Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston Mariko HORI

ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theatre Review Vol.11 No.1 (English Issue) March 2012 Shaping a New Communal Identity: Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston Mariko HORI Abstract Velina Hasu Houston, a Los Angeles-based American writer, is often regarded as a multicultural or postmodern playwright because of the characteristics of her works written from her transnational or multiracial point of view, but she posits herself as a feminist writer, resisting the labels such as “multicultural artist” or “postmodernist” that may force every “ethnic theater” into “an artistic ghetto.” She creates works revealing struggles and frustrations of transnational, multicultural and multiracial women in the white male-centered society, dreaming of a new world community where they are treated equally and with respect. Houston challenges to accepted practices by exploring theatrical innovations in her pursuit of an identity that dissolves any border. In her most successful play, Tea, her her- oine, a ghost, who, having killed her husband and lost her daughter, committed suicide, crosses the border between this world and that world, listening to the interactions of four other Japanese women who are visiting her house. Scenes go back and forth; in some scenes five women enact the roles of their husbands and daughters. Such use of scenes defies chronological order; the use of geographically unfixed sets and multiple roles played by a single performer are features often seen in contemporary feminist theatre. She often re-envisions the gender relations of ancient myth and creates a new myth where individuals “transgress borders of nations and identity, forming new communities that often defy categorization.” Mina in The House of Chaos, based on the Medea myth, is a Japanese woman who defeats her husband and his male ally who conspired to drive her away to rob her of the firm she had inherited from her Japanese family. Mina’s spirit of resistance will be passed on to her daughter. Keiko in Calling Aphrodite, a survived victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, has a fictional confidante in Aphrodite, a Greek goddess of beauty, who advises her to foster “hope.” The play reveals Houston’s effort to find an ethical solution to such a difficult issue as the bombing of Hiroshima by looking at it from an angle of how one can overcome atrocious memories of war and heal pain. Houston, thus, uncovers the pain in racial antagonisms, cultural wars, social conflicts, family problems, etc. in our time, tackling complicated matters that today’s women, especially multiracial, multiethnic, and transnational women are faced with, and hoping ■ Mariko HORI Shaping a New Communal Identity: - 52 - Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theatre Review Vol.11 No.1 (English Issue) March 2012 for the formation of a borderless community with new communal understandings. 1. Houston as a Multiracial Feminist Velina Hasu Houston, a Los Angeles-based American writer, has been writing plays from her transnational, multiracial point of view since the beginning of her career. Born of a Japa- nese mother and an African and Native-American father, she questioned a single monoracial identity and the black-and-white binary racial categorization established in the United States since the days of slavery. It was before the idea of postmodernism began to permeate the country that she, through writing, took painstaking efforts to affirm multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural identities and transcend the borders of the traditional sense of racially and culturally divided community. Her personal heritage and upbringing naturally placed her in a challenging position to a society that is based on monocultural communities. Houston criticizes the present structure of ethnocentric communities in the United States as follows: In the media and in sociopolitical discourse, groups of people are often identified as communities such as the Asian American community, the Latino community, the Afri- can American community, or “whites.” Each of these communities defines itself on the fictional basis of a common race. Racial commonality supposedly promises other com- monalities in ideologies, diet, cultural values and customs, politics, ethnic idiosyncrasies, artistic tastes, and so on and so forth. This concept of community divides what is ‘Ameri- can’ into ethnocentric tribes of sorts that not only compare themselves with each other to measure success, intelligence and a myriad of other sociological and political benchmarks, but also compete with each other for their respective pieces of the (economic) American Pie.” (Houston 2009. pp. 6-7) Racial and ethnocentric ideology is, however, so deeply rooted in cultural, social, and economic systems in the United States that it is difficult to remove it and establish a new ideology. But it is possible to notice the errors of the racially based society and to realize the existence of the multiracial people who challenge the concept of identity categorized by race. Such multiracial identities seem to have received more and more recognition when a break from established ideas was promoted with the surge of postmodernism in the 1980s and of multiculturalism hailed in the United States in the 1990s. Houston’s plays have been thus rec- ognized under the categories of “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism.” Stan Yogi refers to Houston as a playwright examining “the complexities of cross-cultural and cross-racial identities” which “characterizes postmodernism in general” (Yogi 1997. p.147). S. E. Wilmer regards Houston as one of the artists who “reveal another dimension of diversity and multiculturalism where by ethnicities and religions are combined or integrated rather than separated into essentialized categories” and whose characters “register as multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and perform their hybridity, rather than allowing themselves to be clearly defined by cultural, ■ Mariko HORI Shaping a New Communal Identity: - 53 - Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theatre Review Vol.11 No.1 (English Issue) March 2012 and even national, borders” (Wilmer 2002. p.187). But terms such as “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism” have been argued as ambiva- lent and vague with the reason that they tend to affirm only the de-construction of the central established system without any aspiration to recreate a new system and shift back to funda- mental essentialism or conservatism. Wilmer, who commends the term “multiculturalism,” heeds the danger on the other hand that it may harden “the deep-rooted core of some value systems in America [...] fundamentally exclusionary” (Ibid. p.175). Guillermo Gómez-Peña also condemns multiculturalism, for it is “a dangerous notion that strongly resembles the bankrupt concept of the melting pot with its familiar connotations of integration, homog- enization, and neutralization” (Gómez-Peña 1994. p.27). Houston, also sensing the pitfall of the term, once quoted the words of Joanne Akalaitis, former artistic director of Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre, to defend her position by refusing to be labeled as a multicultural artist: “How do you get people on stage and in the audience to reflect the demographics of the community outside? That’s the issue. I hate to call it ‘multiculturalism.’ Call it diversity, instead. Call it reality, because that’s what it is” (Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1992; Houston 1992b). Houston here resists the term “multiculturalism” because it may force every “ethnic theater” into “an artistic ghetto as being so peculiar to the perceived palette of the subscription audience that they only can be put on the menu once a season” (Houston op.cit.). As to the idea of postmodernism, a feminist literary critic, Linda Hutcheon, in her book, The Politics of Postmodernism, critically comments on it, emphasizing the political aspect of feminism: Postmodernism manipulates, but does not transform signification; it disperses but does not (re)construct the structures of subjectivity. Feminsism must. Feminist artists may use postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order to initiate the deconstruc- tive first step but they do not stop there. [...] Perhaps postmodern strategies do, however, offer ways for women artists at least to contest the old – the representations of both their bodies and their desires – without denying them the right to re-colonize, to reclaim both as sites of meaning and value. Such practices also remind us all that every representation always has its politics. (Hutcheon 1989. p.168) This feminist desire for not only resisting against the dominant power but also providing alternative “sites of meaning and value” is clearly seen in Houston’s work. Houston’s liberal and political position, therefore, should be interpreted as that of “feminism.” Houston herself writes: Feminism is a compassionate, sensitive, and active concern for the spirit, intellect, politics, sociology, economic health, ethno-cultural identities, and emotional and psychologi- cal complexities of women; indeed for our very lives and fates. (Houston 1993a. p.13; Italics original) ■ Mariko HORI Shaping a New Communal Identity: - 54 - Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theatre Review Vol.11 No.1 (English Issue) March 2012 Houston, severing herself from the hailed categorization of “multiculturalism,” posits herself as an “active” feminist. As an artist, she is drawn

Load more