdroppers through a slightly different process: instead of identifying with and then distancing themselves from the eavesdropper onstage, spectators are focusing on the speaker. Or, more accurately, they are listening to the speaker listen to himself. Though our spectatorship may still operate through identification and distance, the second-person address asks us to imagine ourselves in the speaker’s place rather than the secret witness’s place (Capecci 50). In other words, though both Rokem and Refugitive position spectators as primary witnesses, the former frames them as bystanders while the latter frames them as survivors. If the first way for an audience to hear the Man’s “you” is as a “Disguised-I You” then the second is as a “Specific-Internal You” (Capecci 49). Typically, the Specific- Internal You refers to another character within—or internal to—the play. Here, however, it seems to refer to another character within—or internal to—the main character himself, i.e. the Man’s stomach. In a sense, then, this second reading simply extends the first; it still assumes the Man is speaking to himself, he just happens to be speaking to his stomach. In another sense, however, this second reading takes the schism between the Man and his stomach more seriously, and interprets it as an extreme instance of dissociation. Since dissociation is a symptom of trauma, among other things, we are likely to listen differently. That is, we are likely to listen therapeutically rather than secretively. Therapeutic listening is perhaps the default mode for spectators who find themselves listening to testimony and it involves, according to Dori Laub, listening not only to the story of trauma but also to the silences in and beyond that story (Felman and Laub 58). Whereas eavesdropping operates through both identification and distance, therapeutic listening tends to emphasise identification (though of course distance and outright alienation cannot be circumvented completely). Through listening to trauma, according to Laub, the listener will also “com[e] to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread, and conflicts that the trauma victim feels” (Felman and Laub 58). One of the risks of therapeutic listening, according to Julie Salverson, is that we tend to “liste[n] more for injury and violation than for resistance” (“Transgressive” 46). 165

The third way in which to hear this second-person address is as a broader, more ambiguous “you,” which refers to the audience both individually and in its entirety. This is what Capecci calls the “External-You” (49) and because of the ambiguity of the English “you” it is embedded within every second-person address. The difference for spectators is that when we are included in the address (as opposed to when we intrude upon it), we may feel more inclined to listen as an interlocutor, rather than as an eavesdropper or a counsellor. That is, we hear as a potential respondent, a possible speaker, not simply or only as a listener. To put it another way, we listen in anticipation of antiphony, the acoustic structure of call and response, call and response. Indeed, the Man’s talking to himself might be seen as a sort of auto-antiphony. For the most part, antiphony has been theorised as an intersubjective practice. However, this opening scene suggests that it exists as an intrasubjective practice as well, recalling Derrida’s words in Writing and Difference: “In soliloquy as in dialogue, to speak is to hear oneself. As soon as I am heard, as soon as I hear myself, the I who hears itself, who hears me, becomes the I who speaks and takes speech from the I who thinks that he speaks and is heard in his own name” (223, original emphasis). Or, as Alice Rayner puts it in her gloss on this passage: “The ‘I’ who speaks . . . is already an audience to itself, an audience that is comprised by division and difference” (4). To be a speaking self then is to be a listening self and to be a listening self is to be a speaking self, eventually if not immediately. While this first scene stages at least three different forms of listening, later scenes model, enact and enable at least three more. For example, in a later scene the DIMIA Manager models conservative listening, the Man models political listening, and in representing them both Shafaei performs what I call generous listening. The scene unfolds along these lines:

THE MAN: When I remember the second month of the camp, when, for the first time we met the Dima [sic] manager with his dear ass-sistant [sic], and the Australian versions of the word refugee that he used, then I can’t use this word and not laugh. [He laughs again and suddenly stops and starts acting like Dimia [sic] Manager.] DIMIA MANAGER: You people are not welcome in Australia, I am saying this on behalf of all Australian people. THE MAN: But we are refugees! DIMIA MANAGER: From now on don’t forget that you are queue jumpers, illegal immigrants . . . would you please pass me my Australian Oxford dictionary edited by Howard University, oh thanks . . . there we are, you are boat people . . . 166

THE MAN: But according to the convention we have the right to seek asylum in Australia, and Australia has already signed the convention?! DIMIA MANAGER: Unfortunately we don’t have that dictionary, that convention one here. (Shafaei, “Refugitive” 12)

Initially the scene seems to stage a lack of listening between two characters, however they are in fact listening and responding to one another. For instance, the DIMIA Manager is listening and responding to the Man, it’s just that he is doing so without addressing the substance of the Man’s concerns. This is what I call “conservative listening” or what Justine Lloyd calls “listening for disturbance (without being disturbed),” which occurs when “dominant social agents . . . appropriate subordinated communicative practices [such as listening] for the maintenance rather than shifting of entrenched power relations” (482, original emphasis). That is, they “liste[n] without reshaping social relations (482) or to paraphrase Salverson they listen someone’s story but without allowing their own story to be changed by it (“Performing” 183). Seeing conservative listening on stage serves two purposes. First, it contrasts with the listening in the opening scene, thus reminding us of the multiplicity of listening practices. In doing so, staging conservative listening also provides a necessary corrective to the notion that listening is an inherently ethical activity and reminds us that the ethics of listening can be rather more ambivalent than we sometimes allow. For the Man in the play, and for a subject caught in an economy of testimony more generally, the problem becomes how to respond to conservative listening. When the Man hears the Manager’s own mishearing of him, he does not raise his voice, but instead insists again and again that he be heard properly: “But we are refugees! . . . But according to the convention . . . But what about our situation? . . . Excuse me sir . . . but” (Shafaei, “Refugitive” 12–13). Later, in another encounter, the Man again asks the Manager:

THE MAN: At last after eight months we will have pens and paper in our dongas [demountables], to use for something other that [sic] to write requests to meet you?! . . . But what about our situation? How much longer shall we wait for an interview with the Department of Immigration? . . . How did you decide? Without any official interview in the presence of a solicitor, and hearing our reasons for seeking asylum, how did you reject us?!! . . . So isn’t it pre-judgement? (15)

167

This mode of contested and combative listening has yet to be theorised in either theatre or performance studies or indeed trauma studies. Instead, it resembles a mode that political theorist Susan Bickford has called “political listening.” In her book The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship, Bickford argues that political listening—and politics more broadly—proceeds through conflict, discomfort, and compromise. In one example, Bickford analyses a town meeting, in which people listen to each other and attempt to resolve what to do. She notes that in the process of listening “there are both attempts at persuasion and other contributions to collective figuring out. People ask questions, request clarification, affirm others’ statements, raise related issues, and express feelings” (50). In another example, Bickford analyses a protest she participated in. One woman from the other side approached Bickford, who writes: “I cannot remember her exact words, but what she said was something like ‘I want to hear what you have to say, I don’t want us to just yell at each other. Tell me what you want, why you’re doing what you’re doing.’” (172). Bickford notes that in contrast to therapeutic listening (though she does not call it this), political listening is “not a loving or peaceful act” (172). Indeed, the woman’s “face was tight and pinched . . . and what she was doing was clearly difficult for her, perhaps more so because she was the only one, on either side, who made that effort” (172). In both instances, political listening is done out of a combination of generosity and necessity. Here, then, in his encounters the DIMIA Manager, the Man performs political listening. His face, too, as Shafaei performs it, is “tight and pinched” and his form of listening is hardly “loving or peaceful.” Instead, he is hearing things he does not want to hear, he is responding to these statements with statements of his own, he is asking questions, seeking clarifications, and expressing his dismay. It is not passive, nor is it particularly open or loving, but it is listening. And in modelling “a different kind of listening,” the Man enables “a different kind of response” as we shall see (Salverson “Transgressive” 50). In the final scene, as the Man gets progressively weaker and weaker, the Man writhes on the floor and says:

THE MAN: I know that I am at the end of the way. I see myself very close to the lights . . . but I can’t finish before writing my . . . No, please, I tried my best by repeating all these stories for you to forget your suffering, and you were so kind to bear it, and to give me the strength to do all this, but please co- 168

operate with me for the last part, my dear stomach. I should speak my last words, maybe to the wind, to carry them to the first brave pen to write, to write the truths . . . please, please . . . [He forces himself to stand up, and he suddenly hears the sound of the wind, he gets inspired by it and follows it.] THE MAN: [Recites W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” minus the fourth and last stanzas and changing “German Jew” in the sixth stanza to “refugees.”] [Light fades until The Man is standing in a spotlight that is extinguished on the last word.] (18)

Though the second person address still echoes in our ears, it is the recitation of “Refugee Blues” that seems to perform yet another form of listening. More specifically, by aligning his experience with Jewish refugees’ experience in the Second World War, the Man seems to perform what rhetoric and composition studies scholar Krista Ratcliffe has termed metonymic listening. “Listening metonymically,” according to Ratcliffe, “signifies the rhetorical-listening move that listeners may make in public discussions when identifying a text or a person with a cultural group; specifically, this tactic invites listeners to assume that a text or a person is associated with—but not necessarily representative of—an entire cultural group” (78). Of course, it is arguable that this is happening anyway; however by identifying with Jewish refugees, the Man shifts the boundaries of the group with whom we might associate him. While the Man performs and facilitates therapeutic listening, eavesdropping, political listening, and metonymic listening, and the Manager performs conservative listening, in performing all of these characters and their various listening styles Shafaei himself enacts an extraordinarily generous listening. Even more generously, he enables his audience to perform their own versions of listening in the Question and Answer sessions. To put it otherwise, Shafaei does not simply perform antiphonic witnessing but enables the audience themselves to perform antiphonic witness. That is, he allows them not only to respond but also to vocalise their response. Such exchanges would not have been possible prior to the performance, but having had antiphonic witnessing modelled for us, these post-performance discussions became moments of call and response, listening and cross-cultural exchange.

Performing the Response: The Politics of Antiphonic Witnessing

When the performance concluded Shafaei would retreat backstage to change, before coming back to conduct a Question and Answer session with the audience. While the 169

performance went for approximately 40 minutes, these Question and Answer sessions often went for two hours or more. In other words, these post-performance discussions sometimes went for three times longer than the performance itself. Surprisingly, the reviews rarely mention this aspect of the performance. Indeed, as far as I can tell, only Rochelle Smith refers to them (“Review”; “Iran”). In addition, they have not been recorded as part of the official published script, meaning that they have gone largely unrecorded and thus unexamined. Yet these sessions were not only the lengthiest but also arguably the most significant part of the show; rather than being “post”- performance these encounters were actually an integral part of it. Drawing on my memory of the discussion that followed the particular performance that I saw, as well as Shafaei’s description of these sessions in interviews and at symposiums, it is possible to paint a general picture of what audiences were asking. And by considering what they were asking, it is possible in turn to deduce what sort of listening audiences were doing. Firstly, and perhaps most predictably, spectators asked Shafaei about his personal story—who he was, where he was from, what he did, why he had left, and why he had chosen to come to Australia. They also asked about his experiences in detention and whether he worried about those asylum seekers who were still there. Last but not least, these spectators also asked him about leaving his family and friends behind, his Temporary Protection Visa, and the possibility of being deported back to Iran. Read charitably, such inquiries would seem to indicate that these spectators were listening therapeutically. That is, they were listening for the “bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread, and conflicts that the trauma victim feels” (Felman and Laub 58). In doing so, these spectators were, as Salverson has said, “listening more for injury and violation than for resistance,” focusing on Shafaei’s trauma rather than on his resilience (“Transgressive” 46). Read more critically, however, these questions seem designed— consciously or otherwise—to do two things: (1) to demonstrate their speakers’ tolerance; and (2) to provoke an emotional response from the reticent Shafaei. Since almost all of this information was already in the accompanying program, we can only assume that in seeking spoken confirmation of his story, spectators were also seeking emotional confirmation. That is, they were seeking what Laura Grindstaff has called, in the context of television talk shows, an emotional “money shot,” whereby the guest offers “external, visible proof of [their] emotional state” through tears, screaming or 170

occasionally punching (“Producing” 169–70). Having been denied a traumatic reveal in the manner of Through the Wire, it was as if these spectators set about producing one. Nevertheless, this was not the only line of questioning and nor was therapeutic listening the only style of listening. Other spectators asked about the conditions of detention, e.g. the food, visiting hours, rules and regulations, and the practice of separation detention. Some also asked about immigration procedures, such as the refugee determination process, interviewing protocols, and the practice of screening (Smith, “Iran”). Perhaps these spectators were more informed generally or perhaps they simply heard the Man differently—either way their questions indicate that rather than listening therapeutically these spectators were listening metonymically. Like the Man himself at the end of the play, these audience members understood Shafaei’s story not necessarily as representative of but certainly contiguous with a wider community of asylum seekers and refugees. While therapeutic and metonymic listening were, to a certain extent, predictable responses, some other audience members pursued a surprisingly aggressive and confrontational approach. These spectators asked Shafaei who he was, why he was here, why he was telling everyone about his treatment in detention centres, and why he was not more grateful to Australia and its citizens. Shafaei himself has said: “I would get a lot of nasty questions—there were people who wanted to hammer me” (“Aesthetic” 28). To his credit, Shafaei welcomed these spectators, commenting: “As soon as those questions would come up, I would say ‘Yes!’ because I knew that I wasn’t ‘preaching to the converted.’ They were people who [had] sat there and now they were asking me questions—I have made that person think as well” (28). Initially I interpreted these interactions as instances of conservative listening where, like the Managers in the play, “dominant social agents . . . [were] appropriat[ing] subordinated communicative practices [such as listening] for the maintenance rather than shifting of entrenched power relations” (Lloyd 482). That is, audience members were “listening for disturbance (without being disturbed)” (482). Yet, it is clear from their aggression that they actually were disturbed. How then might we characterise this sort of listening? Upon further reflection, and partially inspired by Shafaei’s own patient and generous response, I realised that such encounters might be moments of political listening, as articulated by Bickford and modelled in Refugitive by the Man. Like the Man, who constantly interrupts, contradicts and disagrees with the Manager, these spectators were “ask[ing] questions, request[ing] clarification, affirm[ing] others’ 171

statements, rais[ing] related issues and express[ing] feelings” (Bickford 50). This listening “was not a loving or peaceful act” and nor did it pay heed to Shafaei’s potential trauma, but it was nevertheless engaged (172). Like the woman at the protest, whose face was “tight and pinched,” these audience members were effectively saying to Shafaei “I want to hear what you have to say, I don’t want us to just yell at each other. Tell me what you want, why you’re doing what you’re doing” (172). Even more intriguingly, they were saying these things to each other, so that “there [were] both attempts at persuasion and other contributions to collective figuring out” (50). In modelling “a different kind of listening” in his performance, Shafaei enabled “a different kind of response” in his post-performance discussions (Salverson, “Transgressive” 50). This response is robust, fraught with risk for both parties, perhaps less ethical but also more politically effective. Significantly, these various types of listening did not emerge concurrently but rather consecutively. In the performance I attended, the listening initially happened in the therapeutic modes. Then, more general, metonymically oriented questions were asked. Then, an aggressive question was raised, which seemed conservative but actually facilitated political listening, as those who had been listening therapeutically started to counter the arguments raised by more aggressive audience members. Shafaei confirms this general pattern in his interview with Smith, where he told her: “It’s a kind of victory to see how much people learn. When I started, the audience asked what food you eat in detention centres. Now they are asking about immigration procedure” (Smith “Iran”). This echoes his earlier comment to Harper that, “In the question and answer sessions, I can see that the play has made them think. I can see they have been analysing the situation, so I can imagine that when they go away they might decide to become more involved in this issue” (49). This is not to suggest that listening always happens in this order, or even that it needs to; rather it is to suggest—as Wendy Chun does—that while therapeutic listening may represent an end in itself in the context of counselling, it can only represent a beginning when listening takes place within the public sphere (161). To put it another way, this interaction can be seen as an instance of what we might call antagonistic antiphony, whereby antiphony occurs as and through an argument. While Feldman and Seremetakis tend to downplay this confrontational aspect of antiphony, it has been discussed elsewhere by Paul Gilroy. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy writes—after Toni Morrison—that: 172

The intense and often bitter dialogues which make the black arts movement move offer a small reminder that there is a democratic, communitarian moment enshrined in the practice of antiphony which symbolises and anticipates (but does not guarantee) new, non-dominating social relationships. Lines between self and other are blurred and special forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others. Antiphony is the structure that hosts these essential encounters. (79)

In other words, antiphony is a form that is capable of both facilitating and containing conflict. The concept of antagonistic antiphony asks us, yet again, to rethink what we call the ethics of witnessing. These are not necessarily ethical encounters, indeed they are aggressive, combative and confronting, but they are nevertheless vital and they enable conversations that might not otherwise take place. While all of these vocal audience members can be considered antiphonic witnesses, what of those spectators who, like me, sat and listened but did not contribute to the discussion? How can we account for these silent audience members and can we still call them witnesses? I think we can, given that they too have sat and listened to the primary witness, i.e. Shafaei, testify. Moreover, they have also watched and listened to the testimonial encounter between the primary witness and various secondary witnesses (Shafaei’s interlocutors). In Chapter 1’s scheme, they have become tertiary witnesses, which is to say witnesses to “the act of witnessing as it takes place between characters” (Malpede, “Theatre” 275). This time, however, they have become witnesses to the act of witnessing as it takes place between the actor and spectators. To put it another way, these audience members have become eavesdroppers. In Rokem’s scheme, the eavesdropper is a character on stage with which the spectator identifies. In the Question and Answer session, however, the spectator does not simply identify with the eavesdropper, but rather becomes the eavesdropper, listening in on a conversation between an Iranian asylum seeker and his Australian audience. This is where Rokem’s account of eavesdropping might be usefully supplemented by Krista Ratcliffe’s in her book Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, where she proposes eavesdropping as a way of listening cross- culturally. Though eavesdropping is typically defined as “to listen secretly to the private conversations of others,” Ratcliffe retrieves other etymologies, finding

Old English etymologies of eaves suggesting “edge” and “margin” and “border” . . . an archaic definition of eavesdropping suggesting “to learn or overhear” . . . [and] a Middle English definition of eavesdropper suggesting “one who stands on 173

the eavesdrop [the spot where water drops from the eaves] in order to listen to conversations inside the house.” (104)

Hence, for Ratcliffe, eavesdropping emerges as a composite practice, which incorporates “choosing to stand outside . . . in an uncomfortable spot . . . on the border of knowing and not knowing . . . granting others the inside position . . . listening to learn” (104–05). In this way, eavesdropping becomes “a rhetorical tactic of purposely positioning oneself on the edge of one’s knowing so as to overhear and learn from others and . . . from oneself” (105). Ratcliffe suggests that we can eavesdrop in everyday life by listening to our students talk before class, reading a scholarly text on an unfamiliar subject, or viewing an advertisement for a political candidate we dislike and trying to “heed why its addressed audience finds it so compelling” (107). In this way, “eavesdropping enhances critical thinking” and encourages us to “better assess [or reassess] the situation” (107). Thinking critically does not mean thinking contemptuously and Ratcliffe cautions that “eavesdropping demands an accompanying ethic of care” (105). More recently, Australian sociologist Tanja Dreher has argued that more than “care” there actually needs to be permission, where possible. Hence she elaborates her experience as a white scholar facilitating—but not speaking at—a workshop on Indigenous and Islamic feminisms as “eavesdropping with permission” (“Eavesdropping”). Here, in the aftermath of Refugitive, Shafaei creates a public space in which we are given tacit permission to listen to each other and in which his own “ethic of care” encourages—though it does not guarantee—a similar ethic in his audience. In other words, he creates a space for the apparently paradoxical practice of “ethical eavesdropping.” In ethical eavesdropping we are visible as eavesdroppers: we sit in the audience, surrounded by spectators who are listening therapeutically, metonymically, conservatively and politically, revealing through our silence our own preferred mode of listening. Though we may be brought into the action like Rokem’s eavesdropper character, for example if another spectator suddenly asks our opinion about something, for the most part we are permitted to stay on the periphery, “purposely positioning [ourselves] on the edge of [our] knowing so as to overhear and learn from others and . . . from oneself” (105). The visible presence of eavesdroppers in the audience prompted some audience members to ask about other modes of eavesdropping, though they did not necessarily frame it as such. For instance, at the performance I attended one woman 174

asked Shafaei why he was performing the show and if anything could happen to him. Though the inquiry might have been heard as a symptom of therapeutic listening, it also produced the realisation in other spectators that the government might be listening in and that he (Shafaei), and we, could potentially pay a price. The concept of ethical eavesdropping might also be framed as a sort of silent antiphonic witnessing—but can there be such a thing? The possibility of silent antiphony, or of silence within antiphony, has so far gone unexamined. In Feldman’s analysis of the antiphonic witnessing in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he focuses on the call from the primary witnesses on the stand and the response from the secondary witnesses in the audience (“Memory”). Similarly, in her analysis of the antiphonic witnessing at work in Inner Maniat women’s laments, Seremetakis concentrates on the call of the soloist and the response of the collective (Last 99–125). Likewise, in his analysis of antiphony in musical performance, specifically jazz and hip-hop, Gilroy focuses on occasions where the distinction between performer and spectator collapses as “the performer dissolves into the crowd [and] [t]ogether, they collaborate in a creative process, governed by formal and informal, democratic rules” (Black 200). None of these scenarios leave room for tertiary witnesses, i.e. for participants who sit silently in the audience, listening to both the call and the response, watching both the primary and secondary witnesses. Yet tertiary witnesses were an important presence at the post-performance discussion of Refugitive, precisely because they were not speaking but simply listening. In the same way that the bystander to the accident, or the third party, sometimes has a better memory of the event as a whole, it may be that the third party to the witnessing encounter can in fact remember it better, i.e. with more specificity and accuracy, than either the primary or secondary witnesses. In this way, tertiary witnesses serve an important record-keeping function because they remember not only the testimony but also the testimonial event. However we frame their witnessing, whether as a mode of ethical eavesdropping or silent antiphony, these spectators of Refugitive require us to rethink two of the truisms of theatrical witnessing: (1) that witnessing is a sort of “active” spectatorship; and (2) that it is a sort “ethical” spectatorship. On the issue of activity, conventional definitions would presumably dismiss silent spectators as “passive” spectators. Yet this analysis demonstrates that they are anything but: they may listen therapeutically, metonymically, politically or through a complicated combination of all three; they may 175

experience identification as well as disidentification or distance; they may turn around to listen to an audience member behind them or they may move closer to the front of the auditorium in order to better hear Shafaei’s answers. In addition, once they have left the theatre, it may be they who retestify to other tertiary witnesses rather than the secondary witnesses, who may consider their witnessing work over and done with. When, where and what do definitions of active spectatorship take as their measure? Similarly, on the point of ethics, eavesdropping is routinely dismissed as an ethically dubious practice, as Ratcliffe points out. Yet, both Seremetakis and Gilroy have written about the “ethics of antiphony” (Last 99–125 ; “It’s” 94). In each case, the actions of the silent spectators remain the same but their status as ethical or otherwise changes according to our interpretive frame. Once again, witnessing emerges as an ethically ambivalent practice. Beyond ethics and activity, we also need to think more broadly about the viability and value of ranking witnesses. Can we really say that one sort of witnessing is more or less active or ethical than another? If that form of witnessing is more active, is it necessarily also more ethical? Even if we can make such an assessment, does it have to become a judgement? Finally, having examined the witnessing work of both vocal and silent spectators, we also need to examine what happened in the case of spectators who did not stay to participate in the Question and Answer sessions, as was apparently the case with most critics. Can these absent, or exeunt, spectators still be called witnesses? Initially, it seems obvious that they cannot—their departure from the scene seems to indicate a refusal to witness any further. Like the various managers in the play, these spectators have listened to as much as they are obliged to but no more. Yet perhaps they can be construed as witnesses, though not in the way they or we might expect. Here I am thinking of Shoshana Felman’s analysis of Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, in which the protagonist hears a suicide but does not see it. In her reading, Felman suggests that to listen to an event is to miss it, writing:

In The Fall, the event is witnessed insofar as it is not experienced, insofar as it is literally missed. The suicide in effect is not seen and the falling in itself is not perceived: what is perceived is the woman before the fall, and the sound of her body striking the water after that fall; there is a seeing which takes place before the occurrence and a hearing which takes place after it, but too late. The Fall bears witness, paradoxically enough, to the missing of the fall. (Felman and Laub 168–69)

176

When the protagonist remains silent instead of reporting what he heard, Felman argues that such a silence should not be read as the absence of speech but as the “positive avoidance—and erasure—of one’s hearing, the positive assertion of a deafness, in the refusal not merely to know but to acknowledge—and henceforth respond or answer to—what is being heard or witnessed. In this defeat of the presence of the witness to reality, silence is the active voiding of the hearing, the voiding of the act of witnessing” (183). In their missing of what turns out to be the longest and most significant part of the Refugitive, and their resultant failure to report and record it, these critics arguably become primary witnesses. Like the protagonist of The Fall, they saw the beginning of the performance, and they may have heard its echoes afterwards, but they did not see and thus could not record the event itself. Through their avoiding of the event, they also attempted to void it; the event escaped them and to a large extent the historical record. Once again, this gives us pause for thought about the current hierarchies that operate in many accounts of witnessing. Is the primary witness really the best or most “ethical” witness here? Do they really have a special and privileged knowledge? Does departure constitute “active” spectatorship? Though the critics’ missing of the post-performance Question and Answer session might be read as a refusal to witness, it might also be read more optimistically as an instance of belated antiphonic witnessing. The possibility of belated antiphony has yet to be examined, in part because theories of antiphony insist on the spatiotemporal copresence of the performer and spectator. Yet both Seremetakis and Feldman allow for the fact that in testifying, the primary witness is performing an antiphonic response to the zero-degree witness, albeit belatedly. Or, to put it slightly differently, the primary witness is both calling for (on behalf of, in place of) and responding to the zero-degree witness. Might not secondary and tertiary witnesses also perform a sort of belated antiphony, whereby they miss or mishear the original call, only to hear its echoes later on? Indeed, as in Chapter 3, it may be precisely the delay of these echoes that prompts the response, the belated blush and the retelling of their missing of the testimony.

The Limits of Listening

When listening to trauma and testimony we may feel that we are listening at the limits however, it is important to remember that there are also limits to listening. Listening is 177

easily coopted, as Lloyd reminds us, whether by governments on the “listening tours” or by corporations seeking to “listen” to their employees. Moreover, listening does not operate in isolation; we are almost always seeing as well as listening. For this reason, it is important to note the ways in which Refugitive did not manage to shift our attention from visibility to audibility. This was most evident in reviewers’ response to Shafaei’s looks. Numerous reviews commented on how young, fit and handsome he was. For instance, Harper wrote: “Shafaei Shafei [sic] is young, fit-looking, quietly spoken. He carries himself with the confidence you’d expect from someone acclaimed in his field from an early age” (“Dramatic”). Similarly, Smith commented: “Shafaei is a good- looking, intelligent, passionate and extremely physical performer” (“Review”). And Susan Wyndham, reporting on the Bryon Bay Writers Festival, wrote: “Among the festival’s ‘discoveries’ was the Iranian playwright Shahin Shafaei (pictured), who came to Australia via Malaysia on a people-smuggler’s boat and spent two years in detention. Handsome, articulate and funny, he gave a taste of his first play in English, Refugitive” (“Explosive”). Even though their comments are complimentary, they are indicative of a spectatorial habit, an economy of visibility, which has come to structure the relationship between asylum seekers and Australians—“they” are there to be looked at and “we” are here to look, appraise, and perhaps accept. Nevertheless, Shafaei was not a naïve performer, oblivious to what he was doing. Like the witnesses at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he did not appear as a “disabled and politically naïve witness, susceptible to opportunistic objectification strategies” but as an “engage[d] and mobilise[d subject] who ha[d] been a political acto[r] in [his] own right” (Feldman 178). Instead of displaying his body in order to authenticate his trauma and testimony, for example through the display of scars, Shafaei displayed his in order to authenticate his humanity. Indeed, as he commented at an academic symposium: “I could drink beer like them, I could swear, I could cry, I could sweat: everything was very normal!” (“Aesthetic” 29).

The Critic as Antiphonic Witness

In several interviews, Shafaei has indicated that rather than conceiving of Refugitive as a call to action, he first conceived of it as a response to a prior call from the population. For example, he told Harper: “My . . . reason for writing the play was to answer questions. I know Australian people wonder: Why do these people harm themselves? 178

Why do they go on hunger strike? I try to make them imagine: What would you do in that situation?” (“Dramatic”). Similarly, in another interview with Smith, he said: “I wanted to answer people’s questions. I am asked ‘Why do people go on hunger strikes?’ ‘Why do they hurt themselves?’ I let them decide if they were there would they do the same?” (“Iran”). Thus, in contrast to many playwrights of the period, who conceived of their plays as a call to action and then presumed that their audiences would respond, Shafaei conceived of his play as a response to a prior call. Furthermore, he then provided his audiences with a forum in which they could issue additional calls and he could provide additional and multiple responses. In doing so, Shafaei completely reconfigured the economy of the gift. In her article “Looking for Esfrail: Witnessing ‘Refugitive’ Bodies in I’ve got something to show you,” which takes its title from Shafaei’s play but does not analyse it, Alison Jeffers notes:

“Giving” and “taking” are particularly sensitive concepts in refugee discourse due to the negative image of refugees created by the . . . media where asylum seekers are often characterised as takers, “scroungers” or as “desperate” people interested only in receiving benefits and free health care. The counter arguments to this stresses what refugees have to offer and, historically, what they have already given to . . . society and the economy. This is, perhaps, just as problematic, maintaining an unequal balance of power between the refugee and the host nation as well as setting up certain expectations against which all refugees may be measured and where those lacking may face even greater vilification. (96)

Similarly, in applied theatre studies Helen Nicholson has noted the “coercive function of gift-giving,” pointing out ways in which “self-interest plays a part in many exchanges” (161). Working from Derrida’s notion that the practice of gift giving always serves to locate that gift within particular systems of value, Nicholson urges practitioners to remain alert to the power relationships implied in the language of giving voice (161). Here, rather than an Australian theatre practitioner giving voice to the voiceless and Australian spectators then granting those voices an audience, Shafaei simply grants himself a voice. In addition, he also grants the dead, or otherwise absent, a voice. Even more intriguingly, through his Question and Answer sessions, it is he who grants us an audience. In doing so, Shafaei incorporates his spectators within his particular system of value, albeit briefly. Similarly, though this chapter might be read as a response to the call of Refugitive, it might also be read as a call to other theorists of witnessing, antiphony, and now 179

antiphonic witnessing. In antiphonic witnessing the actor models, enacts and enables multiple forms of listening for secondary witnesses. That is, the actor models the very multiplicity of secondary witnessing itself, which has often been theorised as a stable or singular practice. Thus in the same way that Gilroy’s “writing gives by participating in the culture that has given him an enabling practice” (Chang 154), this chapter hopes that its performance of antiphony will become a performance of “antephony,” in the sense that it is ante- or before the ensuing conversation. 180

Chapter 6

Caveat Spectator Performing Juridical, Political, and Ontological False Witness in CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)

The question is how to respond to these false witnesses in a way that reopens the possibility of witnessing, of responsibility. —Kelly Oliver

The . . . strategy is not to challenge the false witness, but to make the silence speak from within and from around the false witness: the silence within each of these testimonies; the silence between various silences and various testimonies; the irremediable silence of the dead; . . . the silence of the ready-made cultural discourses pretending to account for the [event]; and above all, . . . [the survivor’s] silence . . . in the middle of the talkative, delirious, self-complacent . . . crowd. —Shoshana Felman

On October 7 2001, on the first weekend of a federal election campaign, Australians woke to reports that another asylum seeker boat, the SIEV 4, had been intercepted. This time, however, the navy had met resistance. In a widely aired interview, the then Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, stated “a number of children have been thrown overboard . . . with the intention of putting us under duress. I regard these as some of the most disturbing practices that I have come across in the time that I have been involved in public life.” He added: “People would not have come wearing life jackets unless they planned action of this sort” (Marr and Wilkinson 186). For his part, the Prime Minister John Howard added that “I want to make that very clear, we are a humane nation but we’re not a nation that’s going to be intimidated by this kind of behaviour” (187). In interviews over the next few days, he would say things such as “I don’t want people like that in Australia. Genuine refugees don’t do that. . . . They hang onto their children” (189). When doubts were raised about the reports, the Minister for Defence Peter Reith, released photographs which he claimed proved that children had been thrown into the water. Six weeks later, on November 10 2001, the government won a “famous victory,” largely on the issue of border protection. Still, doubts persisted and in February 2002 the Senate—the balance of power then being held by the minority parties, the Greens, the Democrats, and One Nation— established the Senate Select Committee into A Certain Maritime Incident. Eight 181

months later, in October 2002, the committee delivered its final report, in which it made several findings: (1) no child had been thrown overboard; (2) that the photographs which purported to represent children being thrown overboard on October 7 were actually taken the following day, on October 8, while the SIEV 4 was sinking; and (3) that while the initial report had reached the government within minutes, the correction did not reach the government for more than a month. In addition, the report noted that there were a number of “unusual” aspects about the case, including the reporting arrangements, the leaking of the interception, and a “heated” conversation between the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff and the Chief of the Defence Force, during which the Chief of Staff insisted that the SIEV’s passengers were not to land on Christmas Island (xxv). In the opinion of the committee, these “all point to the likelihood that the Government had decided to make an example of SIEV 4” (xxv). Coming to these conclusions was not easy: each of the key witnesses who might have been held accountable failed to appear. Current ministers were not called before the committee, former ministers were called but did not appear, even ministerial advisors declined to attend proceedings. Nor could the asylum seekers aboard the boat appear, as they were being held on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Those witnesses who did testify, and there were 56 of them from the navy, the public service, and elsewhere, often pleaded forgetfulness, feigned ignorance or simply obfuscated, replying in riddles. In essence, then, even as the Senate sought to investigate one scene of false witness (the initial “mis-seeing” and “misreporting” of the “children overboard”), it became—despite its best efforts—another scene of false witness. The problem for concerned citizens then, becomes, in Kelly Oliver’s words, “how to respond to these false witnesses in a way that reopens the possibility of witnessing, of responsibility” (Witnessing 108). Though several responses have been made, chiefly through Patrick Weller’s book Don’t Tell the Prime Minister and David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s book Dark Victory, only one of these has been theatrical—version 1.0’s CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). This tribunal play distils the Committee’s 56 witnesses, 140 sitting hours, and 2,220 pages of Hansard down to five witnesses, 90 minutes, and approximately 23 pages. This transcript material is organised into four acts, which are admittedly more obvious on the page than they were on the stage. Premiering in March 2004, at Sydney’s Performance Space, before touring to Canberra in October of that year, the play is less an attempt to perform true witness and more an attempt, in Shoshana 182

Felman’s terms “to make the silence speak from within and around the false witness” (266). Unlike the plays in the previous chapters, CMI has already benefited from both mainstream and academic attention. Within the mainstream press, Mark Hopkins of the Sydney Morning Herald praised it as “a passionate, often humorous and ultimately disturbing deconstruction of politicians at work” (“Real”). The critic for the Sun Herald, Colin Rose, called it “ingeniously staged and weirdly funny theatre” (“Return”). Linda Jaivin also singled it out for praise in her survey article “Theatre of the Displaced” in the Bulletin magazine.1 In addition, the play has also received attention in academic publications. The script itself was published in the Australasian Drama Studies journal, with an introduction from the reviewer for the Australian John McCallum. In the same issue, company dramaturg, Paul Dwyer, and company producer and performer, David Williams, also published articles (Dwyer, “Inner”; Williams, “Political”). For obvious reasons, these articles tend to focus on the experience of its creators. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo briefly analyse the play from the other side of the stage, in their book Performance and Cosmopolitics, but their analysis is too short to shed much light (202–03). The aim of this chapter, then, is to conduct a close reading of CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) in order to analyse the forms of spectatorship that the performance elicits and enables. Or, to put it more simply, this chapter aims to analyse the ways in which CMI enacts and explores different modes of witnessing and spectatorship and other points of intersection. In doing so this chapter continues to extend the vocabulary and theory of witnessing set out in the five preceding chapters. Like Chapters 3, 4, and 5 before it, this chapter asks: “What form of witnessing do we find in performance?” This time, however, it asks: “What form of witnessing do we find in tribunal plays in general and in CMI in particular?” Once again, this is not simply a matter of imposing witnessing theory on the play; on the contrary, it is clear that producers and spectators alike perceived it in terms of witnessing. However, it also clear that they did not see it in the same straightforward terms as they saw other plays of the period, such as Through the Wire. For example, Dwyer has argued that:

1 For other favourable reviews in the mainstream press, see also John McCallum in the Australian (“Human”), and the anonymous review “Awash” in the Canberra Times as well as Alanna Maclean’s review (“Verbatim”) in that same publication. In the industry press, see Bryoni Trezise’s review in RealTime (“Version”) and Rebecca Meston in Artlook (“Certain”). For online reviews, see Andrew Filmer’s review (“CMI”) on Vibewire and Joe Woodward’s review on Canberra Review (“CMI”). 183

However much an audience might be wanting to lean into a performance about these issues, ready and willing to bear witness to experiences recounted by someone whose embodied presence becomes the warrant for a sense that some authentic dialogue is occurring, version 1.0 was not in a position to offer this and was never so inclined. There is a place for the theatre of witnessing, I am convinced. There is also a place for theatre that gives the audience what they want but never all that they want and never exactly the way they might think they want it. (134)

In other words, the company saw the play as sitting alongside the tradition of the “theatre of witness” rather than within it. In the same article, he states that the company decided that “we would make a piece of performance based on verbatim transcripts . . . but this would not be a straightforward piece of documentary drama” (131). Unlike other exponents of tribunal theatre, such as London’s Tricycle Theatre, version 1.0 would not aim for verisimilitude.2 Instead, the company would forgo realism in favour of the “strategies of post-Brechtian, postmodern performance works such as those of Forced Entertainment or the Wooster Group” (131). For their part, spectators also recognised that the play was “break[ing] the mould of verbatim theatre’s typically earnest style” (Jaivin). John McCallum, for instance, described it as a “mock-verbatim piece” in which the “actions keep subverting the ‘authenticity’ of the testimony” (“CMI”) and Keith Gallasch noted the paradox that although it “is not verbatim theatre . . . it is a performance devised from the transcripts” (“Children”). Similarly, Gilbert and Lo have called it a combination of “self-reflexive verbatim techniques meshed with physical theatre” (202). In a slightly different take, Bryoni Trezise suggested in her review that “If performance can ‘do’ politics, [then] creating a world in which Senators play their own witnesses is surely how it should be done” (“Version”). In other words, both producers and spectators understood the play as having a particularly self-conscious, reflexive, and resistant relationship with witnessing. This makes CMI a particularly rich and suggestive “object” through which to examine the problem of witnessing in general, and the problem of false witnessing in particular.

2 In her article about Tricycle Theatre’s play The Colour of Justice, Janelle Reinelt describes its “[c]areful verisimilitude” (82). She even says: “The play seemed rather dull, dramatically speaking, old-fashioned in its dramaturgical techniques: a meticulous recreation of surface realism, it staged a simulation of the Macpherson Inquiry, even to the layout of the hearing room, with its computer monitors on desks flashing images of the official documents. The dialogue was based strictly on the transcripts, and the acting was representational and understated in style and function” (“Towards” 79–80). More recently, she has commented that “tribunal plays have been criticised for the hyper-real bore they sometimes are” (“Promise” 14). She adds that the form seems to work “in spite of its seemingly outdated dramaturgy” (14). 184

False Witnessing in Theatre and Performance Studies

Within theatre and performance studies, the problem of false witnessing has yet to be properly investigated either as a mode of mis-seeing or as a mode of mis-speaking. Perhaps we are reluctant to do so because we might jeopardise claims that theatre has a particular ability to witness and to produce others as witnesses. Nevertheless, instances of what we might call false witnessing have appeared in the work of Diana Taylor, Peggy Phelan, and Freddie Rokem. We have already examined Taylor’s concept of percepticide, which she defines as “the self-blinding of the general population,” however this might be reframed as an instance of false witnessing, whereby witnesses cannot and will not admit to what they are seeing (Disappearing 123). More recently, Taylor has also examined the operation of “false identifications,” specifically in the case of minority communities mourning the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (Archive 133– 60). This might also be seen as an occasion of false witnessing, whereby subjects misread or misrecognise a social and political situation, in part through a “promiscuous”, almost contagious, mode of identification (155). In this way, subjects find themselves feeling, or more likely consuming, an event and an emotion that is not really theirs (157). Of course, Peggy Phelan might argue that vision itself is the result of self-blinding to an extent. Indeed, Taylor acknowledges as much by having Phelan’s phrase “learning to see is training careful blindness” as the epigraph to her chapter on percepticide (Phelan, Unmarked 13; Taylor, Disappearing 119). Elsewhere, however, Phelan has examined more specific instances of false witnessing, though she does not call it this. Think, for instance, of the scene at the start of Chapter 2, where Ronald Reagan identified as a soldier in the Second World War, claiming that he had been to the concentration camps when in fact he had only seen footage of them. Once again, a spectator has misrecognised his subject position within a particular scene and in this case claimed a subject position that is not rightfully his. Nevertheless, Phelan argues that Reagan’s misreading opens up a profoundly paradoxical space in which to think through ethics, aesthetics, and spectatorship. Indeed, says Phelan, Reagan reminds us that “[w]e need to develop an ethics whose first allegiance may not be to the empirically true, an ethics that requires a radical conception of what it means to remain ‘alive to’ the event, even when the wire service, the original source of the information has ceased” 185

(“Performance and Death” 119). In other words, false witnessing may be an ethically ambivalent but an affectively significant practice. Like Taylor and Phelan, Rokem does not discuss false witnessing per se but he nevertheless deals with issues of obscured vision. For example, in his book he analyses what he calls “screen-scenes,” which occur when “one of the fictional characters is secretly spying on one or several of the other characters” (Performing 203). Since they cannot see everything, they inevitably misinterpret what they are seeing and hearing and because “the audience in the auditorium also knows about this arrangement, it creates an obvious dramatic irony” (203). In some plays, for example in the arras scene of Hamlet, this irony heightens the tragedy; in others, for example in Tartuffe, this irony heightens the comedy (203–05). Whether in comedy or tragedy, screen-scenes tend to position both the character as a false primary witness, i.e. as a victim or perpetrator, and the spectator as a true primary witness, i.e. as an all-seeing bystander. While each of these accounts deals with witnessing as a mode of seeing, they do not contemplate witnessing as a mode of testifying. To put it otherwise, Taylor, Phelan, and Rokem conceive of false witnessing in terms of the accident, but they have yet to consider it in terms of the account. Yet surely any complex and nuanced account of theatrical witnessing must come to terms with the ambivalent affiliations of rehearsal, perjury and performance. This is where trauma studies might, once again, provide some useful tools because, unlike theatre and performance studies, trauma studies has considered the issue of false witnessing in some detail and from a variety of perspectives: personal (Primo Levi); philosophical (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Kelly Oliver); historical (Dominick LaCapra); and psychoanalytic (Shoshana Felman and Robert Jay Lifton), among others. Rather than rehearsing their arguments here, I draw on each of these scholars as I analyse CMI, in order to argue that we find not one but three theories of false witnessing within the play, which I call juridical, political, and ontological.

186

Prologue to Perjury: Juridical False Witness

CMI begins with bodies:

Figure 8. version 1.0, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr

In order to enter the theatre, we have to pick our way over five naked performers who lie with their arms crossed over their chests, their toes tied and tagged as if bound for the morgue. They are strange, still and silent, uncanny and for the time being unreadable. 187

When we finally take our seats, we see a small child standing on a narrow forestage, backed by a large glossy Australian flag and accompanied by an adult minder. The minder (Stephen Klinder) addresses the child as Mr Reith and appears to be testing him on a lie detector. The scene unfolds like this:

INTERVIEWER: Come on, Mr Reith. Mr Reith, this is the lie detector. I’ll just turn that on for you. Do you want to just talk into the microphone and say “Hello, I’m Mr Reith?” MR REITH: Hello, I’m Mr Reith. (version 1.0 145)

This raises a laugh from the audience, who can see all too clearly that this five-year-old boy (or girl on some nights) is not Mr Peter Reith, the former Minister for Defence. The interview continues:

INTERVIEWER: Very good. Now Mr Reith, you have something to say don’t you? MR REITH: Yes. Well, it did happen. The fact is the children were thrown into the water. We got that report within hours of that happening. Given that there are people who weren’t there of course, you know, claiming all sorts of, making all sorts of exaggerated claims. INTERVIEWER (VIRGINIA TRIOLI): Mr Reith, there’s nothing in this photo that indicates these people either jumped or were pushed. MR REITH: No, well you are now questioning the veracity of what has been said. Those photos are produced as evidence of the fact that there were people in the water. You’re questioning whether it even happened, that’s the first point and I just want to answer that by saying that these photos show absolutely without question whatsoever that there are children in the water. Now we have a number of people, RAN [Royal Australian Navy] people who were there who reported the children were thrown into the water. Now you may want to question the veracity of reports of the Royal Australian Navy. I don’t and I didn’t either but I have subsequently been told that they have also got film. That film is apparently on HMAS Adelaide. I have not seen it myself and apparently the quality of it is not very good, and it’s infrared or something but I am told that someone has looked at it and it is an absolute fact, children were thrown into the water. So do you still question it? INTERVIEWER: Thank you Minister Reith. That was much better than you did last time. See you later Mr Reith. (The small child exits.) Unfortunately, Mr Reith wasn’t able to stay with us for the inquiry, as he had to catch a flight to London. (145–46)

Once again, the audience laughs as the child walks off the stage, never to be seen again. In staging an actor playing a character who appears to be rehearsing false testimony, this opening scene inaugurates the first of the play’s many investigations into what it is to bear false witness. Initially, and most obviously, the scene stages the 188

relationship between rehearsal and perjury, which is arguably the most commonly understood form of false witness. Of course, “any witness can make a mistake in good faith; he can have limited, false perception, one that in any number of ways is misleading about what he is speaking about” (Derrida, Sovereignties 83). However, as Augustine Brannigan and Michael Lynch point out, “In law, perjury is a very special construction of error. Unlike inadvertent memory distortions, observational impediments, witness anxiety, or fatigue, it is culpable deception and is defined as wilfully misleading the court by not telling the truth under oath” (118). In other words, perjury is defined by intent, specifically the intent to deceive. Or, as Ricoeur puts it, “false testimony cannot at all be reduced to an error in the account of things seen: false testimony is a lie in the heart of the witness” (128). Unfortunately, intent is notoriously difficult to prove, as Brannigan and Lynch explain. In their analysis of a trial for perjury, they argue that without corroborating evidence or a confession (which raises its own set of problems), the witness’s intent is judged not only by what they say but also by the way in which they say it. The judge is more likely to convict witnesses of perjury when they give delayed or qualified responses, express apparent confusion about the questions put to them, or agree with the prosecution in a hypothetical or minimal way. CMI’s prologue attempts to prove Reith’s perjury, or his intention to deceive, in two ways. First, it defamiliarises his testimony by having a small child read it in a slightly sing-song voice. Through this defamiliarisation, we hear the indicators of perjury even more clearly than we did at the time: the rejection of the premise of the question (“well now you are questioning the veracity of what has been said . . . You’re questioning whether it even happened”); the qualified response (“these photos show absolutely without question whatsoever that there were children in the water”); and the minimal agreements (agrees with Trioli that some evidence is less conclusive, “I have not seen it myself and apparently the quality of it is not very good, and it’s infrared or something”). Once again, we hear the witness’s rejections, prevarications, equivocations, and ellipses. Then, at the end of the scene, what appears to be a lie detector test is revealed as a rehearsal: “Thank you Minister Reith. That was much better than you did last time” (version 1.0 145). Thus rather than showing the witnessing in the act of perjuring, the scene actually shows the witness in the act of planning to perjure. That is, the scene clearly demonstrates his intent. 189

While the scene may be read as the prologue to perjury, it also suggests a broader theory of false witnessing which is not limited to lying under oath. In showing Reith rehearsing his lie, CMI also shows him coming to terms with it, even coming to believe it. This recalls Primo Levi’s argument that the line between witnessing in good and bad faith is blurry. In his analysis of the confessions, depositions, and admissions of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Levi suggests that:

The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one; in repeating its description to others but also to themselves, the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours, and man ends by fully believing the story he has told so many times and still continues to tell, polishing and retouching here and there the details which are least credible or incongruous or incompatible with the acquired picture of historically accepted events: initial bad faith has become good faith. The silent transition from falsehood to self-deception is useful: anyone who lies in good faith is better off, he recites his part better, is more easily believed by the judge, the historian, the reader, his wife and his children. (Drowned 15)

Levi adds that such witnesses are “most certainly false, but we are unable to detect whether the subject does or does not know he is lying” (17). Here, then, is another form of false witness, which we might call juridical false witness, where the blind spot of the witness becomes the blind spot of the justice system itself. There is no way in which we can judge the intentions of such witnesses. Though we may be able to confirm their actions, by checking with other witnesses, documents, corpus delicti, and historically accepted contexts, we cannot confirm their intent. The legal system cannot account for the witness who believes their own lie and as a result, it cannot convict them of perjury. Intriguingly, Levi employs the language of acting in order to articulate his argument. There are hints of it in the passage above, where the witness starts with “an invented scenario” and through repetition comes to “recit[e] his part better,” so that he is “more easily believed” by his audience members. This language becomes even more explicit when Levi states: “Supposing, absurdly, that the liar should for one instant be truthful, he himself would not know how to answer the dilemma; in the act of lying he is an actor totally fused with his part, he is no longer distinguishable from it” (17). When Levi’s argument is placed alongside the arguments of Derrida and Ricoeur, both of whom argue that the false witness must be aware of what they are doing, they begin to bear more than a passing resemblance to theories of acting. More specifically, they replicate “the classical ‘paradox’ of the actor or comedian who may be seen either as entirely ‘into’ or identified with their role or as playing it in a distant, aloof manner (or 190

both in some obscure or oscillating manner)” (LaCapra, History 87). The problem that remains for the actual actor is: Is one type of witness, or one type of actor, “truer” than the other? Can one sort of false witness be “better” than the other? This, of course, leads us back to the small actor on the stage before us. From the point of view of the spectator, all actors in verbatim, documentary and tribunal plays are false witnesses since they repeat testimony that is not theirs (with the exception of those who are cast as themselves). Indeed, they not only repeat it, they rehearse it. The difference between these actors lies in how they deal with their falsity: on the one hand, the mimetic witness attempts to minimise the gap between the original witness and themselves through the aesthetic strategies of likeness and closeness; on the other hand, the epic witness embraces the gap, even emphasises it, as in this opening scene where a small child plays a senior government minister. In this way, epic actors acknowledge their own falsity, even flaunt it. Paradoxically, this may make them seem more “truthful” than mimetic actors. This seems to be what Claude Schumacher is suggesting in his discussion of Holocaust drama, where the actor is inevitably an “imposter” and where, in order for the audience to accept this imposter, the play cannot “try to create an illusion of reality” but must instead “affor[d] the spectator of a heightened experience ‘liberated from the lie of being the truth’” (4).3 In presenting itself as being “liberated from the lie of being the truth,” CMI’s opening scene also suggests that it is going to liberate other lies disguised as truths. Hence the scene also serves to signal the intentions of the show at large: “to respond” in Oliver’s words “to these false witnesses in a way that reopens the possibility of witnessing, of responsibility” (108). In addition, the scene addresses the spectator as a “true” witness, as a tertiary witness who sees the false witnessing of both the actor (the secondary witness) and the character (the primary witness). The spectator becomes, in a sense, an omniscient metawitness. Yet, there is an important sense in which spectators actually are false witnesses. In his introduction to the published play, John McCallum explains that:

The lie detector software is real—a program, apparently developed for the Israeli army, that analyses digitised voice for pauses and other indicators of lying. The irony, not clear to the audience, is that the software almost always returns a

3 It also recalls Jonathan Kalb’s statement that: “Ours is an era obsessed with witnessing, and an effective Verfremdung is nothing less than a reason to consider one sort of witnessing more persuasive than another” (28). See also Julie Salverson’s call for testimonial theatres to reject “the lie of the literal” (“Performing”) and Timothy Raphael’s appeal for them to “break the naturalist habit” (“Staging”). 191

“truth” reading for actors performing texts, because they are not, of course, actually lying, they are simply telling a truth that is not their own. (“CMI” 139– 40)

McCallum’s explanation is apparently based on a personal communication with Williams, who in turn confirms in his 2008 article that “[t]he child is found to be telling the truth, and the words, being verbatim are ‘true’, despite the statement being known to be a lie” (“Performing” 202). This information leads to the belated realisation that the scene resembles one of Rokem’s screen-scenes, except that instead of a character misconstruing what they are seeing while the omniscient spectators look on, it is the spectators who misconstrue what they see. In this way the scene produces the spectator as a sort of false witness, since they think they are reading the scene in its entirety when in fact they can only partially see what is happening—rather incredibly, a false witness repeating false testimony has registered a “true” reading on a lie detector. Yet even this rereading depends on another piece of testimony, since there is now no way of confirming this fact—the show has finished and the version that remains on DVD does not reveal this secret, despite many viewings.4 In the end we can only take Williams’ word for it. In this sense, Williams’ testimony resembles the problematic confession of the former perjurer. While the first act is the play’s earliest reference to the problem of perjury, and juridical false witnessing more broadly, its most explicit reference comes at the beginning of the third act. Klinder, who was playing the interviewer but is by now playing the Chair, Senator Peter Cook, states the following:

CHAIR: I declare open this meeting of the Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident. . . . Witnesses are reminded that the evidence given to the committee is protected by parliamentary privilege. It is important for witnesses to be aware that the giving of false or misleading evidence to the committee may constitute a contempt of the Senate. The committee is obligated to draw to the attention of a person any evidence, which in the committee’s view, reflects adversely on that person, and to offer that person an opportunity to respond. (version 1.0 157)

4 In fact, the DVD itself is a problematic “witness” because it does not show a single performance but rather two separate performances cut together. I did not discover this until I noticed that the DVD did not include a date for the performance it had recorded. When I asked Williams to confirm the date he explained what had happened. 192

When we hear such an oath in the theatre, we are witness to the oath “misfiring” or becoming “infelicitous” in J.L. Austin’s terms (How 14). Indeed, he writes that “a performative utterance will . . . be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage” (22). This peculiar void gives us pause for thought about the way in which the original oath may have misfired. Once again, further research reveals that the original oath misfired in two related ways. In the first instance, the Committee did not compel Reith to give evidence despite the fact that he “was not entitled to immunity from this inquiry as he was no longer a serving member of the House of Representatives” (SSCCMI xv). However, as Senator Cook notes in his Chair’s Foreword, “bolstered by an opinion from the Clerk of the House of Representatives, he [Reith] rejected three formal requests to appear” (xv). While the Clerk of the Senate disagreed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, and advised the Committee that Reith had no grounds for immunity, the Committee eventually decided that any summons to Reith “would be contested in the courts with the taxpayer having to foot the bill and with the inquiry having to mark time until the issue was settled” (xv). This failure is referred to in the play’s prologue, when Klinder remarks “Unfortunately, Mr Reith wasn’t able to stay with us for the inquiry, as he had to catch a flight to London” (version 1.0 146). In this way, the scene gets worse and worse with each rereading: what appeared to be a test is in fact a rehearsal and what appeared to be a rehearsal is actually a performance, a radio interview that is somehow supposed to substitute for an appearance before the Senate. While the Committee failed to compel some witnesses to testify, such as Reith and various ministerial advisors, it also failed to protect others who wished to do so. More specifically, it failed to extend parliamentary privilege to the asylum seekers involved in the SIEV 4 incident who were, by this time, being held in detention centres on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Though the Committee invited the asylum seekers to give testimony via radiotelephone, it also noted that “The Committee’s jurisdiction is limited to Australia and its territories. . . . This meant that their evidence could not be heard under privilege, nor could the usual protections be extended to them should they be adversely treated as a consequence of what they may have said” (SSCCMI xv). In the language of the second chapter, parliamentary privilege can only be extended to those who are spatiotemporally copresent rather than those who are temporally copresent only. 193

In addition, the Department of Immigration advised that “if something was said on the link-up that might relate to an application for asylum, then there was no legal way that information could be prevented from being used in an assessment of an individual’s eligibility” (xv–xvi). In the absence of a guarantee that their testimony would not adversely affect their claims for protection, the asylum seekers involved— rather unsurprisingly—declined to testify. This fact is also referred to in the play’s third act, when Senator Andrew Barlett (played by Danielle Antaki) says:

SENATOR BARTLETT: Mr Chair, you mentioned before that people named adversely would be given the opportunity to respond. Can I clarify that that means the people on the various boats will get an opportunity to answer the allegations that were outlined today and the assertions that were made about their being evil people who engage in child abuse, moral blackmail and the like? It is a bit difficult when they are all locked away in a foreign land somewhere. (version 1.0 161)

To which the Chair replies, “Outside of our jurisdiction—it is a bit difficult but . . . that is a relevant line of inquiry and we should apply our minds to how we conduct it” (161). Once more CMI reminds us that juridical false witnessing cannot be defined solely in terms of perjury or lying under oath. For juridical false witnessing is not simply a matter of what is said, or how it is said, or the witness’s intent while under oath, it is also a matter of what is not said, who is not there, who remains absent and who cannot or will not take the oath.

The Fog of War: Political False Witness

If the first form of witnessing we find in CMI is juridical false witnessing, then the second is what I have come to call political false witnessing. The earliest example of this occurs shortly after the prologue, when the child departs from the stage and the flag falls to the floor to reveal a much deeper space. Upstage, a screen glows a greenish- grey, gradually revealing itself as a circling shot of Parliament House, with its steep grassy roof and mighty flagpole. This shot is intercut with a similar circling shot which tracks around the interior of a ship, which is interrupted again by brief snapshots of a map. In front of the screen, we see six actors getting dressed, doing up their shirts and jackets, putting on shoes, and tidying their hair. Four of the actors take their seats at the long black table that stretches across the space while another two pick up the flag and fling it over the table; the seated actors tip back on their chairs as their eyes follow the 194

flag arching overhead. When the last two actors join the panel by sitting at either end, they all tip forward in unison and start gesturing in slow motion—furrowing their brows, flipping pages, shifting their weight, leaning on their hands, crossing their arms and staring at the audience. These opening moves are naturalistic enough to be recognisable but because they are in slow motion they also suggest that they are not illusionist and that the performers are in no way pretending to be the Senators. While they are settling, one performer (Danielle Antaki) walks to the overhead projector and places a transparency on it, which reads “Vice Admiral Shackleton, Chief of the Royal Australian Navy.” She then walks downstage to the microphone, faces the audience and starts to deliver Shackleton’s testimony.

Figure 9. Foreground: Danielle Antaki as Vice Admiral Shackleton. Background from left to right: Nikki Heywood, David Williams, Stephen Klinder, Deborah Pollard, and Chris Ryan as Senators, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr

Shackleton offers a brief description of his visit to the HMAS ships Kanimbla and Adelaide, before saying:

VICE ADM. SHACKLETON: This brings me back to the evidence I gave to the Senate on the 20th of February 2002, when I was asked about the “fog of war”. My answer was: 195

She pulls out a brightly coloured beer coaster from her pocket, and reads from it. Her voice deepens and slows. The music volume increases. It is related to the reality that everything is real but it is not real. You are trying to pull threads and strands from many miscellaneous and sometimes disconnected information flows. You are trying to build a puzzle from many disconnected pieces. Sometimes the pieces fit accurately, sometimes they do not. You are dealing with millions of shades of grey and it is only as events start to get to a point of culmination that they start to form up into a real pattern, and then sometimes it disintegrates again as the events change. This is constantly moving and going up and down all the time. The commanding officer has to make hypotheses, judgments and calls based on what he sees at the time. It is never absolutely right; it is never absolutely wrong. The music cuts abruptly. This is what I call “the fog of war”. (version 1.0 148)

The moment is genuinely flummoxing for several reasons. For a start, the scene resembles the previous scene where Reith was reading his testimony in order to rehearse it. Has Shackleton also rehearsed his testimony? Rather than a rehearsal, however, this appears to be a repeat performance. But why would he read his testimony? Is he nervous? Or was he so pleased with his “original” performance that he wants to reproduce it as faithfully as possible? Initially I read this passage as a riff on the ontology of testimony—its fragility, contingency, impossibility—but given its context in both the committee hearing and the play this reading seemed unlikely. Upon further reflection I began to see it as an instance of political false witnessing. Here I am drawing on the work of Dominick LaCapra and Kelly Oliver. LaCapra defines the false witness as someone who misappropriates the subject position of Holocaust survivor. Recall the passage previously cited in Chapter 1: “Certain statements or even entire orientations may seem appropriate for someone in a given subject-position but not in others. (It would, for example, be ridiculous if I tried to assume the voice of Elie Wiesel or of Saul Friedlander. There is a sense in which I have no right to these voices.)” (Representing 46). Similarly, Aleida Assmann describes Binjamin Wilkomirksi, author of the misleading “memoir” Fragments, as a “false witness” (“History” 270). More recently, Kelly Oliver has expanded on LaCapra in order to argue that false witnessing involves not only the misappropriation of a subject position, but also the misappropriation of the rhetoric of subjection. For instance, she analyses a court case in which two white students who were not admitted to the University of Austin, Texas, took the university to court for “reverse discrimination” (107–32). She argues that the notion of “reverse 196

discrimination” is a form of false witnessing that misreads or misrecognises affirmative action policies as somehow similar to or on par with the structural discrimination that has affected minority communities for centuries (112). In other words, for Oliver as for LaCapra, false witnessing involves misreading a particular historical, political, and social context and misrepresenting one’s subject position within that context. In this scene, then, Shackleton misappropriates the subject position of war combatant. Yet the notion that the “fog of war” could descend when a guided missile frigate (the HMAS Adelaide) is confronted by a dilapidated fishing boat that is about to sink (the SIEV 4) is patently absurd. Indeed, the very word “war” indicates a misapprehension of the situation and “fogs” over another fact: that Australia had just declared, or was about to declare, war against the countries these people were fleeing. Shackleton’s false witnessing is underscored by the false witnessing of another Navy employee Rear Admiral Geoffrey Smith, Maritime Commander of the Royal Australian Navy, who proceeds to testify that:

REAR ADM. SMITH: The use of children as a means of intimidating the boarding parties—the sailors and the soldiers—is one of the techniques being used by these people in an attempt to achieve their aim. Children were used by some people, and not all, as a means of applying moral pressure on our people. That was designed to appeal to our moral values. That was designed to strengthen their position and weaken our own and invite us to not persevere with the mission that we had been given. (version 1.0 157–58)

This statement did not go unchallenged at the time. For instance, Jacinta Collins said: “Do you believe that that is not part of their own culture? . . . The care of children. Do you think there is a difference between our culture and their culture [in that respect]?” (158). Nevertheless, Smith persisted, and in doing so went even further than Shackleton—who merely misappropriated the subject position of combatant—to suggest that he and the navy were, in fact, the victims of this operation. In doing so, he enacts another version of Taylor’s false identification, albeit in reverse: instead of a subaltern subject identifying with authority, a figure of authority identifies as subaltern. Of course, false witnessing, subjection and subalternity are deeply entangled, though not in the way that Smith would seem to think; Smith’s false witnessing causes him to think that he is the victim whereas in fact, it is his false witnessing that creates others as victims. That is, it is his political false witnessing that produces survivors— 197

those who are designated as ontological false witnesses (discussed more fully in the final section). In the words of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton:

False witness tends to be a political and ideological process. And really false witness is at the heart of most victimization. Groups victimize others, they create what I now call “designated victims,” the Jews in Europe, the Blacks in this country [the United States]. They are people off whom we live not only economically . . . but psychologically. That is, we assert our vitality and symbolic immortality by denying them their right to live and by identifying them with the death taint, by designating them as victims. So we live off them. That’s what false witness is. (Caruth, “Interview” 139, original emphasis)

In other words, false witness or witnessing “is discursive, not solely a property of persons but a productive property of cultures—an engine of history, not its consequence” (Knox, par. 21). Taken together, Smith and Shackleton remind us of precisely this fact.

Figure 10. Nikki Heywood, Danielle Antaki, Stephen Klinder, and Deborah Pollard listen to David Williams (not pictured) give testimony as Commander Banks, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr

Finally, the false witnessing of Smith and Shackleton is underlined by the fact that the two performers are enacting their own rather joyous appropriation of inappropriate subject positions. Though they take slightly different approaches, both Antaki and Pollard maintain a distance between themselves and the person they are playing. With 198

Shackleton, Antaki maintains her distance through parody and play. When playing Smith, Pollard maintains her distance by using a deadpan voice and a blank expression. This self-consciousness is encouraged by an overhead projection, which reads:

WE KNOW THAT YOU KNOW WE ARE NOT REALLY THE SENATORS WHO TOOK PART IN THE CMI SENATE INQUIRY. STEPHEN IS A LOT SHORTER THAN SENATOR COOK AND DEBORAH WHO PLAYS SENATOR FAULKNER IS ACTUALLY A WOMAN. WE FOUND THAT OUT AFTER THE AUDITION. (version 1.0 149)

This in turn functions on a meta-theatrical level, serving to remind spectators that we are watching an inquiry into an inquiry, and that we too are dealing with “millions of shades of grey,” trying to assemble meaning. Moreover, we are dealing with version 1.0’s assemblage as well as our own. Caveat spectator, in other words: we might be presenting you with the testimony, but we aren’t the real witnesses and neither are you. Paradoxically, it is through this caveat that this scene addresses its spectators as true witnesses. Unlike the prologue, which facilitated a form of false witnessing through the spectatorship of a screen-scene, these scenes are less likely to be misread since the relationship between actor, character, and reality is always clearly signalled. Nevertheless, there are moments of instability and multiplicity. For instance, when a mobile phone rings out in the DVD version of the performance, Klinder shoots back “Quiet in the gallery please,” as if the audience were sitting in the parliamentary public gallery. Here the spectator is at once a primary witness (witness to the theatrical accident), a secondary witness (witness to the testimony from the inquiry), and a tertiary witness (witness to actors as secondary witnesses). (Watching the documentation, I then become another type of tertiary witness—spatially distanced, temporally belated, yet emotionally copresent.) In another moment, when Senator Bartlett (Antaki) is asking Smith (Pollard) about the relevance of the refugee status of the people aboard the SIEV 4, Antaki grabs the hand of an audience member:

SENATOR BARTLETT: . . . Is the fact that people say, “We are refugees” of any relevance? REAR ADM. SMITH: It had no relevance for us. Our mission was clear—that is, to intercept and then to carry out whatever direction we were given subsequent to that. The status of these people was irrelevant to us. SENATOR BARTLETT: Was that specifically outlined in the operational guidelines that you were given—that, when you have people in Australian territorial waters saying, [to audience member “Excuse me.” Takes hold of 199

their hand and raises it] “I’m a refugee” [“Thank you”], such claims have no impact on your mission? REAR ADM. SMITH: Our mission was clear. Claims from the UAs [Unauthorised Arrivals] were not to be taken into account in terms of how we conducted that mission. We expected those sorts of claims to be made. Our mission, however, was clear, and that is the way we executed it. (version 1.0 161–62)

Here, Antaki encourages a particular audience member, and through him or her the audience at large, to identify with the passengers on the SIEV 4. Though she delivers the words, she has the audience member gesture as if they were a primary witness, as if they were the one pleading for protection. Once again, Taylor’s false identifications come to mind, however Antaki’s corporeal manipulation and manifestation of these identifications makes them visible as such. If one way in which to reply to the false identifications of subjects such as Shackleton and Smith is to facilitate additional false identifications so that we become aware of them as such, then perhaps another way of responding to false witnessing is through more false witnessing. To frame it another way, by revealing a theory of political false witnessing through performance, CMI reveals the relationship between acting and witnessing to be dense, complex, and ripe for re-evaluation. If a subject is claiming an inappropriate subject position, how can we “respond to these false witnesses in a way that reopens the possibility of witnessing, of responsibility”? One way to respond is to reveal this subject position as inappropriate through careful historical research, as in the case of journalist Daniel Ganzfried and historian Stefan Maechler’s investigations into Binjamin Wilkomirski. (Intriguingly, though they agreed that Wilkomirski was in fact Bruno Dosseker and that he had fabricated his memoir, Ganzfried and Maechler could not agree on whether he believed in his own story or not. In other words, solving the problem of political false witnessing led them back to the problem of juridical false witnessing.) However, CMI suggests another way, which is to displace the subjects themselves, i.e. to inappropriately appropriate their subject position. In other words, to reply by having a false witness play the false witness. While this strategy is certainly theatrical, in the sense that it involves the doubling of appearance, it is not limited to theatre. Indeed, one could perhaps write a memoir as Wilkomirski, in the same way that he wrote a memoir as a Holocaust survivor. Obviously, this is not the only way in which to reply and nor should it be. In fact, it is 200

likely to be possible only in the wake of careful historical work. In this way, performing false witness becomes possible only through its own belatedness. Indeed, this is reflected through the fact that CMI only appeared in 2004—two years after the inquiry, three years after the event, four years since the beginning of the age of asylum, and nearly 20 years since the introduction of mandatory detention.

Show Overboard

Having spent so much of the show pursuing the illusive “children overboard,” the show itself starts to go overboard in the third act, slipping loose of its moorings to reality and heading into the realm of fantasy. In doing so, the show grants its audience a brief but welcome respite from the work of witnessing. The act starts with a series of imaginary phone calls, each of which becomes slightly more ludicrous that the last: performers call themselves on their phones, harried bureaucrats call home, mothers arrange swimming lesson, sailors try to organise shore leave. Still other phone calls are between Banks and his superior Silverstone, before Banks reappears with a towel perched atop his head explaining how he came to brief Channel 10 by accident (“I thought she said she was a staff researcher. She might have said she was a staff reporter” (166)). He is then interrupted by a sobbing Pollard, who is in turn interrupted by Nikki Heywood playing Jane Halton, Chair of the People Smuggling Taskforce, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Heywood leads the cast in a series of increasingly suggestive aerobics moves all the while yelling: “Straddle to the left! Lift those legs! Going to go for a run now, running for office, running from the press! Communicate! Work the phones! Now I heard it on the grapevine! You’re just about to lose your job baby! So you better shred! And while you’re at it, do a bit of photocopying! Step it out! And squeeze, squeeze! And turn and cover!”5 When the music stops, the scene briefly recovers its balance as Halton relates a rather absurd parable about a blind man and an elephant, before descending into chaos once again. To the tune of Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime,” the Senators crack open the champagne, toast their professionalism, and indulge in some dancing. Building on Halton’s parable, motifs of blindness pervade the scene: Chris Ryan is blindfolded and spun around on a chair, Klinder has his head in the loudhailer, and the

5 This passage does not appear in the published script; what appears here has been transcribed from the DVD of the performance. 201

screen at the back of the stage starts to swivel, as if even the “objective observer” of the situation has finally come unhinged. However, this respite is short-lived, for in a few short seconds, the play plunges into a mode of ontological false witnessing.

Witnessing Degree Zero: Ontological False Witness

In contrast to the chaos that precedes it, the third act is aesthetically restrained. Indeed, Williams has described it as “get[ting] down to a representational degree zero” (“Aesthetic” 35). Writing about Tricycle Theatre’s tribunal play Justifying War, Reinelt argues that the “scrupulous reproduction of surface reality . . . attempts to guarantee that the artists have not ‘sexed up’ the performance in the same way that the government was suspected of ‘sexing up’ the critical dossier” (“Promise” 16). Similarly, the aesthetic shift in CMI implies that while the play has treated the false witnesses falsely, it will now treat the true witnesses truly, truthfully. The act starts with the testimony of Tony Kevin, a former diplomat who investigated the sinking of the SIEV X (so-called because it never received a number), a boat that left Indonesia shortly after the SIEV 4 but which never made it to Australia resulting in 353 people drowning. Kevin’s testimony is calm but relentless and the Senators become increasingly discomfited by its implications. Soon their table starts to turn before it is used as a sort of battering ram to shunt Kevin (played by Chris Ryan) off the stage and down the same corridor through which we entered. From here, CMI starts to shed all references to matrices of time, place, or space. The actors remove their jackets, as if to shed any last trace of the characters they have been playing, and start cleaning. Klinder strips and lies on the table, where Pollard wipes his body with a cloth before Ryan plugs his ears, nose, and anus and ties his jaw. Pollard places his hands over his chest and binds his big toes together, tagging one of his big toes, and then removes her plastic gloves and leaves the stage. The large screen hanging above Klinder has a point of view shot as if we are bobbing up and down in the sea. White words, apparently the testimony of a SIEV X survivor, scroll across the screen while they are read aloud by computer text-to-speech engine. For the more than 10 minutes, the monotonous voice testifies to a trauma so immense it is hard to imagine:

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Figure 11. Deborah Pollard tends to Stephen Klinder, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). Photo Heidrun Löhr

A COMPUTERISED VOICE READS: [. . .] When they came to us and showed us the boat, we were told that this boat was not the one to get us to Australia, it was only a transit boat that would get us to the boat that would bring us to Australia, they put us in a very small place on the boat, with children on top of each other, we remained there till [sic] 6AM and then the boat moved out and kept moving till [sic] 3:10PM when it began to sink. [. . .] I grabbed my daughters, aged five and two, my husband was fixing the engine inside, my daughter was crying wanting her father [. . .] As I was holding my daughters trying to keep them from drowning, a woman came and stepped on my elder daughter as she was scurrying for safety, I pulled my daughter up, the women [sic] kept tripping on my daughter repeatedly until my daughter sank and I could not pull her up anymore. I only had my younger daughter now [. . .] A woman [. . .] she pushed me and my daughter under water. I was able to keep holding my daughter, she pushed us a second time but we were still able to go up, on the third occasion, my daughter was lost. [. . .] I found [. . .] my husband. I told him that my daughters were taken under, he said: maybe someone has rescued them, he was able to grab a floating plank of timber for me, we went on the plank for a while [. . .] As he was talking, he was looking very tired, he was crying, his grip became loose because of his exhaustion, a wave then came and washed him away from the timber. [. . .] I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined that the boat would sink . . . I never imagined . . . (version 1.0 173–75)

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In combination, the body, the screen, the testimony, and the computerised voice call the spectator into a complex web of witnessing. Immediately the body makes sense of the bodies at the beginning of the play—these are the true witnesses. Indeed, this body becomes an excruciatingly literal embodiment of Levi’s true witnesses. In his book The Drowned and the Saved, he writes that:

we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. . . . We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy. (63–64)

Hovering beneath the lurching screen/sea (enough to induce sea sickness in some spectators), Klinder’s body seems to literally “touch bottom.” In doing so, the scene serves to remind the spectator of the ontological impossibility of witnessing: every survivor is a false witness and the subject who not only survives but also testifies is arguably doubly false. In the words of Agamben, who draws heavily on Levi, “the witness, the ethical subject, is the subject who bears witness to desubjectification” (151). Since it is impossible to testify to one’s own desubjectification, even the primary witness—the survivor witness—is necessarily false. Yet, as the testimony continues to scroll across the screen and the dehumanised voice drones on, the scene also seems to insist on the need for, and necessity of, false witnessing. That is, it insists that false witnesses have to witness for the true witnesses, otherwise they will be lost to history once again. The problem for the false witness, as for the ambivalent, mimetic and antiphonic witness in previous chapters, becomes how to interpret and enact this for, whether we take it to “on behalf of,” “in place of,” and “for the benefit of” (Derrida, Sovereignties 88–89). In this scene, CMI enacts all three fors: Klinder’s body seems to sit in place of the true witness; the testimony seems to witness on behalf of the true witness; and the scene itself seems to be for our benefit. For the spectator, this scene is complex. When we watch the body it is as if we are the false witnesses to the extinction of the true witness. Yet we also recognise that this is a false identification, and that we are not survivors, and that we are doubly false for identifying with the false witness. In addition, we are also implicated in Klinder’s ordeal. However, rather than identifying as survivors, as we do through the body and 204

the screen, when we watch Klinder we identify as bystanders or worse, as participants in, even perpetrators of his humiliation. Like the “witness-actress” in Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa who tattoos a number on her forearm, though not to the same extent, Klinder dissolves the boundary between character and actor and in doing so “transforms the spectators of the performance itself into the witnesses of human suffering” (Rokem, Performing 74). Finally, we are witnesses to the testimony that is scrolling across the screen. Though the computerised voice works to complicate this, it is hard to suppress the feeling that we are, at long last, becoming true witnesses— arguably all the more so because we recognise our own false identifications and our implication in the scenario. However, there is an important sense in which we are once again false witnesses to this scene. When I saw the show I assumed that it was the testimony of a single witness, as did every single reviewer I have read. For instance, McCallum wrote “there comes, in the final scene, a much-needed witness statement from a survivor of the SievX [sic] disaster” (“Human”). Bryoni Trezise stated that the “computerised voice of one SIEV X [sic] survivor flashes in subtitles across the screen” (“Version”). Joe Woodward, in Canberra Review, wrote that the final scene employed “the digitally processed voice of an actual survivor” (“CMI”) and Andrew Filmer stated the “the most affecting and intelligent moment of CMI was the presentation of one SIEV X survivor’s story, told simply via scrolling text and a computer generated female voice” (“CMI”). Colin Rose referred to “one statement” and stated: “The penultimate scene is a terribly moving first-hand account of the SIEV-X sinking from a woman who lost her husband and both her daughters” (“Return”). Of course, it is possible that each of these reviewers read the previous reviews and that one original misreading produced a chain of misreadings. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a significant number of spectators misinterpreted this scene. In fact, what we are watching is a compilation of five survivor statements, however this is not at all clear in either the performance or the script. Once again, as in the case of the lie detector, the audience can only ever find out about this after the fact, through further research. The first time I became aware of this was in McCallum’s introduction to the play, where he writes that “The show then moves powerfully into the only piece of truly witnessed testimony in all its verbatim histrionics: a compilation of statements by the few survivors of the SIEV X disaster” (“CMI” 140, emphasis added). This is confirmed by Williams in his two articles on the production, where he writes 205

“the performance closes with an extended reading of SIEV survivor accounts by a computer text-to-speech engine” (“Political” 127; “Performing” 203, emphasis added). These misreadings were apparently a source of frustration for the dramaturg Dwyer, who said at a Sydney symposium that version 1.0 felt that they had done everything possible to indicate that the testimony was not from a single source, including inserting “identifiable breaks” on the screen. To be fair to the spectator, however, this is not at all clear and closer inspection reveals that the breaks are not at all consistent: sometimes they indicate a new paragraph and sometimes they indicate a new person. Thus, despite the fact that there are five accounts collated, there are in fact seven text breaks, which would in turn suggest eight separate accounts (though only if each survivor is present as an enclosed statement).6 Even if audiences had read these breaks as Dwyer suggested they should, they would still have come away with a slightly mistaken impression. In one sense, this scene represents yet another instance of false witnessing—in attempting to respond to the false witnessing of the political and juridical witnesses, version 1.0 have themselves inadvertently created another sort of “screen-scene” where the spectator cannot properly comprehend what they are seeing. Worse still, they have accidently reproduced the singular figure of “the asylum seeker.” In another sense, however, perhaps this false witnessing is immaterial. Like Phelan, version 1.0 elaborate “an ethics whose first allegiance may not be to the empirically true, an ethics that requires a radical conception of what it means to remain “alive to” the event, even when the wire service, the original source of information, has ceased’ (“Performance and Death” 119). While CMI might betray the empirically true version of events, it nevertheless remains alive to them, and more significantly, it helps its spectators to remain alive. To put it otherwise, CMI might perform false witness but in doing so it creates a problematic, paradoxical, and ultimately productive space in which spectators can become witnesses who are ontologically false, but affectively and effectively true. The final section is arguably more remarkable again, where Klinder speaks the final words of the committee.

CHAIR (lying on the slab): Senator Mason, Senator Brandis and Senator Faulkner have left but that is meant as no disrespect to you. If they had not left, they

6 The five accounts are Person 1, Person 20, Person 5 (Rokaya Sater), Person 21 (Njal Mksise), and Person 16. The majority of the account is from Sater. The original transcripts can be accessed via the SIEV X website: http://sievx.com/articles/disaster/KeysarTradTranscript.html 206

would have missed their planes, and the end of the examination was in sight, so I pass on their regards and thank you for your appearance here. We do not have a listed date for another hearing—this may well be the last formal hearing of the inquiry. I cannot be certain about that, because there are outstanding matters yet to be settled as well as other information that has been requested. There is also the possibility of other witnesses being called. On behalf of the committee, I pass on our thanks and appreciation. Committee adjourned at 6.45 p.m. Slow fade to black. End of show (version 1.0 175–76)

Here the one who touched bottom voices the words of those who have barely skimmed the surface; the zero-degree witness gives voice to the tertiary witness. It is an incredible reconfiguring of the economy of the gift: the play cannot give voice to the voiceless since they are no longer alive to accept such a gift, nor can it give voice to the survivors, who could not testify due to the Department of Immigration’s intransigence. Instead the play has examined how this voicelessness was produced in the first place. Even more remarkably, it is the zero-degree witness who gives voice to those who have produced his voicelessness.

Collision as Conclusion

Though this chapter has treated juridical, political, and ontological witnessing separately, in its totality CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) reveals just how entangled these three modes of false witnessing are. Indeed, they collide dangerously in the work of so-called revisionist historians such as Robert Faurisson, who writes: “I have analyzed thousands of documents. I have tirelessly pursued specialists and historians with my questions. I have tried in vain to find a single deportee capable of proving to me that he had really seen, with his own eyes, a gas chamber” (qtd. in Lyotard 3). Here he reads the inability of the zero-degree witness to bear witness not as evidence that the witness did not survive the traumatic event, but as evidence that the event did not take place at all. Yet, even if a survivor somehow emerged, one suspects that Faurisson would dismiss them as false, not because he comprehends the finer points of ontological false witnessing but because his own political false witnessing depends on it. In the case of the CMI, these three forms collide in a slightly different, though no less devastating, way. Chronologically, it is arguable that it was the ontologically false witnesses—the survivors of the SIEV 4 and SIEV X disasters—who produced the 207

political and juridical processes that followed. Ideologically, however, it is arguable that it was the political false witnesses—busy claiming to be “victims” of boats of asylum seekers—who produced these disasters, and their witnesses, in the first place. When the political process set in place to investigate these events could not interview the true witnesses, nor indeed many of the ontological false witnesses (survivors) or political false witnesses (former ministers, staffers etc), then it too became a part of this cycle of false witnessing and the Senate became a scene of juridical false witness. Clearly, Oliver’s problem of how to respond to false witnesses in a way that reopens the possibility of witnessing is not easily solved. While the processes of juridical, political, and ontological false witnessing are deeply entangled with each other, they are also profoundly implicated in performance. CMI demonstrates that juridical false witnessing depends on rehearsal as well as acting, that political false witnessing also resembles acting in the sense that it involves assuming a subject position that is not one’s own, and that ontological false witnessing involves performing for (in place of, on behalf of) the true witnesses as well as for (for the benefit of) other potential false witnesses. Since false witnessing is so entangled with performance, a performance about false witnessing is bound to become particularly slippery, suggestive, and elusive. In essence, CMI performs from juridical, political, and ontological false witness in order that the silence may speak. 208

Conclusion

Performing Witness, Again

In May 2010, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship started a YouTube channel called No to People Smuggling. The channel currently features four videos titled “Ali’s Story” (uploaded May 18 2010), “Strengthened anti-people smuggling measures” (uploaded May 17 2010), “Left Behind” (uploaded on June 6 2010), and “Homeward Bound” (uploaded June 22 2010). The first three videos are available in English, Tamil, Sinhalese, Pashto, Farsi, and Dari. “Ali’s Story” and “Left Behind” are also available in Arabic. The fourth video, which is also the longest at eight minutes and 34 seconds, is currently available in English only. It is the first and third of these videos that are particularly striking and disturbing. The video “Ali’s Story” begins with the black screen below. “Based on actual events,” it proudly declares, adding “This story is portrayed by actors and taken from factual events.” (Similarly, “Homeward Bound” begins with the statement: “The following production is based on factual events and experiences. Persons appearing in this video are actors and staff from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and/or partner agencies.”) Then, as the black screen fades and an image emerges, a man and a woman appear: he has his back to the camera, while she faces us, as if

Figure 12. Screen shots of “Ali’s Story,” No to People Smuggling Channel YouTube interviewing him. However, this is no ordinary interview. For a start we never see either actor speak; instead, the interviewer remains silent while we watch Ali’s hands, neck and back and listen to the following voiceover:

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My name is Ali Hussein, I came from Middle East, and this is my story. After my wife was killed, I decided—by the militia—I decided to take my daughter and my sister and go away to another country. I was not that scared because I, he was speaking the same language, he was speaking the same language, so I have no problem so, and it was in my country so I have no problem in talking to him. So, he told me that he will, he will arrange everything to Indonesia then from Indonesia I, I will need to speak to someone else. In Indonesia I stayed, maybe three months, maybe four months, three and half months, I am not sure. After I spoke to the smuggler there, he told me that I need to pay money for myself, my daughter, and my sister. And so I paid him about US$15,000, which all I have. I saw the boat and I said: “Is this the boat?” And he said “No, no, no, this boat will only take you to the better one.” So I didn’t know this is the boat. So what happened is we got into this one and after 10 or 12 hours he said: “this is it.” I was sad to see my daughter crying the whole time; my sister was very quiet and crying. So when the storm came and the boat went down, to water, I tried to catch my daughter and my sister, she went away from me. I could not help her. So I don’t know what happened to my sister. And my daughter I could hold her and we found a piece of timber so I put my daughter and myself on that, then after that, [a] wave, big wave came and I lost my daughter. And I tried to—I was crying and doing everything I could to find my daughter but I cannot find it, I cannot find her. When I was rescued I was taken to Christmas Island, they told me “this is Christmas Island.” I spent around three months but I was very sad because I lost my daughter and I have no news about my sister. So many people around there, so many, many different countries, and some from my country, some other countries, so people telling me everything, like, different from what the immigration officer’s telling me. So I don’t know what to believe and who to believe. It was very difficult because people tell you all sorts of stories and I don’t know who to believe. I lost my wife in my country, and I lost my daughter at sea, and I lost my sister and she’s missing and now the Australian government is going to send me back. I feel very, very sad and I don’t know what to do. So the people who smuggled me, they did not tell me the truth. So they all liars, and I have lost everything now, so I have no life. (DIAC, “Ali’s”)

Here, then, is the testimony emptied of itself—testimony as aesthetic, even tactic. In empty testimony, a fictional text deploys “testimony as a trope,” adopting a restrained realist aesthetic in an attempt to persuade its audience of its veracity and integrity (Van Alphen 20). Or, as James Young puts it, a fictional narrative is “stuffed” with the words of an actual witness, creating what he calls “a texture of fact” and thereby “suffusing the surrounding text with the privilege and authority of witness” (59–60). This empty testimony both does and does not resemble the many testimonies examined throughout this thesis. On the one hand, it obviously recalls the generic shape of the testimonies produced during the refugee determination process and reproduced on stage in Through the Wire. In addition, the content clearly references the sinking of the SIEV X. Indeed, it is almost identical to the testimonial fragments that scroll across the 210

screen in the final scene of CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). More generally, the video replicates the restrained aesthetics of the video testimonies we might see in the

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies or any number of other archives and museums. In this way, we might say that this video performs mimetic witness; it looks like a video testimony and hopes to function like one too. On the other hand, there is no way such a testimony would lead to an asylum seeker being “screened in” and allowed into the refugee determination process proper. Indeed, the lack of specificity as to the country of origin and the exact nature of Ali’s persecution is remarkable, with references to the

“Middle East” and the “militia.” Moreover, the testimony is completely dominated by the people smuggler and the immigration process. In other words, Hussein’s trauma derives from the smuggler and the immigration authorities. Though this may be true, it would not be enough to claim protection. The third video, “Left

Behind” (right), is even more disturbing. Unlike “Ali’s Story,” Figure 13. Screenshots of “Left Behind,” No to this video does not rely on People Smuggling channel on YouTube 211

testimony, but instead relies on a series of images, shot from the point of view of someone drowning. Several images flash before our eyes, along with four subtitles, as the sound of someone struggling to breathe fills our ears. In the same way that the aesthetic of “Ali’s Story” resembles the video testimonies staged in Through the Wire, the images in “Left Behind” recall the final scene of CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident): the point-of-view shot; the attempt to operate (for the most part) beyond language; the separation of the speaker and their testimony; and the slippage of subject positions (sometimes the cries seem to belong to a man, sometimes a woman). Once again, the video performs mimetic witness, albeit in a slightly different way to “Ali’s Story”—instead of imitating a video testimony, it imitates what we might call a “videoed trauma.” In addition, the video also performs false witness, as it misappropriates the subject position of the primary or perhaps even zero-degree witness. In combination, this mimetic and false witnessing prompted asylum seeker advocates to raise concerns that the video was “re-traumatising people who [have already come] here by boat” (Curr qtd. in Procter, “Asylum”). Taken together, these two videos represent a testimonial aesthetic turned against itself so that a government can deploy the imaginary testimony of an imaginary asylum seeker against other imaginary asylum seekers, warning them of the dangers of seeking refuge in Australia. For the most part, these videos—or public service announcements—have remained largely invisible to the Australian public. In part, this is due to the department’s media strategy, which has eschewed the mainstream media and focused instead on online forums as well as the “ethnic media” (Keane). In part, it is also due to the mainstream media itself: only ABC1 has shown one of the videos on television (“Insiders”), and only SBS (another government-funded channel) and crikey.com (an online newspaper) have covered the item online. In contrast, election advertisements trumpeting the need for strong border protection have screened in prime time on commercial television networks. In this way, even the fictional Ali seems destined to oscillate between invisibility and hypervisibility. In doing so, he performs a strange but perfect epilogue to the scenes of witness performed and examined throughout this thesis.

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Scenes of Witness

Each chapter within this thesis has sought to focus on a single scene and the testimonial witnesses within it as well as the spectatorial witnesses to it. In Chapter 1, I examined Brecht’s Street Scene, as well as Tim Etchells and Freddie Rokem’s readings of it, in order to investigate how theatre and performance studies have theorised spectatorial witnessing. Drawing on the distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary witnesses at work within trauma studies, I argued that the disciplines of theatre and performance studies have offered two slightly contradictory accounts of spectatorial witnessing. First, theatre and performance studies scholars have theorised the spectator as a primary witness: a subject who is spatiotemporally copresent at the scene of the accident. Second, theatre and performance studies scholars have theorised the spectator as a secondary witness: a subject who is spatiotemporally copresent with the primary witness as they testify to the accident. In other words, these scholars understand the spectator as being present at the scene of the account. These distinctions not only clarify our vocabulary of witnessing, they also shift our theories, moving the emphasis from ethics and activity towards temporality. In Chapter 2, I examined Shoshana Felman’s Classroom Scene, as well as Linda Belau, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra’s criticisms of it, in order to examine how trauma studies has theorised spectatorial witnessing. Drawing on distinctions at work within performance studies and media theory, I suggested that trauma studies tends to conflate spatial, temporal and emotional copresence. More specifically, it tends to assume that the secondary witness has to be spatiotemporally copresent in order to be or become emotionally copresent. In contrast, this chapter proposed a theory of tertiary witnessing, where the spectatorial witness is spatiotemporally distant from but emotionally copresent with the primary witness. The chapter concluded by suggesting that paradoxically, it may be this temporal lag or belatedness that makes tertiary witnessing all the more affecting. In other words, it may be that spatiotemporal distance magnifies, or amplifies, the feeing of emotional copresence. From Chapters 3 to 6, I investigated a series of scenes that have occurred both on and offstage in Australia between 2000 and 2005. In Chapter 3, the performance at issue was the refugee determination process. In attempting to recover these lost scenes, and to read or reread them, I developed a theory of ambivalent witnessing. For the primary witness, ambivalent witnessing is characterised by an inability to choose 213

between two actions (contextual ambivalence), a duplicity of feeling (emotional ambivalence), and the constant tension between the originality and citationality of testimony (testimonial ambivalence). These three overlapping types of ambivalence also structured the experience of the secondary witness, who could not choose between the contradictory roles of bureaucrat and witness, and as a result experienced a duplicity of feeling. For tertiary witnesses like me, ambivalent witnessing was experienced, once again, through belatedness and absence. Chapter 4 focused on Ros Horin’s verbatim play Through the Wire. More generally, this chapter proposed a theory of mimetic witnessing, so named for its aesthetics, ethics, and politics. In aesthetic terms, the play operated through the strategies of likeness and closeness, working to convince spectators that these actors were like asylum seekers and/or that they had been in contact with asylum seekers. When Shahin Shafaei was revealed (in a move I named the traumatic reveal), these strategies coincided. In ethical terms, the play inadvertently imitated the refugee determination process, through its dependence on interviews. In political terms, the play produced a moment of mimesis when the government refused to fund a national tour, effectively censoring the play. In the fifth chapter I examined Shahin Shafaei’s monopolylogue Refugitive. In doing so, I developed a theory of antiphonic witnessing, which, as the name suggests, proceeds through antiphony, the acoustic structure of call and response. In antiphonic witnessing, the actor is cast as a soloist caught between two choruses: the one he or she represents and the one he or she addresses and assembles through performance. In this way, the performance becomes both a response to a call from a prior chorus and a call to potential chorus. In antiphonic witnessing the actor not only performs several subjects, he or she also performs several modes of listening. In the case of Refugitive, Shafaei and his characters variously performed eavesdropping as well as political, metonymic, and generous listening. In modelling and enacting so many forms of listening, Shafaei also facilitated several forms of response. Most remarkably of all, he provided a space in which these responses could be vocalised in the post-performance Question and Answer session. Finally, Chapter 6 considered the tribunal play CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) in order to develop a theory of false witnessing. In fact, the chapter suggested that there are at least three forms of false witnessing—juridical, political, ontological— and possibly more. Juridical false witnessing occurs not only in the case of perjury but 214

also in instances where the blind spot of the witness becomes the blind spot of the justice system itself. Political false witnessing occurs when a subject appropriates an inappropriate subject position or, more broadly, the rhetoric of subjection. Finally, ontological false witnessing occurs always and everywhere, since survivors are not the “true” witnesses in Primo Levi’s sense. In replying to false witnesses by performing false witness, and inadvertently producing the spectators as false witnesses (through screen-scenes), CMI produced a paradoxically ethical space in which spectators could perceive their own false witnessing within the world, if not always the production.

The Risks of Witnessing

In writing a thesis about witnessing, I risk what Patricia Yaeger has called “consuming trauma.” In her article by the same name, she cautions “we inhabit an academic world that is busy consuming trauma—eating, swallowing, perusing, consuming, exchanging, circulating, creating professional connections—through its stories about the dead [or traumatised]” (“Consuming” 29). Though we claim to be:

obsessed with stories that must be passed on, that must not be passed over . . . we are also drawn to these stories from within an elite culture driven by its own economies: by the pains and pleasures of needing to publish, by salaries and promotions that are themselves driven by acts of publication, by the pleasures of merely circulating. (29)

These pleasures are arguably amplified in the case of a doctoral thesis, where one is potentially purchasing an academic passport with someone else’s pain. In an effort to minimise that pain, or least to avoid creating additional pain, I took the decision not to interview the asylum seekers involved in the theatrical productions examined in this thesis. Nevertheless, as I acknowledged in the introduction, this decision also risks silencing refugees yet again. It is not an impasse easily resolved. Perhaps, if I were to rewrite this thesis as a book, I would consider interviewing refugees about their theatrical experiences but not about their traumatic ones. Yet, given that the two are not easily separable, such a plan seems unlikely. While Yaeger articulates the risks of working within trauma studies, it is also important to consider the risks of trauma studies itself. For instance, Andreas Huyssen, has argued that trauma studies “confine[s] our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss . . . deny[ing] human agency and 215

lock[ing] us into compulsive repetition” (Present 8). In other words, in focusing on trauma, we potentially fetishise it, and in doing so we downplay themes such as resourcefulness, resilience, even humour. In addition, trauma studies is dominated by psychoanalytic approaches, meaning that it sometimes misses the insights that human geography, sociology, or phenomenology might yield. The mention of phenomenology also reminds me that by focusing on trauma and witnessing, I have arguably neglected issues of embodiment and missed the opportunity to place these works and their subjects within the wider context of work on carceral subjectivities, as articulated by Giorgio Agamben, Avery Gordon, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, and others. If focusing on trauma has potentially limited the insights of this thesis into theatre made by, with, and about asylum seekers, then it is also possible that focusing on these particular plays and performances has also limited this thesis’s insights into trauma, testimony, and witnessing more generally. In other words, it has perhaps reduced the opportunities for comparative approaches. How does the performance of this period relate to the art of this period? How does this local art relate to international responses to and representations of refugees? And how do these contemporary responses compare to historical responses? These questions point the way to some of the potential future(s) of this project.

The Future of Witnessing

This project can be seen as part of an ongoing cultural and theoretical effort to understand what it is to be a spectator, whether as an addressee or not, of trauma and testimony. Following in the footsteps of Saidiya Hartman, as well as Susan Sontag, Kaja Silverman, and Christian Boltanski, this thesis has attempted to theorise the relationship between violence and the voyeur, the spectre, the spectacle, and the spectator. It is a privilege to do such work, not only because it can be pleasurable (Yaeger’s caution again) but also because spectatorship is a persistent problem for a very particular type of subject (often white, Western, and wired). What is it to watch? What is to watch ethically? Where is the uncertain line between witness and spectator? These questions are, for me, persistent and pervasive but there are several more specific contexts in which they might be examined in the future. First, this thesis lays the foundation for a wider study of other performance forms from the period, not just the testimonial theatre. In fact, such a survey is currently being 216

done by Rand Hazou, through the lens of political theatre, however more work will need to be done and from a variety of perspectives. The language of witnessing not only has much to bring to this area of study, it also has much to gain. What happens, for instance, when my vocabulary and theory of witnessing meets the work of a performance artist such as Mike Parr? How might they test and enrich each other? This might become part of broader investigation into other “refugee art” from the period, including films, television series, poems, novels, paintings, and photographs. This, in turn, could potentially serve as the basis for a comparative project that analysed how artists have responded to and represented asylum seekers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere. Even as this thesis lays the foundations for several latitudinal projects, it also lays the foundations for at least two longitudinal studies. First, this thesis might form the beginning of a more general history about theatre made by, about, and with migrants in Australia. Second, it could form the basis for a history of testimonial theatre in Australia. While Alan Filewod has written a history of documentary and verbatim theatre in Canada (Collective), and Gary Fisher Dawson has done the same for the United States (Documentary), no such text exists for Australia. Clearly, there is a much larger and longer story to be told about testimonial theatre in Australia. Obviously, notions of latitude and longitude confine us to the current map, so it is important to remember that there are more imaginative leaps to be made as well. For example, there is clearly more work to be done at the intersection of theatre, performance, and trauma studies for the benefit of all three fields. Some of this is already underway: for instance, Performance Research recently released a Call for Papers for its issue titled “On Trauma” (due out in March 2011). Within theatre and performance studies, there is clearly a need to develop a taxonomy of actor witnesses, in the same way that I have developed a taxonomy of spectatorial witnesses. The performances of this period incorporate many different types of actor witnesses: autobiographical performers who tell their own stories on stage; Stanislavskian actors who repeat someone else’s testimony as if it were their own; Brechtian actors who repeat someone else’s testimony while acknowledging it is not their own; and performers who seem to abreact or embody another’s trauma. This would also be important for trauma studies, which often refers to acting without thinking through the historical, cultural or even medium specificity of acting styles. The mention of acting within trauma studies points to the additional work that 217

needs to be done about the function of theatre and performance, and theatricality and performativity, within trauma studies. Where do theatre and performance appear within trauma studies and what work are they being asked to do? When Geoffrey Hartman likens the intellectual witness to a spectator in the theatre what does he mean (“Shoah” 38–39)? It is clear that we need to develop a document along the lines of Samuel Weber’s summary of theatricality in psychoanalysis, where he argues that there is not just one theatricality, but rather several theatricalities, that permeate and structure psychoanalytic thought (“Psychoanalysis”). More broadly, there is also work to be done on the role of video testimony in visual culture. Within the confines of this thesis, we have already seen several uses of and for video testimony: the video conferencing that occurs in the refugee determination process, the representation of video testimony on stage, and its “remediation” online as part of a government campaign against asylum seekers. How do these various versions of video testimony inform, inflect, and conflict with one another? In view of the fact that even the original testimony is “mediated,” what happens when video testimony is “remediated”? What kinds of cultural work do these representations do? Here, we find ourselves coming back to some of the original questions that first inspired this thesis, when I was sitting on the couch watching Ayen’s Cooking School for African Men listening to Malual Wal and Alier Ateny testify to the trauma of seeking asylum while they chopped vegetables. How does migration produce trauma? How does trauma “migrate” to become testimony? How does that testimony itself migrate into new and different contexts? What happens when these stories are repeated? How do repetition and rehearsal shape a story’s construction, presentation, and reception? What is it to watch someone testify? Can one watch ethically or should I have turned the television off? And where is the uncertain line between witness and spectator? In setting out to locate this line, one inevitably sets out to fail for such a line is not only uncertain, but also unseen, even unseeable. But in this, I agree with Samuel Beckett, that we must “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The achievement of performance is that it tries, again and again, to render the invisible line between witness and spectator slightly, albeit briefly, more visible. The achievement of performance scholarship is that it tries, again and again, to prolong and even explain this moment, where the line wobbles between opacity and transparency. If scholarship emerges as a belated response to a theatrical scene of witness, which is itself a belated response to 218

and representation of a prior scene of witness, then it arrives always already too late. Yet, it may be that, like Felman’s students, we watch and write about these scenes not only to respond to the past but also to rehearse for the future. For even as we hear the screams from the past echoing in the present, we must also attempt to heed the screams from the future. And more than heed them, we must make sure that they are heard. Or, better yet, we must make sure that they are not heard, not because we are deaf but because we have acted to prevent the violence and injustice that precipitate the scream in the first place. 219

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