Latino/a Reception of Greek Tragic Myth: Healing (and) Radical Politics
By
Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and
Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
May 2018 Latino/a Reception of Greek Tragic Myth: Healing (and) Radical Politics
By Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou
Has been approved
May 2018
APPROVED
1. Savas Patsalidis
2. Yiorgos Kalogeras
3. Yiorgos Anagnostou
Supervisory Committee
ACCEPTED
To Nitsa (1951-2016)
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………i
ABSTRACT………………………………………….………………………………….iv
PROLEGOMENA: MESTIZA MYTHOPOESIS....……………………...... …...1
I. IN LIEU OF A PREFACE………………………………………….1
II. FROM PRE-COLONIAL MYTHS TO POST-COLONIAL MITOS AND
BEYOND…………………………………...……………………4
III. THE GREEK MYTHOS OF NEW MITOS…………………………..15
IV. LATINO/A MYTHOPLAYS AND THE TRAGIC: TOWARDS HEALING
(AND) A RADICAL POLITICS…………………………………...31
V. SETTING DOWN METHODOLOGICAL CAVEATS………………..38
VI. OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS………………………………...43
CHAPTER 1: THE TRAGIC MODE: MODUS POLITICA, MODUS VIVENDI………….....48
I. INTRODUCTION TO THE TRAGIC……………………………….48
II. BUILDING ON THE TRAGIC OPUS……………………………...50
III. THE TRAGIC AND THE POLITICAL……………………………..67
IV. THE TRAGIC AND THE THERAPEUTIC………………………….82
V. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION……………………………………92
PART ONE: MEDEAS MESTIZAS………………………………………………...……96
I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS………………………………………97
II. THE TRAGIC MYTH OF MEDEA………………………………..98
III. TOWARD MEDEA’S LATINO/A-IZATION……………………...111 CHAPTER 2: LA MALINCHE……………………………………...... 116
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR LA MALINCHE AS MEDEA…………116
II. LA MALINCHE: MEDEA AS AN AZTEC VIGILANTE……………120
III. UNCOVERING/RECOVERING FROM THE COLONIAL WOUND…134
CHAPTER 3: THE HUNGRY WOMAN: A MEXICAN MEDEA…………………...……..142
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR MEDEA AS A HUNGRY MEXICAN
WOMAN……………………………………………………..142
II. THE HUNGRY WOMAN: MEDEA AS A MEXICAN “HUERFANA
ABANDONADA”…………………………………………….....147
III. ACTS OF BIRTHING/ACTS OF KILLING AS ACTS OF HEALING..167
CHAPTER 4: MOJADA……………………………………………………………….173
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR MEDEA AS A MEXICAN
“WETBACK”…………………………………………………173
II. MOJADA: MEDEA AS A TRAUMATIZED “EL GUACO”……...... 178
III. MOJADA AS SOCIAL THEATRE AND AS THERAPY…………….201
PART TWO: MESTIZO OEDIPUS…………………………………………..………...208
I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS…………………………………….209
II. THE TRAGIC MYTH OF OEDIPUS……………………………..211
CHAPTER 5: OEDIPUS EL REY………………………………………………………238
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR OEDIPUS AS EL REY OF EAST L.A…238
II. OEDIPUS: OEDIPUS AS A “DESTINED. / TO BE. / DESTINED. . . .”
HOMEBOY…………………………………………………...244 III. OEDIPUS EL REY AS SOCIAL THEATRE AND AS THERAPY…….302
PART THREE: TRAGIC DAUGHTERS I: MESTIZA ELECTRA……………………,….312
I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS…………………………………….313
II. THE TRAGIC MYTH OF ELECTRA……..……………………...314
CHAPTER 6: ELECTRICIDAD………………………………………………………...330
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR ELECTRA AS AN EL BARRIO CHOLA..330
II. ELECTRICIDAD: ELECTRA AS A BARRIO-BOUND “OLD SCHOOL
CHOLA” ……………………………………………………..338
III. ELECTRICIDAD AS SOCIAL THEATRE AND AS THERAPY………369
PART FOUR: TRAGIC DAUGHTERS II: MESTIZA IPHIGENIA…………………….…382
I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS……………………………………..382
II. THE TRAGIC MYTH OF IPHIGENIA...…..……………………...385
CHAPTER 7: IPHIGENIA CRASH LAND FALLS ON THE NEON SHELL THAT WAS ONCE
HER HEART: A “RAVE” FABLE………………...…………………………………...400
I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR IPHIGENIA AS A RAVE CELEBRITY...400
II. IPHIGENIA CRASH: IPHIGENIA AS AN OLD VICTIM FOR A NEW-
BUT-NOT-THAT-DIFFERENT AGE…………………………...410
III. HEALING AND THE POLITICS OF LOVE……………………….438
EPILEGOMENA……………………………………………………………………...447
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………469
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE…………………………………………………………..515 Delikonstantinidou i
Acknowledgments
It has been five years since I embarked on a journey of reflections, affections, thought and word experiments through the (border)lands of U.S. Latino/a reception of the Greek tragic myth. Looking back now, I realize that I cannot tell for sure what it was exactly that initially lured me into the multiple folds of this rich cultural and theatrical drapery. Was it the place of myth therein? The very process of syncrisis at play? The tragic itself, etched on every bit of the folds? Whatever it was, it left indelible marks on the way I am in the world, in the way I perceive and act in it. The end of this part of the journey finds me a significantly changed person.
I vividly remember the first time I read Moraga’s The Hungry Woman. I sensed something so intimate yet so strange in it—mine, Greek, and inexorably alien, fierce but oddly comforting—that I felt compelled to search and search until I would be able to pin it down. I never did, not really, even if, one after the other, the revisions included here kept intensifying the sort of response that Moraga’s mythoplay initially elicited. I may never do. Yet, the search for that elusive “something” was so extremely satisfying in itself that it made the doctoral research that issued from it and the development of the present study a thoroughly pleasurable process.
The source of the most important rewards out of the many that I reaped in the course of this process is my Teacher and supervisor, Professor Savas Patsalidis, whose mentorship is only matched by the vastness of his knowledge and understanding of the theatre. I owe all of this to him. His passion and enthusiasm were contagious. His guidance, calmness, the solid and stable intellectual and affective ground he provided to me throughout made this project possible. No one and nothing can be lost when he is around. I am blessed to have shared this journey with him. Delikonstantinidou ii
As if that blessing was not enough, I had the honor and delight of also collaborating with Professor Yiorgos Kalogeras, a beacon of wisdom, optimism, and serenity for me throughout the years. Professor Kalogeras is a true Teacher whose sagacious mind and generous heart serve as a source of inspiration and hope for all of his students, younger and older, official and unofficial. He is the one who introduced me to the fascinating field of ethnic studies, as well as the one who taught me how to navigate through it. I will be forever grateful to him for that.
Yet, I am also grateful to Professor Kalogeras for introducing me to Professor
Yiorgos Anagnostou who, a bit later, did me the honor of joining my supervising committee. The moral support Professor Anagnostou has granted me, as well as his advice and assistance have been invaluable. His intimate knowledge of the cultural workings in the U.S. and his relevant commentary have opened my eyes to nuances and possibilities I would have hardly imagined if it had not been for him.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Zoi Detsi, who has offered me treasured advice and words of encouragement over the last few years, and whose trust has made me a better person, as well as to Professors Tatiani Rapatzikou and Katerina
Kitsi for their guidance and for the kindness they have showed me.
I should not fail to thank the artists whose work this study includes, Caridad
Svich, Carlos Morton, Cherríe Moraga, and Luis Alfaro, for the interest they have expressed in this project and for their willingness to contribute to it despite their tight schedule. Special thanks extends also to all the Latino/a scholars and activists whom I have contacted during my research, including Jorge Huerta, Diane Rodriguez, Alicia
Arrizón, Father Gregory J. Boyle, and Luis Rodriguez, and who, despite their many obligations, have supplied useful input to it. Delikonstantinidou iii
I owe the most sincere gratitude to the Research Committee of Aristotle
University for the Academic Excellence Scholarship they awarded me (2015-16), to the Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation (ΕΛΙΔΕΚ) for offering me a
Doctoral Scholarship a year later, and to the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) who has also honored me with a doctoral scholarship and provided me with considerable financial support (2017-18). Their contribution to this project has been great and highly appreciated. In this period of economic and humanitarian crisis, the mere fact of investing in me, an Arts and Humanities student, is a win for our domain.
A heartfelt thanks goes to Christos Arvanitis for his unconditional help, thoughtfulness, and encouragement, as well as to Tasos, Eirini, Dafni, Kleoniki, and
Foteini. Their presence has brightened my way. I need to also thank the European
Association for American Studies (EAAS) and its Greek branch, HELAAS, as well as the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) and its Greek branch, HASE, for the book, conference, and travel grants they have offered me during my doctoral years. Additionally, I want to express my gratitude to the University of Oxford and its extraordinary Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) for hosting a research visit of outmost importance to my doctoral research. The APGRD
Director, Fiona Macintosh, and Archivist, Claire Kenward, have been more than helpful and made my visit memorable as well as profitable.
All of this would mean very little if it were not for my family and friends.
Their genuine love, unwavering faith, and hard-won wisdom make everything possible. They also make everything joyful and worth the effort. Thank you for seeing the best in me and for making me want to become the best version of myself. Thank you for carrying my home with you at all times. This journey has been a pleasure because of you. Delikonstantinidou iv
Abstract
Commendable and, in many cases, quite successful attempts have been made, in the last few decades, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to counter the devalorization and systematic exclusion of Latino/a theatre by the hegemonic canon, and to promote the work of representative playwrights, performers, and other theatre practitioners.
However, the role and function of the Greek tragic myth, as a rich corpus of widely known yet contested material, for Latino/a theatre and for the communities this theatre engages and addresses have drawn little critical interest. The purpose of this project is to attempt to make up for this lack of critical analysis of Greek-inspired and
-based Latino/a revisionary theatre, reverse its current state of marginalization, and foreground its potential for remedying sociopolitical ills, but also for forging inter/transcultural bonds between the Greek and the Latino/a cultures. In order to serve the said purpose, the present study examines the practice of creating dramatic mythic revisions of ancient Greek tragic myths, as one which marks the fin-de-siècle and post-millennium theatre work of a number of playwrights who identify themselves as Latinos/as (and Chicanos/as), namely Carlos Morton, Cherríe Moraga,
Luis Alfaro, and Caridad Svich.
In the course of the study, this Greek-inflected revisionary practice on the part of Latino/a theatre artists is shown to be permeated by and advancing a new, critical mestizaje ethos and consciousness. Yet, specific focus is given throughout to the conceptions and uses of the tragic mode of the employed Greek myths by contemporary Latino/a mythoplays as bearing the potential for a radical politics, as well as therapeutic potential. We also explore the various ways in which the foregoing potential is channeled by/through each of the “mythopoetic” revisionary theatre works Delikonstantinidou v
included here (some of which, in fact, qualify as social theatre projects) towards
Latino/a communities in/of crisis; that is, communities plagued with traumas and so- called social “diseases” (or nosoi).
Fulfillment of the intentions of the present project requires embracing a variety of methodologies. Hence, not a single theory or approach is used, although, admittedly, many of the most crucial parts of the analysis rely on insights gained from the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies,
(Classical) Reception Studies, and Tragic Theory. A theoretical net comprising a number of different veins of thought is undergirding the examination of the relationship between Greek tragic myth, Latino/a dramatic mythic revision, the sociocultural contexts of both of them, as well as those (European and Euro American contexts) mediating between them.
With respect to more practical methodological aspects, exploration and achievement of the objectives that this project set from its beginning required the combined strategies of close reading of play scripts, literature survey, and related data collection and analysis. Among other things, reviews, official and unofficial production-related material, such as pre- and post-production reports, dramaturgical statements, as well as recorded versions of the plays’ workshops and actual productions, were surveyed; interviews were conducted, not only with the playwrights, but also with members of some of the communities in/of crisis addressed in the study; while, both in situ and online, archival work greatly benefited and facilitated this endeavor in each stage of its development.
[W]hat is about the ante-texts that persists through various transplantations and re-interpretations, sinks below the radar, and then perhaps emerges at the most unlikely moments, insinuating its
way into subsequent horizons of reception and practice? . . . [W]e
cannot ignore the transmissive energy of elements that helped to
form and are then ‘carried’ by the text—what does the text bring
with it?
(Hardwick, “Against the ‘Democratic Turn’” 23)
Delikonstantinidou 1
Prolegomena
Mestiza Mythopoesis1
I. In Lieu of a Preface
In an email interview I conducted with Caridad Svich on June 12, 2014, and, specifically, in responding to an inquiry about the reasons why she chose to engage with Greek tragic myths for her theatre work, the playwright described the process of sustaining a dialogue with the ancient mythical source texts as one of “re-falling in love with” and “wrestling with” them.2 She also described it as a process that involves dramaturgical practices that mix and elbow with the Greek mythical material. Thus,
Svich concisely articulated the foundations of the practice of creating “dramatic mythic revisions” of ancient Greek tragic myths (Chirico 2008); that is, creative re- writings of these myths that aim at both capturing the myths’ core meanings, and
1. An earlier version of this chapter, or rather, of parts of it appeared in “Questing for 21st Century Mestizaje in the Realm of the Greek Tragic Myth: Dramatic Mythic(al) Revisions by Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Caridad Svich,” in the volume Mythmaking Across Boundaries (2016). 2. A clarification is due here. As scholar F. Carter Philips has usefully explained, “we really do not possess any myths . . . from the ancient Greeks at all; what we have are various uses of the myths within literature and art. . . . But it is crucial to distinguish between the myths themselves that once existed (of that there is no doubt) and their uses by various authors. . . . Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is not a myth—it is a tragedy that uses myth.” It would be wise, throughout this study, to keep in mind and make good use of his suggestion to never lose sight of the fact that “the literary uses of the pre-literate popular myths and folk tales,” or “pseudo-mythical sources,” as he calls them, are animated by and dependent on these very myths and vice versa. “[I]f we do,” the scholar warns, “we may lose completely the point that an individual author is trying to make” (157-9). The words under examination in the present study draw on and allude to earlier treatments of Greek myths, especially ancient Greek tragedies. Yet, it is not on the latter, but on the myths and their reception that we will focus here. Although we will acknowledge explicitly the specific literary treatments of the Greek tragic myths from which each dramatist borrowed in the creation of their plays, we will neither dwell on the plays’ relation to tragedy as dramatic genre, nor comparatively analyze their relation to the particular tragic vision that is constructed in specific Greek tragedies.
Delikonstantinidou 2 critically and creatively opening up new meanings behind them.3 It is a practice that marks not only much of Svich’s post-millennium theatre work, but also some of the contemporary work of other theatre practitioners who identify themselves as
Latinos/as4 (and Chicanos/as), namely, Carlos Morton, Cherríe Moraga, and Luis
Alfaro. Thus, William Garcia’s argument that “the Latin American playwrights have not been oblivious to the rewriting of tragic myths originally elaborated by the
Greeks” is corroborated, whereas new, U.S. Latino/a-specific dimensions are imparted to it and hitherto underrepresented folds are revealed in it. The present study suggests that this is a practice deserving of our critical attention mainly for three different, but equally important, reasons.
3. Throughout the present study, Miriam Chirico’s terminology (2008) is employed to describe the plays under consideration. Verna A. Foster (2012) has made a strong case for this particular choice of words. This study fully endorses her argument that, unlike more conventional terms, “revision” opens up and points to an expansive and inclusive range of narratives, which incorporate “various kinds of retellings of myth” and use “old stories for new cultural purposes” (2-12). Moreover, besides its “greater flexibility,” “‘revision,’ in the sense of looking again, places more emphasis on interpretation, both the contemporary dramatist’s interpretation of the story he or she is retelling and also the interpretative possibilities opened up for the audience,” as both Foster and Sharon Friedman have observed (Foster 3; Friedman 8). Additionally, the term “revision” draws attention to the political motivation and “process[es] of ‘defamilarization’” that are often associated with acts of re-vision (Foster 3). Again in line with Chirico and Foster, we should also make note of the fact that by “dramatic” we are “referring to both text and performance” (Foster 2). The works engaged in this study are taken up both as scripts and as performances, while, where pertinent to the analysis, we touch upon their production history. It should be also stressed that “revision” is considered to be a much more accurate and hospitable term than, for example, “adaptation,” “reconfiguration,” or even “translation,” in our particular context. First of all, it points emphatically to the fact that the playwrights addressed here worked with and reworked primarily myth-texts, rather than myth-based dramatic texts. Further, it preserves the notion of an ongoing process, involving more than one line of influence between ante-text and new text, which is central to our purposes, while it also conveys the sense that the ante-text is itself an ever-changing object for which no absolute original can be postulated. Finally, the term allows for a variety of approaches to the reworking of myth to find shelter within its semantic realm. Indeed, as we shall see, the plays that will be discussed follow different patterns of revision, exhibiting varying degrees of complexity, congruity, or parallelism in their relation with the Greek (and non-Greek) mythical material. We will revisit the terminology in the analytical chapters and qualify it further where this is deemed useful for a better understanding of the plays. 4. For the purposes of this study, the designation “Latino/a” will be employed as an ethnonymic term that adequately captures the undisputed and well-documented variety of racial, ethnic, regional, and cultural constituencies comprising the diasporic Latino/a cultural corpus in the U.S. The artists whose work will be discussed here identify themselves along the lines of the coalitional yet still plural Latino/a panethnicity and “meta-identity” (Hurtado et al. 293), and continue to invest in and draw on the term’s political import.
Delikonstantinidou 3
First, whereas engagement with myth is anything but alien tradition for
Latino/a artists, engagement with Greek tragic myth to attend to U.S. Latino/a realities, especially to the extent that it occurs in the past twenty-five years, signifies a crucial new development in the theatre of the Latin American diaspora in the U.S.
This is a development in the direction of reaching out and opening up to inter/transcultural flows, or even to “the globalization of Latinidades across the world,” to use Ana Patricia Rodriguez’s resonant phrase (222), and one that occurs in full view of twenty-first century specificities, challenges, and problematics. The fact that the tragic mode, operative in the Greek myths which are being revised, is seized on and employed as having radical political and therapeutic possibilities points emphatically our attention to the artists’ need to respond with urgency to the present conditions of our world. More than that, though, given the growing demographic significance of the Latino/a population,5 this emerging theatre practice further points to a significant development in the broader American6 theatrical and cultural landscape which grows increasingly “transnationalized by Latinos/as’ transmigratory presence” (222).
Second, indications and evidence of the beneficial role of this kind of revisionary (social) theatre in the experience of (sociocultural) trauma7 and in the
5. Latino/a Americans constitute, as of 2014, 17.37% of the U.S. population, remaining the most populous minority group in the country, thus making the U.S. home to the largest community of Spanish speakers outside of Mexico (Colby and Ortman 8). 6. The adjective “American” is used in its hemispheric sense. 7. It might be useful to touch upon the concept of trauma, which we will encounter in the course of the analytical chapters. The concept found its modern form in the late nineteenth century, as trauma scholar Ruth Leys documents (3). “Trauma” has served over the years both as a clinical concept and as a broader social concept. In both cases, it refers to the stress/blow that produces injury or/and disordered behavior, and, increasingly in the past few decades, to “the state or condition produced by such a stress or blow,” as sociologist Kai T. Erikson records. Nowadays, after decades of research into the mechanisms and effects of trauma, few would not concede that trauma has a social function. However interconnected, individual and social, or collective, trauma differ in crucial respects. By “individual trauma,” we usually mean “a blow to the [body and/or] psyche [or constellation of life experiences]
Delikonstantinidou 4
practice(s) and process(es) of healing, with regard both to the individual and the
collective, such as those that the present study hopes to bring to light, might lead to
the adoption of more and more effective institutional policies and other relevant
actions on the interface of health/well-being, arts, and social sciences.
Third, the revisionary theatre work that falls within the purview of this project
is conducive to carving out precious space for the advancement of existing and
cultivation of new cross/inter/transcultural bonds between the Greek and the Latino/a
cultures and the respective diasporic communities in the U.S. and beyond—including
collaboration between the fields of Hellenic and Latin/o/a American studies.
In what follows, a framework, as comprehensive as possible, is provided
within and by means of which a profounder understanding of both the parameters of
the aforementioned Latino/a, Greek-inflected, theatre practice and the reasons for
pursuing its close examination can be fathomed.
II. From Pre-colonial Myths to Post-colonial Mitos and Beyond
Dramatization of myth has been a staple practice in Latino/a theatre since the
late decades of the sixteenth century, where we can identify the origins of the
that breaks through one’s defenses . . . with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively.” By “collective” trauma,” we mean “a blow [or continuing pattern of abuse] to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (229-30, 233). In the case of collective trauma, “the community is profoundly affected,” and “one can speak of a damaged social organism the same way that one would speak of a damaged body” (234). Another scholar of trauma, Kirby Farrell, distinguishes between trauma as clinical syndrome and as trope, or as “a strategic fiction that a complex, stressful society is using to account for a world that seems out of control” (2). The evolution of trauma from clinical concept to trope arouses no wonder given the fact that, “[w]hatever the physical distress, . . . , trauma is also psychocultural, because the injury entails interpretation of the injury” (Farrell 7). Thus, trauma can be employed in various ways in order to serve a number of purposes and interpretative processes. This last point is of outmost importance to our discussion, since the use of trauma as an interpretative tool, inextricable from its other significations, will be central to our succeeding encounters with the concept.
Delikonstantinidou 5 theatrical genealogy of Latin Americans in what would later become known as the
United States (U.S.) (Huerta 2000).8 From this colonial beginning, the merging of
Spanish dramaturgy with Central and South American religious rituals and myths gave birth to a strong and vibrant theatrical tradition. This tradition has been further enriched, since then, by the mythical, cultural, and theatrical capital of a number of disparate, migrant cultures that converged in the U.S. Thenceforth, myths and myth- making have been finding expression in various U.S. Latino/a creative manifestations, including theatre and drama, imbuing accounts of history, oral literature(s), and other cultural traditions, at the same time shoring up ethnic bonding and identities.
Mythological imagination has been perceived and put into use by Latinos/as as a form of knowledge that counters that of the imperial, first Spanish and later Euro
American U.S., imagination. Latino/a theatre, in particular, has been grounded on a solid yet pliant complex of ritual and myth, functioning so as to express anxieties and conflicts arising from people’s relationship to other people and to the surrounding world, and serving, at times, to resolve them. Early corridos (ballads), carpa (tent) teatros, and even zarzuelas (musical comedy) syncretized popular myths with everyday concerns. Simultaneously, in their polyvocality, interculturality, and varying political inflections, they reflected not only the cultural heterogeneity informing the backgrounds and realities of their practitioners, but also controversial issues, predominantly political and ideological in nature, related to Latino/a identity construction as well as to forms of resistance to the dominant Euro American culture.
Such controversial issues, spawned around Latin American being/becoming and representation in the U.S. context, continued to inform Latino/a theatre, albeit
8. Here, we are referring to theatre as understood in the “West.” This is not to say, however, that the native cultures of the Americas lacked performance traditions. For a concise account of the Latin American theatrical genealogy, see also Pottlitzer (1988).
Delikonstantinidou 6 with renewed urgency, when the torch was passed on to pioneer playwrights active in the Latino/a Civil Rights Movement (and the Chicano Rennaisance) of the nineteen- sixties and -seventies. As a matter of course, they pertained mainly to race and ethnicity, although they were never far removed from considerations of class and gender. The same can be said to be true for the search for truth in myth, at work in the theatrical exploration and recreation of (mainly Central and South America-derived) pre-colonial myths, or mitos, and in the syncrisis of the mythical with the everyday in plays of that period.
Although dominant Church and state narratives in the Americas have operated in ways that largely robbed Latinos/a of their pre-Columbian pasts and mythico- cultural history/ies, several U.S. Latino/a artists of that period committed themselves to the re-creation of myths based on pre-colonial narratives. Their limited historical knowledge of the said narratives did not hinder them in their attempts, grounded as these were in the conviction that “[a] mythos . . . gives a people a place in the cosmos, describing and recalling their ancestors, giving them a ‘from the beginning,’ as it were” (Huerta, Chicano Drama 15-6). Determined to find their place in a “cosmos” dominated by European/Euro American cosmological traditions, Latino/a playwrights began giving concepts, tropes, and images recovered from their indigenous mythical pasts a central position in the Latino/a cultural imaginary.9 Referring particularly to the emergence of the Chicano/a mythos within the context of Chicano/a theatre after the sixties, Herminio Rios-C has claimed that “[i]t is indeed impossible to understand many Chicano literary works without a knowledge of Nahuatl and Mayan mythology.
Many Chicano writers are exploring this part of our history and are actualizing it in terms of contemporary realities” (qtd. in Huerta 19). As Huerta further documents,
9. Usage of the term “indigenous” and the forestaging of indigenous cultural strands throughout should not obscure the fact that we do not exclude African (diasporic) influences.
Delikonstantinidou 7 bringing Aztec and Maya divine figures back to contemporary Latino/a audiences, so that the later can begin to recognize and identify with them, was a great challenge to
Chicano/a playwrights. It was a challenge that the pioneers of Chicana/o dramaturgy, most prominently Estela Portillo-Trambley and Luis Valdez, took up, thus “setting a mythico/historical quest for themselves and their communities” (19-20), still ongoing.
More specifically, Portillo-Trambley and Valdez (with his El Teatro
Campesino) incorporated and reinterpreted historical and mythological elements in their plays, drawing, primarily, on Native American history, mythology, and rituals.
Their professed and principal intention was to treat political and sociological themes, dilemmas, and quandaries of U.S.-based Latinos/as, as well as those of new immigrants. Additionally, the theatrical actualizing of Native American mythology in terms of contemporary Latino/a realities was intended to respond directly to political and cultural Eurocentrism. It sought to promote an idiomatic, largely Latino/a- specific, integration of the cosmic, the individual, and the community, as well as an integration of the cosmic and the sociopolitical dimensions of the conflict between forces of the dominant and the resistant. The twentieth-century pioneers of Latino/a theatre in the U.S. aspired, by means of these integrations, to acquaint Latinos/as with their spiritual heritage, ritual resources, and mythohistorical narratives—all of them almost lost in obscurity within the dominant, institutionalized Euro American cultural apparatus. They would thus instill into Latinos/as “a sense of their own history as
Mestizos”10 (Huerta, Chicano Drama 36) and, by extension, empower them through remembrance of their mythohistorical and cultural pasts.
10. Mestizo/a and mestizaje translate as hybrid and hybridity respectively, but they refer to the diasporic Latin American context. More specifically, the terms are currently used to refer to the complex, biological and cultural intermixture that makes up the Latin American heritage.
Delikonstantinidou 8
The recording and retelling of ancient narratives through the theatre were supposed to help dispossessed peoples to understand their roles in the “cosmos” and their place in the greater scheme of things. Moreover, they were supposed to reinforce faith and pride in the Latino/a community and image, as well as function as a mode of
Latino/a self-formation. The reclaiming of pre-colonial mythologies and histories was perceived and enacted by militant advocates of Latino/a communities—most often identifying themselves as cultural nationalists—as a way of compensating for the loss of their pasts by the realities of colonization, enslavement, exploitation, and exile; a loss that made Latino/a enunciation extremely difficult. Remembrance, in that context, operated as a mechanism of coping with the conflicts, stresses, and ambiguities of an unstable present and an uncertain future.
Ultimately, the documentation of tradition and the theatrical recreation of myths of a resonant, albeit obscure, past contributed greatly to the shaping of the
“history of the [Latino/a and Chicano/a] self, modifying and expanding it,” and, therefore, served to forge “a new historical subjectivity” for Latinos/as, more generally, and for Chicano/as, more specifically (Rebolledo 153; Pérez-Torres,
“Ethnicity” 549). This process should be understood in terms of a self-conscious assertion of ethnoracial difference, founded on strategic political coalitions, and as part of a struggle against the disenfranchisement and subalternization11 of Latino/a peoples. Shot through with unmistakably essentialist over- and undertones, however, the nationalist project of mythico-cultural recovery would soon reveal its limits.
and their meaning has expanded to include not only Spanish and Native American, but also African, Anglo, and other U.S. components. 11. This study’s understanding of the subaltern owes much to Ranajit Guha’s definition of the subaltern as the “name for the general attribution of subordination . . . whether in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way” (Preface 35). It is also informed by Fernando Coronil’s theorization of subalternity as defining “not the being of a subject, but a subjected state of being” (648-9).
Delikonstantinidou 9
The affirming and enabling articulation of Latino/a and Chicano/a subjectivity, in the form of a revival of mytho-history/ies and proud recognition of ethnoracial difference, was supposed to represent an “authentic”—genuinely committed to the nationalist cause—engagement in the process of decolonization and transformation of the status quo. Nevertheless, the politically engaged recovery/revival of indigenous myths in Latino/a theatre was often accompanied with conservative and ahistorical idealizations of pre-colonial cultures, and with mystification of Latino/a ethnoracial identities, while it also became entangled with the patriarchal politics of cultural nationalism(s). In the following decades, however, other Latino/a theatre practitioners, including the ones addressed in this study, would seek to both revitalize and critically revise indigenous mytho-histories, thus pushing against the limits of the nationalist project. Their intention has been to combat maladies resulting from colonial and neocolonial—ethnic, class, sexual, and otherwise identified—oppression, the latter stemming, in turn, from both Euro American hegemonic and Latino (that is, predominantly masculine/ist) prevalent politics, which are seen as stifling the progress of Latino/a communities. In the process, they reach out to the rest of the world, and its multitudinous cultural traditions, and turn a critical eye on their communities of origin, and on the politics and ethics operative therein.
Partaking in an ongoing political struggle catalyzed by the Civil Rights
Movement and the Chicano Rennaisance, yet conscious and critical of its shortcomings, and most of them in the triple capacity of theatre practitioner, scholar, and activist, Morton, Moraga, Alfaro, and Svich encode in the body of their work different yet related responses to the multiple legacies of colonialism. Through their cultural production, they, more specifically, respond to the tensions generated by
Delikonstantinidou 10 contemporary neocolonial and neoliberal regimes12—involving increasingly palpable polarizations bearing upon ethnic, class, gender, and sexual identification—and to the attendant realities of subordination and dispossession. Their responses are, in other words, directed to, what Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson describe as, the “social and cultural corollaries of organizing legal and economic powers to discriminate among populations along lines of conquest” (“New Worlds, Old Dreams?” 35), both literal and metaphorical, past and present. Their work offers, in fact, intimations of the postcolonial state of being as persistently neocolonial, and of the postcolonial world as a “‘postcolonial neocolonized world’ by invisible colonial matrices of power underpinning the current unequal world social order” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 4). Thus, it confronts us with the question of whether there is an “outside” beyond the colonial condition and whether it is possible to imagine it, and, perhaps, set it in motion.
Significantly, their cultural production, especially their theatre work, shows the mythical dimensions and elements of Latino/a theatre to be anything but reactionary, antithetical to, or incompatible with historically shaped social consciousness (raising). Indeed, it shows the mythical resources of Latino/a theatre to be imbued with a dynamic, dialectical,13 awareness of historical forces: from colonization to the rise of dictatorial regimes in Latin America, and to current attempts at moving beyond the confines of cultural nationalism and toward new forms of kinship and affiliation, still—but differently—committed to a decolonizing vision.
More than that, as we shall see in the following chapters, it reveals the revisiting/rewriting of myth to be “an ongoing process of interpreting and mediating
12. The term “neoliberal regimes” refers, in this context, to highly economized, privatized, free (conglomerate) market oriented, globalized-corporate-capitalism dominated clusters of institutions, policies, and systems, operating on the basis of an individualist ethos and a logic according to which “everyone does better when they do better” (Bessant et al. 17). 13. That is to mean, relational, embracing contradictions, involving both the disparate and the similar, welcoming syntheses as well as re/actions.
Delikonstantinidou 11 the contradictions in the everyday historical experience of the people” (Lamadrid 496,
497). At the same time, it draws attention to the crucial role that the creative, though historically grounded, negotiation with myth has played in the discourses that contributed to and processes that led to the formation, first, of an early-twentieth- century, politically charged and decolonization-oriented vision of mestizaje, and, later, of a late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century, flexible, albeit similarly politically charged, global(ized) mestizaje.14
Instead of putting myth in the service of Latino nationalism, these contemporary agents of Latino/a theatre mobilize myth for a different, dual purpose.
On the one hand, they seek to map out the quest for and quandaries of Latinidad
(Latino/a-ness) in the U.S. and beyond. On the other hand, they advocate the sociopolitical and cultural vision of a new mestizaje, a concept/discourse that undergirds this study to the extent that it partly accounts for the “bridge” between the
Latino/a and the Greek mythico-cultural imaginary that Latino/a dramatists create in and through their recent revisionary theatre work. Most significantly for our purposes,
14. It is hardly a coincidence that, in an effort to advance a new Mexican nationalist project by revaluing hybridity in positive terms, revolutionary intellectual Manuel Gamio (1883-1960), offered, as early as 1916, a mythohistory of mestizaje for which, perhaps contrary to what one would expect from a Mexican nationalist, he drew heavily from Greek mythical resources. Gamio fused Greek myth with Mexican mythohistory, using specific Greek mythological subjects (for instance, the figure of Hephaestus and mount Olympus as the dwelling of ancient Greek gods) as metaphors, in a quasi-historical account that narrated “attempts at forging the [Mexican] nation from pre-Columbian times to the present” (Alonso 466). The centrality of the indigenous mythological element in his work “is linked to an identification of the interiority and timelessness of the nation—its ‘soul’—with the ‘Indian’” and provides “a particularly suitable way to territorialize the nation and ground it in the indigenous past” (Alonso 467-8). At the same time, though, the presence of Greek mythical elements in the same work bears testament to the fact that, even in this early account of mestizaje which rests on essentialist premises regarding difference, Greek myths were understood not only as non-antagonistic but, actually, as conducive to the advancement of (Mexican) mestizo/a nationalism. This interesting, although somewhat indirect, historical instance serves to indicate that, despite its rejection by many twentieth century Latino/a intellectuals and artists on the grounds that it constitutes the foundation of hegemonic western civilization, Greek tragic myth has functioned as a rich arsenal of empowering concepts and images and as a source of inspiration for the struggle of Latin Americans against oppression; one that can be “conjured up whenever the call for freedom is heard,” as another well-known creative “receiver” of Greek tragic myth has claimed (Òsófisan 128).
Delikonstantinidou 12 the material in many of their fin-de-siècle and post-millennium plays embarks on drastic departures from the conspicuously nationalism-inflected and male-dominated
(in character and subject matter) Latino and Chicano teatro of previous decades. In fact, it reveals the playwrights’ attempt to denunciate essentialist notions of ethnic purity, cultural authenticity, and separatism, predicated on the notion of a homogeneous and coherent Latino identity, and to promote, instead, inter/transcultural exchanges as well as a new, critical and inclusive, mestizaje ethos.
The new mestizaje ethos differs markedly from early conceptualizations of mestizaje, such as the one offered by the “father” of modern Mexican anthropology
Manuel Gamio (1916). Those earlier accounts were grounded in “an essentialist understanding of mestizaje itself,” since they postulated “cultural and biological difference” as dysfunctional and thus upheld “the superiority of homogeneity”
(Velazco y Trianosky 286). On the contrary, according to later thinkers, such as Alicia
Arrizón (1999) and Ruben Rosario Rodriguez (2008), “new mestizaje” is not solely adversarial but is certainly alternative, calling for and bringing forth a new cultural reality. This new cultural reality endorses hybridity and transculturation15; embraces
“foreign” cultures in its effort to construct a meaningful cultural past for Latin/o/a
American mestizo/a people(s) (cultures such as the Greek which had been often excluded as the hegemonic “Other” of the Latino paradigm); and preserves its means of resisting racism, as well as its emancipatory value, without devolving into a narrow ethnocentrism, ethnic/racial essentialism, or masculinist/heterosexist nationalism.
15. The Cuban theorist Fernando Ortiz coined the neologism “transculturation” as a substitute for “acculturation,” in his germinal Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1995), “to express the varied phenomena that came about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here” (97-8). Several decades later, literary scholar and cultural critic José David Saldívar offered a succinct interpretation of the term as “the hurricane-like contact of cultures” (80). Here, it is taken to denote the productive, albeit not conflict-free, merging and converging of seemingly disparate cultures.
Delikonstantinidou 13
The more contemporary conception and formulation of mestizaje corresponds to a plural “Latino diasporic condition spanning the globe,” as Ana Patricia Rodriguez has recently argued. To put it more precisely, it corresponds to the current, evolving cosmopolitan (less oriented toward nation-based distinctions, and receptive to other cultures), experience of more and more Latinos/as, who reach “outside of the U.S. geographical territory,” while taking into account “its expansive geocultural” ambit, and “engage with and represent Latino/a cultural imaginaries and identities outside of historically traditional ethnic configurations and U.S. geographical locations.” It is a mestizaje that reflects and responds to “the transnational diffusion of Latino American diasporas and the globalization [namely, the global reach] of Latinidades across the world” (222); that is, to the turn of the Latino/a world in the third millennium.
Permeated by this mestizaje ethos, the works that are discussed in this study challenge both Euro American and exclusivist Latinocentric constructions of Latino/a cultures. In this way, they give new impetus to the exploration of the complex relationship between Euro American and Latino/a American cultures, and advance new modes of cultural exchange. Simultaneously, they forestage more, more varied and complicated clashes, as well as more nuanced conflicts than those present in the work of earlier Latino/a dramatists, and bring together many distinct positionalities of
Latinos/as without trying to unite them. As we shall see, the plays afford an understanding of the critical discourse of mestizaje which is as multidimensional, plural, and tense as the mestizo/a subject that lies at its center. This is so especially inasmuch as they show the processes and experiences of “mestizo-ization” to be various, complex, and often distressing, leading people to adopt diverse sets of values and to exist in complicated collective/communal webs of meaning. As a matter of
Delikonstantinidou 14 fact, they explore queer, cholo/a,16 spiritual, real and metaphoric mestizaje, meanwhile exposing various conflictual and oppressive realities faced by Latino/a communities and individuals. This is not a facile mestizaje blending and bridging that they foreground, then; one that entails transculturation in a comfortable fashion. On the contrary, the plays themselves and the kind(s) of mestizaje to which they call attention are made possible and are animated through/by struggle with colonial inheritance, post- or neo-colonial realities, as well as through/by struggle with the impact of the foregoing on identity.
At times, the works under consideration question the very nature and form of
“identity” itself, and, at others, they reveal identity through the construct of hybridity, in which, as Miriam Sobré-Denton says, “individuals construct their sense of self through multiple influences in a dialogue of dialectical tension” (104). Participants in this dialogue, the mestizo/a figures populating these works assume a complex multi- voicing in enacting, what Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott call, “the serious heteroglossic play of dominant and marginalized discourses.” That is to mean, they seek to engage all of the said discourses simultaneously in a space proper to neither
16. “Cholo was another ‘mixed blood’ category that was directly linked to that of mestizo. Cholo, however, in contrast to mestizo, would later become a pejorative term associated with low social and ethnic/racial status,” Zoila S. Mendoza informs us (13). “Chola or cholo refers to a person who has left her or his society and culture of origin, but who has not acculturated and integrated into the new sociocultural context. In many parts of Latin America, cholos refers to indigenous people who live in cities. In Chicano-Mexicano communities in the U.S., the term generally refers to youths who are associated with gangs” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 222). In more recent years, many U.S. Chicano/a urban youth have adopted the clothing style, gestures, and behavioral norms that are typically associated with choloismo without any gang affiliation as “an image of urban Chicano cool,” as sociologist James Diego Vigil comments (From Indians to Chicanos 290). This has led to an interesting development documented by Latino/a theatre scholar Jon D. Rossini: “the greater visibility one has as a stereotypical gang member, the less likely one is to participate in stereotyped gang behavior, [thereby] casting into doubt any simple association that might ground such a stereotype” (101). At the same time, the fact that the cholo/a subcultural model has, over the years, become “so institutionalized that ‘crazy’ acts [constitutive of choloismo’s lifestyle of ‘la vida loca’] are considered acceptable” to a certain extent, drastically erodes the resistance- related connotative content some have attributed to the model (Vigil, Indians to Chicanos 290). We will discuss the cholo/a subculture in detail later in the course of the study, within the framework of our analysis of Alfaro’s mythoplays.
Delikonstantinidou 15
(xv), mounting resistance to interlocked oppressions without, however, making any
claims to purity or unity. The mestizo/a subject of the Latino/a imaginary as it appears
in the plays we examine, like the tragic subject of the ancient Greek mythical tradition
from which it is inspired and to which it alludes, is a subject-in-communities not
peacefully coexisting with each other. It is a plural and conflictual subject. Yet, as
will be hopefully demonstrated, it is precisely its revealing, agonic and agonistic
(borne of and bearing both agony and agon, or struggle), participation in a network of
heterogeneous, strained, and often clashing relationships of philia17 what carries the
potential to contribute to the healing of the traumatized (subaltern) other(s) of the
current world order; an order resonating with old and new mythologies of identity and
difference, of insiders and outsiders.
III. The Greek Mythos of the New Mitos
It is in the light of the emergent vision of an alternative, global mestizaje18 that
the plays included here combine the Greek pantheon of icons and symbols, mythical
heroes and their narratives, with indigenous mythologies and their corresponding
iconographies. The new mythoi that emerge out of this coalescence perform a
productive and engaging dialogue between the distinct mythico-cultural contexts from
17. “Philia” is the Greek word for non-exclusive, relational and congenial love, and fellowship. 18. The qualification “global” may sound overambitious. Nevertheless, it functions as a useful marker that differentiates this contemporary mestizaje discourse, which acknowledges the present multiplication of syntheses and (con)fusions, the proliferation of new identities irreducible by older categories (of race, gender, sexuality, class, and so on) around the world, and the evolving vision of a global civil society, from earlier formulations of Mexican mestizaje, which placed emphasis on indigenous cultural (inter)mixtures. Better understood in the plural sense, “global mestizaje” both retrieves the particular Latin American historical contexts from which it emerged, and seeks to also retrieve indigenous, African, and European roots, as well as promote an ethical paradigm for global belonging and participation in the world community. Let us also note that the global inflections of mestizaje in the above formulation seem even more urgent in view of the prevailing inequitable dynamics of global cultural and capital flows, as well as the unequal patterns of development in the twenty-first century world, on which the new mestizaje aspires to act remedially.
Delikonstantinidou 16 which they originate. Arguably, this is a dialogue mutually beneficial for all the
“parties” involved. However, it must be acknowledged that arguments concerning the mutual benefits entailed, more generally, in the reception(s) and, more specifically, in the production of revisions of classical Greek tragic myths are nothing if not sharply contested. The same holds for related arguments concerning the myths’ supposed universality, on the grounds of which Greek myths inspire other (non-western) artists about their own mythologies. Quite understandably, considering the enlighting wealth of knowledge that the postcolonial critique has bestowed on us, one cannot but be wary of claims about Greek myths’ abstract universality, a western conceit which aims at exalting western culture by way of the ancient Greek one, according to many critics, and even more wary of associative assumptions of European (cultural) superiority. Yet, as will be shown here, the former arguments, about the mutual benefits to be reaped from a critical and creative negotiation with the Greek resources, probably deserve much more credence than the latter.
In fact, as we will discover in the course of this study, it is not some ideal quality of transcendental universality, but the Greek myths’ very tangibly felt, earthbound “chronotopic elasticity” (Shevtsova 100) what allows them to be recontextualized/transculturated, as products of a specific culture, across/through time and space, to serve other specific cultural contexts for specific reasons. The resulting works thus accrue multiple meanings and resonances. These, in turn, enable the myths to interact with a greater range of cultures, temporalities, and traditions, theatrical and otherwise. The concept of “chronotopic elasticity” should be, therefore, calibrated in the context of our discussion into the “model of pushing and pulling,” as it has been put forth by Goff and Simpson. As the scholars insightfully observe,
Delikonstantinidou 17
[w]hile the older version of ‘tradition’ would claim that the texts of the
ancient world push their way through history, independently powered
by their own vigorous excellence, the more recent model recognizes
the motive force of a critical mass of reappropriations, pulling the
ancient texts forwards [sic] into new situations. There is an important
variation in this model of pushing and pulling: some texts, . . . , are
pulled through history by so many reappropriations, in so many
contexts, that they develop an autonomous capacity to push, from the
sheer momentum bestowed by this pulling power; but it is especially
clear in the context of a putative ancient Greek tradition, which in
Europe is utterly discontinuous, that there can be no push without pull.
. . . (Crossroads 53).
Their model accords with and builds on much contemporary scholarship on (classical) myth, while, at the same time, it opens promising vistas to the study of classical myth in postcolonial (with and without the hyphen) directions.
Along a similar strand of thought, Chiara Botticci, building on Hans
Blumenberg’s ideas about myths consisting in the artistic/literary and intellectual
“work on myth,” observes that “myths are not products that are given once and for all but are instead a process of the continual reworking of a basic narrative core of the mythologem . . . [which] also changes over time, because, on each occasion, it is reappropriated19 by different needs and exigencies” (qtd. in Duprey 83-4). “Every
19. This study shies away from the terms “appropriate” and “appropriation.” This is because, especially since the nineteen-eighties, the terms have taken on strong negative connotations, given that they seemed to emphasize, as Claire Sponsler acknowledges, “’taking over’ as an act of power between unequal partners in which a dominant group . . . seized cultural material from a weaker . . . one and took it over.” It is true that postcolonial theory “has stressed the ways in which appropriation can be understood outside the
Delikonstantinidou 18 reshaping [of a myth],” Blumenberg writes elsewhere, “will make clearer, . . . , the operative forces that emerge from the present situation. [But, concurrently, we] would know almost nothing of the significance of [a mythic element] if this work [on myth] had not ‘disclosed it or ‘invented it’ and superadded it” (277). Greek myth, like all myths, then, can be understood as “a discourse that generates discourse,” as
“polymorphous and intertextual, as well as (apparently) infinitely interpretable.” It can be understood as a kind of metalanguage for expressing the needs, desires, and concerns of each receiving context (or “present situation”) (Moddelmog 3-5); a metalanguage geared or, rather, made to gear to each one of them.
In the process of using Greek tragic myths as primary material for their plays,
Latino/a theatre artists engage effectively with their own “situation,” their cultural past and present, needs and exigencies. In doing so, they land subversive blows to
Eurocentrism and its claims of Europe’s exceptionalism, by demonstrating, as many theorists and cultural critics have also done in recent years, that Europe is not the only natural and legitimate heir of ancient Greece (despite the fact that it has been presenting itself thus through “false” genealogies masked as historical continuities).20
Indeed, contemporary receptions and reception treatises, such as Goff’s and
Simpson’s, expound on the fact that ancient Greece “is not necessarily ‘white,’ or
‘western,’ . . . , except by means of the active construction of a tradition that appropriates ancient Greece for the origin of Europe.” They often counter, in a
dominance-subordination model by granting the subordinate culture a more active role in processes of appropriation,” and has allowed us to theorize appropriation without asserting an unassailable hierarchy of one partner being imposed on another (11). Nevertheless, the terms continue to have negative coloring, which, in turn, affects the contexts in which they find themselves. Not using them is part of an effort to avoid such unnecessary complications. 20. On the implications of this “fabrication of relatively recent European history,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s much-discussed words (5), and of modern European culture’s claims on the civilizational authority of ancient Greece, consult DuBois (2010), Harrison (2000); Greenwood (2009); as well as Stam and Shohat (2005). See also Aijaz Ahmad (1992), for a critique of Edward Said’s conflation of Europe and ancient Greece in Orientalism (1978).
Delikonstantinidou 19 polemical tone, “[t]he proprietary claims by European powers that compensate for the lack of such direct and unbroken transmission,” or of a single shared history
(Crossroads 47). Therefore, the dramatic mythic revisions under consideration here, situated in and speaking to the contemporary Latino/a diasporic condition, serve both as self-explorations and as anti-(neo)colonial resistance in “putting new roots down and finding new routes back” (39). Yet, they also re-invigorate the ancient Greek fabula by means of their dynamic, radical treatments; that is, by treating them with new insights and by re-presenting them not as something that belongs to the (foreign) past, but, rather, as a corpus of knowledge and affect which is unfinished and carrying into the future—a corpus that has been made exceptionally flexible through thousands of years and miles of use, though not abstractly “universal.”
The forward impulse of the works discussed here derives precisely from their imagining(s) of the future both of Greek as well as indigenous myth, and of their truths in contemporary contexts, instead of simply searching for truth in indigenous myth, as in the nationalism-inflected work of earlier Latino/a dramatists. The dramatic mythic revisions in question seize on the Greek tragic myths as much more—if not other—than integral constituents of the Euro American imperial tradition and the colonial archive. They seize on them as fecund sites of political agency and of existential investment. In the very act of revis(ion)ing them, they foreground both the impossibility to recover “untainted” originals of the Greek texts and the need to distinguish the texts from the western traditions that have embraced them as their own.
Particularly germane to our discussion, on that point, is Goff’s and Simpson’s cogent argument that the Greek resources have been “successfully . . . annexed by
European culture” to such an extent that “any disengagement . . . requires
Delikonstantinidou 20 considerable labour on the part of those effecting it.” Therefore, “no easy, immediate traffic between ancient Greece” and other, non-European, receiving cultures can be assumed. No account of ancient Greece’s reception should overlook the fact that:
Any modern work of these cultures that transacts with an ancient text
is thus also trafficking with several other works of European tradition,
and . . . [is] culturally and formally riven by the effort. But the Greek
“originals,” . . . , do not walk away from this encounter unscathed, and
in some cases bear the imprint of those later works, like a haunting
echo. . . . (Crossroads 7)
Conversely, at the very instant that the authority and vision of the Greek resources is tampered with in their encounter with non-European receiving cultures, “they are simultaneously validated by being deployed to articulate a new set of concerns” (55); in our case, Latino/a-specific ones.
Hoping that the replacement of Latin/o/a America for Africa in the scholars’ formulation is not an overextrapolation of their line of argumentation, we could proceed with a suggestion. If “ancient Greece has been subject to deterritorialization driven by the rise and fall of several European empires,” with modern Europe reterritorializing Greece as its own “before deterritorializing it in the process of exporting European culture to its colonial possessions,” by engaging with Greek resources, Latin/o/a America, in a very real sense, reterritorializes and deterritorializes them, and is reciprocally reterritorialized and deterritoriazed by them. The latter point can be more specifically defended “on the grounds that the two domains [Latin/o/a)
America and Greece] are the beginnings of diasporas, in which colonization has been a common factor” (49). This function bears multiple and hitherto underexamined
Delikonstantinidou 21 implications for the afterlife of the Greeks in Latin/o/a America. Bellow, we will focus on the meaning and value it imparts on the revionary practice under examination.
Insofar as they successfully redeploy the Greek resources in such a way as to set up a reciprocal and dialectical relationship between multiple “originating” and
“receiving” cultures, the works included here undermine adherence to a unified, linear notion of mythico-cultural “tradition.” Instead, they plead on behalf of a plurality of traditions, or of a nexus of intimately interconnected traditions, involving the constant rewriting of existing ones and the invention of new, though still related, ones.
Therefore, they offer an alternative perspective according to which the “internal western vision” that has been developed of “Classics” (and of western subjects as their alleged inheritors) is not, as Freddy Decreus claims, merely complemented with the external one, coming from the erstwhile colonized (263-4), but, rather, transformed by it. Importantly, being themselves premised on migrations (as much textual as contextual) and on cross-hybridization, the plays appear to be aligned with and mobilizing Lorna Hardwick’s “migratory model” of classical receptions.21
Hardwick’s model proves most useful in understanding and interpreting the revisionary drama at hand. Five core features of this “migratory model,” in particular, open up new horizons of possibility for the understanding, study, and use of the
“Classics,” and are highly germane to our discussion. Her model proposes that
“classical texts have provided important fields in which different societies have worked out the relationship between past and present and their interaction with that of others”; it emphasizes that “classical texts are themselves diasporic, uprooted from
21. On this point, one can consult Hardwick’s “Contests and Continuities in Classical Traditions” (2007) and The Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions (2007), especially Section One: “Reception within Antiquity and Beyond.”
Delikonstantinidou 22 their original contexts, travelers both physically and metaphorically across time, place, and language”; it takes into account “the contexts and practices of different receptions of the same ante-texts, image, or theme”; it acknowledges “the shaping forces of the subsequent filters that have conditioned understanding of the texts without assuming that only one set of filters matters”; and, finally, it “leaves room for investigating why any particular ante-text re-emerges under particular cultural conditions and for considering the extent to which the dynamics of its relationship with its ancient context are replicated or revised” (Contests and Continuities 46-7).22
In line with this migratory model, the dramatic mythic revisions of this study set up a four-way relationship with the Greek mythical resources on which they draw: ancient Greek–modern European–Euro American–Latino/a (itself a blend of age-old and current aspects). Multi-directional flows of influence are at play here and a dialogue in which all four “interlocutors” are constantly implicated with one another, so that, ultimately, “complex cultural relationships” are foregrounded. This same
“dialogue” belies “a linear trajectory between two poles,” Greek/European and non-
Greek/non-European, as well as “suspiciously neat narratives that chart the flow of
‘influences’” (365), to draw from Emily Greenwood’s formulation in another context of classical reception.
Entering into this dialogue has entailed a two-fold challenge for the dramatists.
First, they have tried to create texts that, similarly to their Greek material, would be part of civic as well as poetic engagement with society, and that would explore the controversial, public questions that Greek tragic myths posed to their original
22. There is extensive bibliography on Hardwick’s last point. Let us cite indicatively The Invention of Tradition (1983) by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, as well as the more contemporary Classics and Colonialism (2005) by Barbara Goff, Classics and the Uses of Reception by Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas (2006). They all contain helpful discussions of aspects of Hardwick’s argument.
Delikonstantinidou 23 audience—questions all-too-human and unmistakably relevant to contemporary
Latino/a contexts. Most of these questions revolve around:
the struggles of the individual to make sense of her/himself, her/his story, and
the world, and/or to re-invent her/himself in the midst of challenging
circumstances; recognition of one’s frailties, foibles, and mortality;
the negative implications of excessive pride (hubris), of moral and mental
blindness, and of the interplay between of folly and virtue; the pressures
exerted and the restraints imposed upon society’s “other-ized” subjects;
crises of (collective and individual) identity, as a result of dispossession,
injustice, or under the burden of alterity, and the attendant experiences of
alienation;
the bounds set up by circumscribing family and social roles;
and, certainly, confusions and splits generated by incompatibilities and clashes
between different relationships of philia, or different forms of communal life
in which the individual subject partakes, as well as by the very tragic mode to
which the human condition is perceived to be attuned (Felski 2008); that is,
the mode of be(com)ing and perceiving that lies at the heart of the Greek
myths engaged by our Latino/a dramatists and that we will consider in more
detail later on.
In that regard, the plays considered here do not only stage interactions among cultures, but also can, in and of themselves, be said to constitute “processes of cultural and political intervention” (Hardwick, Reception Studies 107-11)
Second, they have tried to contest traditional and time-honored interpretations of the myths by deliberately re-contextualizing and, sometimes, exploding the
Delikonstantinidou 24 terrain(s) of storytelling of the Greek source material, thus allowing it to signify anew.
In their dramatic mythic revisions, the dramatists appear to be involved in critical negotiation with the Greek mythical source stories, their structures, and the forms their staged interpretations have assumed over the years, at the same time re- imagining and re-shaping them in ways that permit a topical exploration of the struggle to establish a (Latino/a) sense of self in a post-millennium world. As we shall see, no small part in this negotiation have played the dramaturgical practices adopted in the works’ productions and which, in performing a syncrisis of cultures, allow the mythic revisions to shed new light on current (global) issues, such as war, migration, violence, domination and subordination, desire, resistance, and sacrifice.
Significantly, a complementary effect of the dramaturgical practices implemented in the productions of the revisions, and of the syncrisis of cultures that these bring about, is the foregrounding of a number of cross-cultural bonds existing between the referential context of the Greek tragic myths, on the one hand, and that of the Latino/a artists who engage them, on the other. Arguably, this effect serves to destabilize notions/constructions of ancient Greek culture as primarily—or even exclusively—European, as well as the flimsy basis of claims of Greek culture’s transcendental universality and its underlying skewed dynamics. Instead, it emphasizes the context-specific basis on which the revisionary praxis operates. The fact that U.S. Latino/a artists choose to view Greek culture as a vital and enduring part of their plural, mestizo/a cultural heritage, not simply compatible with their more immediate culture, but allied to it on the grounds of actual cross-cultural bonds, not least of which is the migratory/diasporic strand traversing both, does indeed say much about the artists’ outreach impulse. Yet, in this light, it also gives credence to Goff’s and Simpson’s compendious “pushing and pulling” model, as well as to Hardwick’s
Delikonstantinidou 25
“migratory model” discussed earlier in this chapter. What it does not do, though, is justify conflations of “plural” with a largely Eurocentric “universal.”
One of the aforementioned cross-cultural bonds, namely the use of myth in drama and society, has already been touched upon, but we should not fail to take account of others, such as:
ancient forms and systems of polytheism (with local frameworks of religious
practice incorporating polytheistic elements, such as: the variety of objects of
religious observation and the deification of natural forces and historical
figures);
invocation of the gods and spirits manifest in curses and practices of
divination and/or oracular consultation;
a holistic theatre concept and practice which involves an integrated approach
to the use of spectacle, rhythm, music, dance, ritualistic elements, and, of
course, drama;
the communalistic character of both the ancient Greek and the Latino/a
referential cultural contexts;
and, perhaps most importantly, the hybrid origins and nature of both the Greek
and the Latino/a cultures.23
It is, in large part, due to these very cross-cultural bonds that the Greek material can serve, to borrow Kevin J. Wetmore’s words from a different context, “as an outside matrix of interpretation, a frame upon which the indigenous [in our case, Latino/a]
23. As Wetmore points out, “ancient Greek culture . . . made no attempt to hide its hybridic nature. . . .“ Rather, it acknowledged its hybrid past, although “the modern Western tradition was to disregard (and even work to obscure) the hybrid origins of Greek culture” (18-9).
Delikonstantinidou 26 experience can be explored from without, yet not necessarily from an imperialist
European point of view” (Black Dionysus 3).
Besides the foregoing cross-cultural bonds, other similarities between the ancient Greek and the Latino/a—especially the Mexican—American contexts furnish common ground on which the artists of this study have built their works. These include similarities between the respective cultures’ mythologies, mythographic traditions, and the archetypal struggles and conflicts incorporated therein, which facilitate connection with and understanding of the Greek source stories on the part of
Latino/a American receiving cultures. (We should not fail to notice, although we will address this point later on, that the similarities are striking in the case of the Greek myth of Medea and the Central/South American myths of La Malinche and La
Llorona.) They also include similarities in terms of the cultural development or transition from oral, myth-based cultures (pre-seventh-century B.C. and pre-colonial respectively), to proto-literate and literate cultures (post-seventh-century B.C. and colonial/postcolonial respectively). The latter transformed and/or critiqued both myth and the society that produced it, especially by means of the myth’s dramatization, first, in epic (Homeric epics and epic/heroic corridos respectively) and, later, in drama.
Given these cross-cultural bonds, mythological similarities, and similar patterns of cultural progression, it is no wonder why the Greek material is appealing and accessible (instead of “alien” or incommensurably “Other”) to Latino/a artists, both as an object and as a means of interrogation. It is no wonder why their revisions of the Greek tragic myths in their mythical/mythological plays (or, for short, mythoplays), even when the latter problematize aspects of the former, are all the more relevant and able to serve as useful sociopolitical commentaries on the present
Delikonstantinidou 27 circumstances of twenty-first century audiences, especially, but not exclusively,
Latino/a ones.
As has been mentioned earlier, in addition to playing up cross-cultural bonds between the original culture of the mythical source stories and the target (Latino/a) culture(s) of the revisions, the dramaturgical practices employed in the mythoplays’ productions enable a critical negotiation between the material drawn from the Greek culture (and its Euro American legacies) and the target cultures, transculturating and updating it in the process. The staging approaches, language, and other related choices that the artists bring to bear on their encounter with the Greek myths forestage revision’s sense, not only as an imaginative rendering of extant sources, but also as a rewriting of culture apposite to the artists’ present(s) and familiar performance traditions (magical realism24 springing first to mind).
24. Although the length of this study does not allow for a close look at the debates involving Latino/a uses of magic(al) realism, we may add a few lines in regard to this tradition as it pertains to our discussion, in view of the fact that the works we examine are related to it. Described at times as a redemptive practice, offering the possibility of “rescuing the ‘voice’ of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time,” in Michael Taussig’s words (qtd. in Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference 145), and, at other times, as a practice that contributes to a neocolonial reworking of primitivism and reification of alterity, magic(al) realism still evokes strong reactions and responses. According to Caridad Svich and María Teresa Marrero “‘[m]agic realism’ became the convenient code word to describe a variety of theatrical work with little thought as to the term’s origin or meaning, and with little regard to the diversity of subject matter and points of view” employed by Latin American artists (x). Svich’s and Marreno’s observation is further corroborated by many contemporary Latino/a artists’ explicit rejection of the label of “magic(al) realism.” Furthermore, we should be mindful of the fact that the popularity of this label served to appropriate diverse Latin American (con)texts into western canons as examples of an exotic “other,” and thus diminish their scope and impact. Quite interestingly, however, the dramatists whose work we consider in this study have been experimenting with magic(al) realism in many of their plays—the ones examined here included. In fact, they have been harnessing the possibilities that this genre (or style) offers for a “synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth,” as John Barth has put it (qtd. in D’haen 200), and for its “political consciousness-raising powers . . . within postmodernism” (D’haen 202). We could even claim that they engage with a new, post-magic(al) realism, in that they both acknowledge “the pervasive power of the notion that an essential connection links all Latin American history and cultures to magical realism and aim to model a variety of paths to transcend it” (Pérez Melgosa 106). Their incorporation of mythical elements extraneous to Latin American cultures in the works that will be examined here constitutes one such path away from the
Delikonstantinidou 28
On the one hand, in the process of re-interpreting and re-staging the ancient texts, the dramatists often disrupt the linear narrative structures, breach the fourth wall of the stage, or even burst the fictional bubble by employing forms of pastiche, non- psychological characterization, cross-dressing, absurdist theatre, tragicomedy, and magical realist elements; by inserting pop culture lingo, objects, and references; and by staging interactions between live and mediatized performance, as well as between on- and off-stage worlds. Recontextualized, in more than one sense, the ancient fabula are made to speak in multiple theatrical, as well as actual, including barrio-specific,25 tongues. Reception of the Greeks becomes thus diversified.
On the other hand, to borrow from Amy Green’s view of contemporary classical revival, it is at times “contradiction” rather than “continuity” between the familiar Greek myth and the new cultural and theatrical idioms that distinguishes these revisions (2). The Latino/a renderings of the Greek myths “do not necessarily seek analogues,” as another scholar, Sharon Friedman, claims of contemporary productions of classics. Rather, often in “collage style,” they disassemble and
metaphysics of essentialism and towards a “transplantation” of magic(al) realism to the fecund site of a global mestizaje ethos. 25. “Barrio” is a Spanish word meaning neighborhood. But a barrio is much more than an inner city neighborhood, “spatially segregated from newer or Anglo parts of the cityscape,” according to Daniel D. Arreola (83). Rather, David Díaz explains, “[e]l barrio is the foundational logic of Chicana/o urbanism in the Southwest: its space is central to cultural expression, as well as to conflict and resistance to the dominant culture” (23). Found throughout Latin America and within the U.S., barrios are much more than places of commerce and residence that “include residential, commercial, and industrial properties” and that can be characterized by “demographic, socioeconomic, and political criteria.” They constitute “local, regional, national, and international structure[s],” geographical units, at once inclusive and marginalized, accommodating “specific social, cultural, and identity politics that permit residents to have a voice in their community” (Perez 134-6). Additionally, the barrio is for most Latinos/as, but also for non-Latinos/as, “a symbolic space of identification,” symbolizing “struggle, pride, unity, and a sense of community. It also becomes a permanent space to celebrate successes and remedy community failures” (134). As a symbolic and racialized space, the barrio has been constructed and construed by theorists and artists alike as an ambivalent space over the years; one that takes on positive and negative qualities depending on its interpreter’s standpoint. In recent years, the barrio began to be redefined as a result of institutional changes and changes in barrio infrastructure. It remains to be seen in what way(s) exactly this redefinition will come to pass in the near future and what its impact will be for Latinos/as and non-Latinos/as alike.
Delikonstantinidou 29 reassemble segments of texts to convey a sense of disconnection and offer alternative forms of re-connection with the old narratives (2). Deconstructive approaches to intertextuality are utilized and are usually put into action through experimentations with dramatic form, metatheatricality, mise-en-scène, language, and the body. These experimentations allow the revisions to also spell out, probe, and re-present constructions of identity, difference, and otherness woven into the employed myths.
The aim is, to use Friedman’s words once more, to “denaturalize the values we have come to associate with [the originals’] iconic figures”; to make the familiar strange; to draw attention to ideology encoded in the plot, language, structure(s) of the story, and performance; and, ultimately, to recognize the theatrical choices of the revision as divergent from earlier, especially Eurocentric, versions and as “historically situated”
(2). Reception of the Greeks becomes thus defamiliarized.
In radically, and at times subversively, revis(ion)ing the classics, the dramatists render explicit their objective to fully exploit revision’s potential to reshape conventions, in ways that challenge long-standing “orthodoxies” supporting the dominant theatrical and cultural traditions that have claimed Greek antiquity as their own. The new versions of the ancient Greek material work to de-centre it, to employ Hardwick’s model once again, “from what used to be thought of as their dominant western, cultural, social and political associations.” They also work to distance it “from at least some of the effects of its association with (for example) imperial hegemonies.” In that sense, the Greeks can be said to be undergoing “a quasi postcolonial experience in being released from oppressive constraints and exploitation and freed to assume new identities which are not limited by the dictates, values and material culture of colonialist appropriators” (“Refiguring Classical Texts” 109).
Delikonstantinidou 30
To conclude the first section of the “Prolegomena,” the mythic revisionary drama that we examine in the present study taps into and, sometimes, problematizes the ideological moorings of the ancient sources and their alleged correlatives in the present. Engaged in a productive, but tense, dialogue with the Greek mythical texts, as well as with the traditions that have been laying claims to them, it embodies and conveys the idea that cultural inheritances are as unfixed, pliant, or even fluid, as the cultural identities they make up. Thereby, constitutive elements of these inheritances
(such as the ancient Greek myth, itself diasporic) can be recontextualized in the process of inter/transcultural exchange so as to refer to and meet the imperatives of non-western, or, more accurately, non-Euro American, “host” cultures; in our case,
Latino/a ones. In light of that fact, each one of our dramatic mythic revisions can be said to contribute to the advancement of the vision of a new, alternative and global mestizaje, centered, in Svich’s words, “on tracing and creating new maps of seeing theatre and theatre-making, and by extension, seeing the world” (Blasted Heavens 5); maps no longer representing strictly bounded places but, rather, indicating new spaces defined by emergent sets of (social) human relations among and across diverse people, peoples, and cultures. However, the quest for an empowering mestizaje consciousness, in the sense of “a critical practice of cultural negotiation and translation” (McLaren 142), is presented in all of them as littered with thorny obstacles: ambiguous and debatable values, violence and vengeance, victimization and terrible sacrifices. Yet, there, in its vibrating, struggling dynamic lies its radical and healing potential for contemporary audiences, within a mestizo/a world. The mode in which our mythoplays attest to that is, as we shall see next, a tragic one.
Delikonstantinidou 31
IV. Latino/a Mythoplays and the Tragic: Toward Healing (and) a Radical
Politics
As Caridad Svich graciously stated in a relevant question during our interview, contemporary Latino/a theatre artists are attracted by the fact that the temporal and the trans-temporal, “the local and the global are always at work” in Greek myths. It is this particular quality that facilitates historically situated negotiations between Greek and non-Greek resources across time and space; a critique toward worldwide lingering injustices and disempowering power structures; and an exploration of the person as embedded in multiple circles of being, from the familial to the cosmic, as well as in various, often strained and clashing, relationships of philia. Yet, special attention should be granted to the fact that they, also, appear to gravitate toward Greek myths because of the tragic mode pervading the myths and offering invaluable insights into the human condition.
Let us note at this point that the term “mode” is used throughout this study to qualify the tragic. One is most likely to concur with Rita Felski that this is a far more
“elastic term” that serves a triple function. First, it subsumes “the three kinds of meaning and usage clustering around ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragic’: the literary, the philosophical and the vernacular,” and takes us beyond this tri-partite definition of tragedy and the tragic. Second, it lends “itself especially well to the complicated history and vicissitudes of tragic art,” and draws attention to “the hybrid, mixed qualities of genres.” And, third, it directs us away from the “generalities often associated with the idea of the tragic in philosophy,” while giving us “a more selective rubric than its everyday use to mean ‘very sad,’” by pointing us toward “the formal particulars that render sadness tragic” (on which we will soon comment), without, however, excluding multiple media and forms from within its purview (2,
Delikonstantinidou 32
14). As we shall see, what Felski calls, the tragic “shape of suffering” (10), caused by rupture, brokenness, and loss, can be found at the heart of the mythoplays discussed here, and which are evidently about human conflict and about the conflicted natures of human characters themselves: about “what is ripped apart” (Svich, Interview). Yet, our mythoplays are, also, and most resonantly we may add, about “what can be healed,” or how we can “move towards a process of healing” (Svich, Interview).
Contrary to George Steiner’s interpretation of tragedy as that which, when properly understood, belies hope (2004), the works that we discuss here, and, of course, the present study as a whole, do not treat the tragic as a mode of being, becoming, and perceiving that entails the relinquishment of the vision and reality of healing. Rather the opposite. To be more precise, in keeping with Terry Eagleton’s
(2003) (and others’) views on the tragic, we reflect on it as a life-affirming way of be(com)ing in and of seeing the world. It is precisely the tragic mode of the Greek myths on which the works are based—this, not only existential, but also political coordinate of the human condition—that forms the subject of the next chapter. Later, the analytical parts of this study focus on examining more closely the ways in which it is employed in the mythoplays as having political and therapeutic/healing potential able to be channeled by and through each work toward Latino/a communities plagued with traumas and so-called (social) “diseases” or nosoi—involving exile and cultural dispossession, social marginalization and alienation, poverty, sexual aggression, crime, drug abuse, incarceration.
As we shall discover, then, our mythoplays seem to take up the tragic, in line with social theorist Michel Maffesoli, as more than pertinent to our own time—a late
Delikonstantinidou 33 postmodernity or post-postmodernity, or even a trans-modernity.26 They take it up as
“quotidian, popular, and contemporary, epitomized in the practices of present-day youth cultures (raves, drug-taking, popular music)” (Felski 15). Maffesoli conceives of the tragic in terms of an (re)emergent consciousness “embodied in an ethics and aesthetics of the moment, a fascination with extremity and excess, and a surrendering of the self to impersonal forces.” Thus, his formulation conducts us toward an encounter with the contemporaneity of the tragic and the task of rethinking what tragedy might mean today (Felski 15; Maffesoli 319-35). Yet, Maffesoli’s understanding of the tragic needs to be calibrated in light of Raymond Williams’
Marxism-inflected interpretation of the tragic as a diagnostic tool or marker in human life and society, if a more comprehensive—and germane to our purposes—view of the tragic is to be induced.
More specifically, Maffesoli’s rather nihilistic “surrendering of the self” is, in
Williams’ account of the tragic, a struggle always on the verge of ending up in surrender; an outcome that is, nevertheless, actively ever-deferred. The difference between Maffesoli’s and Williams’ readings, very interestingly, seems to embody
“the paradoxical juxtaposition of nihilism and action” that constitutes tragic revolutionary politics according to Hannah Arendt. Indeed, for Arendt “[t]here is no revolution without tragedy, . . . but the revolutionary power of tragedy also lies in its association with action, in its ability to move beyond nihilism . . .” (Leonard Location
26. The recently coined term “post-postmodernity” constitutes a cumbersome proposition resisted by many a scholar. One can turn to Paul Hiebert (2008) for an account of the contemporary era set in relation to the “post-postmodern.” The term “transmodernity,” on the other hand, has been offered by philosopher Enrique Dussel as an alternative to Eurocentric formulations of modernity and postmodernity. “Transmodernity” signals a “move beyond Eurocentred modernity,” for him; it acknowledges “[t]he existence of epistemic diversity,” which it views as the basis for “decolonial project that takes seriously the critical thinking of the epistemic traditions of the Global South” and seeks to “take ideas and institutions appropriated by Eurocentred modernity and decolonize them in different directions . . . towards a pluriverse of meaning and a pluriversal world” (Grosfoguel 23-46).
Delikonstantinidou 34
606). In this sense, the difference between the two approaches provides a fascinating angle, or preliminary frame, to the consanguineous relationship between tragic philosophy and so-called tragic revolutionary politics, on which we reflect in the next chapter and which informs our plays’ analysis.
Besides that, and within the specific context of our discussion, the need for
William’s “intervention” ensues from the fact that the plays treated here share his assessment of tragedy and the tragic mode as playing “a crucial role in uncovering structures of social oppression and conditions of alienation,” and as bringing about an
“exposure of the shortcomings of modernity [that] is necessary to the creation of a new modernity” (Leonard Location 295). The (re)emergent consciousness of which
Maffesoli speaks is for Williams “the new tragic consciousness of all those who, appalled by the present, are for this reason firmly committed to a different future: to struggle against suffering learned from suffering: a total exposure which is also a total involvement,” as he writes in his Modern Tragedy (203). This is, most importantly, the consciousness that animates the plays we will soon embark on examining closely.
Drawing partly from Miriam Leonard’s, Joshua Dienstag’s and David Scott’s views on the subject, we will discover that, instead of treating the tragic mode as synonymous with the bleakest form of metaphysical pessimism, as apolitical, or even as politically conservative (as some lines of thought have over the years), the revisions offer conceptions of the tragic as politically restless and radical. In this, they are aligned with other, very important lines of thought examined in the following chapter. According to the latter, the tragic is founded on “a sense of the contingent and time-bound nature of existence, caught in an inexorable flux of creation and destruction,” “unlikely to be enamored of the status quo,” and chastening “any form
Delikonstantinidou 35 of politics that seeks to ground itself in narratives of perfectability and progress”
(Felski 18; Dienstag 104-20; Scott 200).
These conceptions of the tragic also oppose previous anticolonial,
Enlightenment-inflected, progressivist Romance narratives which, through specific temporal (teleological) rhythms, a certain progressive momentum, and a sense of destination, are/were beckoning a new future into the presen: a glorious future of emancipation that would unambiguously resolve present impasses. Contrary to such narratives, our mythoplays, precisely by means of their tragic mode, alert us to the limits of rational agential activity. They also caution us of “the tragic conundrum constituted by modern power’s construction of options that are both ineluctable and paradoxical, at once impossible to disavow and eternally bitter to embrace,” to employ Scott’s formulation. Moreover, and most importantly for the perspective and focus of this study, they call forth a will for social transformation which is fostered through the tragic’s “agonic confrontation that holds no necessary promise of rescue or reconciliation or redemption,” and which accommodates “the ambiguities and paradoxes of time and action, intentions and contingencies, determinations and chance” (Scott 201). In that regard, the works under consideration do not guarantee the success of a radical politics, but they certainly herald the possibility for such a politics that would be much more self-reflexive in its ethics and praxis than the politics currently in place, or, to employ Bonnie Honig’s elegant phrase: “the possibility of action in conditions of impossibility” (9).
Inextricable from the radical political potential that they find in the tragic mode is the therapeutic potential they discern in it and conjure forth from it. The sociopolitical transformation they will forth through the tragic is, as we will see, principally a healing one. Significantly, the plays summon the tragic mode as that
Delikonstantinidou 36 which, by consigning (collective) trauma to a ritual space, allows it to be solemnly voiced and lamented, instead of silently reenacted (or simply and counter- productively acted out); as that which wrenches back from trauma the rest of life and allows the rest of life to work through trauma; and as that which allows a traumatized life to be given meaning, insofar as it “changes trauma into the density around which meaning orbits, held and repelled like planets around the sun,” according to Kathleen
M. Sands’ poetic description (83-4). In the course of the present study, we explore the various ways in which the plays uncover losses, recognizing them exactly as such, and further seek to reclaim grief, desire, and pleasure, thus operating as vehicles of healing for the bearers of the losses.
Yet, we also explore the ways in which they, at times, take one more step toward helping participants in the plays’ productions, especially the productions’ target communities, to recover from the mental and moral effects of these losses. This is an endeavor similarly, if not more, conducive to healing, which aligns them with the practices that we commonly associate with social theatre, whose origins, in turn, reach back to tragic art and its (contested yet still un-disproved) cathartic function.
With regard to the achievement of the latter objective, we assess the therapeutic efficacy of the works’ productions on the traumas afflicting Latin American diasporic communities, whether in the process of creating the plays (as, for instance, in Alfaro’s
Electricidad, for which the artist worked with at-risk youth), or during the plays’ productions (as in Svich’s Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On The Neon Shell That Was
Once Her Heart, A Rave Fable, whose productions were sociotherapeutically oriented toward assisting the public in recognizing and coping with the trauma of massive femicide in the city of Juárez).
Delikonstantinidou 37
I would like to conclude the second section of this introduction on a more personal note, by expressing the hope that, in trying to achieve its goals, this study— the first of its kind to my knowledge—will serve as a map of a fertile cultural/theatrical territory that has been left virtually unexplored. It is unfortunate that, despite the fact that commendable and successful attempts have been made, in the last three decades, to counter the devalorization and systematic exclusion of
Latino/a theatre by the hegemonic canon, and to promote the work of representative theatre practitioners, the role and function of the Greek tragic myth for Latino/a theatre and for the communities this theatre engages and addresses have drawn little critical interest. Therefore, the purpose of the present research is fourfold: make up for this lack of critical analysis of Greek-inspired and -based Latino/a revisionary theatre, alter its current state of marginalization, and foreground its rich potential for remedying social and cultural ills, but also for forging inter/transcultural bonds between the Greek and the Latin/o/a cultures.
Ideally, the contribution of the present study extends beyond illuminating recent, transhemispheric in nature and character, developments in Latino/a theatre and, by extension, in the U.S. culture, no matter how paradigm-changing these developments seem to be, in terms of outreach and influence, from my standpoint. As was mentioned earlier, my hope is that the evidence this study supplies on the beneficial role of the kind of revisionary theatre under consideration in the experience of trauma (more broadly conceived), as well as in the practice(s) and the process(es) of healing, both at the level of the individual and at the level of community, might lead to the adoption of more and more effective policies and actions on the interface of health/well-being, arts, and social sciences. That would be this project’s most significant contribution.
Delikonstantinidou 38
Yet, there is also the anticipation that this project will contribute to enhance contact between the Greek and the Latino/a cultures and their respective diasporic communities, within and without the U.S., especially given the diffusion of Latin/o/a
American diasporas currently under way and the (successive) recent reframing of the global turn of (Latino/a) American studies. I would be glad to find that this project can aid the practical advancement of new modes of inter- and trans-cultural exchange, negotiation, and syncrisis. It might even be that the spirit of mestizaje that imbues this research and study will also inspire a stronger collaboration between the fields of
Hellenic Studies, Latino/a American Studies, and Theatre/Performance Studies, which would tap into the bonds, mythological similarities, and similar patterns of cultural progression that the (ancient) Greek and the Latino/a referential contexts already share.
Before rounding off this section, I must comment on the fact that, although the plays considered in this study represent the most characteristic examples of Greek- inflected Latino/a revisionary theatre that I have managed to gather during five years of research, and although they are written by some of the most significant Latino/a dramatists of their generation, I certainly do not have the last word on the subject.
After all, I do prefer to think of this work as the beginning, rather than the culmination, of inquiry.
V. Setting Down Methodological Caveats
It must be clear by now that the intention of this study is to chart the ways in which contemporary Latino/a revisionary theatre crosses cultures and the limits of time and space, and celebrates the weaving and mixing of mythico-cultural strands of
Delikonstantinidou 39 the artists’ various “phantom patrias” (Svich, Interview), as well as inter/transcultural syncrisis and exchange. Specifically, we attempt to chart the creative and critical ways in which this kind of theatre engages with the Greek tragic mythical sources and the new modes of seeing and of living in a twenty-first century mestizo/a world that it discovers through them. In order to fulfill the intentions of the present study, we embrace a variety of methodologies and, since the idea is to suit the methodological tools to each play, not a single theory or approach is used. Rather, a theoretical net comprising a number of different veins of thought is undergirding the examination of the relationship between Greek tragic myth, Latino/a dramatic mythic revision, and the cultural contexts of both of them as well as those (European and Euro American contexts) mediating between them.
Although this study cannot be placed within the discipline of Classics, it does rely heavily on insights drawn from scholarship within the area of Classical Reception
Studies. Yet, the interdisciplinary scope of the research means that the study also draws on Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, as well as on Latin/o/a
American, Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies, while the Classics is bringing to bear on all these fields, and vice versa. The project’s interdisciplinary approach serves as a constant reminder that the critical angle in the present study is directed to the revisions and their contexts, and not to their ancient Greek material per se; the telos, as it were, of the interpretative work is on the former rather than the latter.
In the light of the stated focus of this study, we engage Tragic Theory, namely, both western and non-western theoretical formulations of the tragic, as an epistemological field and as a methodology for examining the revisions, their politics and effects on their audiences. It is important to recognize, however, that the realm of
Delikonstantinidou 40
Tragic Theory itself is “essentially interdisciplinary, and, like tragedy itself, highly dynamic,” as Sarah Dewar-Watson pointedly observes (1).
In accordance with the interdisciplinary approach employed here, perspectives and findings in the areas of cultural anthropology and sociology, as well as arguments about the relationship between theatre and therapy (more broadly than typically conceived) within the framework of trauma studies are also mined for their use in analyzing the mythoplays. The use of valuable insights from all these different epistemological frameworks, discourses, and methods of inquiry hopefully provide a broad, though accessible and hospitable, avenue that will allow a wide range of diverse constituencies—students, scholars, educators, theatre practitioners, or theatre enthusiasts—to glean a better understanding of the material this study investigates.
Two further methodological caveats are in order before proceeding with an overview of the chapters. The present study can be considered to be centered on the written word, like much theatre research conducted in the “West.” Admittedly, it does privilege, in a sense, dramatic literature, and the works’ transculturated textual codes; this, however, is not for lack of eagerness and effort to delve into the performance codes of the mythic revisions in question here. Rather, necessary scope delimitations, along with the fact that productions of the plays were available to me only in video form, swayed the project toward the said word-centeredness. Nevertheless, every effort has been made to ensure that this study engages, to the extent possible, performance, productions of the plays, and audience and critical response. After all, one of its guiding assumptions is that a theatrical play never fully dons its ontological mantle until it is performed in front of an audience, thus realizing its performative potential.
Delikonstantinidou 41
Finally, allow me a clarification of a more personal nature, which may seem superfluous but is made necessary by the extremely contested position of the Greek classics and their reception(s) in the Greek context, especially its scholarly streams.
Five years of research have alerted me to the following quite interesting phenomenon.
Many scholars who are active within or tangentially with the domain of the Greek
Classics, and who explore, one way or another, the Greek cultural past, hasten to clarify at the beginning of their analyses that they speak from a position inserted within the western intellectual tradition which, inevitably, imparts specific characteristics to their readings. This is an indication of scholarly integrity and self- reflexivity, one would argue, and with good reason. I have struggled with the thought whether this predicament applies to me, and, by extension, to this study, too.
However, I have come to the conclusion that, in being Greek, my predicament is more complex still. This is because, being Greek and a student of English and
American literature and culture for the past ten years, I am not far removed from the western tradition, yet many of its aspects are as distanced from me as Latin/o/a
America. At the same time, I am as close to ancient Greece as a modern Greek can be.
Yet, modern Greeks’ relation with their renowned ancestors constitutes a thorny issue to say the least. This is partly because Greek identity politics and the “Classics” (both ante-texts and academic discipline) have been going hand in hand throughout
Greece’s history, with Greek education predisposing students to think of the grandeur of their people’s ancient past with awe and cultivating meticulously a particular sensibility toward Greekness; a Greekness that, for many Greeks, is identified with the ancients. Therefore, for a Greek, adopting a critical stance toward the “Classics” and their legacies automatically translates into occupying a site of contested discourse or, better, conflict that has been raging for years and shows no sign of abatement.
Delikonstantinidou 42
Aware of the risks associated with participating in this conflict, and taking into consideration the arguments of as many of the contributing factions as possible, I decided to tread this rent and palpitating ground determinedly and with confidence, yet carefully and with sensitivity. Respectful of all the teachers and fellow-students— ancient, modern, and current, European and non-European—who have enriched the discussion of the relationship between ancient Greek and contemporary, non-Greek, texts and contexts, and without whose contributions this study would not be possible,
I aspire to contribute, in my turn, to the discussion and, hopefully, open it up to new possibilities of development. And, although I do not purport to be able to convincingly answer Hardwick’s questions which precede this introductory chapter, I can fully appreciate the significance of their being “out there” and up for grabs, and I hope to be able to supply an interesting angle of reflection upon them.
In view of all the above, I feel compelled to clarify that, lodged within this convoluted network of affiliations, I occupy neither the position of the westerner nor that of the non-westerner, but, rather, one in between. It is out of this position of in- between-ness and multiple perspectives that the present study is born. This evokes, context-specific consideration aside for the moment, the position of both the border subject of much Latino/a discourse and the Greek tragic figure of the pharmakos, insofar as they both offer embodiments of a paradigm of doubleness and decentering of authoritative meaning (making). This is the position of this study, as far as I am concerned, and, expectedly, it will prove to be as generative of new cultural meanings as that of the border subject and the pharmakos figure at which it hints.
Delikonstantinidou 43
VI. Overview of the Chapters
As has already been mentioned, the next chapter offers a thorough exploration of the tragic mode operative in the Greek myths and in their dramatic revisions by contemporary Latino/a playwrights, Carlos Morton, Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and
Caridad Svich. Chapter One prepares the ground for the more particular examination, in the study’s analytical portion, of the reasons why and the ways in which the tragic mode, as employed in specific revisionary works, can be perceived as contributing, in politically charged terms, to a process of healing for the traumas of Latino/a communities and of different constituencies within these communities. The latter include immigrants, at-risk youth, ex-felons, ex-gang members, LGBT+ individuals, as well as families and friends of victims of violent crimes of various kinds.
More specifically, the following chapter discusses several bodies of scholarship on the production, operational modes, and functionalities of the tragic, beginning with a consideration of the concept’s defining parameters. Subsequently, it engages with theoretical approaches on the question of the tragic’s relation to politics.
Here, we also consider the tragic mode in relation to radical politics and reflect on the possibility for such a radical politics as inherent to the tragic. Closely related to accounts that regard the tragic as bearing the potential for a radical politics is the last theoretical strand which the chapter tackles, namely perspectives on the question of the relation between the tragic and the therapeutic. This discussion issues into thorough illustrations of the function of the tragic mode in specific plays in the analytical portion this study.
The aim of the analytical parts is to discuss in detail how the therapeutic potential and the potential for a radical politics in the tragic mode (the two will be
Delikonstantinidou 44 treated as interpenetrating and cross-fertilizing) render it an ideal conduit for the unmistakably political projects of contemporary Latino/a dramatists. Through(out) the analysis, we will discover that their dramatic mythic revisions aim at more than writing back to the western canon, cultural/theatrical tradition, and Euro American hegemony, as theirs in not a “canonical” counter-discourse targeting exclusively
(neo)colonialism. They seem to aim, in fact, at advancing a global, inclusive, and multiply agentic “queer” mestizaje that takes Euro America and the “West” into account, without, however, lending them a superior status and without defining them as their sole term of comparison by compulsively resisting only them. This is revealed by and through their exploration of nuanced aspects of the contemporary U.S.
Latino/a experience, and of more complex hegemonic power structures than those entailed in Euro American hegemony over Latino/a peoples, through a mestiza blend of ancient mythical Greece, modern Europe and Euro America, and past and present
Latin American diaspora.
The analytical portion of the study is structured in four parts. In the first part, comprising chapters two to four, we discuss the presence of the Greek tragic figure of
Medea in the contemporary Latin American diasporic theatre in the U.S. First, the tragic import of Medea is explored by means of a synoptic account of the Greek tragic myth of Medea and of American (specifically, U.S.) theatre’s response to it. Next, we consider issues of the myth’s transculturation from the Greek context to the U.S.
Latino/a context, and the uses it serves in the latter, placing particular emphasis on the so-called Medea–Malinche–Llorona paradigm and its implications. Chapter Two,
Three, and Four engage the plays La Malinche, by Carlos Morton (1997), The Hungry
Woman: A Mexican Medea, by Cherríe Moraga (2000), and Mojada: A Medea in Los
Delikonstantinidou 45
Angeles by Luis Alfaro (2015), respectively. Where pertinent, comparisons are drawn among the three mythoplays.
In the second part of the study we change focus from Latino/a revisions of the
Greek myth of Medea to a revision of the myth of Oedipus. Here, we first provide a brief account of Oedipus’ mythic career and, then, go on to explore Luis Alfaro’s revisionary approach to the tragic myth of Oedipus (and to so-called “oedipal issues”). Specifically, Chapter Six takes up Alfaro’s much-praised Oedipus El Rey
(2010). In the context of this chapter, we discuss how the Latino playwright transposes the myth of Oedipus to a U.S. Latino/a, urban and barrioscaped present, in view of the overarching concerns of this study. Similarly to the first part, the second part of the study allows for comparisons to be made among the mythoplays under consideration.
The third and the fourth part zoom in the mythological family of the Atreides, and, specifically, in its tragic daughters, Electra and Iphigenia. Each part treats a dramatic mythic revision based on/inspired by the myth of Electra and Iphigenia respectively. Alfaro’s Electricidad (2003) forms the focus of the sixth chapter (in Part
3), which takes on the play’s myth-inflected articulation of the twenty-first century barrio-cholo/a experience in a contemporary, postcolonial, or, rather, neocolonial U.S. context. Finally, the seventh chapter (in Part 4) probes Svich’s Iphigenia Crash Land
Falls On The Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable) (2004), which, interestingly, recasts Iphigenia as a mythical celebrity and, in recontextualizing her myth, provides a engaging critical commentary on issues of violence, celebrity culture, sacrifice, and the remnants of cultures haunting our contemporary world, and calls for the undertaking of socially remedial action.
Delikonstantinidou 46
The conclusion, or “Epilegomena,” which follows immediately afterwards, serves as a synthesis of the main points that have comprised the body of this work and speculates on the possible future directions and impacts of research conducted in the same or in a similar vein as the present one.
Delikonstantinidou 47
Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an
incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into
the future.
(Bergson 194)
Delikonstantinidou 48
Chapter 1
The Tragic Mode: Modus Politicus, Modus Vivendi
I. Introduction to the Tragic
Is there such a thing as the “tragic”? Before offering a discussion of the concept of the tragic (mainly) in terms of its therapeutic and political import, it is incumbent that we provide a convincing answer to the aforementioned, preliminary question. The kernel of this answer, which serves as the matrix of the description
(rather than definition) of the tragic upon which this chapter and the rest of the present study are built, has been first put forth by Péter Szondi, in his landmark An Essay on the Tragic (2002, originally 1961): “There is no such thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. Rather, the tragic is a mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical” (55). Manifestly influenced by
Hegel, Szondi proceeds to construct his theory of the tragic around “the dialectic,” understood as involving the unity of opposites, the sudden change into one’s opposite, the negative pointing of oneself, and self-division (102). Potent as Szondi’s specification, “the dialectical manner,” has been shown to be, nevertheless, it is not of immediate relevance for the present study. It is, rather, his formulation of the tragic as
“mode” that is of primary importance here.
Almost half a century later, Rita Felski elaborated on Szondi’s proposition in an attempt to disentangle the tragic from an exclusive association with the genre of tragedy, although the latter is remarkably variant in itself. She also sought to loosen
Delikonstantinidou 49 the tragic’s ties to the heavy load of connotations that Enlightenment, Romantic, and
Existentialist thinkers and artists deposited on it, as well as disembroil (but not disconnect) it from trivializing, mostly media-bred, vernacular uses of the tragic as commensurate and coterminous with any (more and less) sad event involving human suffering. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton’s notorious thumbnail vignette-critique of existing literary and philosophical definitions of tragedy and the tragic,27 in re- claiming the term “mode” to qualify the tragic, Felski took caution not to be buried under “the ruins” of theory. At the same time, she was careful not to make the tragic into a category “infinitely elastic,” and thus utterly drained of its usefulness as an analytical tool, in a misplaced democratizing gesture.
The rethinking of the tragic as a mode, according to the scholar, allows us to embrace it in its many “guises and forms,” without jettisoning the implications of it having also an aesthetic referent, and hence pertaining to certain “formal characteristics” that give a distinctive shape to tragic suffering. And, although “the specifics of this shape are the source of dispute,” whether we consider elements “of plot and structure, characterization and language,” or even an intra- or extra-fictional status, as Felski herself acknowledges, “significant agreements and commonalities of view” do exist (10, 14). It is to these points of convergence that we turn our attention later on in this chapter.
Underlying the discussion advanced here, therefore, is the recognition of “the sheer impossibility of coming up with a substantive definition of the tragic that can satisfactorily account for all known examples of tragic art” (Felski 3). In fact, the present study seizes on a conception of the tragic according to which the latter is as
27. In his well-known Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2009), Eagleton pronounced tragic theory “a theory in ruins,” attacking with special severity rarefied, “purist,” notions of what counts as “tragic.”
Delikonstantinidou 50 elusive as it is rich, familiar, and urgent. However, the complementary conception of the tragic as a “mode,” a rubric flexible yet selective, will help us navigate the vast and dense corpus of tragic theory, capitalizing on past reflections to which we are deeply indebted, but, concurrently, envision and flesh out present and future directions. To respond explicitly to the opening question of this chapter, then, and borrowing from both Szondi and Felski: no, there is no such thing as a strictly definable tragic, and mode is our way of thinking and rethinking it within the context of this study and according to its premises and operative logic.
II. Building on the Tragic Opus
Perhaps too abstract for people to grasp and articulate it, even “unthinkable” for some (Maffesoli 319), yet alluring and modern almost beyond comprehension, the tragic has had an impressively long and venerable trajectory. From Plato and
Aristotle, to the Romans (from Livius Andronicus to Horace and Seneca), all the way to Ludovico Castelvetro, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, René Rapin, David Hume, and
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the tragic is considered only within—and is invested with meaning only insofar as it is related to—tragic drama.28 As in Hellenistic Greece, so
28. As a matter of fact, we find the first politically inflected treatments of tragic drama in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Plato, a detractor of poetry, in general, and tragic drama, in particular, detects in the recalcitrant, subversive aspects and agonistic elements of tragic drama a menace to philosophical thinking, moral order, and social stability. Instead of inculcating values beneficial to the creation and regulation of the citizen body, tragedy, according to the Platonic critique, encourages the audience to indulge base, degrading passions. Against the backdrop of Plato’s condemnation of tragedy as dangerous demagoguery, Aristotle sought to secure for tragedy a place in society and culture by insisting on the logos of tragedy as unifying and edifying, a genuine craft whose effect of catharsis renders it beneficial to those who experience it. See Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics and Politics, as well as Else (1957) on the Poetics as a response to Plato. It is worth mentioning also Michelle Zerba’s observation that “[i]n the Poetics, we first encounter the effort of philosophy to incorporate . . . tragedy . . . , into its orbit of the rationally intelligible, by submitting its production to the controls of a techne. Beginning with their canonization in the Renaissance, Aristotle’s principles have assumed a kind of institutional power over the
Delikonstantinidou 51 in Renaissance Italy, Baroque Spain, Neo-classical France, and Enlightenment
England, writes Rita Felski after Glenn Most,29 “tragedy refers to literature rather than life; it is a genre rather than an idea, a form of dramatic poetry governed by certain conventions rather than an aspect of philosophy or a rendering of the irresolvable contradictions of human experience” (2). With particular reference to the ancient
Greeks, Most remarks that we may provisionally (in light of the extant historical evidence) assume that the meanings they deduced from Athenian tragedy were more political than philosophical. In other words, they related less to “metaphysical anxieties” about a human’s place in a sometimes seemingly unintelligible universe, than to “the political tensions between the individual and the community associated with Athens’ rapid and controversial democratization” (21). Other current accounts of tragedy and the tragic in ancient Greece corroborate Most’s claims.
It is imperative to note, at this point, that even Aristotle’s ambiguous medical loanword “catharsis,” to which earlier and contemporary scholars retrace the question of tragic pleasure, has well-attested, deep political connotations and rich political implications, as we shall see further on. The same is true of the interpretative controversy that its elliptical nature has spawn among experts as to whether it should be more accurately explicated as “purgation” (Nuttall 1996) or “purification” (Golden
1962; Nussbaum 2001),30 and of the lack of critical consensus regarding the kind of
centuries. Their status, however, has come into question in our time with increasing pressure.” All the indeterminacies of tragedy that provoke irresolvable aporia, thus countering the Aristotelian view of tragedy as “a unified totality,” and that were for centuries “relegated to the margins of study or regarded as unfortunate anomalies” (5), are increasingly attracting the attention of researchers of the tragic, both scholars and artists. 29. See Most (2000), especially pages 15-35. For a brief overview of the (conceptual) trajectory of tragedy and the tragic, see Adrian Poole’s Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (2005) and Vassilis Lambropoulos’ The Tragic Idea (2006). 30. Some of the recent critics who challenged the said dichotomy include Jonathan Lear (1992) and Eva Schaper (1968), while Stephen Halliwell (1998) proposed that catharsis be understood as an educational, rather than evacuative process. Gerard Else (1957) and, more recently, Charles Segal (1996) have theorized about catharsis as part of the play itself; Segal in terms of the onstage experience of ritual cleansing from the pollution of death.
Delikonstantinidou 52 process catharsis is, as well as the objects which it concerns (emotional, event-related, or otherwise). By way of return to the main point here, we should observe that it would require “a love affair between Athenian tragedy and German Idealism,” to borrow Olga Taxidou’s poignant words (4), for the tragic to break (almost) free from its moorings in the literary genre of tragedy.
The concept of the tragic as inextricable from the genre of tragedy underwent drastic developments over the last two centuries. These developments are conditional on a conceptual shift in the understanding of tragedy. Vassilis Lambropoulos’ compendious comment on the subject is worth quoting at length:
The tragic is abstracted from drama and its circumstances for the first
time at a fascinating moment in history, when moral, political and
artistic demands converge in the German confrontation with
modernity. A complex quest for justice, freedom and beauty creates the
new ancients, the Greeks—the ancients of modernity. The tragic idea
represents an integral part of the modern Greek project as it is first
formulated in Germany and gradually spreads around the world. Since
the French Revolution made palpable the ethical tensions of modern
freedom, the tragic has come to represent the difficulties of resolution.
(8)
Raymond Williams specifies these developments further, pinning down their foundational linkage with the French Revolution.
Indeed, “[s]ince the time of the French Revolution,” Williams observes, “the idea of tragedy can be seen as in different ways a response to culture in conscious change and movement.” It is since that watershed of human history that “[t]he action of tragedy and the action of history have been consciously connected, and in the
Delikonstantinidou 53 connection have been seen in new ways” (62). And, “[i]f Williams is correct to say that the French Revolution inaugurates a new ‘structure of feeling,’” then “one [can] understand the turn to tragedy within modernity as a way to make sense of this new affective structure,” as Miriam Leonard suggests (Location 321). To put it differently,
“[m]odern Western thought in the wake of the French Revolution insistently turned to a series of ontological questions to which tragedy appeared to hold the answers”
(Location 881). These were questions regarding the very foundations of being, such as the nature, modes, and meaning of existence; reality, its appearance and representation; knowledge and its limits; the world’s constitution, its purpose (or purposelessness), humans’ place in it and ability to fathom it; self, identity, personal and social relations; the enigma of death; the nature and conflict of good and evil.
Thenceforth, tragedy has emerged as one of the dominant—yet admittedly ambivalent—“emplotments” of history, in general, as well as of revolution, “a mode of the political . . . that defined and redefined the political stakes of modernity,” and of the allied notion of the pursuit of freedom, in particular (Leonard Location 328). It has “transformed,” from a specific dramatic genre, “into a philosophy of history . . . a metahistorical text” (Location 629), with which to analyze and diagnose the “modern condition.” Thus began also a stream of political thought inextricable from the modern philosophical engagement with tragedy, because it emerged “from a critique of metaphysics for which tragedy would become essential” (Location 881). What is particularly notable about this development, as Leonard argues, is that “[t]he incorporation of the tragic into the critique of metaphysics, . . . creates the possibility for a different politics” (Location 888). It is a politics whose starting point becomes
“the impossibility of metaphysical foundations” (Dillon 129).
Delikonstantinidou 54
At this juncture in the history of human thought and experience, then, the idea of the tragic as a developing (instead of fully developed31) world-picture distinct from tragic drama came forth.32 The idea of the tragic sprang up from “the crucible of
German Romanticism,” to use Rita Felski’s words (2). One of its pillars, Friedrich von Schiller, has been identified as the architect of the most fundamental structure undergirding this idea; namely the notion that “human existence is essentially tragic, epitomizing a painful and irrevocable schism between the individual and the world in which he finds himself stranded” (2). Nevertheless, according to Szondi, “only since
[Friedrich Wilhelm] Schelling there has been a philosophy of the tragic” (1). Besides
Schiller and Schelling, other thinkers associated more or less directly with German
Romanticism and Idealism, including Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, August Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and, later, Søren
Kierkegaard, offered various and often divergent expositions of the said notion, and, by extension, of the idea of the tragic.
Predicated to a great extent on the shifts (and shocks) in society and the individual brought about by the rise of modernity, its antinomies and “processes of secularization, disenchantment, and individualization” (Felski 2-3), their readings established the tragic as that which “signifies constitutive self-division” and
“announces the necessary split of a primordial unity” (Lambropoulos 10-1). The tragic was, in that context, conceived as that which “stands for contradiction within human autonomy” and “for the conflict of freedom and necessity, liberation and
31. See also Goldhill for an analysis of this conceptual framework (2012). 32. Although sustained emphasis was indeed put on the tragic as idea, a kind of conceptual locus or constellation, within the philosophy of the tragic, we should not fail to counter, after Leonard, the reductive view according to which the philosophy of the tragic as a whole represents “a departure from aesthetics and a refuge in metaphysics. Instead, its formulation was the consequence of the elevation of aesthetics to a new position within philosophy and a simultaneous questioning of the promise and the limits of metaphysics” (Location 901).
Delikonstantinidou 55 legislation” (Lambropoulos 10-1). The beginnings of an understanding of the tragic as a distinct mode of being and becoming in, as well as perceiving, the world began to be brewed at that time, although many years would have to pass until such a configuration of the tragic could be spelled out.
With Friedrich Nietzsche’s extraordinary contribution to the philosophy of the tragic, the suffering contradiction of the tragic (Szondi 34)33 was absorbed into philosophy’s own operation, and, in a sense, philosophy became another species of tragedy/the tragic. Nietzsche did more than serve as the chief prophet and preacher of the “tragic sense of life” (Galle 34, 39). He also helped forge an identification of the tragic with what “overflows, surpasses, oversteps human horizons—with whatever exceeds reason, knowledge, understanding, history, justice, kinship, and so on”
(Lambropoulos 10). He set the foundations of a conceptualization of the tragic as that which is beyond and above the human, yet still bound to the human realm, which is itself inevitably and irrevocably transfigured in/by its encounter with the tragic.
Therein lies the radicality of Nietzsche’s re-thinking of tragedy and the tragic idea.
His relatively recent rehabilitation into the “Classics’” good graces after decades of scornful treatment speaks volumes about the current need to re-rethink the tragic (as poetics, philosophy, and beyond) and the ethical, political, artistic, and philosophical possibilities34 it has opened up for us.35
33. “The tragic is the suffering contradiction” Szondi has evocatively written (34). 34. Lambropoulos touches upon some of these possibilities, namely: “(a) ethical possibilities in the face of the internal contradictions of history and freedom; (b) political possibilities in the face of the defeat of the revolution and the ensuing dilemmas of justice; (c) artistic possibilities in the face of the collapse of Neo-humanist genres and forms and the dissolution of Neo-classical audiences; and (d) philosophical possibilities in the face of the incompatible demands of liberalism and skepticism which tested the limits of reason” (11). 35. Felski, after Paul Gordon, writes that it was “[t]he very untimeliness of Nietzsche’s ideas [which] have rendered them newly timely; his vision of tragedy as forged in the crucible of collective frenzy, orgiastic coupling, and rapturous self-loss offers a provocative challenge to
Delikonstantinidou 56
Within the frame of German Romanticism and Idealism, philosophers such as
Kant, Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, and, to a certain extent, Nietzsche, sought to bring the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political in some sort of reconciliation with one another in the realm of the tragic—especially tragic art.36 The idea that apparently irresolvable ethical and political issues can be reconciled, or, at least, brought into a precarious balance (in the case of Nietzsche), by tragic aesthetic arbitration drastically influenced later thinkers, while its significance for the evolution of so-called western thought cannot be overstated. We could, parenthetically, propose for consideration
Georg Lukács’ elaboration on the Hegelian concept of a dialectic totality as one that harbors the possibility of redemption, as well as the concept of a “messianism without a messiah” and its link with revolutionary politics,37 treated by thinkers such as
Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno, as formulations bearing distinct traces of this line of tragic thinking. Martin Heidegger also struggled with the Kantian and Hegelian heritage in his works, finding it difficult to abandon the possibility of reconciliation in a conjoining order and, eventually, returning, in his later writings, to
Hegel’s conception of the tragic and to the hope that a possible re-emergence of it could remedy the destitution of modernity.38
the received view of Greek antiquity as the cradle of Western civilization and an epoch of enlightened serenity” (6). 36. Hegel—as well as most of his intellectual descendants—presents the tragic as a “dialectic of conflict and reconciliation in human action, a dialectic in which the moment of reconciliation is ineliminable” (Finlayson 493). Yet, he does not speak of a reconciliation as a “conflict-free harmony,” but rather formulates it as “a grievous, anguished reconciliation, . . . that is troubled, disturbed, or disquieted”; it is a reconciliation to which conflict and tension are internal (Williams 313). 37. Central to which is the notion that redemption is not (no longer and not necessarily) predicated on sacrifice and the related notion that we are to wait for (and work toward) the fulfillment of the promise for a better world absent any guarantee that what we are waiting for can ever arrive. 38. Additionally, a case in point is early-twentieth-century Christian philosophers, such as Vyachislav Ivanov and Nikolai Berdyaev, who sought to integrate the tragic, as art form, idea, as well as the ethical inquiry into the tragic, into a Christian vision of the world.
Delikonstantinidou 57
Other philosophers and philosophically minded scholars and artists, however, rejected the idea of reconciliation altogether as chimerical. Søren Kierkegaard introduced the contrarian idea that tragic art lends expression to an existence defined as tragic “on the basis of the unresolvable struggle between individuality and the general order” (Lambropoulos 70). His formulation foregoes, what he considered to be, the false promise of reconciliation and redemption, and instead stresses that division and contradiction cannot be transcended by an already compromised
(because man-made and thus frictional and split) artificial unity. Kierkegaard’s idea found ardent defenders in Friedrich Hebbel and Georg Simmel. Simmel, in particular, described human culture as tragic in itself, in the sense of carrying its self-destructive fate within it from the beginning, and considered tragic art “as the prototype of existential alienation” (99). If there is a mode of the tragic to be discerned in the
Kierkegaardian legacy, it is certainly a deeply and irredeemably embattled one. Parts of this legacy were taken up by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), while his ideas about culture seem to have anticipated developments in twentieth-century thought and (counter)cultural politics.
Philosophical reflection on the tragic declined in Germany in the generations following Benjamin, Bloch, and Heidegger. This development owed as much to the real-life tragedies of the two World Wars as to the aestheticization39 of (the discourse on) the tragic. In the mid-twentieth century, the heart of the philosophy of the tragic was beating in France where a long line of thinkers, which includes Gabriel Marcel,
Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Paul Ricoeur, René Girard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques
39. This refers, on the one hand, to the shift in discussions of the tragic to a pronounced emphasis on its aesthetic dimensions, as well as its association with the broad domain of aesthetics and aesthetic concerns (the “tragic aesthetic”); and, on the other hand, to the reception of tragedy by the German fascist regime, and the attendant spectacularization, sensualization, and instrumentalization of tragedy.
Delikonstantinidou 58
Derrida, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Hélène Cixous, among many other bright and inquiring minds, elaborated on the tragic idea and broke new ground in the study of the tragic. Meanwhile, new tragedies were written and new and old tragedies were directed by French artists, from Antonin Artaud to Ariane Mnouchkine. The contribution of French scholars and theatre artists has been immense in that it turned the tragic into a complex of issues that can be approached from a great number of directions, involving ethics, aesthetics, criticism, political theory, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, studies of myth and ritual, feminism and gender studies, religious studies, and, of course, theatre and—later in the twentieth century— performance studies.
In Britain, interest grew exponentially, in the course of the twentieth century, and on the part of many scholars, with regard to the theory of the tragic and classical reception. The contribution of the Cambridge Ritualists and the New Historicists cannot be overestimated, while the voices of George Thomson, Raymond Williams,
Ruth Padel, Edith Hall, and George Steiner, again, among many others, continue to resound throughout the field of tragic theory. Similarly to France, in Britain too, theorization and research on the tragic coincided with a renewed and intense creative interest in tragic art, exemplified in the works of artists such as Tony Harrison,
Edward Bond, Howard Barker, and Peter Hall.
At the end of the twentieth century, in America—where systematic philosophical, anthropological, and artistic, interest in the study of tragic can be traced back to the 1920s—and elsewhere, a great many contributors from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and ideological leanings engaged in the discourse of the tragic.
Once again, mentioning only a few involves the risk of not doing justice to the depth and breadth of research and insight invested in the field by cultural agents such as
Delikonstantinidou 59
Kenneth Burke, Francis Ferguson, Arthur Miller, Walter Kaufmann, Judith Butler,
Simon Goldhill, Martha Nussbaum, and Timothy Reiss.
At this period, the presence of African artists and scholars in the field was rendered increasingly known and more strongly felt, as they not only examined the tragic theory of the “West,” but also started developing an African tragic theory, differing in its cultural specificity from the western one. Indicatively, let us mention only a few: Robert Plant Armstrong, P.J. Conradie, Yole Soyinka, and Ato Quayson.40
One of the most important developments in the history of tragedy and the tragic that has come to pass, beginning in the previous century, as Leonard’s erudite
Tragic Modernities documents, is that tragedy forcefully “reemerged as a privileged trope in political discussions.” It repeatedly provided “a common lexicon for arguments between philosophers, literary critics, and political theorists,” from Jean-
Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet to Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Žižek, and Cornell
West. Indeed, the “confluence” of tragedy and politics went “[b]eyond a mere metaphorics” in the twentieth century (Location 767-74). The contributions of these thinkers to the discourse of a so-called “tragic politics” of modernity41 bear witness to the fact that “tragedy and modern political theory have shaped each other’s discourses and have provided mutually reinforcing ways of understanding the predicament of modernity” (Location 320). A cognate development has been tragedy’s emphatic
“transformation,” once more, this time from idea or abstraction into “a product of a concrete social and political situation” (although a precedent of this development, of the “tragic as experience,” can be traced back to the works of Plato and Aristotle,
40. More information regarding twentieth-century developments and representative figures can be found in Lambropoulos (2006), Young (2013), and Dewar-Watson (2014). 41. With the term “tragic politics” Leonard refers to a “politics rooted in the insights of tragedy” (Location 3181).
Delikonstantinidou 60
Schiller and Nietzsche, among others) (Location 804). Arguably, the foregoing
“transformation” contributed to the installation of the “quotidian lexical usage” of both “tragedy” and “tragic” in the twentieth century on which we will touch shortly.
Picking up a line of thought that was first introduced by Kierkegaard, Hebbel, and Simmel, twentieth-century thinkers, particularly those setting out from the province of post-structuralist critique, sought to break the link between dialectics and the tragic that informed most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readings of it. Within the more contemporary milieu, the long pending and contested question of whether tragedy/the tragic, as genre, conceptual locus, and experience, is possible or not in a modern world that has broken free of traditional metaphysical and communal moorings, has taken many “localized and temporalized forms,” as Lambropoulos asserts. The same is true of the related question of whether it is desirable or not, as well as of the question of tragedy’s specific relationship to “meaning” and experience.
Lambropoulos goes on to conveniently summarize most of these “forms” (142-6), which are, in turn, presented in an even more condensed manner bellow:
1. Is the tragic possible only in certain cultures?
2. Is the tragic possible within monotheism?
3. Is the tragic possible within Marxism?
4. Is the tragic compatible with psychoanalysis?
5. Does the tragic remain available after a certain era and author, or during a
modern condition, such as autonomy, capitalism, colonialism?
6. Does the tragic inhere in specific domains (for example, war, international
relations, being human)?
7. Is the tragic compatible with an explicitly political theatre?
Delikonstantinidou 61
8. Is the tragic meaningful when the stage has been rendered redundant by
novel (postmodern and even post-dramatic) practices which have prevailed
in the public domain?
9. Is the tragic insight better expressed by non-theatrical arts?
10. What can be learned from the fact that the rise of the tragic idea coincided
with the decline of the genre of tragedy as traditionally conceived?
Each of the above questions comes with its own number of sub-questions and a much greater number of answers and their attendant assumptions. As was, perhaps, to be expected, none of them is complete and conclusive, for different reasons, most of which concern the very “localized and temporalized” (and even biased) character of the questions themselves.
It seems almost redundant to state that an attempt at answering them does not fall within our scope. Nevertheless, the position of this study on some of these questions, and most importantly, what we gather about the position(s) of the theatre works addressed here, will be made known in the following pages. Suffice it to say, for the time being, and bringing Most again to our discussion, that, although the approach to, explication, and usage of the tragic among philosophers of all schools and shades over the last two centuries have many variants, we may still describe the philosophy of the tragic:
as a complex set of related conceptions involving most or all of the
following features: a semblance of meaningfulness that conceals the
fundamental arbitrariness of things; an overwhelming personal
responsibility that goes far beyond the narrow limits of freedom of
action and is not lessened by the evident constraints of blind necessity;
Delikonstantinidou 62
an indestructible nobility in the human spirit, revealed especially in
suffering, insurgency, renunciation, and understanding; an inextricable
knot of fate, blindness, guilt, and atonement; a final wisdom
concerning the individual’s grandeur and inconsequentiality in the
universe, attained at length, through the purification afforded by deep
suffering at least partly unmerited, and sometimes at the cost of total
annihilation. (21)
Very interestingly, the said features feed into the colloquial usage of the tragic.
This usage has developed alongside the tragic’s “opus metaphysicum,” to borrow Steiner’s erudite wording (Antigones 2), over approximately the same period of time, and became widely established in the previous century with the tragic’s
“grounding” in the material world of social and political experience. In fact, the general lay usage of the tragic seems to have less to do with the poetics of the tragic strictly defined (namely, with the specifics of tragic art and the genre of tragedy) and much more to do with the idea of the tragic as elaborated in (the history of) philosophy. It seems more akin to the “abstract(ed)” category of the tragic which is descriptive of the human condition and “designed above all to designate an important lesson about our place in the world”—a lesson entrusted, according to most thinkers,
“to a certain kind of text (‘tragedy’) that is said to embody and communicate that lesson with supreme effectiveness” (Most 22).42
An element that all three constellations of meaning and usage around the tragic (the literary, the philosophical, and the vernacular) appear to have in common,
42. “This is not to say that the tragic itself is universal. It is, as Williams reminds us, a historical concept of universality, itself time-bound and etched into an ongoing history of tragedy and the tragic” (Leonard Location 3284).
Delikonstantinidou 63 though, is an awareness of sorrow or deep sadness borne of “the discord between the human and the universe” (Most 21), and/or of the (related) difficulty of the human to find their place in the grand scheme of things. Still, the general lay usage of “tragedy” and “tragic” in casual conversation and media parlance to denote a very sad event/situation is believed to be misguided and demeaning by a number of theorists.43
Against such criticism, Terry Eagleton (2003) contends that, instead of dismissing the said usage as trivial(izing), we should consider it as revealing not only of a current state of affairs in which the significance of human suffering is routinely minimized, but also of the possibilities that the expanded availability of the tragic harbors for a revitalization of a critical tradition that could provide an alternative to the said state of affairs.
A few decades earlier, Raymond Williams had exposed the “deeply ideological underpinning” of “[t]he seemingly common-sense division of the literary genre of tragedy from its quotidian lexical usage,” while he had also opposed the division of tragic as a property of philosophy from its social, political, and cultural usage. Both divisions were construed by Williams as regressive political gestures
(Leonard Location 810). As Pamela McCallum correctly observes, “[f]rom his perspective, the rigid separation of the socio-cultural usage of tragedy from the literary genre [and from philosophy] represents an instance of ideological paralysis that blocks recognition and acknowledgement of the tragic affect circulating in and around human experience in modernity” (232). He forcefully argues, in Modern
Tragedy, that the inability and/or unwillingness to discern “ethical content” and
“human agency” in events that are “deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics,” and to connect them with general meanings is to
43. One of the most influential advocates of this thesis are Andrew C. Bradley (1904), Clive S. Lewis (1961), and George Steiner (1961; 1984; 2008).
Delikonstantinidou 64
“admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide” (49). In other words, the inability and/or unwillingness to see these events, and the conditions of their production, through a tragic lens spells out a kind of crumbling of our intellectual, affective, and moral potencies.
Leonard explains that, for Williams, modern material conditions “had tragic alienation ‘built into them,’” while “broader historical movements conspired to perpetuate and exacerbate the modern experience of tragedy. Wars and revolutions saw death and suffering rupture the lives of families and communities,” and if they
“have been characterized as tragic, it is in order to abstract from [and hence make sense of] the suffering of the individuals who bore their consequences” (Location
798). This particular kind of abstraction is according to him, and contrary to the abstractions of German Idealism which he opposes, conducive to a collective understanding of tragedy that can allow it to give “coherence and conceptual shape to a diversity of experiences” as a useful tool of social critique and in the diagnosis of alienation (Location 818-33). Evidently, Williams’ critique has two prongs. On the one hand, there is the failure of earlier (mainly Idealist) thinkers to grasp and assess the relationship between tragic art and the material/historical conditions that produce(d) it. On the other hand, there is the more contemporary failure to recognize the tragic in the historical conditions of our existence (Location 826), or, in Williams’ words, to “recognize social crisis as tragedy” (63). This is a notion most useful for the integrated view of the tragic signaled in the conceptualization of the tragic as “mode” and, by extension, for our discussion.
Williams’ critique indicates that, similarly to the quotidian and colloquial usage of the tragic and its cognates, the far more distinguished, philosophical treatment of the tragic, past and present, has not been invulnerable to criticism either.
Delikonstantinidou 65
As we saw above, Williams, among others, targeted aspects of tragedy’s co-option by
German Idealism (namely, its vision of tragedy and “tragic legacy” with their penchant for universalizing and moralizing notions and readings) as well as our contemporary failure to “recognize social crisis as tragedy” (63). Much more recently,
Olga Taxidou has pointed our attention to, what she sees as, “one of the most problematic aspects of the relationship between tragedy [as literary genre] and philosophy” (33); namely, the minimization, or even blatant disregard, of the theatrical, performative, and embodied dimensions of tragedy. Along similar lines,
Most finds the question of the precise relation between the idea of the tragic, as it is set in philosophical terms, and the literary and performable texts subsumed under the rubric of tragedy ill-formed, and thus irresoluble. As a result, she regards all strategies developed to deal with this question necessarily problematic; that is, whether we simply “declare that certain tragedies are ‘tragic’ and others are not,” or “define ‘the tragic’ so broadly that it can include all tragedies, or even “in despair . . . claim that tragedies and ‘the tragic’ have nothing whatsoever to do with one another” (22). Yet, it is these strategies that prevail in current readings of tragedy and the tragic.
Precisely because the idea of the tragic acquired over the last two centuries “a general theoretical salience and metaphorical power as a prism through which to grasp the antinomies of the human condition,” as Felski pointedly observes, it is has been made very difficult to eschew “conflations of tragedy [as literary genre] with the modern idea of the tragic,” and the resultant anachronistic and, more or less, distorted conceptualizations of the relation between the two (3). Conflations of and the attendant cross-pollinations between the tragic as genre, with the tragic as conceptual locus or constellation, and, we should add, with its quotidian use, to describe social and political experiences tied to the material world, do present challenges. However,
Delikonstantinidou 66 these conflations have proven to be extremely productive in many respects, aesthetic, political, and other discursive, as Leonard (2015) underscored in her study of tragedy and the tragic. Hence, they have increased the cultural capital of the tragic (as) mode.
Without compromising the tragic’s historical specificity by resorting to an essentialist understanding of it as a perennial feature of the world, Simon Goldhill
(1984) and Bernard Williams (1993) have argued that, despite the irreducible otherness of the Greek culture that produced the first known tragedies, and of other later cultures that followed its lead, there is common ground between those cultures and our own, made up mainly of ethical and political concerns. Whether or not we side with them, we can hardly deny that the very complications issuing from the tragic’s integration into the philosophical regime and into the world of mundane experience derive from and are made possible by the indisputable resonance/relevance of the tragic for our contemporary world. The rethinking of the tragic that begins to take shape, this multistranded “nascent shift in critical sensibility” with regard to the tragic that Felski identifies (4), and, most importantly for our purposes, the many recent, non-western, politically-charged reappraisals/revisions of tragic theory, myths, and topoi bear witness to the tragic’s consequential ethical and political contributions, creative potency, and reach well beyond the limits of the western tradition.
This same development serves as a valuable corrective to views of the tragic as opposed to radical politics and to certain recent reckonings of the politics and ethics of our postcolonial present, the most constructivist of which reject the tragic as an oppressive principle of Eurocentric domination.44 It is on these last points that we focus our attention in the next section of this chapter, keeping in mind throughout that, while tragedy as a distinct dramatic genre may be scarce, as Steiner (1961)
44. See Lambropoulos (2006), especially page 11, and Scott (2008), especially page 201.
Delikonstantinidou 67 contends, the persistence of the tragic mode in modernity (and in its “beyond”) is anything but.
III. The Tragic and the Political
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the colloquial use of the tragic to denote a wide range of so-deemed “very sad,” material, and/or even mental, experiences (from everyday accidents and mishaps to natural disasters, wars, and pandemics) has been resisted by many a theorist of the tragic. One of the most prominent exponents of this view, renowned scholar George Steiner, has lamented the loss of specificity in the usage of both “tragedy” and the “tragic.” Steiner has expounded on the idea that “the perception of the metaphysical, of the agonistic relation to being as these are made explicit and functional in tragedy, is not given to everyman” (“‘Tragedy,’
Reconsidered” 38)—a politically charged thesis in itself.
In fact, he takes one step further in his overview of tragedy, and its past and present usages, and engages exclicitly its relation with politics. Although he grants that “tragedy is never politically value-free,” as his own conception of it serves to plainly establish, it nevertheless argues for “an aristocracy of suffering, an excellence of pain.” This, however, “has nothing to do with social snobbery, . . . with fortuitous circumstances of priestly or regal or titled patronage.” Rather, it relates to the fact that tragedy goes beyond the mundane world of politics, because its very concern with
“the logic of estrangement from life, of man’s ontological fall from grace,” transcends that world (32-7). Ultimately, he appears to be deeply skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the possibility of tragedy’s existence in a modern world structured upon and around democracy, capitalism, and secularism, surrogates for the forces of divinity and fate that constitute, in his reading at least, the sine quibus non of tragedy.
Delikonstantinidou 68
Steiner’s critical approach is one among many on the topic of the political function of tragedy. His landmark The Death of Tragedy, where he first articulated the aforementioned ideas, became a fixed point in the theory of the tragic, on which many later thinkers extrapolated and which as many sought to dispute. With the rise of the radical politics of the seventies, Steiner’s work—granted, in large measure, misinterpreted and misrepresented—lent itself well to several critics who put forth a conception of tragedy as an enemy of politics, particularly of its progressive and/or revolutionary brand, insofar as it was perceived to promote a sense of hopelessness, fatalism, and resignation, quietism and even despair. In its most extreme manifestation, this kind of criticism of tragedy issued in its wholesale dismissal from a vision of future sociopolitical change. Raymond Williams summarizes this so-called
“Marxian” or “Brechtian” account of tragedy, which he resolutely opposes, thus:
The most influential kinds of explicitly social thinking have often
rejected tragedy as in itself defeatist. Against what they have known as
the idea of tragedy, they have stressed man’s powers to change his
condition and to end a major part of the suffering which the tragic
ideology seems to ratify. The idea of tragedy, that is to say, has been
opposed by the idea of revolution. (63)
In Williams’ reading of tragedy and the tragic, this opposition is viewed as “deeply problematic” (Leonard Location 833). And with good reason, as we shall see.
Where, around the same time, Arendt (1963) encodes revolutionary politics within the framework of tragedy, theorizing revolutionary politics as resting on a decidedly tragic paradoxical juxtaposition of nihilism and action, Williams, along similar lines, discerns a “structural relation” between revolution and tragedy
Delikonstantinidou 69
(Location 598, 826-47). “In our time,” he argues, “it is the connections between revolution and tragedy—connections lived and known but not acknowledged as ideas, which seem most clear and significant” (64). Leonard expounds on Williams’ thesis:
The conditions of alienation that necessitate revolution are not fully
overcome in the moment of revolution; rather, these conditions are
inevitably carried over into the destructive violence of revolutionary
action. What the revolution unmasks in its own violence is the violence
. . . that characterized the old social order. Revolution has to be
understood not just as a singular moment but as a crisis in a much
longer history of social action. In other words, revolution represents
both the failure and the necessity of action. (Location 843-50)
It is in this sense that, according to Williams, “the revolutionary societies have been tragic societies, at a depth and scale that go beyond any ordinary pity and fear.” He continues claiming that:
At the point of this recognition, however, where the received ideology
of revolution, its simple quality as liberation, seems most to fail, there
is waiting the received ideology of tragedy, in either its common
forms: the old tragic lesson, that man cannot change his condition, but
can only drown his world in blood in the vain attempt; or the
contemporary reflex, that the taking of rational control over our social
destiny is defeated or at best deeply stained by our inevitable
irrationality, and by the violence and cruelty that are so quickly
released when habitual forms break down. I do not find, in the end, that
either of these interpretations covers enough of the facts, but I also do
Delikonstantinidou 70
not see how anyone can still hold to the idea of revolution which
simply denied tragedy, as an experience and as an idea. (74)
The reason(s) why many contemporary thinkers have failed to see the profound connection of tragedy and revolution in modernity, therefore, can be traced to the received ideologies surrounding, and ultimately obnubilating, both.
Yet, for Williams, tragedy emerges through and against these ideologies “as an experience of modernity, . . . [that] both describes the conditions of alienation that make revolution desirable and critiques the willful blindness of revolutions that fail to acknowledge the persistence of human suffering in their midst,” as Leonard observes.
In his reading of tragedy’s relation to revolutionary politics, then, tragedy “becomes the necessary condition” for a self-reflexive and self-critical (revolutionary) political praxis (Location 859). To put it differently, after McCallum, for Williams, to acknowledge and embrace the full tragic import and impact of the tensions that result from the inevitable (because internal) contradictions involved in the praxis of radical sociopolitical change is of outmost importance to the continuation of the revolutionary project (239). If the revolutions of modernity are simultaneously animated by the pursuit of freedom and expose the limits of (the quest for) freedom, give impetus to collective action and expose the failure(s) of collectivity, “[t]ragedy is the stage on which these paradoxes of the political are repeatedly reenacted” (Leonard
Location 3180). As such, it has much to teach us about the possibilities and challenges of thinking about “politics in a tragic key” (Toscano 2013; Leonard Location 3208), within the context of modernity and beyond it.
In the teeth of the “Steinerian” and “Marxian”/“Brechtian” assessment of tragedy, and along very similar lines to those of Williams, Terry Eagleton also
Delikonstantinidou 71 attempted to “reconstitute,” so to speak, the modern tragic tradition by spelling out an alternative approach. For Eagleton, the tragic and, according to the aforementioned assessments, its alleged opposite, the progressivist have been rendered “intimately allied” in the modern era, insofar as myth (“mythical destiny . . . in the guise of vast, anonymous forces”) and modernity are made into both adversaries and mirror images
(204, 206, 226). He explains:
Nietzsche thought that tragedy needed myth, and that modernity had
banished them both. But though this is true in one sense, it is false in
another. It is true that a rationalized, administered world cannot easily
accumulate the symbolic resources it needs to legitimize itself. Its own
profane practices constantly deplete them. . . . Yet religious mythology
survives modernity, in however diminished a shape; and Horkheimer
and Adorno claim in Dialectic of Enlightenment that Enlightenment in
any case becomes its own mythology. For them, the fate which brought
low the heroes of antiquity reappears in the modern world as logic. To
which one might add that the gods stage a come-back in the form of
Reason, providence in the shape of scientific determinism, and nemesis
in the guise of heredity. Infinity lingers on as sublimity, and the
traumatic horror at the heart of tragedy, still a metaphysical notion in
the case of Schopenhauer’s Will, will be translated by Jacques Lacan
as the Real, which has all the force of the metaphysical but none of its
status. (225)
Even more resonantly for this study, although modernity extended the vision of human emancipation and democracy and, with them, the promises of progress, freedom, and self-actualization to “wretchedly impoverished” peoples around the
Delikonstantinidou 72 world (Eagleton 240), it, simultaneously, issued a deepening schism between glorious expectations and insurmountable social and biological realities. In many cases, it even deflected that very vision and those promises into their opposites, and even disproved democracy as a guarantor of happiness. The failures of modernity’s promises show it to be “the precondition for universalizing tragic potential,” to use Felski’s phrasing
(9), rather than its destroyer.
Modernity’s “progress,” thus, appears in the work of Eagleton as an ever- expanding tragic narrative, inasmuch as it sustains the will for (revolutionary) sociopolitical change, while it repeatedly frustrates (both thwarts and problematizes) the powers that can bring it about. Ultimately, the option of denying the tragedy of modernity and/or exiling tragedy from a vision and praxis of change is viewed in the work of Eagleton, as in that of Williams, as dishonest and (self)deceiving. For both thinkers, “returning to antiquity” and reaching “beyond the resources of modernity to formulate its critique” through the modality of tragedy, to employ Leonard’s words
(Location 3267), translates into a self-conscious and self-critical investment into a revolutionary project, not its surrender. Evidenly, as we will discover, the same applies to the artists addressed in this study, since the process that Leonard describes above is precisely what their revisionary works under examination pursue, and so is their investment. Tragedy, “not [as] a single and permanent kind of fact, but [as] a series of experiences and conventions and institutions” (Williams 46), becomes, in the work of Williams and Eagleton, as in the works considered here, “a way of giving shape to the contradictions between intention and consequence, individuality and system, freedom and necessity,” to employ Alberto Toscano’s eloquent formulation
(28). In other words, it becomes an “explanatory framework” for the modern predicament, its implications and its legacy, or “an explanatory structure that makes
Delikonstantinidou 73 sense of the paradoxes inherent in action” (Leonard Location 3267, 3214), thus prompting, instead of forestalling, action.
As evinced in the above discussion on the ability of tragedy and the tragic to speak to modernity and its political quandaries, despite their proceeding from different premises, a great number of contemporary thinkers, including Williams and
Eagleton, subscribe to a more democratized (that is, more widely available, accessible and transmissible) vision of the tragic. The emergence of the said vision is directly linked to the rise of the modern tragic sensibility under the sway of Marxism,
Freudianism and Existentialism, three ideologies centered on the “common man.”
Williams considers all three to be essentially tragic (189), inasmuch as “they all probe the tension between the need for radical remaking and the terrible cost of it, a cost that some see resolved or redeemed in political transformation or revolution” (May Scott
27; Eagleton 58-60). Contrary to Steiner, in discussing tragic sensibility as instantiated in modern art (mainly in literature), many mid- and late-twentieth-century critics recast the tragic protagonist as an Everyman figure. They even argue that the debate about high and low protagonists in tragic art “is in fact irrelevant” (Eagleton
96). Yet, for all their spirited, democratic and democratizing arguments for the
“common man” of modern tragic art, (persistently and unsubtly) a man drawn from the mundane sphere, most such critics demonstrate an almost exclusive focus on canonical literary texts and on tragic subjects that are as white and as male as the authors themselves, from Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and Herman Melville’s Moby-
Dick, to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Beckett’s Endgame.
After the turn of the twenty-first century, however, a gradual shift can be witnessed in the study of tragic art, in particular, and of the tragic mode, in general, especially within the frame of revisionary criticism, whose origins can be traced back
Delikonstantinidou 74 in earlier developments in cultural studies brought about mainly through the contribution of postcolonial theory. Tragic extremity is increasingly found to be lodged in narratives of subaltern suffering. The literature of slavery, segregation, and subaltern expression, more broadly, is examined through the lens(es) of tragic theory, and even discussed comparatively with Greek tragedies. Meanwhile, African,
Caribbean, Asian, African American, and Latin American writers and theorists engage in revisions of Greek tragic myths and plays, recontextualizing them in their respective contexts, with the view to draw attention to the catastrophic implications of both western hegemonic and hardcore nationalist politics.
At the same time, and as the body of texts that are theorized as tragic grows and accretes, involving gradually media other than literature, critical disputes over the particular shape of tragic suffering persist. As Felski notes, unfortunately, they often serve to bedim features of the tragic mode that have been identified over the years in different, and even widely divergent, iterations and instantiations of it. Her account of these features, or “formal particulars,” is worth quoting at length:
For example, critics of differing methodological and political stripes
concur that tragedy undermines the sovereignty of selfhood and
modern dreams of progress and perfectibility, as exemplified in the
belief that human beings can orchestrate their own happiness. In
confronting the role of the incalculable and unforeseeable in human
affairs, it forces us to recognize that individuals may act against their
own interests and that the consequences of their actions may deviate
disastrously from what they expected or hoped for. Exposing the limits
of reason, the fragility of human endeavor, the clash of irreconcilable
desires or incommensurable worlds, the inescapability of suffering and
Delikonstantinidou 75
loss, tragedy underscores the hopelessness of our attempts to master
the self and the world. (11)
Still, it is not that, through the workings of the tragic mode, individual sovereignty is presented as being usurped by the “inexorable unfolding of a predetermined pattern,” or that personhood is being denied in favor of forces which lie beyond the awareness, comprehension, and control of the individual (11-2). Rather, as Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet have underlined, “the same character appears now as agent, the cause and source of his actions, and now as acted upon, engulfed in a force that is beyond him and sweeps him [sic] away” (77). In that respect too, the tragic mode seems to be enamored of and embracing (what seems to be a) contradiction. As we saw earlier, though, in providing an explanatory structure for it, the tragic creates impetus for action through that very contradiction.
Indeed, as a long line of contemporary thinkers, classicists, political theorists, and more, including Charles Segal, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Euben, Christopher
Rocco, and David Scott, have acknowledged, in the tragic we find a presentation of human beings “as simultaneously authors of our ends and authored by forces and circumstances over which we have little rational control. It is not that tragedy doubts our capacity as world makers or history makers. Rather, it is that . . . [it] doubts whether the rationality involved in agential activity is such as to . . . keep us entirely beyond the reach of chance” (Scott 210). The implications of this for the politics of our world and for the world of politics are profound.
Old and contemporary tragic works thus give the lie to the manichaeistic, quasi-melodramatic rhetoric of the popular politics of rationality which thrives on false polarizations (between good and evil, victim and perpetrator, conservative and
Delikonstantinidou 76 progressive, coercion and resistance, and so on). In their place, works attuned to the tragic mode offer “powerful meditations on the ambiguities of causality and the complex intertwining of internal motives and external imperatives”; a condition that
“pervades our experience of being in the world at an elemental level” (Felski 12). As a growing number of scholars and artists have begun to recognize with regard to the tragic mode, it is, for all these reasons, not only far from opposed to politics, but it is, in fact, pregnant with the possibility of an ethically informed radical politics that is more pertinent to our era than the individual-Bildung-inflected, progressivist politics currently in place. If, as Slavoj Žižek (2009) argues, we currently find ourselves in the midst of an unspecified global revolution that dares not speak its name, it is perhaps the very fact that this revolution “does not claim its revolutionariness” (Leonard
Location 3295) what has made us turn again to the tragic mode and discern the said possibility in it, as well as the extent to which it matters to us now.
Felski attributes this possibility to the fact that the tragic “underscores the inescapability of epistemological reflection and the ethical urgency of claims of justice,” even as it “diagnoses the dangers of intellectual hubris, single angles of vision, and attempts at theoretical mastery,” and as it “depicts a world riven by agonistic politics and Dionysian turbulence” (13). Along similar lines, Joshua Foa
Dienstag builds on Nietzsche and, more specifically, on the latter’s reading of the strand of “Dionysian pessimism” pervading the tragic, to advance his own thesis on the tragic’s relation to radical politics. Nietzsche, according to Dienstag, finds the political productivity of the tragic deriving from its very capturing of worldly chaos and from its making visible the unstable and tumultuous human nature. These are two functions of the tragic which, purportedly, allow it to represent the joy of becoming as liberating and us to relish in it.
Delikonstantinidou 77
The tragic, in Nietzsche, requires that we accept “the necessity of pain in a life of growth and change, setting aside the goal of happiness as the ultimate aim of human life,” and embrace becoming in the sense of taking pleasure “in the suffering that accompanies the demise of whatever is” (Dienstag 114). Yet, Dienstag, by way of his famous “mentor,” qualifies this pleasure not as “sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others,” but, rather, as a decision to “be glad that ours is a world of becoming . . . that things are always changing, that the future is always coming and the present always passing away” (114). The (Nietzschean) tragic teaches us that, in order to withstand this/our human condition, “we must learn to hope in the absence of an expectation of progress.” And, if we choose life, despite its afflictions, as a whole, to embrace it “with all the suffering entailed both for ourselves and for others” (115).
Hence, the philosopher’s sowing the seed of a politics that belies modern narratives of teleological progress.
Nietzsche’s “politics of transfiguration,”45 deriving from the tragic cradle, and the “theme of self-shaping and self-transformation against a tragic background,”
Dienstag reminds us, have appealed to twentieth-century thinkers, such as Albert
Camus, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and William Connolly.46 These later thinkers have “found in Nietzsche a portrait of energetic individuality that can be supportive of democracy while remaining distinct from the liberal assumptions that are often assumed to be a necessary complement to democratic theory” (120). Read in this way, the tragic is revealed to permit processes of individual and collective invention and re-invention, just as it necessitates recognition of both the individual
45. For a description of Nietzsche’s politics as a politics of transfiguration, or “a politics that seeks radical change in how human beings live and act in the modern Western world,” and that serves to “expand our notions of democratic politics and democratic understanding,” see Strong (1988). 46. See Camus (1955); Arendt (1958); Foucault (1984); Connolly (2002).
Delikonstantinidou 78 and the collective as unstable, fallible, and perishable. In this sense, then, the tragic allows for a radical and even liberating—insofar as it replaces devised “boundaries of self and history with the terrifying limitless horizon of time-bound existence” (120)— politics of insecurity and possibility which arguably correspond to the fundamental ontology of our mortal condition.
Nietzsche and his heirs have bequeathed us a rich legacy of translations of the tragic into a radical political idiom and of well-founded suspicions of meta-narratives of modernity; that is narratives of perfectibility and progress that extend well into our present. Another such heir, scholar David Scott, offers a reading of the tragic in relation to our postcolonial present that is of great value to this study. According to
Scott, ours is a tragic time, not only in that it features “moral disasters and political monstrosities,” indeed exhibiting a “very palpable barbarism,” but also, in that it is punctured by “retemporalization.” By “retemporalization, Scott refers to the fact that the once familiar temporalities (past–present–future), through which our modernities47 have organized our collective and individual lives, which animated, or even constituted, our historical reason, and which underwrote dominant ideas about historical change (change-as-progressive-succession), have been disrupted (199-200).
The tragic, the scholar argues, is “attuned to an experience of time in which the future resists being narrated as an unambiguously progressive resolution of the present’s impasses.” As such, it provides us with a mode of reflecting “on human action that draws our attention toward the relation . . . between time and the distinctive chanciness of contingency,” and toward our vulnerability “to the unforeseeable and the unexpected in time’s unfolding.” Consequently, it serves so as
47. The plural is used in this context to address both the variety of transitions that we subsume under “modernity” in the singular, and the fact that the latter is not identical across the globe. See Charles Taylor (1999) for a theory of modernities, instead of modernity.
Delikonstantinidou 79 to cast doubt on the Enlightenment view of historical time as moving teleologically and transparently forward. It also casts doubt on the humanist Romance historical emplotment of human (individual and collective) evolution, which is based on the said progressive teleological rhythm. The latter has been a formulation in terms of which the subordinate, subaltern subject, resisting dominant power and “tilting heroically against the grain of the given, . . . contributes to remaking her or his own world from below,” all the while progressing toward an “imagined horizon of emancipation” (200-1). Scott reads our time as one “in which the story-form of
Romance is harder and harder to sustain,” in view of the fact that “the hoped-for futures that inspired and gave shape to the expectation of the coming emancipation are now themselves in ruin.” In other words, the postemancipation futures imagined in modern anticolonial narratives are now futures past (Scott 201; Koselleck 1985 and
2002).
Tragic sensibility emerges, thus, not only as timely, in its very untimelessness, but also as anything but “bereft of moral and political hope or unmoved by the sufferings that spur the desire for emancipation,” or even paralyzing of the will to social transformation (Scott 201). If we let it, Scott proposes, the tragic has the potential to enable a radical politics that will face up to the challenge of envisioning and acting upon the vision of a future released from the grip of colonial
Enlightenment’s conceptual languages, with all the cost that such a disengangement and such a politics would entail (201). Whereas it does not (and won’t) guarantee the success of a radical politics, or a revolutionary politics, as Arendt and Williams would have it, it heralds the possibility for it and may even help us inscribe a more self- conscious, self-reflexive, and self-critical ethics and praxis into the politics currently
Delikonstantinidou 80 at work. It is almost as if the plays under examination here respond directly to Scott’s proposition in building on this possibility.
In consideration of the contemporary collapse of an absolute belief in the essential nature of the tragic, whether inherently conservative or radical, Felski underlines the reality of the historical specificity and contextual contingency of all readings of the tragic, whether these focus on the question of its relation to politics or to the (equally politically-loaded) question of what constitutes tragic art. Yet, although she concurs with Raymond Williams in that “modern critics had projected the individualist and existentialist philosophies of their own time onto the entire history of tragedy as a genre, thereby misrepresenting key aspects of that history,” she understandably questions whether it is possible to avoid these and other similar “acts of anachronistic attribution.” It is indeed hard to disagree with Felski when she writes that “revisionist readings of tragedy,” conceived here in a more inclusive sense as exceeding generic considerations, are inevitably “beholden to the hopes and beliefs of the present” (5). The dramatic revisions of seminal Greek tragic myths that we consider in this study bear testimony to Felski’s argument, insofar as they are pronouncedly bound to and by their own fin-de-siècle and post-millennium present(s).
Yet, at the same time, they are motivated by the striking parallels that the playwrights have discovered between the tragic elements of the Greek mythical con-texts and those of their own mestizo/a ones, such as “issues of obscure origin, interfamilial strife and impossible conflicts of allegiance” (13).
More specifically, our mythoplays show race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as their lamentable subaltern constitutions, to be ways in which tragic consciousness is played out in our contemporary world, involving the playwrights’ local traditions and ways of thinking about and understanding this world. As a matter
Delikonstantinidou 81 of fact, in the course of the present study, and through(out) the analysis of our mythoplays, we will bear witness to the fact that the works drastically depart from the
Enlightenment-inflected narratives of modernity, in alerting as to the limits of rational agential activity and in cautioning us of “the tragic conundrum constituted by modern power’s construction of options that are both ineluctable and paradoxical, at once impossible to disavow and eternally bitter to embrace,” to borrow again Scott’s words. We will find that they also, and most importantly for the perspective and focus of this study, call forth a will for social transformation which is fostered through “an agonic confrontation that holds no necessary promise of rescue or reconciliation or redemption,” and that accommodates “the ambiguities and paradoxes of time and action, intentions and contingencies, determinations and chance” (Scott 201).
In entering into a productive “affair” with the Greek tragic myths and their ancient literary treatments, the Greek tragedies, the revisions ultimately open up to and act on the possibilities and costs of thinking about “politics in a tragic key” within their own cultural, social, and political present(s) (Toscano 2013; Leonard Location
3208). Most significantly, they seem to align with the thesis Eagleton advances in his
Sweet Violence in that they seize on “the tragic as a skeptical faith necessary for the renewal of ethical politics” (Lampropoulos 147). Yet, as we shall see in the next section, they also align with a long tradition of thinkers, from antiquity up until the present day, who have postulated a foundational relation between the tragic and the therapeutic. In point of fact, we will discover that their investment into the therapeutic is integral to their political radicality.
Delikonstantinidou 82
IV. The Tragic and the Therapeutic
The first indications of a relation between the tragic and the therapeutic—in the sense of contributing to an enhanced wellbeing by attending to the underlying causes of social disease (or nosos) and in the sense of social rehabilitation—can be gleaned from Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, as it developed in his Poetics and
Politics.48 In fact, in his theory of catharsis,49 according to which tragic art promotes the (emotional) wellbeing of spectators-citizens to the benefit of the polis, the tragic, the political, and the therapeutic are shown to overlap. Aristotle’s use of a medical loanword to describe the psychological and political benefits that both individual spectators and the collective as a whole can reap from their experience of tragic art is far from coincidental.
For the ancient Greeks, as Ruth Padel has convincingly argued in her In and
Out of the Mind (1994) and in Whom Gods Destroy (1995), the physical, the social, and the metaphysical are not only contiguous realms of existence and experience, but, rather, they are made from the same fabric. Thus, “‘what comes in,’ the environment
[whether deamonic, physical, biotic, or social], decides the moral as well as the physical makeup of human beings” (In and Out of the Mind 52). Padel finds, for instance, that the “intermingling of moral and physical corruption is essentially Greek, though different ages reuse[d] it for their own purposes” (54). By now, most scholars agree that the emotions which the Aristotelian catharsis concerns had, at least for the
48. The concept of catharsis has been associated with all sorts of healing, cleansing, and transforming experiences throughout history, and has been discussed in relation to an extraordinary (and extraordinarily varied) amount of contexts, from cultural healing practices, medicine, and psychology, to religion, literature, and drama. 49. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis developed, in the view of many theorists, as a response to Plato’s earlier rejection of tragedy in his Republic. See, for example, A.D. Nuttall (1996).
Delikonstantinidou 83 ancient Greeks, first and foremost, a physical referent, even if they were later to develop more abstract or metaphoric meanings and resonances.
Back (or rather, forward) to our modern referential systems, this is how
Eagleton has (re)formulated Aristotle’s account of catharsis: “Tragedy can perform the pleasurable, politically valuable service of draining off an excess of enfeebling emotions such as pity and fear, thus providing a kind of public therapy for those of the citizenry in danger of emotional flabbiness . . . [T]ragic theatre is a refuse dump for socially undesirable emotions, or at least a retraining programme” (168-9). In the centuries following Aristotle, however, and until relatively recently, the denotations and connotations of the therapeutic—which Eagleton evidently detects—in his account of catharsis had been frequently downplayed to the advantage of, at times, the didactic/pedagogic, at times, the pleasure-oriented, and, at other times, both, as when the two paradigms they are brought together in the same treatise.
A landmark figure of the post-Aristotelian critical tradition, Horace, interpreted the Aristotelian catharsis in terms of aesthetic pleasure and learning, while, in a similar vein, Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney and late-Renaissance poet
Giovanni Batista Guarini placed emphasis on the didactic potential of tragedy— primarily in terms of a stimulus to self-reflection and, thus, self-reformation. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a number of scholars picked up this line of thought and pursued the question of tragedy’s pedagogic function. Martha Nussbaum,
Leon Golden, and Stephen Halliwell, among other critics, have supported an
Delikonstantinidou 84 educational view of catharsis, although voices of dissent have not failed to be heard on this interpretation as well.50
On a different note, Renaissance critics gave a decidedly conservative twist to
Aristotle’s theory, interpreting catharsis as conducive to a Renaissance proper conceptualization of civic order. Later, David Hume, in his essay “Of Tragedy”
(1757), accounted for catharsis (understood as the paradoxical tragic pleasure51) by attributing it to the eloquence of the artistic creation which “transfigures the negative potential inherent in our response to the sadness of tragedy into something pleasurable.” In other words, he claimed that tragic art transforms passions at source into something pleasurable, thus, in a sense, “sublimating” them (Dewar-Watson 99).
Friedrich Schiller, on the contrary, in his essay “On the Art of Tragedy” (1792), attributed catharsis-cum-tragic pleasure to the fact that tragedy engages our moral faculties, as we empathetically identify with the afflicted subjects that it features. And whereas, in most theorizations of catharsis of that time, emphasis fell on the emotions, similarly to Schiller, Hegel’s aesthetics, or philosophy of art,52 placed emphasis on an order higher than the emotions, that of reason and spiritual truth, thus prioritizing an intellectual and ethical response to tragedy.
50. Julen Extabe (2013) has expounded on the “several shortcomings,” as he puts it, of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. With regard to the pedagogic function of tragedy, Extabe writes that “in assuring us that tragedy does not have a negative constitutive effect, Aristotle strips tragedy of its (potentially) educative effects as well. Concerning emotions, katharsis is unlikely to bring us closer to knowing how to identify the emotions, how not to mistake one for another, how to know when to display them when needed, and how to correct them when necessary. Aristotle’s katharsis falls sort of such a pedagogic function” (126). Jonathan Lear (1992) has also opposed the view of catharsis as potentially educational, on the grounds that Aristotle’s attention to the mimetic nature of tragedy must have precluded a reading of tragedy as somehow equipping its spectators for real-life experiences on his part. 51. Nuttall writes on the paradoxical nature of the notion of tragic pleasure that “‘[t]he pleasure of tragedy’ is an immediately uncomfortable phrase. Quite apart from the original basic collision between terrible matter and a delighted response, there is an awkwardness, somehow, in the very mildness of the term ‘pleasure’—it seems a puny word to set beside the thunderous term tragedy,’ adding a species of insult to injury. The Nietzschean oxymoron, ‘tragic joy’ is, oddly, easier to accept because it fights fire with fire” (1). 52. See his Aesthetics (1975).
Delikonstantinidou 85
The idea of the therapeutic in relation to tragic art, and catharsis, in particular, returned with renewed intensity to the proscenium, albeit recontextualized, with Josef
Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s theory of abreaction, and has, since then, become very influential in the psychoanalytic tradition and beyond. This is how Sarah Dewar-
Watson frames their theory of abreaction: “the patient is understood to have an accumulation of emotion after the experience of trauma, particularly in cases where the memory of the original trauma has been repressed. According to Freud and
Breuer, this emotion seeks to be discharged and released, thereby bringing the patient relief” (100). The concept of catharsis, central to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, was adopted by twentieth-century psychotherapy to describe the act of experiencing repressed emotions associated with traumatic events in the individuals’ past which s/he has not worked through, while it continues to hold currency in twenty-first century psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Although “modern research on the subject [of catharsis] is limited,” as Esta
Powell reports, “and presents contradicting data about the effectiveness of cathartic techniques in psychotherapy practice, . . . some contemporary modalities such as
Psychodrama, Primal therapy, Emotion-Focused therapy, to mention a few, use catharsis as their core technique to achieve positive therapeutic change” (n. pag.).
Within the frame of “expressive therapy” or “creative arts therapy,” in general, and
“drama therapy,”53 in particular, the achievement of catharsis is considered to be a core process at the heart of therapy, conducive to the mental and emotional recovery of individuals that have been suffering from trauma-related disorders.54 It is important
53. “Drama therapy” has been defined as the use of techniques of applied drama to promote mental health, applicable to individuals, groups, and even entire communities. 54. Variations on this process or strategy include so-called “social catharsis,” see Gable et al (2004) and Rimé (2009), and “collective catharsis,” see Pennebaker and Harber (1993), as well as Rimé et al (2010).
Delikonstantinidou 86 to note, however, that, since no “one size fits all” definition of catharsis has been provided, an accurate delineation of its specific use in therapeutic terms lies at the moment beyond our horizon of expectations.
A number of theorists of tragedy have also drawn on the theory of abreaction, on Freud’s conception of catharsis, as well as on his later work on the psychology of pleasure and pain, especially the ideas he formulated in his seminal essay “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle” (1984, originally 1920), in their own accounts of the cathartic function of tragic art. A case in point is Lionel Trilling’s “mithridatic” account of tragedy, in which the renowned scholar expounded on the way that “tragedy is used as the homeopathic [small and controlled] administration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater [doses of] pain which life will force upon us” (56). On the opposite side of the same spectrum, Bertolt Brecht mounted an attempt to subvert catharsis, or rather, the ideas about catharsis that he received by way of neo-classical critics.55 He dismissed it as pabulum for the bourgeois theatre audience, and claimed that the absence of empathy, and the cathartic resolution to which empathy leads, would incite the audience to take political action in the real world, in order to fill the emotional gap they had experienced vicariously in a “non-cathartic” theatre. The “estrangement effects” of his Epic Theatre, that is, the experimental means by which audience members are alienated from the drama of a play, were intended precisely to negate catharsis in practice and promote, instead, another kind of intellectual engagement contributive to social change. Nevertheless, later, and within the framework of a series of shifts in Brecht’s overall theoretical position about the theatre and its social
55. Whether Brecht’s interpretation of the Aristotelian catharsis did justice to the concept is a matter which, unfortunately, falls outside of the scope of this study.
Delikonstantinidou 87 function(s), he was going to reformulate, update, and revalue his views on both the role of the emotions in the context of the theatrical experience and catharsis.56
In the late seventies, Brazilian critic and theatre director, Augusto Boal echoed the early views of Brecht. He even took the latter’s critique of Aristotle and catharsis a step further in arguing that “Aristotle constructs the first, extremely powerful poetic- political system for intimidation of the spectator, for elimination of the ‘bad’ or illegal tendencies of the audience” (xiv). Boal provided an account of the “coercive system of tragedy,” which, during periods of relative stability, purportedly functions so as “to diminish, placate, satisfy, eliminate all that can break the balance—all, including the revolutionary, transforming impetus” (47). For him, catharsis is essential to an understanding of tragedy. “Tragedy,” he writes, “in all its qualitative and quantitative aspects, exists as a function of the effect it seeks, catharsis. All the unities of tragedy are structured around this concept. It is the center, the essence, the purpose of the tragic system. Unfortunately it is also the most controversial aspect” (27). However, to Boal, as Snyder-Young comments:
the function of catharsis is not to purge pity or fear, but to purge
tendencies or feelings bringing the individual into conflict with the
status quo. In this way, catharsis operates as a hegemonic technology. .
. . [E]mpathy and the catharsis it enables purges the spectator of desire
to battle oppressive systems, for it encourages individuals to believe
56. Interestingly, R. Darren Gobert observes a shift in Brecht’s conception of catharsis. According to the scholar, Brecht initially conceived of catharsis as “an empathetic identification of spectators with a hero,” one that “concentrates their collective emotion in a single direction” and, therefore, ensnares “them in a somatic, uncritical experience.” Later, however, Brecht developed a more “nuanced understanding of emotion” and, ultimately, of catharsis itself. Indeed, he came to understand that, instead of playing a purely conditioning role, emotions might play an important role in ethical decision making and in cognitive processes, more generally, thus letting go of his hostility toward the emotional effects of the theatre (15, 13).
Delikonstantinidou 88
that individual flaws, rather than systemic injustices create tragedies in
the real world. (n.pag.)
Boal, similarly to his predecessor, Brecht, was to revise his understanding of catharsis later in his career. His interpretation of catharsis as it appears in his Theatre of the
Oppressed (1979), namely, catharsis as a structured tension and release that manipulates the audience to the advantage of the status quo, differs diametrically from his approach to catharsis in the Rainbow of Desire (1995), in which he uses his theatrical techniques as a therapeutic method intended to help individuals and groups heal. Catharsis, as Boal suggested later in his career, is “a [liberating] removal of blocks, not a [repressive] voiding of desire” (Jackson xxi).
This change of mind with regard to catharsis coincided with a productive critical dispute over the more accurate meaning of the term, on which we briefly remarked earlier in this chapter. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a gradual shift could be observed in the interpretation of Aristotle’s vague clause, which seems to have much to do with Boal’s own shift.57 Catharsis was now taken by most thinkers to mean, not purgation/expunction of emotions, but “release” of an excess of emotions (Lear 320-1), or “clarification (or illumination) concerning experiences of the pitiable and fearful kind” (Nussbaum 391), through the very workings of pity and fear in tragedy.
57. It is worth borrowing Paul Dwyer’s argument that Boal, like Brecht before him, first constructed and then demolished (and then, in a sense, re-constructed, we could add) the “Aristotle” he needed in order to suit his own rhetorical purposes (635), namely, in the words of Snyder-Young “to highlight the function of mainstream (aka ‘non-political’) theatre as an apparatus reinforcing and upholding an unjust status quo” (n.pag.). Dwyer correctly stresses, however, that in late-capitalist democratic societies, “no theatre-maker is ever ‘outside the system’” (636), and thus “flattening the motives of the makers of mainstream culture to ‘oppress the subaltern’ rather than to ‘make a lot of money’ ignores the power of capitalism in determining how cultural products are made” (Snyder-Young n.pag.).
Delikonstantinidou 89
With all its swifts and swerves, Boal’s work, as Fintan Walsh observes, “has been the most influential approach to developing socially engaged theatre projects worldwide.” His conception of what counts as therapeutic, central to his theatre, “is quite nuanced and complex,” involving also environmental concerns and promoting physical participation and critical reflection on the part of the individual, who is always “perceived and engaged in relation to a socio-political context” (46).
Admittedly, the fact that the idea of the therapeutic, as well as various and challenging modes of reimagining and reframing catharsis inflect contemporary theatre and performance practice, including the revisionary theatre practice in this study, owes much to Boal’s contribution to a theatre committed to sociopolitical transformation, at the heart of which lies catharsis as conducive to healing.
Much more recently, scholar Kathleen M. Sands has drawn from the many disciplines of psychoanalysis, feminism, trauma, literary, and religious studies to formulate a reading of tragedy and the tragic at the heart of which lies the experience of trauma. In her theory of the tragic, the latter is explicitly and literally discussed in relation to a therapeutic function. One of the most crucial aspects in her theory is that she discerns and fleshes out a fascinating parallel between tragedy and trauma-related processes. The question “what makes tragedy successful?” can be recast as “what makes suffering good to tell?” she claims. Therefore, “[t]he problematics of defining tragedy and of finding meaning in suffering are . . . the same,” since “it is equally perilous to find and not to find meaning in suffering.” This is because “[t]o find meaning in suffering is in some sense to accept it, enabling the legitimization of suffering that may be unjust or unnecessary. But to find no meaning in suffering is to leave history not only unredeemed but unmourned and forgotten. And so it is with tragedy.” According to Sands, traumas and the suffering they entail “interrupt time.”
Delikonstantinidou 90
They are constitutive of a terrifying sense of finality which is so absolute that “it cannot be spun into the fabric of meaning, and so manifests itself as gap or silence.
And because it cannot be integrated or expressed, trauma demands reenactment.”
Whereas tragedy is similarly disruptive of the uncomplicated narration of time as meaning, it
change[s] the modality of repetition from act to ritual, from event to
narration. Tragedy . . . consigns trauma to a ritual space where, rather
than being silently reenacted [or traumatically acted out], it is solemnly
voiced and lamented. Just as marking of the sacred creates the profane,
so tragedies mark off trauma and in so doing wrench back from trauma
the rest of life, during which time does not stand still and from which
swaths of meaning can be made. This modal transposition is the
peculiar efficacy of tragedy; it changes trauma into the density around
which meaning orbits, held and repelled like planets around the sun.
(83-4)
Evidently, earlier and more recent theories of the tragedy and the tragic, their psychoethical and sociopolitical aspects, as well as aesthetic, moral, and mystical dimensions of the tragic play into Sands’ theory.
According to her reading, the tragic yields an encounter with the unfathomable loss around which the world revolves. It is the kind of loss we associate with negative limit experiences, or “that than which nothing worst can be conceived,” and of which the world is full. In other words, the tragic rivets us at the brink of an existential abyss involving irredeemable loss, inescapable defeat, innocent fault, incommensurable goods, vanishing freedom, inexorable sacrifice, and “fated” violence (86). In offering
Delikonstantinidou 91 us a sight of this abyss, it generates neither meaning nor beauty, not as we commonly conceive of them, but the desire for both. In Sands’ account, the desire that the tragic generates is, in a sense, also abyssal, a sort of insatiable hunger. And, then, the tragic partially caters to this desire, partially feeds the hunger, only to perpetuate it. Thus, it opens up an approach to meaning and beauty via negativa (87); that is, by allowing us to come to uneasy terms with the trauma of the absence of meaning and beauty, and, perhaps, even worth through it. In Minnema’s words, although the tragic constitutes
“a shattering of worldviews, a loss of belief in ultimate justice and universal order,” it constitutes also “the renewed and sharpened awakening of the desire for ideals despite the full recognition of their ultimate loss” (275). In the tragic, we afford to stand in front of and against our/our world’s irredeemable brokenness, affirming it, at the same time affirming the world, as well as our place and value in it, precisely because the tragic affords us the possibility to grow into our and our world’s fractures.
Much like Freud’s melancholic, Sands argues, modernity has lost something valuable, yet unidentifiable and unnamable.58 But rather than identify and mourn for the desired object, it has attempted to become it; that is to mean, it has attempted to become the invisible, traumatic loss. In the process, it has ingested its hostility at the lost object (99). Directed against itself, this hostility has resulted in a feeling of inadequacy in itself; namely, against its reality/ies, precisely because its reality/ies has/have failed to coincide with a desired ideality/ies (“ideals about ourselves, the world, nature, the gods” (Minnema 275).59 Sands sees in the tragic the potential to function as a vehicle for the healing of our world’s melancholia, insofar as the tragic
58. We could easily concur with Sands that this “something” which has been lost to modernity can be taken to mean coherent worldviews, metaphysical warrants, belief in moral perfection and absolute values, or a sense of wholeness. Our losses and “[t]he losses at stake in tragedy . . . are fundamentally moral losses” (100). 59. See Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1957, originally 1917).
Delikonstantinidou 92 can assist us in uncovering the loss, recognizing it precisely as such, as well as in reclaiming desire, the desire for a human community that is fully functional, if not integrally good. In other words, the tragic’s impetus for and sphere of action—its dran (Greek verb for “to act”)—can remedy the melancholy paralysis of modernity.
The re-emergence and re-assertion of the tragic as politically significant, and even radically transformative, in recent decades, is telling of the contemporary need to uncover the tragic, and with it our loss(es); “to confront the crushing limitations of humanity and to reignite the desire for lives and selves that are better” (Sands 100), not despite the catastrophes, but because of and through them. This contemporary development, to which so many thinkers and artists have responded, serves as a powerful reminder of the need to keep trying to recover from our losses instead of suppressing and/or (self-defeatingly) internalizing them; a reminder of the need to heal, a need pressing as ever, yet acknowledged more openly than ever before.
V. In Lieu of a Conclusion
Admittedly, we have come a long way from Aristotle’s conception of catharsis as the purpose (or telos) of tragic art. Nevertheless, the connection that he first—albeit rather ambiguously—drew between the tragic and the therapeutic, and the political import he invested in this connection, despite its being initially set in aesthetic terms, has inspired and enriched the continuing and productive discussion on the role and function of the tragic with regard to both the individual and the collective. It has also inspired, informed, and even served as a starting point for the development of theatre and performance methodologies, from drama therapy to Boalian theatre projects in community contexts, and to more contemporary social theatre projects, that are as
Delikonstantinidou 93 much inflected by the idea of the therapeutic as they are actively seeking to effect sociopolitical change, in various and often challenging ways.
Most interestingly for the present study, the idea of the therapeutic and the idea of a radical politics are never far from each other in both more contemporary theoretical accounts of the tragic’s therapeutic potential and in theatre/performance practice that taps into the said potential. Sands’ account of the relation between the tragic and the therapeutic is a case in point, permeated as it is by an understanding of the tragic as radically transformative in overtly ethico-political terms—an understanding very similar to the one that has been addressed in the previous section of this chapter. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the theatre practice that we will soon start examining in detail: revisionary theatre practice that invests in the tragic mode and that is also aligned to the therapeutic paradigm (as a broad complex of discourses and practices).
This kind of performing arts praxis builds on the idea of the therapeutic, whether by way of narrative choices, dramaturgical practices, production methods, and other related processes and strategies. At the same time, it is intimately allied with a radical politics in its propositions or intimations of an expansive scope of sociopolitical reforms; in its vision of a deepening (more participatory and deliberative) democracy within the theatrical sphere and beyond it, in the broader cultural sphere; in its advocating personal and community responsibility for the undertaking of sociopolitical action; and in its promotion of social justice and similar values.
In the course of the analytical part(s), we will discover that, in the process of revis(ion)ing Greek tragic myths, contemporary Latino/a dramatists have invested in
Delikonstantinidou 94 and built on both the tragic’s relation to radical politics and its relation to the therapeutic, tapping into the potencies they have discerned therein. On the one hand, they pull into their mythoplays the tragic’s potential for a radical politics; that is, they make use of the possibilities opened up through the tragic mode for a politics much more self-reflexive in its ethics and praxis than current politics. On the other hand, they heavily rely on the idea of the therapeutic and on the vision of healing, woven in and through and around the tragic mode, and feeding into and off the possibilities that this mode presents for a radical politics.
In the following chapters, we will proceed to a more particular examination of the diverse ways in which the dramatic mythic revisions under consideration contribute to, or intervene in, a timely investigation of the conditions of possibility for a politically engaged process of healing of the traumas of Latino/a communities and of different constituencies within these communities through their very tragic mode.
Delikonstantinidou 95
For better or for worse, we live in a world where there seem to
be no limits. Perhaps this is why Medea continues to challenge our imaginations: like our neighbors, our colleagues, and the most distant
people whom the news media bring to our attention each day, she evokes both our pity and our fear, our admiration and our horror. In
confronting Medea, we confront our deepest feelings and realize that
behind the delicate order we have sought to impose upon our world
lurks chaos.
(Johnston, Introduction 17)
Delikonstantinidou 96
Part One
Mestiza Medeas
Delikonstantinidou 97
I. Preliminary Remarks
In the introductory chapter, we traced the transition, in U.S. Latino/a theatre, from the earlier utilization of indigenous myths (or mitos), as in corridos, zarzuelas, carpa teatros, and in the theatre of the Civil Rights Movement era, to the mestiza mythopoesis of contemporary Latino/a dramatists. In their dramatic mythic revisions, these dramatists combine material drawn from Greek tragic myths and material drawn from indigenous mytho-histories and/or from their Latino/a reality/ies.
This practice has been construed as a gesture on the part of theatrical practitioners and cultural agents of the Latin American diaspora in the U.S. toward distancing themselves from earlier nationalist(ic) accounts of an authentic realm of tradition embodied by Latino/a-specific (past and present, oral and written, historical and mythical) narratives. It is a gesture toward celebrating transcultural exchanges and negotiations, integral to the sociopolitical and cultural vision of a new, global mestizaje; a mestizaje now reconceptualized, in a way that its emancipatory potential disengages from a literal/nationalist(ic) understanding, and re-interpreted, instead, as an ethical and political possibility.60 By practicing the said mestiza mythopoesis, they acknowledge mestizaje, and its concomitant processes of transculturation, as a suitable conceptual, theatrical, and real-life alternative for twenty-first artists and audiences.
Greek tragic myth is, thus, no longer regarded and treated as the hegemonic
“Other” of a Latino paradigm. Rather, it is taken up as an integral part of a common global (instead of exclusively Euro American) heritage, (inevitably) diasporic, and thus, in a very real and significant sense, allied to the dramatists’ own backgrounds
60. See Andrew Irvine (2000) and Ruben Rosario Rodriguez (2008), especially page 80, for an exploration of this idea.
Delikonstantinidou 98
and realities. Moreover, Greek tragic myth is taken up as a rich arsenal of not only
culturally familiar, but also resonant and relevant themes, concepts, figures, and
images of considerable philosophical, political, sociocultural, and artistic currency.
In the “Prolegomena,” we also touched upon the tragic mode pervading the
Greek myths and tapped into in the dramatic mythic revisions we consider here, while
Chapter One served to provide a more detailed account of the tragic mode, discussing
at length its defining parameters, qualifying it, and examining its potential for a
radical politics as well as its relation with the therapeutic paradigm.
In the subsequent three chapters, comprising Part One, “Mestiza Medeas,” we
explore the specific uses of the Medea myth and of its tragic import in three dramatic
mythic revisions by Carlos Morton, Cherríe Moraga, and Luis Alfaro, respectively.
But, before undertaking the analysis of the plays, we proceed with a brief introduction
to the Medea myth and its trajectory, an overview of its presence on the U.S. stage,
and a consideration of its distinct significance for the Latino/a context.
II. The Tragic Myth of Medea
In the “Prolegomena” to this study, we discussed the rather common—if not
hackneyed—view that Greek myths lend themselves to a wide variety of
(political/politicized) readings, revisions, interpretations, and symbolic
representations of contemporary concerns, ideas, and events. Scholars and artists have
perceived and used Greek tragic myth as “a rich cultural archive for ideological
reworking” of various political, social, and cultural premises, to use Rachel
Fensham’s words (167), or even as a purveyor of “social charters,” in the words of
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James S. Ruebel (6). Its power has been said to be connected to the important existential and sociopolitical crises that it identifies and enacts, thus helping us work through them. Given the vast body of knowledge that we have inherited on Greek tragic myth and its long reception history, it is hard to dispute Savas Patsalidis’ point that Greek tragic myth leads to the “question mark.” It is a “question mark” that forces us to reflect on the very experience of human life (2010),61 while it reinforces the mystery of that life and dramatizes the very questions it (pro)poses.
The longevity of the myth of Medea, thus, begs the question: what is that makes this myth, in particular, “good to think with,” to borrow from Lévi-Strauss’ famous statement (89)? What are the important questions that it (pro)poses, and for which it provides no (easy) answers? After all, as Emma Griffiths reminds us, “Medea is not an obviously sympathetic figure.” If anything, she is “an unlikely focus for identification” (3)—another point that is hard to dispute.
We may be tempted to attribute the singular fascination she has been exerting from antiquity to our own day to the fact that works about her, references to her tale, and other artworks featuring her have survived (many of them intact). We may even attempt to attribute it to the fact that she is associated (at least after Euripides’ authoritative treatment of her myth in the eponymous tragedy) with the horrifying
(then and now) crime of infanticide (among other criminal acts), or even to the fact that she is involved in an ever stimulating “gendered dialogue, focusing on powerful women” (3-4). None of the above suffices to fully explain her appeal, however.
Besides, we should remember that other subjects of surviving tragedies (such as
Alcestis, Andromache, Hekabe, or Thyestes), child-killers (such as Prokne and Ino), and powerful female figures of ancient Greek myth, many of whom may have
61. My translation.
Delikonstantinidou 100 affinities with Medea (such as Clytemnestra or Eriphyle), have not enjoyed Medea’s popularity, especially outside classical circles (3-4). An overview of her myth, an attempt at rounding out her mythic biography, may serve as a good starting point for understanding the hold Medea has upon the western and non-western imagination for the past two and a half millennia.
It is helpful to conceive of Medea’s myth as a multilayered mythic complex consisting of a host of strata. First, a nexus of stories about other figures to which she is linked and to which she relates—the wider, all-encompassing context of “Greek myth.” Second, a constellation of stories specifically about her, made up of incidents or episodes, about which Fritz Graf has identified a “vertical” and a “horizontal tradition”—the former referring to “different versions of the same mythic episode” and the latter to “a running biography” of individual episodes (21). Third, the totality of specific instantiations or treatments of her myth (or parts of it) developed over the course of centuries, each shaping and/or altering it to serve specific purposes.62 The relationship between the different layers of Medea’s myth, between individual narratives of the same episode as well as of different episodes, is a complicated one.
Tensions, conflicts, and disparities exist throughout, rendering Medea a figure who defies simple description.
In his condensed account of Medea’s mythic biography, Graf helpfully identifies five individual episodes, “each of which is tied closely to a specific locale,” that together make up the aforementioned horizontal tradition:
a. The Colchian [or the Golden Fleece] story: Medea [daughter of
Aietes and Iuia/Eidyuia/Neaira, or Hekate] helps Jason, who has
62. See also Emma Griffiths’ concise mythic biography of Medea (2006), especially pages 6 to 10.
Delikonstantinidou 101
arrived with the Argonauts, obtain the Golden Fleece [using her
magical powers]; she then must flee with him [killing her own
brother, Apsyrtos, in the process and, later, during their journey to
Greece, causing the death of the bronze giant, Talos].63
b. The Iolcan story: Medea helps Jason to avenge himself on [his
uncle] Pelias [her magical powers once again involved in this
incident]; they then must flee from Peliades [his daughters], who
seek revenge.
c. The Corinthian [also transliterated as “Korinthian”] story: Medea
avenges herself on Jason, who has abandoned her, by killing the
Corinthian king [Creon], his daughter [Glauke or Creousa, again
using magic], and the children whom Medea has borne to Jason;
she then must flee.64
d. The Athenian story: Medea becomes the companion of King
Aegeus and almost kills his son Theseus; she then must flee.
e. The Median story: after fleeing from Athens, Medea settles among
the Arioi in the Iranian highlands, who since that time have been
called “Medes.”65 (22)
A propensity toward flight, practice of the arts of witchery, troublesome relationships with fathers and sons (and children in general), and prevalence of impunity, all serve
63. In Griffith’s account of Medea’s mythic biography, we learn that, according to some sources, “Medea comes to Greece as Jason’s wife and uses her [magical] powers to rejuvenate Aison, Jason’s father. There are also references to Medea rejuvenating Jason himself” (7). 64. This, however, is Euripides’ version of events. “[Ot]her variants of the myth give different reasons for the death of Medea’s children which do not make her a deliberate child-killer. In some accounts Jason is the ruler of Korinth and Medea his consort, or Medea herself is the legitimate ruler” (Griffiths 7). 65. According to some sources, it is “her son Medus/Medios/Medeios who becomes the founder of the Medes,” while “[t]here are also accounts which make Medea return to Kolchis [or Colchis]. Her final resting place is said to be Elysion, the paradise afterlife, where she becomes the wife of Achilles” (Griffiths 8).
Delikonstantinidou 102 as links between the various, and often disparate, episodes of Medea’s convoluted mythic career. “Recurrent themes and emphases,” however, should not blur “the problems and contradictions contained within the myth,” Griffiths warns (8). There is no canonical version of the myth of Medea, and to state that “the main focus or meaning” of the myth is hard to pinpoint is an understatement. To clarify this point, let us look more closely at some of the most well-attested of these problems and contradictions.
In some versions, Medea’s story demonstrates striking parallels with the folktale of the “helper-maiden” found in many different cultures around the world. In the abovementioned, first episode, Medea “appears as a lovely and lovelorn princess who enables Jason to steal the Golden Fleece,” by means of her magical skills, and who is, subsequently, incorporated into Greek life, Johnston summarizes (5).
However, later stages of her life problematize her inclusion in the “helper-maiden” category. In these, Medea appears to have abandoned “Greek mores,” aligning herself
“with the world of the foreign, the abnormal” (8-9). She is now
a wrathful woman whose lust for vengeance drives her to slaughter her
own children . . . the utter opposite of the “good” or “helpful” woman.
Indeed, . . . infanticidal Medea resembles a type of female demon,
feared in traditional cultures throughout the ancient and modern world,
who specializes in killing children. (5)
To compound the problem of constructing a coherent persona for Medea even further, not only does she remain unpunished for all of her crimes, but also she, somehow, earns a place in the Elysian Plain, where, after her death, she marries Achilles and is allowed to rest eternally among other “noble” souls. Confronted with these
Delikonstantinidou 103 conundrums, ancient authors attempted to “smooth over the dissonances between the different ‘Medeas’ whom they had inherited” (6), or, to put it more simply, to harmonize the disparate elements of her story. The fact that, in certain variants of her story, she kills (and dismembers) her brother, thus foreshadowing her later infanticide, no less than the fact that, in most variants, she uses magic to accomplish her ends, practice of which the ancient Greeks were highly distrustful (especially when the practitioner was a woman), can be interpreted as such attempts.
Moreover, Medea’s role as witch and her affinities with Helios/the sun-god
(her grandfather), Olympian gods (Zeus, Hera, and Artemis), and chthonic deities
(Hecate)66 situates her at the intersection of “two powerful discourses: concern about the divine, and concern about the position of women,” arguably “an explosive combination” in patriarchal societies (Griffiths 45). Thus, she is rendered “an intrinsically liminal figure pushing the boundaries of different societal categories”
(45). As witch, she is a transgressive figure who draws from and feeds back into male fears about women—particularly those revolving around female sexuality. Yet, besides divine and magical powers, Medea also yields the power of words. Her rhetorical skills, skills of persuasion, and her strategic skills (indicated by her very name, which literally means “The Planner”), which are rarely attributed to women in patriarchal societies where gender roles have been narrowly defined and fixed, mean that she possesses both masculine and feminine characteristics. This “androgynous” quality of Medea’s figure further accentuates her liminality and her “otherness.”
66. In some accounts, Medea refused Zeus’ advances out of respect for Hera, thus earning the latter’s gratitude, while, in others, she originally was part of Hera’s manifestations. In Euripides’ tragedy, Medea even claims to be acting as an agent of Zeus’ divine justice (in his role as Zeus Horkios or Zeus of Oaths), wrecking revenge on Jason because he broke his oath of marriage. She has been also linked to Aphrodite, in the context of her relationship with Jason (according to some versions of the myth, it was Aphrodite who caused Medea to fall in love with Jason). In certain variants, she is the priestess of Artemis and in others of Hecate. See Griffiths (2006), especially 16, 52-55, 75-76, and Johnston (1997).
Delikonstantinidou 104
It is worth adding to this account of Medea’s complexity that her constant movement between different cultures and societies constitutes her as the quintessential foreigner, especially in the ancient Greek imagination. In ancient
Greece, where the categories “Greek” and “barbarian” were clearly drawn and mutually exclusive, Medea, the perpetual itinerant, would have been construed as thoroughly liminal and fearful, challenging the aforementioned prescribed categories and constantly threatening to collapse them. Both affectionate mother and child- killing demon, divine and mortal (indeed, at times all too human), displaying male and female characteristics, occasionally appearing to be assimilated into Greek culture, but always a “barbarian,” a stranger by blood and/or by choice, Medea
“represents different modes of thought and action at one and the same time” (57); her stories are inherently paradoxical and she a moving contradiction.
It could be—and has been—argued that the very complexity of Medea is what makes her so appealing to past and present authors, artists, and audiences. To embrace her complexity means to go beyond acknowledging her myth as a vehicle for exploring the notion (and dichotomy) of “self” and/versus “other” “out there,” and confront the dichotomy “in here,” within the self. It is not only that Medea “provides an example of the problems of negotiating identity, of where to draw boundaries,” as
Griffiths argues (62), and of the problems entailed in defining all that “self” is by everything that it is not and should not be, by everything that is rejected and gets censured in the process of safeguarding the defined “self.” Rather, Medea constitutes a mythic exemplar of the abject “in-between” that defies categorization and a normative notion of identity. Unlike most mythical heroes, then, she conflates the acceptable and typical of “self” and the unacceptable and atypical of the “other”
Delikonstantinidou 105 within her, thus frustrating any attempt to use her myth in order to organize the world on the basis of received conceptual templates.
The multiple inter-personal conflicts in which she is implicated in a sense mirror, expand, and/or reconfigure internal conflicts, fleshing out the tragic load of
Medea (as figure and myth), and thus allowing authors and artists to use her myth in order to produce more nuanced readings of real-life individual and collective conflicts. More specifically, Medea’s myth not only allows them “to explore the opposing concepts of self and other,” and, by extension, the dominant and the oppressed (whether ethnically, racially, sexually, or otherwise). “[I]t also allows them to raise the disturbing possibility of otherness lurking within the self—the possibility that the ‘normal’ carry within themselves the potential for abnormal behavior, that the boundaries expected to keep our world safe are not impermeable” (Johnston 8). This is, perhaps, a possibility too threatening to contemplate and confront absent the distance that her myth affords due to the very “there” and “then” of the mythical narrative.
From the Greeks of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic period (such as
Pindar and Euripides), to the Romans (such as Ovid and Seneca), and to the
Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, up to twentieth and twenty-first- century authors and artists from around the world, working in a variety of media, including those considered here, the qualitative and quantitative wealth of works about Medea is great. This wealth attests to the tragic myth’s remarkable responsiveness to a variety of sociopolitical exigencies and quandaries, as well as to ethical ambiguities and conundrums, often involving individual and collective suffering.
Delikonstantinidou 106
Euripides’ eponymous tragedy, the earliest extant play on Medea’s myth,
(re)presents Medea as a tragically self-divided figure, “fraught with conflicting desires and exhibiting an extraordinary range of behavior” (Johnston 6). His Medea is androgynous, displaying a masculine and a feminine side; at once victim of passion and male oppression; deft manipulator and perpetrator of self-destructive revenge— one less motivated by sexual jealousy than by a fierce sense of honor; at once able to form proto-feminist bonds with the chorus of Corinthian women (despite her status as a foreigner), and isolated in her internalized exile, alienated from the social order.
With regard to the tragic self-division of Euripides’ Medea, Helene P. Foley comments: Medea “borrows heroic masculine ethical standards to articulate her choice [to avenge her wrongs] . . . while stereotypically feminine duplicity and magic permit her to achieve her goals.” She deliberately imitates “a heroic brand of masculinity” (Female Acts 264) and performs a “masquerade of femininity,” more acting like a “normal” (by Greek standards) woman than being one.67 In doing the former, she imitates a heroic code which “oppresses women, both because it traditionally excludes and subordinates them and because it gives priority to public success and honor over survival and the private concerns of love and family” (Felski
264), thus, in a sense ratifying it. In doing the latter, she simultaneously employs and subverts a feminine code that is equally oppressive to women.
67. Luce Irigaray’s treatment of the concept of “masquerade of femininity” has been very influential and resonates strongly in the context of our discussion. A man, she writes, “has only to effect his being-a-man, whereas a woman has to become a normal woman, that is, has to enter into the masquerade of femininity,” “a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation” (133-4, 84). Yet, although “the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity” (84), the very structure of the masquerade of femininity furnishes the possibility for resistant strategies that “can be used to undermine the very systems of representation that it is supposed to maintain” (Hollinger 317).
Delikonstantinidou 107
At the same time, Medea veers restlessly and inconclusively between her status as an honorary Greek, having won over the Corinthian people, and her status as barbarian. In thus ambivalently performing the role of the barbarian, she, on the one hand, exposes the Greeks’ treachery, patriarchal oppression, and failure at justly ordering the relations between the sexes, while, on the other hand, serves to justify, by means of her heinous act, Greek anxieties centering on the figure of the “barbarian other.” To slightly modify Foley’s argument, “[l]ike all disfranchised rebels, she can tragically imagine no other self [or selves] or self-defense to imitate [and perform] than” those that her oppressors have instituted, both for “self” and “other” (264).
Later versions of Medea’s myth, including the ones we consider in this study, build on the Euripidean Medea’s performance of a tragically self-divided, ambiguous, and in- between identity, both in terms of gender and, increasingly in the course twentieth century and beyond, in terms of race and ethnicity.
Constitutive elements of Euripides’ version of Medea’s myth explain, according to Foley, its appeal to American (mainly U.S.) audiences. “The characters of this play are not the victims of fate . . . ; they articulate their positions, make their own choices, and face the devastating consequences of their actions. They defy (even while exploiting) traditional expectations about male and female, Greek and barbarian, and challenge clichés” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 192). In the American context, “[Euripidean] Medea’s gendered self-division and ability to perform various as well as deceptive roles are often tied to a disjunction between two cultural traditions and/or social identities,” usually carrying strong racial and ethnic inflections
(193), as we shall see in the following pages. Yet, the American reception of
Euripides’ Medea grew to become more nuanced as time went by.
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Euripides’ tragedy, as well as Ovid’s and Seneca’s versions of the tragic myth, links Medea, as Diane Purkiss aptly comments, “with the periphery wherever the centre locates itself.” Her “barbarization does not confine itself to geographical relocation.” Rather, both Medea’s “actions and her magic are understood in terms of ethnic alterity,” while ethnic sameness is violated on her part, “not only by her rejection of maternity [for honor or] for power . . . but also by her magic” (260). In these versions, Medea is without a home and without a homeland. Indeed, she is nowhere at home. Her exile is incrementally expanding both outwards and inwards; her ethnic alterity weighting heavily upon her already tragic predicament and expediting her plunge down a vortex of self-destruction. Still, in the process of mythopoesis, and as new versions of Medea’s story appeared, in the U.S. and elsewhere, the heroine’s (ethnoracial) alterity, instead of only decentering her and relegating her to the margins of identifiable world(s), thus risking to reiterate conventional patterns of center/periphery relations, has been construed and constructed as able to radicalize and empower her political commentary. This is a commentary almost invariably directed against such oppositional patterns and against the asymmetries in the distribution of power that they evince.
The development of Medea as ethnoracial outsider/other began in nineteenth- century Europe, as Foley documents, and has been succeeded, more recently, by a range of international responses (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 193). As far as the
American theatrical scene is concerned, the heroine’s cultural, racial, and ethnic otherness had already begun to make its mark on it since the nineteenth century, but the Civil Rights and the Feminist Movement of the sixties and seventies provoked an eruption of new Medeas (210). In these, more recent, treatments of the myth of
Medea, the foreign tragic heroine is established as a sociocultural critic, “not only a
Delikonstantinidou 109 feminist critic, which she is in part in the original [Euripidean] play, but a broader and more pointedly ironic and/or witty social critic,” with extant racial, ethnic, and cultural prejudices and injustices as her major target (193). She is often represented, predominantly by ethnic artists and authors, as “the wounded, colonized barbarian, who kills off part of herself by destroying Jason’s children,” and who “speaks both as a woman, and for the conquered and subjugated of the world,” to employ Jeanette R.
Malkin’s words (173). She enacts her revenge both as woman and as part of a vanquished/ing people; her revenge is also the revenge of the oppressed of the world.
In most post-Civil Rights U.S. treatments of Medea as “other,” her otherness acquires an increasing number of dimensions in response to the country’s history as a nation of continuously and uneasily mingling peoples, while several ethnic Medeas draw on their own mythical traditions and foreign heritages (Foley, Reimagining
Greek Tragedy 210-27), as is the case with the mestiza Medeas we will examine shortly. In these treatments of the tragic myth, Medea’s “magical/manipulative powers” are remotivated, sympathy is created for “her failure (often as immigrant) to assimilate to another world,” while her “multidimensional otherness” is probingly and compellingly dealt with (193). Many contemporary, ethnic Medeas embody a powerful (and deadly) combination of precarious at-homeness and threatening homelessness that unsettles the U.S.’s distinct structures of feeling, in which, as Amy
Kaplan has argued, the “domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographical and conceptual border of the home” (581-2). At their best, as intimate aliens, ethnic Medeas cause the reciprocal logic that maps the relation between the domestic and the foreign in unmistakably gendered terms, and that validates and safeguards the domestic over against the foreign, to implode.
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At this point, we should underline that, whereas due attention has been granted to the rash of “black Medeas”—whether African, Africa American, Caribbean, or otherwise—that, from the late seventies onwards, have taken the U.S. theatrical scene by storm, the “brown Medeas” of contemporary Latino/a theatre have drawn much less scholarly interest. The reasons for this neglect can be traced partly to persisting structures of bias and discrimination against Latino/a cultural production within the
U.S. context. After all, Latino/a theatre still occupies an anything but secure position within the dominant U.S. theatrical landscape. Yet, they can also, and perhaps primarily, be traced to a persisting guarded stance toward the Greek resources within the U.S. Latino/a context. As we have already stated in the introductory chapter, the present study will hopefully mark the beginning of a change in the critical praxis.
Substantial benefits could be harvested from such a development in terms of inte/transcultural understanding, negotiation, and exchange, and in terms of processes of transculturation, translation, and syncrisis.
With special regard to Latino/a revisionary theatre engaging the myth of
Medea, this development gains impetus and purchase in view of the fact that, for
Latino/a playwrights, besides Medea’s complexity, radical alterity, and tragic import, it is her affinities with Central and South American mythical (and mythohistorical in the case of La Malinche) figures that has proved particularly compelling and inviting of revisionary treatment. The similarities, or points of contact, between Medea and the figures of La Malinche and La Llorona, as was noted in the first chapter, are, at least partly, explanatory of the relevance and resonance of her myth, as well as of the issues that the myth raises, for Latinos/as. A brief discussion of the said figures will pave the way for our subsequent examination of the first play by Carlos Morton, suggestively entitled La Malinche.
Delikonstantinidou 111
III. Toward Medea’s Latino/a-ization
According to the Spanish chronicles of the conquest of the New World, La
Malinche, or Malintzin Tenepal, or Doña Marina (her Christian name), although noble by birth (according to most versions of her origins), was sold to Hernán Cortés, the
Spanish conquistador, as a slave by the Mayans, to whom she had been initially sold by her people, the Nahuas. She became his consort and served as his interpreter, thus emerging as “the most prominent cultural intermediary between the Spaniards and the
Aztecs during the conquest of Tenochtitlán,” the capital of the Aztec Empire (Kaup
221). As we learn from Debra J. Blake’s comprehensive account of La Malinche,
“[i]ronically, . . . La Malinche’s elite status was restored by those who had first enslaved her, the indigenous peoples,” largely due to “the translating and leadership roles she assumed during the conquest period. . . .” Yet, this esteem “lasted for only a brief period of history; respect would quickly turn to notoriety that evolved with ever- increasing negativity into the twentieth century” (35-9). In fact, “La Malinche went from heroine to betrayer/whore in the public sentiment,” Blake explains, due to the widespread adoption of a mythohistorical narrative according to which she willingly forsook her people for love of Cortés. She was transformed, through a process of mythmaking that has lasted for more than five centuries, “from historical figure to a negative feminine archetype”68 (Blake 40), not unlike Medea with whom she shares many resonances and parallels.
68. To slightly alter Allen Carey-Webb’s argument, as La Malinche gets “detached from historical events, from the ‘signified’ and becomes a symbol, a ‘sign,’” she becomes vulnerable to manipulation “by colonizing discourse,” which, in this way, staves off the possibility of the symbol/sign pointing to itself as made-up and constantly re-invented (48).
Delikonstantinidou 112
Earlier, as a “[s]ymbol of syncretism of cultures and races, she was portrayed as the mother of the first mestizo,” but, after the 1810 War of Independence, for the
“criollos69 who came to power [and] felt compelled to distance themselves from all things Spanish,” she became a (cultural and gender) scapegoat on which they transferred blame and guilt70 (Blake 40). Later, “[w]hen La Virgen de Guadalupe came into prominence as the nationalistic sign of the liberated Mexico, La Malinche was rewritten as the anti-virgin, the traitor whore” (41). In the twentieth century, she was recast by Octavio Paz, and others, as “La Chingada” (the violated/fucked mother) in a metaphor that extended to all (U.S.) Mexicanas and Chicanas. This formulation of
La Malinche was to be debunked by Chicana feminists in the latter half of the twentieth century as one that was robbing them “of subjectivity, agency, and identity”
(42), and that was stigmatizing their bodies and sexuality/ies as inherently abject.
In light of the complex processes of hybridization (or mestizo/a-ization) that shaped Latin American cultures, inevitably implicating their mythologies, it is not surprising that, in the course of her long history, La Malinche was connected to La
Llorona, whose life story is also reminiscent of that of Medea. La Llorona kills her children when abandoned for another woman by her husband (or lover), and then laments them for eternity, while wandering in search of them in rivers and other bodies of waters. She is also a syncretic figure, deriving from a combination of
“Spanish medieval notions of animas en pena, spirits in purgatory expiating their sins,” European folktales and myths (including the myth of Medea, according to
Diana Rebolledo (63)), pre-colonial mythical figures (including the mother earth
69. “Criollos,” that is creoles of “pure,” white blood, to be distinguished from “mestizos,” creoles of mixed blood. 70. In their version of history, Mexican nationalists conveniently concealed facts of the historical record, such as those that showed indigenous groups aligning themselves with Cortés against Aztec chiefs and overlords, as Sandra Messinger Cypess points out (20).
Delikonstantinidou 113 goddess Cihuacoatl, the fertility-water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, and the Cihuateteo reproductive demons), as well as “indigenous Mexica conquest stories involving La
Malinche” (Blake 45). Similarly to La Malinche, La Llorona evolved from a positive
“Mexican maternity symbol” to “a negative cultural symbol,” charged with the crime of “cultural infanticide” (Kanellos 1975). She thus turned into a cautionary exemplum of a woman who does not conform to the normative gender roles of the proper woman, mother, wife, lover, or patriot.
Although La Malinche and La Llorona began as distinct figures, gradually, during and after the conquest of Mexico, they merged in the popular imagination, with La Llorona sometimes interpreted as a variation of La Malinche which contained the infanticidal theme. The unitary figure which was thus formed occupied, as Blake records, “the negative pole of dualistic thinking that compares them to the idealized mother, La Virgen de Guadalupe” (48). However, alternative versions of La
Malinche/La Llorona do exist which present her as “a benevolent goddess warning her people about the Spanish and American invasions” and mourning the loss (or betrayal) of her people, whether because of “assimilation into the dominant culture or because of violence and prejudice” (47). In these variations, her actions are understood to “function as resistance to European conquest and white and male dominance,” hence reflecting “anticolonial and antipatriarchal themes in which indigenous women demonstrate defiance to presumed white male supremacy.” It is also worth emphasizing, by way of Blake, that, like the Greek Medea (and the Judaic
Lilith), La Llorona, in the earliest records of her story, is not represented as an infanticide. Rather, it is “social-political or religious forces [that] kill their symbolic
Delikonstantinidou 114 or actual children” (48).71 Despite some exculpatory variations of La Malinche/La
Llorona, though, most versions of her story point to the fact that she, much like
Medea, (d)evolved from a positive representation/symbol of womanhood to a screen on which patriarchal, male-dominated societies (past and present, colonial and post- colonial) projected all kind of psychological, sexual, and social fears, anxieties, and ambivalences toward women and their sexuality/ies in order to allay them.
“Fear of women, distrust of the woman in a powerful position, envy of the woman as the procreator, all these features of masculinist attitudes are present in the origination of the Medea–Malinche–Llorona paradigm,” argues Sandra Messinger
Cypess. Nevertheless, the scholar laments the inclusion of the three figures in the same paradigm, with specific reference to two mid-twentieth-century plays, namely,
Jesús Sotelo Inclán’s Malintzin, Medea americana (1957) and Sergio Magaña’s Los argonautas, renamed Cortés y La Malinche (1967). She claims that the correlation functions so as to perpetuate the view of La Malinche as “a negative icon in the representation of cultural identity,” as well as the denial of “her positive role in the formation of the mestizo Mexican identity” (20).
In the teeth of this rejective view of the Medea–Malinche–Llorona paradigm, as an exemplification of “the imposition of [a] patriarchal model” and of “a denigration of a pluricultural definition of Mexican identity” (Messinger Cypess 20), first Morton and then Moraga take it up and critically revise the three figures. In the process, they affirm, instead of compromising as Messinger Cypess fears, the constitutive pluriculturality of the Latino/a and Chicano/a identity and experience; redefine “their own experience beyond negative stereotypes and rigid gender roles”
(Blake 42); and give a more inclusive twist to the concept of mestizaje. At the same
71. The Corinthians or Hera in the case of certain variants of Medea’s myth.
Delikonstantinidou 115 time, their revisionary work functions, in a sense, so as to rescue all three figures from the bulk of (largely male-authored) historical notoriety by offering elaborate formulations of their motives and actions, dilemmas and deadlocks. In more general terms, the gesture of combining myths, also at work in Alfaro’s play, and their recontextualization, in all three Medea-inspired and Medea-based mythoplays to be examined in Part One, can further be construed as a statement on the part of the playwrights that the power of myths lies precisely in the power of their tellers to reinvent them in new contexts and within the latter’s indices, thus activating processes of reinvention in themselves and their communities of origin and of engagement.
Delikonstantinidou 116
Chapter 2
La Malinche
I. Setting the Stage for La Malinche as Medea
Whereas Moraga’s and Alfaro’s dramatic mythic revisions of the tragic myth of Medea transpose us to a post-independence/post-movimiento and to a more contemporary Latino/a context, respectively, Morton’s play is set in the early colonial era, in the period following the Conquest. In fact, taken together, the three plays ground Mexican American history, or at least key points of it, within the Medea–
Malinche–Llorona paradigm.
Beginning with/in the Conquest, Morton’s play, although the most conventional of the three plays in terms of dramaturgy, as it makes only moderate use of the techniques and technologies of contemporary (postmodern) theatre, radically reconceptualizes the origins of Mexican American culture as well as mestizaje itself, as reality and discourse. Although La Malinche is not the only play in which the playwright attracts the eponymous female figure in his dramatic orbit,72 it is the only one in which he gives her a syncretic twist. In this play, the drama of the Conquest becomes the drama of La Malinche and Cortés and the drama of Medea.
On one level, the play’s dramatization of the Conquest shares affinities with
Tzvetan Todorov’s much-discussed view of the Conquest as “the collision between a
72. In an earlier, satirical play, El jardín (1974), Carlos Morton's had associated La Malinche with the Biblical Eve.
Delikonstantinidou 117 ritual world”—where the past is an integral part of the present, or even prevails in it— and “a unique event” (84)—the invasion of another world and its order, which disrupts the constitutive narrative of the said ritual world and has to be mythicized and retrojected into an unfolding cosmic saga in order to be integrated into it. Yet, the play takes (us) on deeper mythohistorical levels in radically re-mythicizing the
Conquest and its legacy by interjecting it into the Medea–Malinche–Llorona paradigm, and more specifically, by re-vis(ion)ing, to paraphrase Ann McBride-
Limaye, the leading personage who enabled the drama of the Conquest to play itself out: La Malinche (15).
Insofar as La Malinche is “the locus for . . . [the] multiplicity of contradictions, ambiguities and irreconcilable differences which constitute the
Conquest” (McBride-Limaye 1) and “represents the heritage and the central problems of Mexican and Latin American culture” (17), revis(ion)ing her as Medea, and, most importantly, remotivating the actions of La Malinche/Medea, becomes in this play a way of confronting and coming to some sort of (uneasy) terms with the past and cultural memory, the Conquest and its legacy, and even a way of moving forward.
Indeed, the play can be understood as an attempt at working through the traumatic encounter of the Conquest and its post-traumatic reverberations throughout the history of Latin Americans.73
The widely produced, published, and award-winning Morton, leading figure of the contemporary Chicano/a theatre, wrote La Malinche in 1983, as part of his
73. The above point brings to mind Kai T. Erikson’s formulation regarding the difficulty of distinguishing between traumatic “acute events” and traumatic “chronic conditions” when one considers the “human residue” they both leave. “In one sense, at least,” he writes, “trauma can be defined as the psychological process by which an acute shock becomes a chronic condition, a way of keeping dead moments alive. . . . But . . . many modern catastrophes are both chronic and acute in character . . . [and] the human consequences of homelessness and poverty and abuse are very [much] like those of emergencies of a more immediate kind” (22).
Delikonstantinidou 118 graduate programme in the University of Texas, Austin. Unsure of his choice to link
La Malinche (and all that she stands for) with the Greek Medea, Morton kept the play
“in a drawer fermenting for twelve years,” before submitting it to the Arizona Theatre
Company’s Hispanic Playwriting Contest, where it won First Prize (Morton, Sunday xvii). La Malinche, or, more accurately, a modified and refined version of the play that Morton wrote in his graduate years, received its world premiere at the Arizona
Theatre Company, directed by William (Bill) Virchis, in 1997, and was also produced at Rio Hondo College, Whittier, California, that same year.
The play attracted mixed reviews. The negative ones, quite interestingly, focused almost invariably on the play’s inclusion of La Malinche within the same paradigm as Medea, hence justifying Morton’s earlier uncertainty about this choice.
Apparently, the fact that the playwright did not ignore the Medea myth altogether in order to focus exclusively on the “Mexican/Spanish legend,” as Jorge Huerta suggested in his review of the play (“La Malinche” 177), ground against the nationalist sensibility and sentiment of at least some Latino/a reviewers. Arguably, the colonially instituted bipolarity, Latino/a American versus Euro American, with the latter conflated with “Greek,” is still hauntingly present in the premises of their critiques.
It is true that, contrary to other plays about La Malinche that preceded
Morton’s and had some influence on it,74 this play does not provide a wholesale vindication of her, nor glorifies mestizaje. La Malinche is presented as “the locus for the trauma and generative power of the Conquest,” as McBride-Limaye writes: a destroyer, present at the destruction of the indigenous world, and a creator, present at
74. Plays such as Celestino Gorostiza’s La Malinche o la leña esta verde (La Malinche or The Firewood Is Green, 1958).
Delikonstantinidou 119 the creation of the mestizo one. She is a figure marked by incertitude and conflict that deflects difference “and transmutes dualities into a third term” (16, 2), into a third element that disrupts dichotomies (European/Spaniard versus Indian, whore versus mother of the mestizo, traitor versus uncrowned queen of Mexico, etc.). Thus, she is a figure that can be as easily vilified as vindicated.75 Morton does neither. His
Malinche/Medea, self-divided, dislocated and dislocating, is embedded in indeterminacy or, better, in indeterminate conflict; thereby, her tragic import is augmented.
The three related reasons that scholar Ann McBride-Limaye offers in answer
“to the complexity and extension of her role in terms of its explanatory function,” in fact, adumbrate her representation in the play:
a) she incorporates the problem of the confusion of origins in
Mexico [and in Chicano/a culture] because she facilitated [as
translator and cultural interpreter, catechist to the native peoples and
Cortés’ collaborator] the chaos the Conquest brought, b) she
embodies the problem of national identity as she reflects aspects
of the three heritages: Indian, Spanish and mestizo, and c) she
represents the ongoing process of overcoming difference, of
naturalizing alterity, i.e., the process of mestizaje. (15-6)
Mestizaje itself is presented in the play as anything but consensual, obvious, or unproblematic. Instead, it compels critical caution as a historical/cultural field sown with sacrificial victims that have over the years served as its fertilizer; Malinche’s and
Cortés’ son Martín being, according to our play, one, or rather, the first of them.
75. On this point, see also Rachel Philips (1983), especially pages 111-5, and White (1971), especially page 278.
Delikonstantinidou 120
II. La Malinche: Medea as an Aztec Vigilante
The dramatic action of La Malinche is set in a landscape that straddles the restless, uncertain boundary between history and myth: “nearby Lake Texcoco,” in
Tenochtitlán, Mexico, quasi-mystically bathed in the misty winter twilight, shortly before dawn (Morton, “La Malinche” 5). It is the dawn of the third day before Cortés marries Catalina, the play’s Glauke/Creousa-like figure. The “rival” of the titular protagonist is a Spanish woman, niece of Bishop Lizárraga,76 who is Head of the
Catholic Church in New Spain and the play’s Creon-like figure. Catalina is related to the Crown by blood and Cortés is about to marry her in order to strengthen his position, now precarious in view of the arrival of the new viceroy.77
The play opens with the lament-cum-self-introduction of La Llorona, evocatively portrayed as black-clad and rocking an empty cradle. She will function throughout as much more than a chorus sympathetic to Malinche’s plight and a constant reminder of the mourning that attended the Conquest. Not only will she
“weave the narrative” (7), but she also will propel it forward, up to its tragic climax.
La Llorona has responded to Malinche’s desperate calls for help and is there to assist her in exacting revenge on her enemies. That is how she justifies her presence to
Ciuacoatl, a figure also drawn from indigenous mythology, Malinche’s servant and confidante in the play, who recognizes and embraces La Llorona as an/their “[o]ld mother” (5). The brief encounter of the two mythical figures, La Llorona and
Ciuacoatl, serves as a sort of prologue that has an expository function: it provides
76. The play refers to Reginaldo de Lizárraga (1535-1609), who served both as Bishop of Concepción and as Bishop of Paraguay during his lifetime. 77. Don Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco (1495-1552), who was installed as viceroy of New Spain by King Charles I of Spain, in 1535.
Delikonstantinidou 121 information concerning the action (Cortés’ impending marriage to another woman and
Malinche’s threats of revenge which extend to her son), at the same time explaining the reason behind Malinche’s cries of anguish heard from within her house: “¡Ay, mi hijo!. . . Oh, my son, we must leave here . . . now! . . . But where shall we go? Where will I take you?” (6-7).
It is pertinent to note, at this juncture, that Ciuacoatl’s presence is heavy with meaning and her role of outmost importance to the play as a whole. According to her mythic biography, Ciuacoatl (or Cihuacoatl) was born of Coatlique, the Aztec goddess of Creation and Destruction, or the pre-patriarchal mother. Although
Ciuacoatl was identified with “Tonantzin, a goddess similar to the Christian Virgin
Mary,” in the early stages of her mythic career, writes Alicia Arrizón, after the
Conquest, she transformed into the counterpoint of Tonantzin—now conflated with
La Virgen de Guadalupe. Since then, she was known as the “serpent goddess,” disempowered yet still evil, a transgressor of marianismo, the cult of the Virgin Mary.
“As an opposing power,” Ciuacoatl’s legacy “helps to explain the whore-virgin dichotomy that has shaped gender relations and sexuality in post-Spanish colonial sites,” Arrizón insightfully adds (Queering Mestizaje 68), and, in this respect, it is akin to the legacy of La Malinche.
Nevertheless, in more recent years, and in their concerted efforts to deconstruct and subvert the said dichotomy and its nefarious implications on the psychic lives, the lifeworlds, and the wider sociocultural setting of Latinas/os and
Chicanas/os, artists and scholars have seized on Ciuacoatl (as they did with La
Malinche and La Llorona) “as a form of resistance and cultural reaffirmation” (68).
Invoking the transgressive spirit of Ciuacoatl in their works translates into an expression not only of affliction and the ensuing rage, but also of the desire for
Delikonstantinidou 122
“cultural decolonization and renovation.” Creative reconfigurations of the figure and symbol of Ciuacoatl, like the one offered in Morton’s play, can be understood, then, as transgressions within transgression, “counteract[ing] an oppressive system that has perpetuated the passive [or even demonized] role of women in Christian values and colonial sites,” and as examples of “a revisionist’s interference” (70) in contemporary
Latino/a cultural production.
In the context of La Malinche, Morton’s own revisionist interference has made
Ciuacoatl into the most sober and relatable of all female figures. Her many small yet nuanced acts of resistance to colonial and male authority, interspersed throughout the narrative, render her admirable. Moreover, the vignettes involving her encounters with Cortés’ soldier, and her love interest, Sánchez often elicit humor and provide comic relief to the otherwise tragic plotline. Malinche’s and Cortés’ foils in the play,
Ciuacoatl and Sánchez come closer to each other and fall in love in the course of a subplot that is interwoven with the main plotline, just as the protagonists are drawn further and further apart. Despite the fact that, by colonial and patriarchal standards,
Ciuacoatl, as a woman and a Native, is Sánchez’s inferior, and he, as a man and a
Spaniard, is her “natural” enemy, the two treat each other as equals. Sánchez’s calling her affectionately “Cecilia,” meaning “lacking blindness,”78 in the play, is telling: she is the only character not blinded by hatred, (Morton, “La Malinche” 38), just as he is the only man in the play who is not a liar and a hypocrite.
Although their loyalty to the protagonists remains unwavering throughout the play, Ciuacoatl repeatedly attempts to dissuade Malinche from pursuing her murderous plans, especially insofar as these concern also the life of young Martín (36,
39). She even goes as far as to try to hide the boy from his mother when her
78. For an etymology of the name “Cecilia,” see Liberman (2005).
Delikonstantinidou 123 admonitions fail to impede Malinche’s self-destructive course of action (51). On his part, Sánchez hesitates to obey or circumvents Cortés’ commands when their fulfillment could put Ciuacoatl’s life in jeopardy (29, 30, 53). Each on their own and together, Ciuacoatl and Sánchez push against and even transgress the prescribed limits and power structures of the dominant colonial and patriarchal regime, and thus they end up being the only ones not destroyed by it. As we shall see, the play goes as far as to suggest that it is, in fact, these two who should/will succeed or replace Malinche and Cortés as the new progenitors of the mestizo/a generations to come. Yet, the tragedy of Malinche and Cortés must run its full course before the promise of hope can dawn on the stage of Morton’s play.
To pick up again the thread of the main plotline, following the introductory dialogue between La Llorona and Ciuacoatl, and Malinche’s appearance in a disheveled, frantic state, La Llorona conjures up, instead of narrating, images of the events that led to this moment against the backdrop of Ciuacoatl’s and Malinche’s lamentations, which complement La Llorona’s fragmented, visual “narration”79:
CIUACOATL: Sorrowful was the time the Spaniards entered my
village in warm and verdant Yucatán. Sorrowful the day they took me
and my mistress along on their cursed trail of conquest to the cold
stones of Tenochtitlan.
MALINCHE: Why did I fall in love, Cortés?
Was it your fame that preceded you?
We though you a God.
79. La Llorona will induce a number of similar visions in the mind of Malinche (and in the stage of La Malinche) in the course of the play; visions of past events when the protagonist was warned of her lover’s callousness and future betrayal (Morton, “La Malinche” 22-3) and when she chose to stand by him and comfort him despite all warnings (40-1).
Delikonstantinidou 124
The reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl.80
Was it your beard, your horse, your cross, your sword? (Morton, “La
Malinche” 7)
Throughout the play, the circumstances under which Malinche’s and Cortés’ relationship began and developed reflect those of the protagonists’ historical biography. We learn that Malinche was sold into slavery by her own people and, later, given to the conquistador as a tribute, as well as that she quickly learned Castellano and became his principal translator (16). We also learn that as quickly as Malinche falls for Cortés, realizing “that her destiny would be forever entwined with his” (7), he becomes aware of her usefulness as speaker of both Nahuatl and Mayan.
Her linguistic skills would be of ultimate service to him “in the coming years of Spanish military, political and religious dominance of Mexico”; in other words, “he needs La Malinche at his side if he is going to have allies,” as McBride-Limaye records with regard to the historical Malinche (8-9). As the protagonisit puts it later in the play, during her revealing confrontation with the Bishop, the second pillar of the colonial apparatus besides Cortés, “he [Cortés] spoke through my lips . . . like a priest who transmits the word of God.” The two became so intertwined in the public sentiment that the Native people could not conceive of Cortés without her, and thus a unique being was created through their union (Morton, La Malinche 16).
In keeping with extant historical accounts, the play suggests that Malinche, baptized and renamed “Marina,” not only performed the task of translation between the Spaniards and the Natives, but also put herself in the middle of the conflict,
80. Upon the arrival of the Spaniards, led by Cortés, “[t]he Aztecs are caught in a highly ironic situation: they had used Quetzalcoatl to legitimize their power, but they had moved away from him—Huizilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca were their chief gods. The myth of the return of Quetzalcoatl was just that, a myth they used politically but barely believed in. Now [the appearance of Cortés meant that] it was coming true!” (McBride-Limaye 15).
Delikonstantinidou 125 intervened in the (colonial) plot, and “helped topple their [the Aztec nobles’] oppressive pyramids,” thus bringing an end to the practice of using common people as sacrificial slaves” (17). Indeed, it was primarily due to her function as a crucial site of cultural mediations and translations that she was immortalized in Latin/o/a American lore and beyond.
And if indigenous peoples accorded her reverence as “Marina la Lengua”
(literally “Marina the Tongue”), because of her language-based mediatory function during the early stages of the colonial project, much later, in the second half of the twentieth century, Blake argues, La Malinche was readily adopted and “refigured as a linguistic agent who passes on her agency as a speaking subject” (42). Her
“refiguration” was part of the decolonial project of Latina/o artists and scholars to rewrite iconic female cultural figures in Latin/o/a mytho-history, in order to construct new, viable identities for the individual and the collective. For contemporary
Chicanas, in particular, revis(ion)ing La Malinche became “a means by which to recover language and [through language] their experiences as women of color” (Blake
42). To put it differently, the revisionary process became a means by which to subvert colonial and patriarchal accounts of her story that render her silent and invisible, robbing not only her but also, by extension, her cultural children (especially, her daughters, according to Chicana feminists) of active agency.
Morton’s play, partaking in the said “decolonial project,” represents La
Malinche not only as a speaking subject, but as a speaking subject fully conscious of the political potency of language. According to the play, she knows when to hold her tongue and when to speak, and she uses this knowledge to advance her (dubious) designs (Morton, “La Malinche” 31). Because of her speaking/linguistic skills, she is viewed as “too clever” by her enemies (exemplified by Cortés and the Bishop), just
Delikonstantinidou 126 like Euripides’ Medea was by her own enemies, namely, Jason and Creon. It is, for instance, the power of language that shields Malinche from acts of sexual violence, as when Cortés’ soldiers attempt to assault her when she is first presented to him as a slave (8). Indeed, language becomes almost weaponized through her singular use of it.
It is this same power of language which renders Malinche active in sexual and social politics throughout the play, especially insofar as she skillfully wields both the heroic idiom (she is eloquent when she tries to persuade, demand justice, protect her honor) and the one that is stereotypically deemed “feminine” (she is equally eloquent when she poses deceptively as a supplicant and as helpless and weak). In that, she also strikingly resembles her ancient Greek counterpart. Like her, she manipulates the skewed dynamics of her male-dominated world through language to her ambivalent advantage. Similarly to Euripides’ Medea, Morton’s Malinche is intensely, even fiercely, audible and visible as a figure of resistance, albeit a controversial one, to coercive colonial and patriarchal power.
La Malinche creates a space of enunciation,81 from a subaltern perspective and from the fissures of the colonial/patriarchal system, for the voicing of its protagonist’ desire which, when acted upon, takes the shape of a project of wrecking revenge that is as much personal as it is political. This is so inasmuch as it is a project contrived to avenge Malinche’s betrayal both as a wife/lover and mother, and as a Native who sees the future of her people fatally compromised by Cortés’ plans. Most importantly, it is
81. See Mercer (1994), especially pages 194 and 204, for an elaboration on Homi Bhabha’s now famous concept of the “contradictory and ambivalent [third] space of enunciation” (1994), which is particularly germane to our discussion as it relates to—or, better, accommodates— “[t]he struggle to ‘give voice’ or ‘make visible’ experiences, identities, and subjectivities that have been historically marginalized”; a struggle, moreover, “that raises political questions of agency: who is empowered or disempowered to ‘speak’ of difference” (Yarbro-Bejarano xiv). Morton’s Malinche can in fact be said to exhibit the kind of border thinking or border gnosis that Walter Mignolo has theorized as “the fractured locus of enunciation from a subaltern perspective . . . a response to the colonial difference” (x).
Delikonstantinidou 127 a project unmistakably tragic, borne of self-division and further dividing Malinche against herself. It necessitates that Malinche step outside the roles of lover/wife, mother, and caretaker in order to prevent the nightmarish future she has dreamt of from becoming reality, but, in the process, entraps her in a no less nightmarish predicament which entails the destruction of all she holds dear in life: Martín, Cortés, their family, and their future. Her dialogue with Ciuacoatl is more than informative in that respect:
MALINCHE: I had a nightmare. I dreamed my son was in chain mail
mounted on a beast with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other.
He looked like a Spaniard! (Beat.) Hide him from his father.
CIUACOATL: Yes, Malintzin!
MALINCHE: My son! You are better off dead!
CIUACOATL: Don’t say that.
MALINCHE: There is no future for him here. (Morton, “La Malinche”
11)
At least, there is not a future for him that will not involve grim prospects for Native and mestizo/a populations, past and present—within and without the world of the play.
On his part, Cortés is dismissive of Malinche’s hurricane-like “storm and fury” to which his soldier, Sánchez, alerts him. He is also arrogant enough to believe that “it soon will pass away” on account of the “provisions” he has made for her and their son (11). The conquistador lays out his long-term plans for his son to the Bishop,
Delikonstantinidou 128 who is getting increasingly irritated by the presence of Malinche and Martín in the same city as Cortés’ wife-to-be:
CORTÉS: This is a cub who will grow into a lion. The way he rides a
horse, as though born to the saddle. Martín will be the bulwark of my
old age, the second in a long line of conquistadores.
BISHOP: Vanity. You wish to populate the New World with your
progeny. (14)
The Bishop’s words strike, in fact, a rich vein of aspirations and implications involving both Cortés and Malinche. As the latter reminds him during their first fateful confrontation, she paved his way (19) and joined with him to build a new nation, a “‘new race of man,’ the ‘mestizo,’ who would populate this New World.” He had even pointed to their “son as an example of this new breed” (21). In the eyes of
Malinche, Cortés betrays their vision, irreparably distorting what she, the mother of mestizos/as, would create.
According to historical accounts, Cortés fathered children other than Martín with Native women. After all, as R. C. Padden argues in his study of the Conquest,
“the primary conquest of Mexico was really more biological than military (230). In the context of the play, however, Martín is Cortés’ only mestizo son. Therefore, his impending hispanization, his acculturation into the Spanish/European colonial regime, his making into a conquistador, in accordance with Cortés’ political agenda, speaks volumes about, and serves to further punctuate, the kind, or rather, the fate of mestizaje that will be brought forth by way of his bloodline. It is the kind and the fate of mestizaje with which real-life Latinos/as, especially Mexican Americans and
Chicanos/as, are well-acquainted.
Delikonstantinidou 129
To put it more precisely, this is a mestizaje that went hand in hand with stigmatization and discrimination, as well as with latent or manifest self-deprecation, or even self-loathing, on the part of mestizos/as themselves for centuries—that is, before it was positively, albeit partially, reconstructed in and by the nationalist discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And that was understandably so, since mestizos/as used to occupy one of the lowest strata of the colonial racial and sociopolitical hierarchy for far too long, and were marginalized, to put it mildly, by both the indigenous peoples (“for whom mestizos served as a reminder of [colonial] rape and racial domination”) and by Europeans, and even by lighter-skinned Mexicans (“who still adhered to . . . [a] social code that privileged whiteness”) (Vigil 113). It was a mestizaje attended by anxiety and anguish about origins, as, paradoxically, mestizos/as wanted to recover their roots while, at the same time, rejecting these very roots, or strands of them that were deemed inferior, as not their own: mestizos/as who could not accept their mestizaje (Riding 4). It is precisely the dismal prospect of a future mestizaje that will gradually turn against itself, one embodied in Martín’s imminent hispanization, which sends Malinche over the edge and activates her project of vengeance, regardless of the high personal costs involved.
Cortés mobilizes the discourse of legitimacy to rationalize his betrayal of
Malinche. He intends to “petition Pope Clemente VIII to make Martín legitimate,” so that his son can “gain respectability,” get “accepted into society and marry into a noble family,” he tells her (Morton, “La Maliche” 21). In a “fit of generosity,” and acknowledging his indebtedness to her, he has even arranged for the legitimization of
Malinche herself: he is marrying her off to “a Spanish gentleman,” Juan Jaramillo
(22). Unfortunately for him, Malinche has already pierced through the thin veil of his facile rationalizations to find only pure ambition and cynical expediency. In the realm
Delikonstantinidou 130 of recorded history, and although, admittedly, little is certain about the life trajectory of the historical Malinche, grants McBride-Limaye, “[w]e do know that in 1524 on the ill-fated trip to Honduras Cortés married her off to one of his captains, Juan de
Jaramillo, to who she bore a daughter, Maria” (7). As for Martín’s non-fictional counterpart, after his legitimization by means of a papal bull, he was sent to live with his father’s cousin in Spain, and, once acculturated to Spanish life, he married a
Spanish noble woman, became a member of the Order of St. James, and tried to follow his father’s footsteps (R. Philips 111). However, Morton’s play, in merging
Malinche’s with Medea’s mythical destiny, releases Malinche (and her son) from the bonds of history, allowing her to avenge the injustice done to her and the betrayal she and her people (Natives and mestizos/as) have suffered. Therefore, as we shall discover, the play also allows an alternative legacy of the Conquest, an alternative future for the mestizo/a peoples to be imagined through Malinche/Medea’s tragedy.
Events take a catastrophic turn after this first confrontation between Malinche and Cortés. Their altercation is dissolved through the intervention of La Llorona into another flashback in which the weeping woman warns Malinche of her lover’s imminent betrayal and prophesizes her eventual vilification by her own people.
Already pregnant to Martín, Malinche had back then evaded La Llorona’s ominous predictions and placed her faith in a future where she, Cortés, and Martín would come to comprise a literal domestic tableau vivant, the one that La Llorona conjures up next: “a domestic scene, as though in a Diego Rivera mural: the white Cortés, the
Aztec Malinche, the mestizo Martín” (Morton, “La Malinche” 24), Malinche’s own fantasy version of the “holy family.” What Malinche did not understand, not until it was too late, is that she, a Native, and her mestizo son could never fit into the white heteronormative paradigm of the nuclear family, sanctified in the course of centuries
Delikonstantinidou 131 by the likes of Cortés and bequeathed as part of the colonial imaginary to subsequent generations of Latinos/as—later to be reformulated, especially within the context of
Chicana feminism.82 The colonial or “conquest [familial] triangle,” to employ the famous phrase of Emma Pérez (1999), Cortés– Malinche–Martín, is, first, dismantled by the “pinnacle’ of the triangle himself, the white father/colonizer, who replaces the
Native mother with a Spanish one of his own “kind,” one “as white as the snow atop
Popocatepetl” (Morton, “La Malinche” 10), and, finally, by the end of the play, is brought to the point of collapse by the Native mother herself.
The next scene, in which the Catholic Bishop Lizárraga encounters his counter, the heather goddess La Llorona (initially in disguise) serves as a foreshadowing of the play’s crowning, tragic event. Their discussion of sacrifice points to the commonalities existing between the two seemingly distinct systems of faith that they represent and hints at later developments in the play:
WOMAN: Your God was sacrificed.
BISHOP: That was different!
WOMAN: I have seen him nailed and bleeding on his cross. So it was
with our Gods. We live because of their sacrifice. (Morton, “La
Malinche” 25-6)
Their survival, however, namely the survival of the legacy of the Native past and of future generations of people that will be able to claim this legacy as (part of) their own, necessitates yet another sacrifice. It demands the sacrifice of Martín, not on the colonial cross but on an Aztec-like altar. This is a powerful a nod on the part of the
82. Here, Morton’s play anticipates in a sense the more radical critique of La Familia de la Raza advanced, as we shall soon see, in Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea.
Delikonstantinidou 132 play to the cruelty inherent in both (if not all) sacrificial systems, or rather, in the conditions that generate (the need for) them, and which demand the death of innocents to remedy the world’s ills.
A bit later, in her role as Malinche’s inner voice, La Llorona will present this sacrifice as inevitable in the light of his (and his mother’) condition:
MALINCHE: . . . they are going to take away my son! Is there time to
save him and flee far away from here?
LLORONA: Where would you go? Who would receive you? He is
neither Aztec, nor Spanish. The men of our race would kill him. And
the whites look down on him because of his Native blood.
MALINCHE: Either way he is damned. . . . (Morton, “La Malinche”
33)
In view of the deadlock in which both she and her son are ensnared, Malinche will choose, “Death to them all!” (34), and she will have to embrace both her manipulative and magical powers in order to effectuate her designs. La Llorona will stay by her side as much more than an advisor and assistant through it all. If throughout the play the inward conflict of Malinche, torn between love and desire for revenge, is externalized and personified in her relationship with La Llorona, with the latter repeatedly dissipating the former’s doubts and furthering the vengeful designs, as the play draws near its conclusion, the two figures increasingly converge, so that, by the end, they are almost conflated. Tellingly, it is also in the last part of the play that
Malinche becomes almost indistinguishable from the Euripidean Medea, their actions building up in an analogous manner.
Delikonstantinidou 133
First, upon becoming cognizant of the Bishop’s decision to immediately banish her from the city, Malinche deceives him into a temporary reprieve. She employs supplication, prostrating herself before him, and, when this wile does not work, she buys time in exchange for a “confession” as to the whereabouts of the cult of La Llorona (Morton, “La Malinche” 32)—a “confession” consented to by the goddess herself (33). Next, convinced of Cortés’ unyielding resolve to take their son away from her after a second, violent altercation, she feigns compliance with his demands and even convinces him to accept the wedding gifts she has prepared for
Catalina “to gain her sympathy” (44): vestments made of solid gold which she earlier sprinkled with poison (45). Both Catalina and the Bishop die, burned alive, the former in the poisonous embrace of her garments and the latter in the blazing embrace of his niece (47-8). After Malinche’s and Ciuacoatl’s plan to help Martín escape from the deathly mayhem that the wedding turned out to be fails, a plan concocted, importantly, as a result of Ciuacoatl’s admonitions in a moment of hesitation on
Malinche’s part, the final part of Malinche’s self-destructive, revenge plan gets implemented. It should be noted that the last stage of Malinche’s murderous plan is now favored as her options have become further limited by compounded external necessity: the Spanish will kill Martín because of what his mother did (49). Here, as in the Euripidean version of the myth of Medea, the “combination of predetermination
[or overdetermination] and active choice,” “typical of tragedy,” as Foley claims, and the fact that the protagonist “makes a conscious choice with full knowledge of the bad consequences of her actions” (Female Acts 5), enhances the tragic import of the play.
Unlike the death of Medea’s children by the latter’s own hand in the Euripides’ variant of her myth, however, and unlike the deaths of Catalina and the Bishop that precede it, Martín’s death takes on overtones and resonances of transformation.
Delikonstantinidou 134
III. Uncovering/Recovering from the Colonial Wound
La Llorona’s and Malinche’s laments compose the soundscape of the play’s concluding scene, as Martín walks up to the pyramid-shaped altar located behind the scrim. La Llorona waits for the boy on the altar. Her face is now suggestively “turned into a skull mask,” or calavera, an iconic symbol of the dissolution of the border between the living and the dead in Mexican and Mexican American cultures. As the light starts to fade, she raises aloft the shining, short blade that she earlier took from
Cortés and holds it over Martín. The fatal deed is marked by Malinche’s scream, and, then, there is a blackout (Morton, “La Malinche” 52).
The choice of Cortés’ blade as the weapon that brings about his son’s death points to his responsibility for this tragic outcome. Cortés, now only a shadow of the man he was, enters in a state of dismay upon hearing Malinche’s scream. The final confrontation between the two protagonists closely resembles the one between Medea and Jason in Euripides’ play. Like their ancient Greek counterparts, they throw accusations at each other as the bloody body of Martín lies in-between them.
Malinche does not allow Cortés to touch his son’s body or bury him in a Christian way. She further prophesizes his death by syphilis and his future infamy in Mexico, and, finally, she asserts her grief at the same time as she admits to a compromised sense of satisfaction at Cortés’ inability to mock it (54)—using almost the exact words that Medea does in Euripides’ treatment of her myth.83
83. “Yet you yourself must also suffer grief,/ and be joint sharer in the sorrow,” Jason tells Medea, to which the she retorts, “Yes, surely, but the anguish is well worth it,/ as long as you can’t mock at me“ (from Oliver Taplin’s translation (Location 3465)). See also Medea in the version edited by Donald J. Mastronarde, especially 158.
Delikonstantinidou 135
The staging of this confrontation is striking. Malinche stands at the top of the pyramid-shaped altar (an “Aztec proper” reconfiguration of Medea’s chariot of the sun) and Cortés at its bottom, while their son’s body lies on the pyramid’s steps. The
“conquest triangle,” Cortés–Malinche–Martín, the familial triangle Malinche had once wishfully imagined the three of them could form, has collapsed into a vertical line along which the last chapter of their doomed family is played out. Her own future remains unreckoned with. This is a choice, on the part of Morton, which can be interpreted as pointing to the need for more revisions of her, as figure and mythohistorical narrative, like the one in which she finds herself here; of more forays into the mythohistorical past with a view to transforming the present.
With respect to this last point, just as the future entailed in the Malinche-
Cortés paradigm reaches its tragic conclusion, the possibility of another, alternative future dawns on the stage of Morton’s open-ended play. It is a future harbored by the loving, egalitarian relationship between Ciuacoatl and Sánchez who arrive, holding hands, to kneel and pray before the body of Martín (55)—the only ones who pay proper respect to the boy’s sacrifice. As silently as their love affair developed in the course of the play as part of a sub-plot unobtrusively weaving through the main plot, it now silently carries the promise to remedy the catastrophe that the relationship of
Malinche and Cortés wrought upon their world. Their union, which has been building incrementally by small gestures of affection, compassion, and protection (as when
Sánchez offers to hide Ciuacoatl to protect her from those who will demand her death as Malinche’s accomplice (51)), now hints at the emergence of a new mestizaje no longer fatally embroiled in the skewed racial and gender power dynamics of the
Malinche-Cortés paradigm, and the pernicious repercussions that this paradigm held for future generations of mestizos/as.
Delikonstantinidou 136
More specifically, Martín’s death sequence is patterned upon the model of transformation “inherent in mythological symbols,” according to scholar Ross Feller.
It is model that “usually involves a sacrificial act, amounting to a ritualized death followed by some sort of rebirth” (73). The boy’s sacrifice becomes in the play a
“metonymic strategy” by means of which his body, as a representation of all that colonially dominated and controlled mestizaje will turn out to be and to mean for both the Natives and the mestizos/as, or as the incorporation of the destructive paradigm of
Cortés, is eliminated so that mestizaje can be reinvented. In other words, Martín’s ritualized death is framed as the vehicle for a transition. The mestizo identity that
Martín embodies (or that he would embody was he allowed to live, as his non- fictional counterpart did) gives way to the promise of a new mestizo/a identity no longer stifled by the colonial and patriarchal legacy of the Conquest. This is a mestizo/a identity that once given a place and integrated in the view, vision, and reality of the Latino/a world has the potential to heal the rupture that the traumatic event of the Conquest caused in the social fabric.
Martín’s death exemplifies Donald Heinz’s evocative notion that “[f]rom the pregnant liminality of death, new rituals, new cultural meanings, new life” will come forth for the survivors, building on and integrating the terrible costs of the sacrifice
(xx). Tragic as it may be, the logical extreme of irresolvable conflict and unbridgeable differences, his death is not the end. On the contrary, in terms of the vision laid out by
Morton’s play, it marks a new beginning whose outcome may be uncertain but does not warrant the relinquishment of hope. In La Malinche, his is not a sacrifice made in vain, but one that can bring about transformation of the post-Conquest future. Instead of negating mestizaje, it affirms its rebirth and reinvention in different, more empowering terms for Natives, Spanish, and mestizos/as alike. The healing potential
Delikonstantinidou 137 of the play lies, thus, not only in its uncovering of the losses involved in and caused by the traumatic event of the Conquest and in recognizing them exactly as such, but also in its recovery of hope among the ruins that the Conquest left at its wake by allowing the bearers of the losses, contemporary Latinos/as and Chicanos/as, to imagine an alternative course of events that is never too late to actualize as the play’s ending suggests.
Kathleen M. Sands’ formulation of the therapeutic possibilities carried by the tragic mode finds an apt application in Morton’s play. La Malinche summons up the tragic mode as that which, by consigning the trauma of the Conquest to a ritual space—more “macroscopically” the ritual space of the play, and more
“microscopically” the ritual space of Martín’s sacrifice—allows it to be solemnly voiced and lamented, instead of silently reenacted, or counter-productively acted out.
Malinche/Medea’s tragedy ultimately wrenches back from trauma the rest of life, the life beyond and after the traumatic event of the Conquest. It also allows this life, which is also the legacy of contemporary Latino/a audiences, to work through trauma.
In the play’s heterotopia,84 lives traumatized by the legacy of the Conquest are allowed to be given new meaning and better future prospects. Just as individual psychic healing requires uncovering of repressed traumas for recovery to be set in motion, for the healing of post-Conquest sociocultural diseases, and for a much- wished-for and long-contested sociocultural transformation to take place, the uncovering of historical traumas is required as part of a self-conscious process of psycho- and socio-therapeutic decolonization, such as the one undertaken by La
Malinche.
84. The term “heterotopia” is used here in the sense in which Victor Burgin has employed it: as a simultaneously real and un-real “space disseminated in space and time” (Streitberger xxiii), or, in the words of Katherine Elizabeth Balcom, as “a complex combination of ‘place’ and ‘space’” that stimulates “cognitive pathways of association for the audience” (3).
Delikonstantinidou 138
The play’s political radicality, then, does not pertain only to the incorporation of two Latin American mythohistorical and cultural figures, La Malinche and La
Llorona, within the same paradigm as the Greek Medea. Although the way in which
Morton employs the Medea–Malinche–Llorona paradigm challenges and transgresses the long-standing polarization between Latino/a, on the one hand, and European/Euro
American, on the other, claiming the tragic myth of Medea and its heritage as an integral part of a shared cultural memory (that is, shared by both Latinos/as and non-
Latinos/as), this is not the sole political contribution of his La Malinche.
Nor does the play’s political radicality exhaust itself in the rewriting of the much-maligned La Malinche as a figure resistant to containment efforts, whose multivalency, contradictoriness, and ambivalence anything but lessens her importance as “the symbol par excellence of cross-breeding of indigenous and European peoples, cultures, and finally of humanity,” to use McBride-Limaye’s words. After all, the very qualities that she displays in Morton’s play are themselves the products of accretion after “a long series of alchemical transmutations in her role as the mother of the mestizo race and creator of Mexican identity” (18), which, if anything, attest to her currency as an inexhaustible mine that provides rich new veins of meaning for treasure hunters.
La Malinche’s political radicality extends to its demonstration of the devastating effects of both the oppressive colonial and patriarchal order, exemplified by Cortés and the Bishop, and of the (self-)destructive logic of violent retribution of rebels against the said order, exemplified by Malinche/Llorona/Medea. Despite their thought-provoking resistance and the eloquent case that they may build for justice, the latter end up uncomfortably close to imitating the colonial and masculine/ist ethics of their oppressors, namely, ethics of justice, revenge, and violence, instead of
Delikonstantinidou 139 subverting them. Instead of conducive to decolonization, Malinche/Llorona/Medea’s oppositional politics defer the project of decolonization indefinitely, to a future that is never close enough.
The only possibility for a more enlightened decolonizing politics and ethics comes in the form of Ciuacoatl’s and Sánchez’s union; the union of the survivors of the catastrophe that Cortés and Malinche/Llorona/Medea wrought on the world.
However small and embattled, the structure of solidarity that their union produces fleshes out the possibility of a working mestizo/a identity “neither utterly dictated by nor dependent on the forces of colonialism and their neo-colonial descendants,” to borrow the words of Goff and Simpson from a different context (Crossroads 18-19).
The play intimates that it will be their task to invent and embody an alternative sexual/gender and social politics to that of the colonial oppressors, which will not confine itself to reacting against the latter. If the Conquest posited the tragic mode inexorably at the core of the colonial and post-colonial worlds, thus rendering “the clash of irreconcilable desires or incommensurable worlds, the inescapability of suffering and loss” an incontestable reality for their inheritors (Felski 11), the new progenitors of the mestizo/a peoples, Ciuacoatl and Sánchez, will have to invent and embody a viable relation between self-reflexive human ethics and sociopolitical structure that, far from rejecting or ignoring the tragic mode, it will be informed by it and make use of its productive potential.
If culture(s) can wound, especially in the process of colonization, when dominant cultures impose their technologies of knowledge and power, including their apparatuses of representation, on “otherized” cultures, they can also heal, through processes of decolonizing knowledge, power, and representation. Morton’s play
Delikonstantinidou 140 admittedly feeds into and off “la cultura cura” (“culture cures”)85 conceptual and experiential framework of a decolonizing discourse that rests on the above notion and that aspires to have a healing effect on the post-Conquest, post-colonial condition. In
La Malinche, the cultures of Latin America are affirmed as cultures of conquest and reconquest, indeed of counter-conquests. The play gives concrete dramatic expression to the related notion that any possible future for Latinos/as cannot but be built, to employ Carlos Fuentes’ geological image, on the “vast historical sediment of the river of the Americas: ancient cultures, transposed cultures, copulating cultures, latent cultures, cultures cannivalized and carvivalized, mestizo cultures” (25). Yet, for all the conflict and destruction that their incessant vying with each other engenders, their productivity, the possibility of words to be wrested from silence and of ideas to be wrested from obscurity, and, by extension, the “curative” possibility of individual and collective re-invention is far from negated.
The play acknowledges the instability and perishability of both individual and the collective within such a tense pluricultural context; it also alerts us to the limits of rational agential activity in the face of the tragic conundrums entailed in this pluricultural condition, presenting “options that are both ineluctable and paradoxical, at once impossible to disavow and eternally bitter to embrace” (Scott 201). Still, it calls forth a will for social transformation that, without postulating a promise of reconciliation or redemption, and while accommodating ambiguities and paradoxes, intentions and contingencies, determinations and chance, heralds the possibility of a future released from the grip of colonial catastrophe fleshed out and demonstrated by
Ciuacoatl and Sánchez. In other words, it heralds the possibility of reconstruction of
85. The Spanish phrase emerged as a political slogan during the Chicano Movement of the nineteen-sixties, affirming and underscoring the idea that healing would come from within the community and culture—in its various manifestations, but has, since then, lent itself to various interpretations and uses, some overtly, and some more subtly political in character.
Delikonstantinidou 141 genealogies, refiguring of social modes of practice, the emergence of qualitatively new desires and modes of association between the community of resistance and its erstwhile oppressors;86 the possibility for an ethical politics lodged in the skeptical faith (Lampropoulos 147) and the suffering contradiction (Szondi 34) of the tragic.
Arguably, Morton constructs an alternative speculative history whose tragic
(under)frame works in tandem with the creative politics of its very speculation to render the modus operandi of his play as a whole a “figure of a larger politics of the possible and of resistance,” to cite from José David Saldívar’s discussion of the political import of, what he calls, the “transmodern magical [or mythical] realist invention” (114), of which Morton’s La Malinche certainly partakes.
86. This is a conscious nod to Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) to which—to whose tragic sensibility, in particular—this study is highly indebted.
Delikonstantinidou 142
Chapter 3
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea87
I. Setting the Stage for Medea as a Hungry Mexican Woman
More than fifteen years after Morton brought together the Aztec Malinche and
the Greek Medea within the same paradigm in his dramatic mythic revision, La
Malinche, in an attempt at revis(ion)ing the Conquest and its colonial legacy, Cherríe
Moraga also tapped into the paradigm Medea–Malinche–Llorona. Only, Moraga
created a Medea whose story would function as a radical critique of the post-Chicano
Movement world of Chicanos/as. In fact, her Medea’s story makes for a dystopic
view of an imaginary post-independence Chicano world.
The playwright created a Mexican Medea who, much like her Greek
counterpart, tries to assert herself as a desiring subject in an uncongenial male-
dominated world, and whose tragic liminality serves to expose and interrogate the
shortcomings of not only Euro American colonial discourses and practices, but also of
the Chicano nationalist discourse El Plan and its related manifestations. In theory, the
said nationalist discourse, the extension of El Plan de Aztlán adopted by Chicano
leaders during the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference (held in
Denver, Colorado, 1969), would give voice to the spiritual cause and struggle of
Chicanos, at the same time reaffirming the cultural identity of their distressed and
87. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in “Questing for 21st Century Mestizaje in the Realm of the Greek Tragic Myth: Dramatic Mythic(al) Revisions by Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Caridad Svich” (2016).
Delikonstantinidou 143 dispossessed community (Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje 25). In practice, however, this discourse foregrounded the “unity of brotherhood” to the detriment of the idea of sisterhood (76). In other words, it dismissed the idea and the reality of sisterhood by its dialectics of patriarchy and its heterosexist hierarchy.
It is this injustice, and related fallouts of the Chicano nationalist discourse and praxis, that Moraga addresses and seeks to amend by and through her play. As a matter of fact, her Hungry Woman should be read as an integral part of Moraga’s wider critical intervention in the history of Teatro Chicano and of her project to
“foreground queer sexualities in Chicano/a cultural practices and collective historical narratives despite their virtual erasure by previous playwrights” (Díaz-Sánchez 142).
It is as a “not-always-benevolent . . . mother” herself (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman”
290-1), then, that she employs and compounds in this play one of the most controversial mother figures of the world’s mythico-cultural imaginary to contribute to the interrogation of the Chicano nationalist(ic) mythos and, thus, challenge “from within,” as it were, its sexist, homophobic, and patriarchal legacies.
It is important to note that, in order to interrogate the extant Chicano nationalist(ic) mythos, Cherríe Moraga enlists a tragic heroine whose exilic status and nomadic trajectory, strangeness and homelessness tally well not only with the mythico-cultural past of her Chicanos/a ancestors (people robbed of their land and history, and forced to lead a migrant, peripatetic life with no fixed abode and/or identity), but also with her own sociopolitical location as a Chicana lesbian and feminist.88 Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger has insightfully argued that the story of
Moraga’s Mexican Medea “is admittedly an expression of Cherríe Moraga’s political
88. Micaela Díaz-Sánchez observes that “there is a significant political correlation between Medea’s relegation to exile in the narrative and the difficulty that Moraga encounters in getting her work produced at theatres, and specifically, Chicano theatres” (142).
Delikonstantinidou 144 views about the interdependence of public and private experience and the Chicana subject’s arduous strivings at accommodating her cultural and social background and her personal inclinations” (265). With her Hungry Woman, Moraga forcefully comments on “the difficult negotiation of conflicting identities in the private and public spheres,” identities corresponding to the different relationships of philia in which the individual subject partakes, and, specifically, on the, sometimes seemingly impossible, reconciliation of “Mexican ancestry, lesbian sexuality, social commitment to Chicano politics, and the desire for family and community” (Oliver-Rotger 265).
Moraga’s challenging dystopic drama, as we shall see, takes the resulting tensions that underlie different spaces and border-zones composing the larger mythohistorical and more immediate Chicano/a cultural context to painful extremes. It thus complicates issues of subjectivity, identity, and belonging for its contemporary Chicano/a (and non-Chicano/a) audiences from within the fissures, or negative spaces, of the dominant discourses that regiment the said contexts.
In line with the concept (and trope) of mestizaje, dominant in Chicano/a critical discourse, in general, and a paradigmatic site of departure for Moraga’s social criticism and artistic imagination, in particular, her play articulates a “cultural doubt” of fixed identity and of unproblematic belonging through “a hybrid conflation of various forms of myths” (Maufort 124), through the hybrid/mestiza nature of its characters, and through its very bilingualism.89 As Catrióna Rueda Esquibel informs us, Moraga was commissioned to write a play on the ancient Aztec myth of La
Llorona by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (34). The play, first stage read in 1995 and
89. Cherríe Moraga notes in the preface to the 2000 published edition of The Hungry Woman that the bilingualism of her works “pays tribute to its origins in a U.S. Mexican Teatro for a Spanish and a Spanglish-speaking people” (290). The presence of two languages, English and Spanish, in the play, could be seen as an overt expression of the type of border thinking commensurate with the feminist “mestiza consciousness” of Moraga.
Delikonstantinidou 145 premiered in December 2000, at the Magic Theatre of San Fransisco, under the direction of the playwright, merges the Greek tragic myth of Medea with the myth of
La Llorona/La Malinche, as well as with the myth of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of the Creation and Destruction.90 The title of the play itself, The Hungry Woman, draws on another Aztec creation myth, narrated by the character Cihuatateo East in the play:
In the place where the spirits live, there was once a woman who cried
constantly for food. She had mouths everywhere. In her wrists, elbows,
ankles, knees . . . And every mouth was hungry y bien, gritona. Bueno,
to comfort la pubre, the spirits flew down and began to make grass and
flowers from the dirt brown of her skin. From her greñas, they made
forests. From those ojos negros, pools and springs. And from the
slopes of her shoulders and senos, they made mountains y valles. At
last she will be satisfied, they thought. Pero just like before, her
mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning . . . opening and
snapping shut. They would never be filled. (320-1)
Ultimately, however, the title alludes to the character of Medea herself: a woman whose insatiable hunger to satisfy her desires and to find fulfillment through that very satisfaction is left unappeased by the workings of patriarchal power and, more particularly, of masculinist geopolitics, and eventually leads to her strange, otherworldly “demise.”
90. Thenceforth, the play has received a number of productions all over the U.S., while, interestingly, “deviations from the published script have often been made to reflect upon current events and social climate,” as Katie Billotte documents. Indeed, the play has undergone some changes in the course of its production history. In several later productions, such as the by Stanford University in 2005, under the direction of Moraga and Adelina Anthony, an introductory voice-over situates the performance within the contemporary sociopolitical milieu by addressing urgent current issues. For instance, the voice-over departed from the published play text in describing 9/11 (2001), with political innuendo, as the time when “two giant pipis fell and everyone went to bed with the flag” (515).
Delikonstantinidou 146
In the “Afterword” to the 2001 published version of The Hungry Woman,
Irma Mayorga reflects on the recovery of pre-Columbian myths as “the conduit for critique and transformation.” Specifically, Mayorga writes that “[m]yths are simultaneously sacred truths and symbolic metaphors, illuminating and mysterious, fiction and history, safe-guarded and public, newly fashioned or of ancient origin, fantastical and quotidian; and they often escape the opposition of these boundaries”
(155). The figures that merge in Moraga’s Mexican Medea—figures that have significantly influenced “the epistemology of feminism in contemporary Chicana” cultural production (Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje 48)—exhibit all of the attributes touched upon by Mayorga. They also testify to Moraga’s commitment to the articulation of the interpenetration of everyday reality and various mythical narratives, or the interpenetration between the realms of the mundane and the mythical, in keeping with the Latin/o/a American theatrical tradition in the U.S., and with Teatro
Chicano, in particular. Moreover, they function so as to stress, as scholar Maria
Antonieta Oliver argues, the “resistance of all women seeking to redefine their fragmented, wounded womanhood” (206); a resistance embodied by the Medea of the
Greek myth, by the betrayed Llorona/Malinche, and by the dismembered
Coyaxauhqui.
In the context of Moraga’s queer and feminist dramatic mythic revision, and in keeping with Moraga’s pronounced feminist “mestiza consciousness,” these mythical women join to create a solid front of resistance to the patriarchal, heterosexist, and homophobic precepts of the sociopolitical project of Chicano nationalism; resistance to the monolith of a mis-conceived Chicano normalcy. In that sense, then, Moraga does with her play something very similar to what Luna, Medea’s lover, does within her play when she breaks into the museum and symbolically
Delikonstantinidou 147 shatters the glass encasing the female Aztec figurines, her “little sisters,” as Luna calls them, in order to free them from history, hold them in her hands, and feel what they have to teach her about their maker (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 333). The
“threatening,” transgressive implications of Moraga’s reconceptualizations, however, were not lost on critics within and without the Chicano/a community. Hence, her play remains quite controversial to this day.
II. The Hungry Woman: Medea as a Mexican “Huerfana Abandonada”
According to “some now-lost versions of the Medea myth,” Helene P. Foley records, “Medea was not merely an exiled foreigner but, because of her illustrious
Greek heritage, was invited to serve as a legitimate queen of Corinth, before she was displaced” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 215). Moraga’s Mexican/Chicana, Yaqui
Indian-blooded equivalent of the Greek Medea, a midwife and curandera (healer), not unlike the Greek figure or the Aztec Malinche, with whom, as we have seen, the figure of La Llorona traditionally bears mythical and conceptual affinities, is also a woman deprived of her legitimate inheritance.
In the play’s mythical-realist future (“the near future of a fictional past—one only dreamed in the Chicana imagination”), “an ethnic civil war,” caused by a large- scale, institutionalized ethnic cleansing conducted in the name of the U.S. Nation, much like the Peloponnesian war of 431 B.C. that destroyed the ancient mighty city- states (Patsalidis 2010), “has ‘balkanized’ the United States” (Moraga, “The Hungry
Woman” 294). In the wake of an anti-colonial, revolutionary war, Aztlán, the much-
Delikonstantinidou 148 longed-for mythical Chicano homeland,91 is “born from the pedacitos [the bits and pieces]” (306). However, this Aztlán Liberado, unlike the “nation” Moraga
(re)envisions in her foundational essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano
Tribe,” in which women and joteria (queer folk) are embraced as equal citizens, falls in the hands of nationalist counter-revolutionaries. These establish a new order that is as oppressive to women and queers as the “Gringo and Gachupín,”92 pre- revolutionary one.
In her futuristic fantasy, Moraga critically imagines this new Aztlán as a place haunted by a male-centered, nationalist(ic) specter, in the form of exclusivist narratives and delusions, in which women are seen exclusively as bearers of the community’s memory and children, and from which queer people are “unilaterally thrown into exile,” “[d]espite their crucial participation in the revolutionary struggle for Aztlán” (Díaz-Sánchez 141). This is a practice that, as we learn in the play, was
“en masse” adopted “by all the colored countries” and their post-independence regimes (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 307)—a suggestive nod to the politics of actual post-colonial, nationalist(ic) regimes around the world. Medea articulates the kernel idea of the reactionary post-colonial patriarchal logic thus: “Men think women have no love of country, that the desire for nation is a male prerogative. So like gods, they pick and choose who is to be born and live and die in a land I bled for equal to any man” (301).
In this, supposedly decolonized but actually neocolonized, Aztlán, race-based domination persists undisturbed and racial purity matters above all else, thus
91. Aztlán is the “fabled origin point” of the Nahua people (also La Malinche’s people as we saw earlier), who “are regarded as the ancestors of the Aztec and, as such, at least one of the ancestral people of modern Mexicans,” Katie Billotte documents (516). 92. “Gringo” refers to a person of European cultural descent, whereas Gachupin is a—sometimes disparaging—term that refers to a Spanish settler in America who emigrated from Spain.
Delikonstantinidou 149 perpetuating the undermining and marginalization of the mestizo/a past and identity of
Mexican and Chicano/a peoples. In fact, quite
[i]ronically, in Aztlán Liberado, indigenous blood quantum persists as
the legitimate claim to the land. Medea possesses the appropriate blood
quantum (as does her son) to claim land in Aztlán. Her ex-husband,
Jason, does not and can only possess the land through Medea or
through their son. (Esquibel 35)
In spite of Medea’s indigeneity and status as revolutionary leader, when Jasón, now
Aztlán’s Minister of Culture, discovers her lesbian sexual involvement with their stonemason, Luna, he has her exiled, along with her lover and her son, Chac-Mool,
“to what remains of Phoenix, Arizona” (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 294), thereby dispossessing her of her rightfully owned land and of her cultural inheritance.
Díaz-Sánchez’s view that, in the course of the play, Jasón’s actions, performed or referred to by other characters, “mirror both the original colonial acquisition of land and represent the heterosexual patriotism that is imbricated in contemporary political systems,” is strikingly accurate (147). Medea’s lesbian sexual practices
“render her incapable of being a citizen of Aztlán” in the eyes of Jasón and of the neocolonial, patriarchal and heterosexist, regime to which he adheres and contributes.
Hence, “she is cast away as an impossible patriot” (142). Apparently, according to new Aztlán’s hegemonic regime, and its organizing ideology of gendered citizenship, heteronormativity and patriotism are decisively paired, while, at the same time, homosexuality and patriotism are perceived as mutually exclusive affiliations/identities—hierarchies of power and control that are resonantly reminiscent of those of many contemporary neocolonial and repressive regimes.
Delikonstantinidou 150
The land of Medea’s exile is “the border region between Gringolandia (white
America) and Aztlán (Chicano country)” (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 294): a grim “wasteland of counter-revolutionary degenerates” (339); “a city-in-ruin, the dumping site of every kind of poison and person unwanted by its neighbors” (294). In the context of the play, it is “represented by the ceaseless racket of a city-out-of- control (constant traffic, low-flying jet planes, hawkers squawking their wares, muy
‘Blade Runner-resque’).” This borderland, Phoenix or “Tamoachán”—which literally means “We seek our home,” according to Mama Sal (Medea’s aging lesbian grandmother in the play)—alludes to and harbors the promise of rebirth for its nomadic population, just like the mythical firebird from which it is named rises from its ashes. At the same time, it serves to destabilize conceptualizations of belonging and identity as fixed categories, forestaging, instead, their processual, even nomadic, nature, since, in Tamoachán, “seeking itself became home” (307).
Furthermore, Tamoachán “challenges the traditional mapping of apparently unified cultures onto autonomous, fixed places,” forcing us to rethink a culture’s supposed authenticity as “measured by its physical proximity to a cultural center,” as
Martin Murno has argued in a similar context (125). As a matter of fact, in having some of her characters, including Luna and Savannah (an exile of African American descent), create a sense of community and belonging in the borderland of Tamoachán,
Moraga suggests that it is possible for a collective cultural identity (based on shared, and/or agreed, values and desires, and on similar or contiguous memories) to survive, or transcend, physical displacement and be reworked “into new configurations, freed from the constraints inherent to the center-periphery model” (Murno 125). The question, then, becomes whether our Mexican/Chicana Medea can re-configure belonging and re-work her identity/ies while she is situated physically and
Delikonstantinidou 151 symbolically away from the alleged core/center of Chicanidad (Chicano/a-ness), namely Aztlán. This is a question to which Moraga does not respond with an uncomplicated answer and the tragic locus of the play.
Moraga’s Medea, much like the Medea of Greek myth,93 experiences geographical and cultural deterritorialization, in the sense that both her national
Chicano/a culture and the queer culture of Tamoachán fail to provide her with a sense of belonging and coherent, or, rather, workable identity. Any “natural” or viable relationship between culture, on the one hand, and geographical and social territory, on the other, is lost for Medea. At the same time, the social relations in which she is involved have become irremediably detached and alienated from what she perceives not only as her place of origin and affiliation, but as her source of self-hood. Insofar as
Medea finds herself unable to return back to Aztlán, (re)possess a motherland, or set new foundations and construct a viable alternative actuality in Tamoachán, as we shall also see further on, she can be said to be facing absolute deterritorialization; that is, the impossibility of being territorialized again (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
110). Medea’s experience of absolute deterritorialization and the consequent harrowing ambivalence about the notion and reality of “home,” which Moraga orchestrates, bring into sharp focus the tragic import that the Greek myth confers on the play.
In a significant sense, Moraga’s Medea, much like the Medea of the ancient
Greek myth, can be construed as embodying a foreignness that is “always already” within the subject. She is figure nowhere “at home,” not even in her queerness, as we will discover. Despite the fact that this constitutive foreignness undermines the notion itself of an unproblematically and seamlessly unified selfhood and, thus, bears the
93. For a discussion of mythical Medea as a deterritorialized figure see Miguel de Beistegui (2003) and Bertrand Westphal (2011).
Delikonstantinidou 152 potential to also undermine attendant divisions into “us” and “them,” into included and excluded, Medea cannot reconcile herself with it. Her constitutive foreignness, instead of allowing her to forsake the premises of normative space and make the best out of the transitory realm of Tamoachán toward establishing a new (plural) identity, renders her more than vulnerable, inasmuch as it uproots her not only physically but also existentially, and, eventually, leads her down to a self-destructive course of action.
Caught up in a not only physical or geographical, but, most importantly, in an existential, even ontological, homelessness, she comes to exemplify the human condition as one fundamentally characterized by alienation and estrangement. In other words, she exemplifies the human condition in terms of rupture within the notion of the self, or dismemberment, to use the play’s organizing metaphor, which once allowed to encroach on interpersonal relationships and other social modes of association causes their disintegration. Additionally, she serves to exemplify “being” as “a strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed,” as Julia Kristeva has articulately stated (Strangers 191). The problem with Medea is that she cannot conciliate herself with this “strange land,” which is as much literal as metaphorical, and as much personal as collective, in the play, precisely because she cannot recognize it as a/her home/mother-land. Hence her inability to build on it and partake of a new, plural collective identity that can spring forth from it like other characters in the play do.
Medea’s predicament offers us a view of the ever-shifting location of the borderline as a no-(wo)man’s land that is no longer at the geographic boundaries of the
Chicano nation/state, but that pervades society and her “self” within. Instead of transformative and conducive to a new and empowering consciousness, Medea’s experience of this rupture/dismemberment and of life in an interstitial space proves to be devastating. Her deterritorialization is a traumatic experience from which she never
Delikonstantinidou 153 recovers; which she never leaves behind in order to rebuild her life. It is a traumatic experience which breeds further fragmentation and dislocation in her and which results in the surrender of whatever fragile authority she had been clinging on when she is driven mad after having tried to poison her son with herbs to prevent his return to patriarchal Aztlán, and his inevitable indoctrination into misogyny and machismo
(although we never learn whether she does kill him or not in the conventional sense of the word).
Interestingly, the structure of the play underscores by reproducing the fragmentation and dislocation of Medea’s dismembered/deterritorialized existence, imprisoned in her body (“inside the prison of my teeth,” as she put is (Moraga, “The
Hungry Woman” 347), in the quasi-clinical setting that frames the narrative, and in the narration itself. Scenes change rapidly from present time, where we find Medea incarcerated for her crime in a prison psychiatric ward, to past time in the form of flashbacks. The dramatic action, which frames the seven-year past leading to Medea’s incarceration, is fragmented, discontinuous, and interrupted. To compound the sense of strangeness that it exudes throughout, the play concludes ambiguously with Medea’s death/sleep, when Luna brings her poisonous herbs and (the ghost? of) Chac-Mool— whose name literally means “messenger . . . [e]ntre este mundo y el otro lado”94 (310)— leads her to another world (although not necessarily to the world of the dead). Further, in the course of the play, Medea’s deterritorialization is rendered all the more pronounced by means of the rapid and often abrupt alternations between the deadening silence and
94. Medea’s son is named after the Toltec messenger who, according to myth, carried sacrificial human hearts to the ancient gods. Quite suggestively, and in more practical, mundane terms, “chacmool” also refers to an offering table used during sacrificial rituals by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica (Miller and Taube 60), as well as to “the vessel in which indigenous Mesoamericans placed the pumping hearts of sacrificial victims during fertility rites” (Bost 136). The boy’s name thus frames him within the context of his own sacrifice from the very beginning of the play and serves to stress his placement at the very intersection between life and death, a point that becomes all the more pronounced as the play draws towards its end.
Delikonstantinidou 154 the glare of the hospital lights of the psychiatric ward (a place that reduplicates Medea’s abject life outside its walls, which, in turn, is the byproduct of abjection generated by the effects of the counter-revolution upon the protagonist); the cacophony of the chaotic
Tamoachán; and the lamenting choral interventions by the Cihuatateo (the four mythical
Aztec warrior mothers who have lost their children and were themselves lost in childbirth).95 In this way, the dramaturgy creates a disorienting effect for the audience, which is also viscerally gripped by the atmosphere of confusion and suffering attending
Medea’s dismemberment.
Thematically and dramaturgically, then, the play points to Medea’s “loss” of
Aztlán, her cruel banishment from it, as the catalyst for her current tragic predicament.
Post-independence, counter-revolutionary Aztlán has betrayed Medea in every way possible: as a Chicana, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a mother. It “otherized” her, projecting upon her all the undesirable, transgressive qualities that could threaten the newfound unitary and totalizing Chicano national narrative, such as deceptiveness, dangerousness, deviancy, as well as promiscuous and uncontrollable sexuality—qualities also projected on Euripides’ Medea, according to Patsalidis (2010), even before the infanticide takes place. It used her as a scapegoat, transferring to her the deep cracks and fissures in the said narrative and in the national makeup. It exiled her to create a cautionary tale out of her, and thus to prevent anyone else from ever trying to detect and point out these cracks and fissures to the Chicano body politic. In “losing” Aztlán to the counter-revolution, Medea was deprived of the possibility of ever finding a
95. The presence of the Cihuatateo figures in the play serves as a useful reminder of the famous assertion on the part of the Euripidean Medea that she would prefer to stand in battle three times than to give birth once (250-1). In this play, the state of child-birth/child-rearing and the state of battle/war are conflated to the point of indistinguishability; by its end, birth and death have become identical. On different level, the Cihuatateo chorus functions so as to contribute to the though-provoking juxtaposition, intersection, and combination of cultural traditions and artistic practices that the play brings forward by means of their stylized, choreographed story-dances which introduce each act and guide the narrative.
Delikonstantinidou 155 home/motherland again, at least in the terms in which she conceives of it. The impossibility of returning to Jasón, or rather, to his bed, is grounded precisely in her realization that there is no place for her in Aztlán anymore, or anywhere else for that matter (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 301). And if what was once her land in Aztlán is now symbolically and literally in his custody, soon, her son, the only “land” she is left with (351), is to be placed in his custody too, brought into the folds of the very power structure that set up Medea’s destruction.
Exactly like his counterpart in the Greek myth, Alfaro’s Jasón is an opportunist man who used Medea in order to ascend to power and who, now, in view of his new Indian wife’s sterility, seeks to retrieve his son to bolster his illegitimate claim to the land. It is only through his son’s Native status that Jasón can disguise his fake autochthony and access the privileges that belonging to the “authentic” Chicano community bestows. Medea tries to warn Chac-Mool of his father’s duplicity and goes to great lengths in order to avert her son’s falling into the hands of Jasón and of the patriarchal, misogynist regime that has been reinstated in Aztlán—the regime that Jasón represents (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 342). At some point, she even plays the role of the seductress and makes love with Jasón, thus equivocally, and at least for a while, denouncing her lesbianism (328), with which as we shall see, she has never been utterly comfortable.
Throughout all this, Chac-Mool, the only character to be played by a male and the “source of conflict” in the play (344), stands hesitantly in-between his parents, confronted with a serious dilemma: stay in exile with his mother or return to Aztlán with his father. Nonetheless, the boy secretly longs for what he perceives as “normal” in a life
Delikonstantinidou 156 with his father.96 Besides, he does want to be initiated into manhood and even contribute to the improvement of his home country. Eventually, Chac-Mool’s desire to receive his initiation and thus be integrated into the national fabric of Aztlán proves stronger than his mother’s admonitions. Her severe critique of the world of Aztlán that Jasón exemplifies does not suffice to alter his decision to leave her. And it is, ultimately, this very fateful decision to follow his father that which will trigger the play’s tragic climax.
The way Jasón is presented in the play allows us to read Medea’s accusations of her erstwhile partner as well-founded and the extremes to which she eventually goes in order to keep her son away from him at least partly justified—the crowning act of horror out of a series of horrors that he propelled. Throughout the play, and in all of their confrontations, Jasón appears obstinate in his intention to make an
“Adelita”97 out of Medea: a self-sacrificing woman devoted to the service of male machismo, who, as Moraga writes in “Queer Aztlán,” performs “the three F’s,”:
“feeding, fighting, and fucking” (157). A representation of the most oppressive and confining masculinist codes of the Chicano nationalist imaginary, Jasón adheres to a concept of la familia Chicana which is permeated by sexism and homophobia, and which perpetuates gender and sexual oppression within the Chicano community.
96. Half way through the play, at an intense scenic moment “that breaks the fourth wall and in Brechtian fashion compels the audience to think about the meanings of Chac-Mool and gender within the production” (Elam 110), a Border Guard tells Chac-Mool: “It’s your play . . . You’re the source of the conflict. You’re also the youngest, which means you’re the future, it’s gotta be about you. And, you’re the only male in the cast” (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 327). By means of the “explicit rupture of the theatrical convention, Moraga exposes the unmarked [hegemony of the male figure of the protagonist in most conventional western drama] and interrogates the power of patriarchal authority,” especially in the form of the male gaze (Elam 110). Additionally, by means of this casting choice, “the prohibition of women on stage during many of the historical performances of Medea” is effectively reversed and the performative nature of gender further punctuated (Lakey 264). 97. “La Adelita,” a figure borrowed from the Mexican revolutionary lore, is one of “the most oppressive idealizations” of what it means “to be a traditional Mexicana woman through a nationalist notion conceived by the Chicano in the name of cultural integrity” (Sandoval 55).
Delikonstantinidou 157
Importantly, the familia ideology in which his nationalist(ic) vision is anchored has served, in the non-fictional Chicano/a context, as the Chicano
Movement’s primary directive, its motto for the collective participation of all members of the community. The deleterious effects that this ideology had for Chicana women have only recently been unearthed by Chicana scholars and artists.98
According to this ideology of la familia Chicana both what a woman is and what her trajectory from birth to death will be are firmly prescribed. One of Mama Sal’s and
Luna’s conversations further enlightens us on the subject:
MAMA SAL: When you’re a girl, hija, and a Mexican, you learn
purty99 quick that you got only one shot at being a woman and that’s
being a mother.
LUNA: Tell Medea. She’s the mother, not me.
MAMA SAL: I’m telling you, so you know. You go from a daughter
to mother, and there’s nothing in between. That’s the law of our people
written comos los diez commandments on the metate stone from the
beginning of all time. (Moraga, “the Hungry Woman” 325)
Whereas women are subjected to the said trajectory and their transgressions are met with swift and stern penalties, in line with the “law” of la familia Chicana, “[m]en are never old,” as Medea says to Chac-Mool when the latter wonders about his old father’s marriage to a much younger woman (309). Later, she further explains to him, in a brief monologue dripping with sarcasm, that it is normal for a man like Jasón to send his
98. For an extensive discussion of the ideology of la familia chicana, consult Arrizón (1999). 99. “Purty” instead of “pretty” in Mama Sal’s idiolect, which often elicits humor. Medea’s grandmother is both a source of wisdom and a source of amusement in the play.
Delikonstantinidou 158
five-year-old child and his mother into exile and then seven years later
come back to collect the kid like a piece of property. It’s normal for a
nearly sixty-year-old Mexican man to marry a teenager. It’s normal to
lie about your race, your class, your origins, create a completely
unoriginal fiction about yourself and then name yourself la patria’s
poet. But that’s normal for a country who robs land from its daughters
to give it to its sons unless of course they turn out to be jotos. (Moraga
343)
What is not “normal,” however, is to “go and change the law” (325), as both Luna does in embracing her lesbian identity and as Medea does in raising her son with her female partner.
These norms and the traditional structures of power they uphold, besides reinstating the authority (and impunity) of the patriarchal father figure, relegate queer desire to the margins of society and history. Medea’s lesbian desire, a desire awakened in the hands of Luna (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 323), precludes the possibility of ever returning to patriarchal Aztlán. As Luna affirms, Medea has changed so that she “won’t ever be able to go back to Aztlán or to any man” (323). Her active lesbian desire and the sheer fact of being a lesbian Chicana mother render Medea a mortal threat to the bastion of patriarchal power now reinstated in Aztlán: the nuclear family. As a lesbian lover and mother, as a combination of vagina and womb no longer accessible to the male, and as a woman withdrawn from the male-female union, within which hetero-patriarchy is (literally and figuratively) reproduced,
Medea is perceived as deadly by the patriarchal order that Jasón represents. Hence his assertion of masculine power through terrorizing efforts to take away their son when
Medea refuses to live as his ward:
Delikonstantinidou 159
JASÓN: Free! You’re the slave, Medea. Not me. You’ll always be my
woman because of our son. Whether you rot in this wasteland of
counter-revolutionary degenerates or take up residence in my second
bed. You decide. I’m not afraid of you, Medea. I used to be afraid of
that anger, but not anymore. I have what I want now. Land and a future
in the body of that boy. You can’t stop me. (339)
The only way for Medea to reclaim “the land she fought for” in the body of her son is to “perform a public disavowal denying Luna as her lover, redeeming herself from her own queer monstrosity” (Díaz-Sánchez 147). What Jasón fails to understand, however, is that Medea is not the naïve girl longing for a father’s protection he once married, but a “Mexican woman” who will not go back “into the kitchen” and who will not be controlled the way Jasón wants, by fear (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman”
306). She is a woman for whom there is “no protection and no place” (340), indeed, a
“huérfana abandonada” (301), and who, therefore, has nothing to lose. Nothing but her son, and she is determined not lose him, at least not in his father’s terms.
In her struggle to decolonize her mestiza-queer body from neocolonial patriarchal and heteronormative forms of control, desire, and signification, Medea brings together the political, the cultural, and the sexual, and transgresses boundaries in all three realms. Yet, Moraga’s “Medea does not represent a woman who regrets her role as the transgressor of the social order; she is not the Medea found in many patriarchal narratives” (Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje 48). Even her final act of transgression, the attempt at murdering her son on the eve of his departure, albeit partly overdetermined and precipitated by external pressures, can be interpreted as a conscious performance of abjection that disrupts male-authored normality and assaults patriarchal motherhood, however ambivalently in ethical terms.
Delikonstantinidou 160
In having her female protagonist try to kill her son, Moraga situates her within a large cohort and a tradition of mythical/historical female figures that killed their children and lived out the consequences of their action. Besides the ancient Greek
Medea, there belongs, also, as we have already seen, La Llorona of the
Mexican/Chicano/a mythico-cultural imaginary. As María Herrera-Sobek has written,
La Llorona, as a shadowy figure of a mother crying for her lost
children, resonates with the Chicano/a psyche since they [Chicanos/a]
view themselves as orphaned children, being [sic] that no “mother”
country wants to claim them. In the United States they are perceived as
Mexicans; in Mexico they are perceived as pochos—non-Mexicans.
(295)
Moraga’s Medea is intimately linked with the figure of La Llorona both in her role as murderous mother and in her role as orphaned child, or “huérfana abandonada”
(Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 301). Moreover, in narrative terms, exactly like La
Llorona, the Mexican Medea of Moraga’s play loses hold of her sanity following her attempt at killing her child, while, throughout the play, the association between the two is figured via frequent explicit references to La Llorona and via the almost ever- present sound of her desperate lament: “A-y-y-y-y-y-y-y! MIS HIJOS! MIS HI-I-I-I-
JOS!” (335).
To add more of the play’s instantiations of the Medea-Llorona connection to our discussion, Moraga’s stated stage directions leave no doubt as to the relationship she wants to forge between the two mythical figures. In the second act of the play, La
Llorona’s lament, first, presages Chac-Mool’s (attempted) murder by his mother and, later, merges with Medea’s own mourning for the imminent loss of her son (Moraga,
Delikonstantinidou 161
“The Hungry Woman” 335). In the former instance, the cry of La Llorona is accompanied by the dance of the four Cihuatateo as warrior women charged with the sacred force of boundary between life and death: “They draw out maguey thorns, the size of hands, from their serpents sashes. They pierce and slash themselves, wailing.
They encircle Medea with the ghostly white veil of La Llorona. It is a river in the silver light” (335). In the latter one: “Their lament is accompanied by the soft cry of the wind in the background that swells into a deep moaning. It is the cry of La
Llorona: The moon moves behind the mountains. The lights fade to black” (357). The collusion of Medea with La Llorona and with the Cihuatateo chorus functions so as to place Medea (as it early on does with Chac-Mool) and the play as a whole at “the intersection between the realms of life and death, social and sacred, human and divine,” and to charge both “with the sacredness of boundary-crossing” (Bost 137).
Yet, Medea is also symbolically linked with La Llorona in her association with the moon, or “luna”: “And as La Llorona needs the moonlight to appear, so Medea . . . needs [her] Luna” (whose name literally means “moon”), without whom “[s]he can’t stand the relentless sun” (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman” 304). The relationship between the two women, however, invokes the said mythical framework only to exceed it a little later. This is a development rather in keeping with the play’s general tendency toward radically revis(ion)ing all the mythical figures and narratives that it embraces.
Within the multi-mythical universe of the play, Medea, as the one who gives and takes away life, and as a mother disengaged from the male-female heterosexual union, is also conflated with Coatlicue in a crucial association that both frames
Medea’s lesbian affair and calls attention to the play’s ethics and politics in relation to both lesbianism and mestizaje. As Medea becomes, in a sense, Coatlicue, Luna also
Delikonstantinidou 162 becomes the embodiment of the Mood-Goddess, Coyolxauhqui, daughter of
Coatlique, and thus both lover and symbolic daughter of Medea. Arrizón’s view on the matter, that is, on the significant linkage of Medea and Luna with Coatlique and
Coyolxauhqui, respectively, and on the import of Medea’s and Luna’s connection to the Aztec mythical narrative in terms of the play’s politics, merits lengthy quotation:
Juxtaposed to Medea and Luna's lesbian relationship, Moraga's
mythological universe intends to dramatize the
Coyolxauhqui/Huitzilopotchli narrative. . . . In this [Aztec] myth,
Coyolxauhqui fights against the power her brother Huitziloptchli will
acquire as the predetermined God of War. When Coyolxauhqui learns
that her mother Coatlicue will give birth to Huitziloptchli, she plans to
murder her. She fails and is killed brutally by Huitziloptchli.
According to Moraga, in the play Coatlicue represents the “pre-
patriarchal” mother, and thus the resistance of the mad Coyolxauhqui
becomes an assertion against “patriarchal motherhood.” Thus lesbian
desire as an analogy of Coyolxauhqui's disobedience functions in the
play as an attack on the larger frame of patriarchy. (Queering Mestizaje
48)
When, near the end of the play, Medea is almost brought to the point of disavowing
Luna to retain custody of her son via the guise of heterosexuality, Coatlicue’s sacrificing of Coyolxauhqui for Huitzilopochtli is recalled and almost symbolically re-enacted. Again, however, the play exceeds this mythical framework by ultimately rejecting Huitzilopochtli’s/hetero-patriarchy’s militaristic triumph.
Delikonstantinidou 163
Besides framing the relationship between Medea and Luna, the former’s association with Coatlique has another, and perhaps more important, function in the play. For the late Chicana scholar and feminist/queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa,
Coatlicue represents “duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective— something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality . . . the contradictory . . . the fusion of opposites” (46).100 It is in this “third perspective” of Coatlicue where
Anzaldúa locates queer mestizaje and in so doing she “draws upon an ancient, precolonial symbol to forge a new, decolonial way of knowing and living in the world” (165). As Arturo Aldama has suggested, “[b]y embracing the generative mythos of Coatlicue, Anzaldúa displaces the immanence of phallocentric desire that codes the reproduction of patriarchal dominance both in imperial nation-states and in cultural nationalism movements that are in opposition to these imperial powers” (qtd. in Bebout 165). The deployment of Coatlicue in Moraga’s play refers critically to the reformulated queer mestiza consciousness and to the related “third perspective,” that is, the Coatlicue state/space for “‘the darkskinned, women and queers’ within the ever-evolving Chicano/a imaginary” (165), which Anzaldúa proposed.
More specifically, what Anzaldúa calls the “Coatlicue state,” a state/space that she offers as an alternative to the colonial U.S. and to the patriarchal nation-state of
Aztlán, is associated with “painful but creative psychic disruption” (Pérez-Torres,
Mestizaje 24), with both identity breakdown and buildup, as Anzaldúa puts it (39).
However, this uncertain, transitional, “third” state/space of nepantla, or in-
100. This “something more” (46) or “something else” (79) in Anzaldúa’s theorization is not clearly defined. As Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba writes, “its promise stays unresolved because it cannot have a fixed definition. Attaining any definition would stop the relentless promise of the ‘something else,’ which is the sense of queer imagination” (83). Liberating in many and important senses as the “constant slide of meaning” which marks Anzaldúa’s “something else” may be (especially for queer and border discourses and praxes), the matter of whether it can provide the ground for “a sound politics that reaches to wider publics,” to use Yiorgos Anagnostou’s words, is still under negotiation (2017).
Delikonstantinidou 164 betweenness and disorder, open to all of excluded, Chicanos/as and queers, to which
Tamoachán101 unmistakably alludes, engenders only identity breakdown in Medea.
Whereas, throughout the play, other characters, like Luna and Savannah, “create their own notions of citizenship” in and “a performative ethnography” of the “third” spate/space of Tamoachán and its community, deploying queer and exiled subjectivity
“as a space or arena of contestation and rearticulation of identities and a strategic practice of refiguring difference and hierarchy” (Moraga, “A Xicanadyke Codex”
127), Medea is unable to do the same. This can be construed as Moraga’s interrogation of the construct of the “third space” that Anzaldúa and other theorists have celebrated over the years.
In fact, Moraga seems to be contesting the celebratory rhetoric surrounding contemporary theorizations of third spaces, mobility, and nomadicity, by showing the quest for a new queer mestizaje that would be lodged in such a third space to be disruptive of preconceived, seamless, and “pure” identity categories, yet not immune to the desire for a sense of functional identity (however plural) and belonging—the one does not cancel out the other as the play serves to demonstrate. This desire, however, serves to arguably complicate the said quest and to also stir us away from a conception of mestizaje itself as an unproblematic panacea. Through the tragic narrative of her Medea, Moraga proves this quest to be embedded in and painfully entangled with the many strands of the complex matrices of relations between
“home,” ethnic identity, and sexuality. Hers is not a utopian or facile mestizaje blending and bridging but one requiring terrible sacrifices, as befits its tragic foundations in this play. The story of her Medea serves to remind us that not everyone can adapt to the sense of impermanence, restlessness, and ambiguity that inheres in
101. For an acute description of Tamoachán in Moraga’s play see Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), especially page 145.
Delikonstantinidou 165 such a “heretical” third space, especially when bereft of other viable options, and that a firm queer mestizaje identity cannot be unproblematically built in such a space—at least not when this space remains one of exclusion, destitution, and expatriation.
Eventually, Medea’s relationship with Luna comes to mirror her relationship with Tamoachán. Medea will not disavow her lesbian relationship with Luna, but cannot be in a healthy relationship with her either, just as she will not leave from
Tamoachán, but cannot live in it either. As Mama Sal had predicted at the beginning of the play, Medea pushed Luna too far away from her (Moraga, “The Hungry
Woman” 302); their bond, one wavering between “passion and sisterhood,” is nearly destroyed by its end (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 217). It is worth noting that their eventual—yet not necessarily permanent—separation comes as no surprise since
Medea, while in a femme/butch relationship with Luna, often appears conflicted about her own Sapphic impulses, contrary to her partner who is unapologetic about her macha status and reconciled with her queerness (and its ramifications). The differing ways in which they experience and articulate queerness becomes an issue that incites conflict between the two partners:
MEDEA: . . . You, you and your kind, have no choice. You were born
to be a lover of women, to grow hands that could transform a woman
like those blocks of faceless stone you turn into diosas. I, my kind, is a
dying breed of female.
......
LUNA: Why are you courting these illusions, Medea?
MEDEA: What illusions?
Delikonstantinidou 166
LUNA: That you’re not a lesbian. (Moraga, “The Hungry Woman”
322)
At the same time though, in bringing this issue to the surface, the play challenges
“notions of sexuality as a binary”: heterosexuality or/versus homosexuality. Instead of positing lesbianism as the defining “other” of female heterosexual desire, it “argues for sexuality as a dynamic spectrum”102 and for a (sexual) desire that “shifts in waves”
(Webb 2014), always fluid, complex, susceptible to reconstruction, and predicated on an incalculable number of variables. The normative hetero/homo sexual binary is presented, in fact, as oppressive for Medea as the related notion that lesbianism and motherhood cancel each other out. The destructive effects of its stifling weight on
Medea are apparent in her disintegrating, or dismembered, identity.
Medea’s struggle with (and over against) her tense, frustrated sexuality and her inability to reconstruct new identity/ies by constructing a new life with Luna in the liberatory, amorphous, trans-identity Coatlicue/Tamoachán state attest (to) her tragic condition of self-division and homelessness as described earlier in the chapter.
Caught up in an impossible either/or situation (either a lesbian or a heterosexual
Chicana mother), one orchestrated by hegemonic patriarchal machinations, Medea finds herself not only unable to do away with the notions of familia, home, and resistance, as a strategy that would allow her to, at least, survive her predicament, but also unable to redefine these notions according to her own experience as a Chicana, a mother, and a lesbian. The confusions and splits generated by the incompatibilities and clashes between the different relationships of philia, that is, the different forms of communal life in which she partakes, or in which she desires to partake, ultimately overcome Medea.
102. On human sexuality as a wide, dynamic spectrum, see the work of Ken Plummer (2010).
Delikonstantinidou 167
III. Acts of Birthing/Acts of Killing as Acts of Healing
In foregrounding patriarchy’s decisive and damaging effect on Medea’s ability
to affirm herself as a female and lesbian individual subject and as a mother while
preserving her Chicana ethnic identity, that is, affirm herself as a queer mestiza,
Moraga interweaves her own personal experience with that of her protagonist and
dramatizes the difficulty of reconciling the self with the family, the larger
ethnic/cultural community, and with lesbian desire. In “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga
described herself as “always hungry and always shamed by my hunger for the
Mexican women I miss in myself” (127). It is as a “hungry woman” herself that she
“engages discourses of racialization and sexual desire that combine to interrogate the
links between a body narrative of her identities as a güera Chicana and as a lesbian of
color,” Katherine Sugg notes (55). “Unlike the more visionary ambivalent subject of
Gloria Anzaldúa” (Oliver-Rotger 269), then, Moraga experiences, and has her
fictional Medea experience, her fragmented, dispersed, and nomadic subjectivity with
an acute sense of disaffection.
Yet, as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano pointedly observes, although in a number of
her works Moraga “writes bitterly about the frequent loneliness and ostracism of
experiencing the borderlands in her ordinary existence,” often focusing on the
deterritorialization/dismemberment of the queer mestiza body, as she does in this
play, she never relinquishes “a vision of a new way to be whole” and to find home
“that would respond to the ‘desire for integration’” of her diverse identities (10). And
it is, indeed, a new “way to be whole” to the extent that the very notion of
“wholeness” is radically reconceptualized by Moraga as one that presupposes
Delikonstantinidou 168 severing of/from the body/self from/of neocolonial, patriarchal, and heterosexist moorings, and reconstruction “from the blueprint” of mestiza, feminist, queer desire
(7). Severing, dismemberment, and deconstruction of the body/self take place only in the context of possible healing, rememberment, and reconstruction (Bost 356), or of possible integration of the cosmic, the larger and immediate, American and
Chicano/a, communities, with(in) the body/self of the mestiza, feminist lesbian—no other social space is identified in the course of the play as the space proper to this integration/rememberment. These possibilities, however, do not mitigate the terrible cost involved in the process, as the play’s tragic mode underscores. Its final birth/death sequences, in particular, illustrate this desire for and promise of integration/rememberment as well as its costly pursual, as does the play’s epilogue featuring Medea’s reunity with Chac-Mool, and, in one sense, with Luna too.
Narrative chronology, character identities, and mythical frameworks collapse in incoherence as a series of births and deaths/sacrifices transpire rendering the play’s end irresolvably ambiguous. Medea gives birth to Luna, she kills Cha’c-Mool, she births herself, Chac-Mool returns to (perhaps) kill Medea and then comforts her while she slips off to sleep or death, and, finally, the two are finally reunited beneath a waxing moon/Luna.103 The Christian Pieta image that Moraga earlier evoked in the description of Chac-Mool’s “death” in Medea’s hands is reversed in the concluding
103. Moraga’s choice to return (the previously considered dead) Chac-Mool back to the narrative—and to Medea—recalls Toni Morrison’s choice in her classic Beloved to reintroduce the slain baby daughter of the story’s African-American runaway slave, Sethe (who dashed her child’s brains out to prevent her return to slavery), back to the story, first as a ghost and then as (the dead child) Beloved. In both cases, we wcould argue, after Guinier and Torres, the reappearance of the child “forces the reader to question her original reaction to the infanticide.” All differences considered, we should not fail to notice that, in both cases, the return of the (dead) child offers to the infanticides the possibility of somehow redeeming themselves to their children, while the writers’ “experimentation with the definitions of life, death, and killing destabilizes the reader’s [and viewer’s] real-world assumptions” (24), about race relations, in the case of Beloved, and about ethnoracial and gender relations, in the case of Moraga’s The Hungry Woman.
Delikonstantinidou 169 scene, creating a cyclical schema that rehearses symbolically the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and thus fleshes out visually the transformation of the “deaths” of both
Chac-Mool and Medea into their “rebirth” in unity:
MEDEA: . . . If you had been my son, the dark of your eyes would
mirror me. And we would blend together sexless.
CHAC-MOOL: Mom, I’m Chac-Mool.
MEDEA: Chac-Mool. No.
......
CHAC-MOOL: . . . Watch the moon. By the full moon, you’ll be
looking at saguaros. You’re going home.
MEDEA: How will I get there?
CHAC-MOOL: I’m taking you.
As our characters merge, they are “both reborn in one another,” “boundaries disappear as the lines between man and woman, self and other, . . . living body and ghost . . . blur,” and the future is torn open (Serrano 127). By the end of the play, we cannot tell with certainly “if Medea is dying or sleeping, if Chac-Mool is dead or alive, and if
Luna and Medea will be reunited or permanently split,” Bost summarizes (140). What we do know, however, is that, with linear narratives of conception and destruction dismissed, with the finality of death rejected, and with the productivity of sacrifice affirmed, as in Morton’s La Malinche,104 the play situates us at an intersection of life and death which is charged with sacredness and possibilities of transformation.
104. Similarly to Morton’s play, in The Hungry Woman, Chac-Mool’s sacrifice amounts “to a ritualized death followed by . . . rebirth” (Feller 73), the vehicle for the transition to a hitherto unimagined future.
Delikonstantinidou 170
Indeed, the play’s final sequences are staged as quasi-mystical ritual acts conducive to the healing of the traumas that the legacy of the Chicano Movement either left open or caused since it failed to turn democratic rhetoric into a democratic reality.
Just as Moraga’s play re-members dis-membered cultural narratives and icons
(Greek and Central/South American) multiply appropriated and colonized by dominant traditions, the dis-membered psyches and bodies of Medea,
Luna/Coyolxauhqui, and Chac-Mool are promised reassembling in new configurations in a future no longer mangled and mangling by/due to (neo)colonial, patriarchal control. They are promised transformation, radical and costly, within the suffering contradiction of a tragic condition, in a future that “extends beyond the
American context and even beyond modernity” (Billotte 524). If, in Morton’s play,
Martín’s death heralded the possibility of transformation of the post-Conquest future,
Chac-Mool’s death signals the possibility of transformation of the post-movimiento future along lines spelled out by mestiza, feminist, queer desire. This is conceived by
The Hungry Woman as a non-exclusive future that will take heed of the ambiguities, tensions, and costs entailed in the praxis of sociopolitical change, that is, of the tragic import of any radical political project, and that will embrace them as necessary for its self-reflexive continuation. And it is, apparently, a future that is up to the audience, to us, to actualize.
The play’s tragic mode does not accommodate a happy resolution; it does not present us with the neat closure of the (ongoing) psychic and social traumas that interlocked oppressions and subjections cause to the world’s Medeas, Lloronas,
Coyolxauhquis. Yet, in acknowledging the trauma of (cultural) loss and in uncovering its dire consequences, it allows for sense to be made of it and for lives to work through it, and thus for recovery and transformation to be set in motion. Instead of
Delikonstantinidou 171 borne in private, trauma is publicly embraced, voiced, and lamented, as well as encoded in the idiom of cultural critique of patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Its articulation drastically challenges public discourses that seek to repress it thus foreclosing the possibility of healing. As the play intimates, this possibility does not translate into the utopian fantasy of becoming unproblematically and seamlessly whole again. After all, the very notion of wholeness is complicated, even radically rethought, as we have seen, by the end the play. Rather, it translates into the realizable, and tragic-inflected, prospect of confronting brokenness as such, affirming it, growing into the fractures of both self and world, and, only then, attempting to make self and world into more viable versions of themselves. The
(structural) breakdown of the play and of Medea, then, can be construed as the beginning not of a buildup but of a breakthrough; or, in the playwright’ words, as a gesture toward “a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation” (Loving 124)—the Nietzschean undertones of
Moraga’s formulation hard to miss here.105
The Hungry Woman asks for audiences to become witnesses of the tearing apart of bodies by cultural violence; that is, witnesses of trauma, so that its revelation and recognition can turn into an urgent call to action that will bring the desired sociopolitical change. In a public lecture she delivered in 2004, Moraga, drawing from the context of Native American culture, used the term “medicine” to describe the said change and explained the progression from myth to sociopolitical change thus:
“myth is history is story that makes medicine,” or sociopolitical change involving practices/rituals of world-making that embrace pain not as world-destroying but as
105. The theme of dismemberment as the genuinely Dionysian suffering is prevalent in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (as is the interplay between dismemberment and reunion/incorporation) (10). In Nietzsche’s theory/theology, it is on the god’s very dismemberment where the promise of deliverance, of eventual reintegration, rests.
Delikonstantinidou 172 world-transforming. The play enacts this progression, bringing together the radically political and the therapeutic, its damaged bodies, or wounded embodiments, opening up and mobilizing us toward imagining and acting upon new ways of doing
“medicine,” informed by a vision of feminist queer decolonization.
To put it differently, the play seems to suggest that moving from an ethics of sacrifice to a self-reflexive and self-critical ethics, and to a politics that will build on the latter, demands that we salvage from the ruins of colonialism and of the once much-hoped-for postemancipation futures of anticolonial narratives the will to sociopolitical transformation. But, contrary to many an Enlightenment-inflected anticolonial discourse, we will have to do it despite the knowledge that suffering cannot be bracketed off from the ever-expanding tragic narrative of modernity
(whether late or post), and despite the chanciness, contingency, and the risk of dismemberment that lurk in every corner of history (past, present, and future)—all
“risk factors” involved in the attempt to make “medicine” anew. For new “medicine” to actualize, we need to think politically about and toward our future, all the while being attuned to the tragic mode. Only then, can the dystopic vision that this Medea dramatizes be averted and the reasons that lead to it be unmoored from the present.
Delikonstantinidou 173
Chapter 4
Mojada
I. Setting the Stage for Medea as a Mexican “Wetback”
In February 2014, I received via email the script of Luis Alfaro’s Bruha, his third take on a Greek tragic myth; this time, on the tragic myth of Medea. Drawing conspicuously on Euripides’ literary use of the mythical material, Alfaro’s dramatic mythic revision can be more specifically described as the myth’s “contemporary correlative,” to use Miriam Chirico’s terminology: “a kind of structural update wherein the playwright modernizes the details, setting, and characters, but still follows the outlines of the myth” (“Divine Fire” 532). For the creation of Bruja,
Alfaro employed the same pattern of revision that we see at work in his earlier two mythoplays, Electricidad (2003) and Oedipus el Rey (2010), both of which will be examined later in this study. In fact, with Bruja the playwright completed the three- part cycle that he began with Electricidad—the entire endeavor conceived by Alfaro as “a play in three parts” (Anderson 2012).
The play received its world premiere in June 2012, at the Magic Theatre in
San Francisco under the direction of Loretta Greco, and attracted very positive reviews. Bruja, the product of Alfaro’s exploration of contemporary Chicano/a experience in the U.S., and of years of research on both Greek scholarship and indigenous communities from Central America (a process that the playwright has described as a journey back “to our roots, our indigenous selves”), revealed the
Delikonstantinidou 174 lingering relevance of Medea’s story by foregrounding the thematic strands of immigration and exile that are integral to it. The whole process of creating this play started, like all his plays, as Alfaro grants, “with a question: what does it mean to live in exile?” (Anderson 2012), and was informed by “the debates on immigration taking place in Congress and around the country” (Sullivan 2013). Without compromising the story’s tragic import, Alfaro attempted to provide some kind of exploratory answer to this question, while also investing heavily in the idea and capacity for healing that this Medea represented—healing being Bruha’s organizing metaphor.
Indeed, the play focused particularly on Medea’s role as curandera, as someone who uses her ancient therapeutic powers for the physical and emotional healing of others.
A year later, in 2013, on the occasion of an invitation to probe the story of
Medea further (an invitation extended by Alfaro’s erstwhile collaborator at the Mark
Taper Forum, Chay Yew, who was also the artistic director of that production), Alfaro rewrote Medea as (a) Mojada for Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre. In the new version, Medea is transformed from curandera/healer into a magically gifted seamstress. Her new “art,” however, still carries strong overtones of the therapeutic.
Her tragedy unraveled amidst Chicago’s Mexican American community, in the neighborhood of Pilsen. The reviews were once again dithyrambic; the play was hailed as a new classic.
Two years later, in 2015, Medea/Mojada was transposed/transported to East
Los Angeles, set in Boyle Heights, and directed by Jessica Kubzansky at the Getty
Villa Outdoor Theatre. Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles enjoyed the same success as the previous two versions. Audiences, including reviewers, responded with enthusiasm and thrill to the production’s attempt at negotiating, with their active participation no less, the aforementioned questions that first formed the impetus for
Delikonstantinidou 175 the creation of a contemporary, Latino/a-oriented revision of the tragic myth of
Medea, in terms and in the light of the particularities and challenges posed by their familiar urban setting(s).
Studying all three versions, one discovers that a main reason behind the evolution of Alfaro’s revision of the Medea myth, from Bruha to Mojada: A Medea in
Los Angeles, can be traced precisely in his wish to capture the meaning and effects that migration and assimilation have, not only within the broader American context, but also within the many different small, insular worlds of contemporary U.S. urban neighborhoods where new immigrants, like his Medea, lead unnoticed, invisible lives; lives weighed down heavily by the conflicting exigencies of inherited tradition and processes of assimilation. Yet, these are not the only sociopolitical concerns undergirding this evolution.
The entire evolutionary trajectory of Alfaro’s Medea (short for dramatic mythic revision of the myth of Medea) was borne out of collaboration: the playwright’s close collaboration with directors, actors (most of whom have worked with Alfaro in the past), and other members of the production team, during and through dramaturgical sessions and frequent visits to the neighborhoods and local communities of interest, some of whose members, most importantly, also participated in the production. The initial play was modified during the said process, as well as during the workshopping process, to cater to the needs of the particular socio/culturescape it would engage upon its/each production. This very interesting collaborative, interactive, and transformative process of maturation that Alfaro’s
Medea has gone through over the past years can be approached, by way of Mary-Kay
Gamel’s reading of Bruha, as an example of “personal and expressive authenticity”
(186) in the production of classical material.
Delikonstantinidou 176
Drawing from Gamel, we could argue that, not only the first, but, in fact, all three versions are representative of the model of theatrical production which she terms
“personally and expressively authentic.” According to this model, a production becomes an “open experiment—a test not just of the audience,” and its ability to understand and engage with the layers of meaning that are unearthed from the primary, mythic material and explored in terms of contemporary realities, but also of the ability of all the contributors to the production to fully engage with the meanings of this material, both in its timeless quality and in its contemporary, context-specific relevance/resonance (186).
As “personally and expressively authentic,” Alfaro’s three versions of the myth’s revision posit an ongoing process of exploration of the meanings of the myth by a wide variety of “experimenters” (all the participants to the productions of his
Medeas, theatre practitioners as well as community and audience members alike), stretching into the future. Therefore, we could concur with Gamel, they signal a more
“democratic turn” in the production of ancient classical material, in that they widen
“the possible meanings of the text and its performance by expanding the agency of all participants in the process” (186). The “democratic turn” that Gamel discerns is further substantiated by the fact that the productions “presume an audience other than a theatre-going elite,106 mobilize interpretations of texts to address unseen or neglected public interests, . . . and occasion public discourse and moments of commonality,” to borrow from Laura Lodewyck’s and Sarah Monoson’s observations in a similar context. Taken as a single project, the three versions conjoin theatre- making and myth-making as social practice, thereby “creating deeply affecting
106. As we shall see later on, Alfaro sought to engage a number of communities and their constituencies in each of the plays’ productions, including new immigrants as well as first and second generation immigrants. In the course of the study, we will examine further this practice as an integral part of Alfaro’s social theatre praxis.
Delikonstantinidou 177 experiences about utterly contemporary matters for new kinds of audiences” (652), and, more specifically, for the temporary communities of transition (transition from the social space of the theatre to the larger society) that are forged among all participants—or “experimenters”—involved in the “Medea experience” orchestrated by Alfaro.
Honed through a process of paring that lasted more than three years, the latest,
Los Angeles version of Mojada, exhibits the playwright’s sharpened skills in dealing with the mythic material—Alfaro was in love with this version, as he has admitted, and it showed (Boehm 2015). The script itself, still unpublished at the time of writing, is tighter than the previous ones; it gets to the essence of the story briskly and foregoes embellishments and elaborations in favor of succinctness. Arguably, the playwright’s familiarity with the vast social and psychic space107 of Los Angeles, as a native of downtown Los Angeles (from the working class Pico Union district), has much to do with the economical, yet engaging and convincing, way in which he captures the post-millennium urban experience the city offers for new immigrants through the lens of (his) Medea’s story; an experience that is often particularly harrowing yet still unacknowledged as such in public discourse. Days before this
Mojada’s premiere at Getty Villa, the plight of Syrian refugees losing their lives as they make the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe through Greece dominated
U.S. news headlines, rendering the Greek origins of the source material all the more resonant. For all the above reasons, the choice to examine the latest Mojada for the purposes of the present study seemed apt, if not obvious.
107. The notion of “psychic space” is borrowed from Julia Kristeva (1995) to describe the space between the social sphere and the biological sphere, or between the body of culture and the human body/ies.
Delikonstantinidou 178
II. Mojada: Medea as a Traumatized El Guaco
Myth seeps into the histories of Mojada’s protagonists and a mystical strand
weaves its way through the play from the very beginning, as the ancient past filters
through their Boyle Heights neighborhood and permeates the yard of Medea’s and
Hason’s dilapidated Victorian rental home. Tita, “a viehita, worn but enduring,” and a
curandera (a charming combination of spirituality and earthliness, in effect the play’s
part chorus-part nurse), enters the “unmistakably Mexican” setting of the yard and,
holding a pair of banana leaves as if they were talons or wings, conjures the spirits of
the ancestors “from the four directions” (Alfaro, Mojada 3). Her Nahuatl prayers
bring forth “old world” sounds/memories: the sound of the old country, a part with
music, rain, lovers making love, a baby crying, a woman laughing, the sound of a
bird, in flight, wings flapping. Soon, however, the intrusion of the noise of a
“helicopter circling and shining its spotlight” brings an end to the conjuring act and
draws us back to the present in which Tita addresses the audience directly (3). She,
thus, breaks the dramatic illusion, just as the helicopter broke the conjured aural
compendium of ancient memories, and enfolds the audience in the world of the
performance: “Buena tardes! Como estan? . . . DIJE, COMO ESTAN?” (3).
In a “collaborative mode,” she asks them for chisme (gossip) and responds to
their timidity with a peculiar prologue-exposition revolving around the discrepancy
she detects between “home” (Mexico) and “here” (the U.S.) on the way people talk
about themselves; a sort of incongruity of affect in the way people “here” articulate
and share their lived experience: “They hide their chisme here because someone
always wants to steal your secrets, your smile, your bull [man], everything you own.
That is why it is better to have nothing in this country, which is exactly what I have”
(4). Tita’s views of the clandestine workings of people in the host country, whether
Delikonstantinidou 179 with regard to personal or public affairs, not only anticipate the losses, or rather, the larcenies that her beloved mistress (really, non-biological daughter), Medea, will suffer by the end of the play, but also frame their status as undocumented immigrants and Medea’s illegal immigrant labor as seamstress. She explains:
Here they think she is just a seamstress, but what she does with the
cloth and the pattern and the sewing is puro pinche DaVinchi./ Late at
night they deliver stacks of fabric. They say, “No name, no social, we
pay you cash you complain we go to someone else.”/ They check her
seams, her hems and they are always muy impressed, but they can’t
show it, because then . . . (she does a gesture for money) Welcome to
the factory in your yard. (4)
Tita’s lighthearted tone throws into sharp relief the gravity of the reality to which her comments draw our attention and which the play as a whole thematizes; that is, “the radical constricting of the private or domestic sphere under the pressures of ethno- racialized and gendered relations of production,” to borrow the words of José David
Saldívar from a related context (81).108
More precisely, Mojada alludes to the social history of the apparel industry in
California and, specifically, Los Angeles, which, according to Edna Bonacich’s and
Richard Appelbaum’s illuminating study, presents “a good example of how our society works, and how the system [within the context of globalization] produces and reproduces an intensifying polarization by class and race” that is further compounded by gender difference and differentiations (20). Within the framework of the new
108. Similarly, Lisa Lowe has suggested with reference to the representation of immigrant life in California in Asian American literature that “[t]he immigrant’s lack of civil rights promised to citizens of the nation permits the ‘private space of the . . . home to become a workplace that prioritizes the relations of production . . . over family relations” (169).
Delikonstantinidou 180
“ethnic distribution of the [apparel] industry” in California (Bonacich and Appelbaum
41), “the subaltern woman,” the U.S. Latina (and otherwise ethnically identified female) immigrant worker, emerges as “the paradigmatic subject of the current configuration of the international division of labor,” writes Saldívar (83), understood as “a displacement of the divided field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism”
(Spivak 287). Alfaro’s Medea/Mojada, an exemplum of the subaltern woman and the twenty-first-century “neoimperial” subject Saldívar references above, testifies to that.
Educated in the ways of magic by Tita, Medea is herself a curandera, a healer, despite the unconventional, or rather, unordinary, nature of the medium through which she exercises her magical skills.109 However, as the title of the play suggests, this Medea will be treated by the world Alfaro brings to life onstage (a world uncomfortably similar to the one off the stage) as a “mojada,” a “wetback”—a derogatory way to refer to undocumented immigrants.110 “With Mojada opening three days after the US Labor Day,” reviewer Jayson A. Morrison writes of the play,
Medea’s (and, as we will learn further on, Hason’s and other characters’) experiences in the country’s labor market, “illuminated how hollow these grand victories have become” (279). Alfaro’s critique of the terrible costs involved in the process of merging in the country’s work life and society begins poignantly and builds up incrementally, in a nuanced manner, paving the way to the play’s tragic climax and denouement.
On a formal level, the use of Spanglish, the admixture of English and Spanish, mainly by Tita but also by other female characters throughout the play, firmly situate
109. Alfaro’s versatility in the idiom of magical realism is apparent here as in most of his plays. 110. The term “wetback” refers to someone who crosses a body of water in the attempt to illegally enter a country. It dates back to 1920, when it was first used in the U.S. press, and has been used officially, in 1954, with the “Operation Wetback,” a project of mass deportation of undocumented Mexican immigrants actualized by the Eisenhower regime.
Delikonstantinidou 181 them on a linguistic and cultural borderland. Carefully employed and placed so as not to impede understanding on the part of audience members not versed in the language,
Spanish words “give a sense to the audience, . . . of how some words cannot be translated”; they carry across “un sentido, a feeling, so to speak, of what it means to hear the feeling of a word . . . a tone or feeling you understand without knowing the word,” Alfaro has explained (Anderson 2012). Spanglish contributes to the creation of an authentic voice for each character and becomes inextricable from the stories they tell of themselves and the world in the course of the play. In this way, it operates, along with the use of humor in instances of syncrisis of popular U.S. and barrio
Chicano/a culture, as we shall see a bit later, as a poetic tool that not only unearths the tension between holding onto tradition and assimilating into a new culture, a tension constitutive of new and old immigrants’ struggle with issues of identity, but also bridges the “old” and the “new” culture insofar as it becomes a critical syncretic site where these merge.111
The most obvious function of the use of Spanglish from the beginning of the play, though, is as a manifestation of Tita’s and Medea’s resistance to the modus operandi of the host country, U.S. Indeed, Tita, much like her mistress, dislikes the new life in Los Angeles. Both women resist assimilation into U.S. society and uphold an adversarial stance toward mainstream U.S. culture. Medea’s entrance barefoot onto
111. Melind Powers (2011) has discussed effectively the use of Spanglish and humor in Alfaro’s Electricidad. Yet, key points in her discussion apply also to this play as well as to his Oedipus el Rey. After all, the creation of “syncretic sites” is characteristic of Alfaro’s work as a whole. It is worth noting from this early point in our discussion (and keeping in mind throughout) that, in the sardonic humor infusing Alfaro’s mythoplays, Mexican humor, the cultural notion “of laughing at death as a means of getting through the harshness of life” (Dramaturgical Statement), and the gang motto “you laugh until you cry,” meet the Euripidean trait of blending solemnity with levity and humor. Both the Mexican (American) and the Euripidean “approach” to humor seem to play into the realization of “how close laughter is to tears.” Exhibiting influences by both his Mexican American cultural background and by Euripides, Alfaro explores the border between laughter and tears, thus, like his literary predecessor, extending the meaning of catharsis (Meagher xvi).
Delikonstantinidou 182 the stage serves to underscore her anti-assimilationist position in corporeal terms. In fact, she displays a characteristic resentment toward shoes throughout the play. Being barefoot is her “strategy” of keeping contact with her Mexican past, with the “muddy
[girl], with no shoes, playing in the rain,” in the Mexican fields surrounding her parental house (Alfaro, Mojada 45), who fell in love with Hason and dreamt of a life with him which now slips through her talented fingers.
In reality, according to Tita’s account, she followed Medea, who has followed
Hason—“her first and her only”—who is following the “American Dream.” In the teeth of Tita’s expressed resentment of Hason, Scene One serves to contextualize
Medea’s unconditional love for him in allowing us, unlike most other treatments of the story of Medea, a glimpse at the depth and intensity of their love affair—an element of the play that renders both the gradual realization that Hason is not worthy of her love and its eventual demise all the more painful to witness. As if responding to
Tita’s protestations, Hason enters, following her prologue, having arrived home after work (he is a day laborer), cell-phone in hand, greeting Medea with the call of El
Guaco bird, the laughing falcon, his favorite Central American bird. In time, we will learn that Medea has been his “guano,” as he tenderly calls her, ever since he mistook her playful imitation of El Guaco for the bird’s call, the music of their native land of
Michoacan; a mistake that occasioned their first encounter (45). As a reminder of their love’s origin, the pair greet each other with the bird’s characteristic call every time
Hason returns home. In the course of the play, the couple’s disintegration is shown to have much to do with Hason’s eagerness to detach himself from this and other memories of their old world and their old life, at the same time that Medea holds on desperately to them as a source of meaning and identity, and as a means of self- preservation.
Delikonstantinidou 183
While Hason’s drive to assimilate and desire to gain recognition and wealth, and thus to prevail in the new environment, is getting stronger, Medea is getting more and more self-enfolded, isolated in the insular world of her yard where she works hours and hours on end, always underpaid. She refuses to leave the house despite
Hason’s pleas, her fear of the world “on the other side of the buildings” (Alfaro,
Mojada 10) growing paralyzing and conspicuously bordering on agoraphobia. Her strange, unpredictable outburst in response to Hason’s insistence to follow him and their son, Acan, in a leisure trip to Santa Monica Pier presages the play’s tragic climax in as much as it shows us that Medea is already pushed too close to her limits by her predicament.
Increasingly, Medea’s alienation grows so profound that distances her even from her son. Acan drifts further and further away from his mother and the staunch
Mexican traditionalism that she seems to represent, seduced, much like his father, by the American Dream, translated for him by Hason (and by way of Hason’s boss and, as we later learn, lover, Armida) into the acquisition of consumer goods and commodities: cell phones, swimming pools, skateboards, and big-screen TVs.
Reviewer Roberto Corona aptly observes that Acan becomes in the play a means by which “the core identity issue of the Chican@ [sic]” is illustrated: “where do I belong in this society, what do I wear, who do I strive to be?” (293). It is precisely Medea’s imminent loss of Acan to the world that Hason and Armida-—an ingenious combination of Creon and his daughter—represent, his transformation into a
“vendido,” or sell-out, what will trigger the fatal transformation in the otherwise meek
Medea by the end of the play.
Interestingly, the way Medea’s memory is activated against the stream to keep her connected to the culture of origin and to her formative experiences in that context
Delikonstantinidou 184 is evocative of Rosi Braidotti’s theory of counter-memory (1994). According to
Braidotti, counter-memory “is a contingent to resist assimilation into dominant modes of representing the female subject as it endows the subject with the power to recall what has been learned” (Bosse 27) and to “enact a rebellion of subjugated knowledges”112 (25), without disavowing loss, pain, and trauma, but working through them. However, in divergence from Braidotti’s formulation, and in what can be read as Alfaro’s critical reception of contemporary feminist postcolonial theorizations, the way Medea clings to her memories with greater and greater tenacity in order to shield herself from reality—as Hason is letting go of them in an inversely proportional manner—is, in fact, symptomatic of her inability to overcome trauma, while the extremes that her resistance will eventually reach will turn out to be also traumatic.
Medea’s trauma is not linked exclusively to imperatives of assimilation into a new world she is terrified of; imperatives with which she is daily confronted. Her “old world” life as well as the family’s horrific journey across the U.S.-Mexican border,
112. What Braidotti calls “subjugated knowledges,” after Michel Foucault, has been described by the famous thinker as “two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systematization. . . . On the other hand, I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand . . . something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated; naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition” (“Two Lectures” 81-2). Along a similar vein of thought, Darcy Ribeiro offered the term “subaltern knowledge” (or “conocimiento subalterno”) to describe the local knowledges stemming from the margins of the modern/colonial world system (a supposedly “global Modernity”) (68), while Walter Mignolo uses the term “subaltern border gnosis” (epistemology or hermeneutics) to describe the border thinking that emerges at the meeting place of “subjugated knowledges” and “subaltern knowledges” (disqualified and local/marginal knowledges) (19). This is a subaltern “knowledge conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial system, and border gnoselogy as a discourse about colonial knowledge . . . conceived at the conflictive intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Américas/Caribbean” (Mignolo 11). As an aside, we should note that all three “Mestiza Medeas” examined in this part of the study are border-thinking subjects who, in different yet related ways, tap into the kind of “subaltern border gnosis” theorized by Mignolo in their “insurrection” (to use Foucault’s term) against injustice, in the process of which they unsettle the hegemonic epistemology, though not necessarily to their own advantage and not in an ethically unambivalent manner.
Delikonstantinidou 185 were equally traumatizing. As another reviewer, Eric A. Gordon (2015), notes,
“Alfaro is certainly no romanticist about rural life back home: That too, was a land of terror, especially for women like Medea.” In a heart-breaking confession near the end of the play, Medea paints her old life in dark colors. We learn that, for all her devotion and generosity in serving her father and twin brother, Acat, they both maltreated her.
In the wake of her father’s death, she was left destitute, since her brother became the sole inheritor of their father’s fortune. When she decided to follow Hason to El Norte,
Acat tried to force her to stay back claiming that she “belonged to the farm like one of the animals” (Alfaro, Mojada 75). Her objections were met with blind violence:
MEDEA: . . . He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me out to where
the pigs were and threw me in the muddy pen. I was in shock. He just
kept hitting me . . . I didn’t know what to do . . ./ I ran to where the
banana tree was, I could hear him close behind, cursing me. Was he
drunk or was he just trying to hold on to his inheritance? I reached for
the first thing that I could find, the machete we used to cut down the
leaves . . ./ He said he would take Acan and destroy Hason. Our
dreams . . ./ I don’t know what came over me. I called on the Gods, I
begged for mercy, pero nada!/ He ran for me and I lifted the blade and
all I could feel was the weight of his body against mine, my brother,
my twin, Acat . . . I wanted to scream, but no sound would come out. It
was as if I wasn’t there at all./ At that point . . . I needed to make a
choice. I steadied the machete and hacked him to pieces. . . ./ The pigs
were so ravenous they ate every last trace of him. I went to the house. I
showered. I found the deed [of the farm]. And that night, we left. (76)
Delikonstantinidou 186
Yet, their experience of leaving Zamora, Mexico for the north turned out to be no less nightmarish than the events that preceded and precipitated it.
The flashback to the family’s journey across the border, narrated by Tita, makes for a searing theatre experience. Medea, Hason, Acan, and Tita get into an old track: “No window, no door, just a big box./ A truck for car parts and dead animals.
And still we get in./ Two men, stand and look at us. They are like us, but they are also them. Narcos. Killers of our country, they run everything now” (33). Hason pays for the two-day journey “more than they can afford,” and the four of them join two young men who are already in the truck, while “[a] young girl runs up at the last minute. . . .
She is alone.” They are all tortured by the lack of air, “sweating like animals, and burning up,” during endless hours of driving through the desert; they are almost suffocated and become desperate (34). One of the two young men they met earlier jumps off the truck, seven of them remain, and they lie down on the floor of the truck, sticking their noses and mouths on the tiny openings, gasping for air (35). Near the border the truck stops, as the driver has to bribe the patrol to let them go. Two soldiers jump in the truck, grab the girl, and drag her to the darkness of the desert. Her muffled screams are unbearable and then they suddenly stop. And then the soldiers return for
Medea:
Two grab Medea, who doesn’t scream. She tries to hold her ground./
Hason, Acan and I hold on to her./ A soldier holds a gun to Hason’s
face. He is crying./ I try to push them away, but one points a gun
towards Acan’s head./ We don’t know what to do. I cant’t let go of
Medea./ Finally, Hason, struggling between tears, says. . . .
HASON: “Medea . . . Please. . . .”
Delikonstantinidou 187
Medea walks willingly into the desert, knowing that she is the one who should be sacrificed. And she is (36). After they rape her, the soldiers return a second time for
Acan, but Tita successfully conducts some sort of mystical invocation to ward them off. They, then, slash the truck’s tires and leave with the Narco’s merchandise. Hason returns with a Medea in shock, hobbling and limping; they bury the dead body of the young girl in the desert, and, after Tita procures some herbal concoction to “kill the soldier” inside Medea, they resume their journey to the north, on foot (37). By the afternoon of the next day they are “in the other America,” where “[t]here is no sign, no line, no welcome” (38).
The reasons why Tita is able to prevent Acan’s but not Medea’s (or, as a matter of fact, the other girl’s) rape are not clear in the play. The incident certainly adds to the pathos of the events and promotes spectators’ empathetic reaction, not just to the tragedy of Medea, but also to the plight of many immigrants, who often experience challenges often unimaginable by the privileged of our world and are, sometimes, reduced to a state of wordlessness as a result of these challenges. Our attention is especially pointed toward the plight of immigrant women who are victimized not only by the racial and class politics of an unfair U.S. labor market, but also by the gender/sexual politics of both the country of origin (Mexico, in our case), and the country of destination and settlement. Further, it contributes to Medea’s representation in the symbolic role of the self-sacrificing Latina/Chicana along the lines of the Mexican ideal of “la madre sufrida,” the long-suffering mother; a representation and role that Alfaro makes sure to dismantle by the end of the play.
“She lives for La Familia, but they don’t do the same,” writes Corona, and he explains: “Medea embodies all the sacrifice, sexuality, and subservience necessary to create a dynamic hybrid between the archetypes of ‘La Virgen’ and ‘La Madre.’ This
Delikonstantinidou 188 impossible hybrid is the principal problem for the Chicana mother” (295). The development of Medea from self-sacrificing and self-abnegating Chicana, from a mother-victim, to an avenging Chicana, a mother-victimizer as a result of Hason’s betrayal exposes the said impossibility, as well as the unjust power dynamics and oppressive stereotypes on which it rests.
Unlike other versions of Medea, including Euripides’ famous one, Alfaro’s
Medea does not ponder out loud on her lost honor and on the need to reclaim it, bringing justice to bear on those who wronged her. She does not really need to.
Witnessing the sacrifices she makes while helping Hason to realize his dream, both in entering the country and in enduring life there, and witnessing the way her character evolves under extreme and undeserved pressures produces a compelling sense of compassion for her. In the course of the play, we glean such an understanding of
Medea’s tragic predicament that, despite recognizing the deplorability of her final actions, we cannot but sympathize with her.113 If Tita was able to protect Acan but not
Medea in the beginning of their treacherous physical and psychical journey from the
“old” to the “new” world, the end of it finds her unable to protect either Acan from
Medea or Medea from herself. In fact, Tita’s inability to effectively protect Medea— who is, for all intents and purposes, a daughter to her—allows us to reckon her as another mother figure, besides Medea, who falls short of realizing the ideal of the proper Chicana mother.
Medea’s struggle to live up to the expectations that derive from her role as
Chicana mother render “Hason’s betrayal,” the fact that he not only allows her to be literally sacrificed but also treats her as a stepping stone in his pursuit of a life of
113. After all, Alfaro’s Medea bears only a remote resemblance to Euripides’ protagonist with regard to the latter’s role as eloquent, deft manipulator.
Delikonstantinidou 189 comfort and prosperity, albeit unwillingly, “all the more poignant” (Corona 295).
Still, Hason is not constructed and cannot be construed as the villain of the piece. He is sincerely committed to provide a better life for his family in the U.S., even if his attempts at achieving his goals are dangerously misguided and miscalculated to say the least: “I’m doing this for the boy,” he tells Medea, “Every nail hammer, every wall I put up, every condo I build here in this country is for our son” (Alfaro, Mojada
30). Convinced that he can acquiesce to his boss’ demands without forsaking Medea and his son, yet also without taking into proper account the former’s cruel cynicism, he is carried away, driven to eventually sacrifice his family on the altar of success.
As for Medea, although she realizes that his work is slowly, but steadily, consuming him, she continues to trust him (and their relationship) unwaveringly, al least in most of the play. She dismisses Tita’s hints and low-key warnings—the viehita functioning here as her consciousness:
TITA: Everyone else goes home to sleep.
MEDEA: He is not everyone else, he is going to be the boss.
He is showing them what he is willing to do.
…………………………………………………………………..
TITA: Do you really trust him?
MEDEA: With all my heart, I would die for him.
TITA: Porque eres siega.
MEDEA: Not blind. (15)
Delikonstantinidou 190
Despite her claims to the contrary, however, she is indeed blind to his betrayal and she will remain so until relatively late in the play. As reviewer Jessica Schreiber
(2013) has pointedly put it, “Medea’s strict adherence to the old ways of unquestioning faith in her man mean that she is blind-sided” by his relationship with his boss, real estate magnate, Armida. In fact, there was not even a marriage certificate to bind them together; their faith, as Medea argues, “is in each other”
(Alfaro, Mojada 58). When she finds out about Hason’s and his boss’s relationship, it will be too late to change the course of events. Hason and Armida will be already wed and initiating the process of Acan’s adoption, and Armida will be forcing Medea out from the house under threats of turning her in to the immigration police. The older woman will have used Medea’s once unquestioning faith to her benefit.
However, it is pertinent to note that Armida is not a stock-character villain either; rather, she represents a different aspect or dimension of assimilation.
Originating from the same Mexican state as Medea and Hason, Michoacán, she has used a previous marriage and a network of connections to establish herself and create a thriving business in the decades since her arrival to Los Angeles. Like all the other characters in the play, she also had to make sacrifices in order to come and build a life for herself in the U.S. and she has also been victimized in the process. When, in their final encounter, Medea begs her to grant her one day before she leaves in exchange for her son (really a ploy to buy some necessary time to exact her revenge), Armida confesses that she had been in Medea’s place in the past (Alfaro, Mojada 71). Further, her aspirations, as we are given to understand, do not exhaust themselves to the transformation of Boyle Heights function-wise and construction-wise. She wants what
Medea has: a family. But, instead of creating one, she manipulates and buys her way through one, playing by the rules that her adopted country has taught her. Arguably,
Delikonstantinidou 191
Armida embodies the most negative sides of assimilation into the U.S. More specifically, she “exemplifies the sacrifice a Chican@ [sic] must make to succeed in an Anglo world,” argues Corona. It is no coincidence “that the actress playing Armida was obviously white passing”; “[s]he made it into white society, and as one would expect, this meant she had to look like she belonged there” (295-6). Still, as Hason tells Medea, “[s]he’s not so disconnected from the old country that she doesn’t realize she needs a man” (Alfaro, Mojada 31). The heteronormative pressure for a Chicana, even for one like Armida, to be a wife and a mother is compelling.
Armida has employed her intelligence and sexuality to achieve the much- longed-for upward mobility that most immigrants in the U.S. (and elsewhere) aspire to. Yet, in the process, she has been deprived of parts of her humanity. In the context of the play, she serves to reveal, on the one hand, the quest for upward mobility to be something much less and very different from the heroic quest in terms of which it is typically celebrated, and, on the other hand, “how a cycle of predation can exist within migrant communities” (Corona 281). By means of Armida, the latter are shown to be vulnerable to becoming “corrosive communities,” as traumatic experiences associated with immigration and assimilation work their way into the fabric of community life.114 Eventually, it is hard not to feel sorry for her as well as for the kind
114. At this juncture, we could draw once again from Kai T. Erikson’s studies on trauma, whose insights can shed more light on the point at hand. According to the sociologist, “traumatic experiences work their way so thoroughly into the grain of the affected community that they come to supply its prevailing mood and temper, dominate its imagery and its sense of self, govern the way the members relate to one another” (236-7). In many cases, as has been well documented in the current literature on trauma, people affected by traumatic experiences, such as those involved in immigration and processes of assimilation, create “corrosive communities,” instead of “therapeutic communities” (236); that is, people “split into factions,” as “whatever fault lines once ran silently through the structure of the larger community” are forced open due to the traumatic experience, dividing the communal body into divisive fragments, instead of mobilizing the remaining resources of the communal body “to dress the wound on its flank” (236). In the context of the play, Alfaro presents the migrant community as one bordering on such a “corrosive community,” suffering from
Delikonstantinidou 192 of assimilation that she represents and that is being fostered not only by the U.S. socioeconomic structures currently in place, but also by the specific capitalist modus operandi that spans the globe.
Importantly, the play intimates that, besides exploiting Hason’s ambitions for upward mobility, Armida has also preyed on the sexual complications that Medea and
Hason face in their relationship as a result of Medea’s traumatic experience of sexual assault—her attempted rape by her twin brother and her rape by the Mexican soldiers.
A survivor of sexual violence, Medea is trying to cope with the psychological, emotional, and mental effects of the trauma, which include her inability to function normally in her sexual encounters with Hason. Although an effort to offer a convincing diagnosis of Medea’s condition falls outside the scope of this study, we could suggest that, as long as her traumatic experiences remain unaddressed (within and without the familial context) and no health care treatment is provided to allow her to overcome them, her extreme isolation and eventual breakdown can be understood within the frame of psychosexual trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.115
“damage to the [social] tissues that hold human groups together,” a “corrosive” social climate and/or communal mood dominating the human group’s spirit (237). 115. Ruth Leys records that post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD) was first officially recognized as an ailment by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980—although there already existed a body of psychiatric literature on survivors of military combat and the concentration camps, civilian disasters, and other traumas—as a result “of an essentially political struggle by psychiatrists, social workers, activists and others to acknowledge the post-war sufferings of the Vietnam War veteran.” During the same period, “[w]omen’s advocates, such as Jidith Hernan, who in the 1970s became concerned with sexual abuse in children, also played a major role in establishing an integrated, post-Vietnam approach to trauma” (5). She explains: “Post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory. The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound in the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present. All the symptoms characteristic of PTSD—flashbacks, nightmares and other reexperiences, emotional numbing, depression, guilt, autonomic arousal, explosive violence or tendency to hypervigilance—are thought to be the result of
Delikonstantinidou 193
Whatever the reasons behind Medea’s sexual dysfunction, Hason’s dissatisfaction with his sexual relations with her may be said to expedite his involvement with Armida. Frequent references, throughout the play, to his attractiveness shore up this reading. Medea’s conversation with Josefina, or “Jossie,” the play’s part chorus-part Aegeus figure, a pan dulce (sweet bread) peddler and
Tita’s partner in chisme, is quite revealing in this respect. Indeed, Josefina’s remarks show remarkable prescience: “It must be a lot of work to keep a beautiful man satisfied. I prefer my ugly husband. The only one that wants him is me!” (Alfaro,
Mojada 19). As Jayson A. Morrison correctly observes “Hason’s attractiveness permits an escape from the fate of less svelte neighborhood men”; he is aware of the quality of what he is selling to Armida and he is determined to get a good price for it
(279). Contrary to Hason, Josefina’s husband has undertaken backbreaking labor in the fields, which takes a toll on him, leaving him too exhausted to have sex with his wife. Ironically, although his job allows him to “earn the money needed to start a family, . . . its physical consequences push the dream further from reach” (279). Her husband’s inability to perform sexually is the reason why she asks Medea for a “baby making dress” to help her seduce her husband (Alfaro, Mojada 20); a request to which
Medea readily assents.116
this fundamental mental dissociation” (2). Sexual aversion is also a symptoms associated with PTSD frequently exhibited by victims of sexual harassment. All of these symptoms, writes another trauma scholar, Kirby Farrell, “may play out against a ground of anxiety, with physical problems such as digestive disorders or fatigue, or with chronic dread” (6). According to this prevalent model laid down by Leys and Farrell (among others), people suffering from PTSD are incapable of consciously testifying to their traumatic experience. This is an interesting point to underline in view of the fact that, in the context of Mojada, it is indeed not Medea but Tita who narrates the events that traumatized Medea in the process of border crossing. Therapy (including expressive/creative arts therapy) received by sufferers of PTSD “usually tries to help the victim complete the blocked process of integration by reexperiencing the crisis in a safe environment,” while it also “works to structure and support” processes of relearning and social adaptation (Farrell 6-7). 116. In juxtaposing the experiences of the two couples in the process of assimilation to the U.S., the play allows us a view at the reality of “a much larger exploited class in the shadows of US
Delikonstantinidou 194
The juxtaposition of the two couples, and, particularly, Josefina’s presence, performs yet another important function in the play; namely, it calls our attention to an often unacknowledged reality of exploitation and inequity in U.S. society and to the existence of a “subterranean river of disillusion and disaffection just beneath the surface of American life” (Dry’s n. pag.). Again, the conversation between the two young women is enlightening:
MEDEA: You work all day?
JOSEFINA: And night. All I do is work. I get up at three in the
morning to bake the bread, on the street by five and then home
by four in the afternoon, if I am lucky. . . . (Alfaro, Mojada 18-9)
When, near the end of the play, things take a decisive downward turn, it is Josefina who will try to inform and warn Medea about Hason’s and Armida’s plans—of which, as we learn, everyone in the neighborhood is cognizant but Medea. More specifically, she alerts her to the need to be in possession of a marriage certificate to be considered married in the U.S., as well as to the need to hide the fact that she does not have immigration papers. Although she explains to Medea that she will not get involved in their affairs for fear of compromising her own interests (Hason is helping her to get a little bakery at a strip-mall in Montebello which is Armida’s property), she eventually aligns herself with Medea and offers her shelter in her humble garage.
Most importantly, however, Josefina’s clarity of mind and firmness of purpose, her adaptive abilities and skills, throw into sharp relief Medea’s inability to accept the
[sic] economy,” which contrast significantly “with the kind of political rhetoric that casts Latino immigrants as criminals and parasites” (Morrison 279); a rhetoric that, in view of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, reached a disturbing level of belligerence, especially within the context of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Delikonstantinidou 195 changes this new world demands of her as well as its workings. Whereas Josefina negotiates her place between the “old” and the “new” world, Medea has the “old” land grafted onto her (24). To put it differently, she is too “much of the old world”
(74) to do the same.
Arguably, Josefina is constructed as a syncretic self and site in which a cardinal issue in contemporary discourses of Latino/a identity and cultural politics is played out: how much assimilation is too much? Certainly, no easy, definitive answer is to be found within the context of the play, but this does not detract from the fact that Josefina is shown to be quite successful in her attempt to straddle both worlds.
Her optimism and unapologetic pragmatism or, rather, resilience enable her to navigate through the strange, “new” world of the U.S. without being defeated by it, yet without forsaking the “old” world in the process. Rather, she appears committed to embodying and (literally) reproducing the best that the “old” world has to offer by holding on to personally and critically filtered values of la familia and la communidad, or tribe, as she puts it (60). Her eagerness for progeny and her support for and kindness toward her gente, her people, constitute cases in point. Unlike Hason and Armida, she is not so blinded by ambition as to not gauge carefully the costs each action toward accomplishing it involves. Unlike Medea, she is not so traumatized by the experience of immigration and process of assimilation as to be terrified of change.
Ultimately, Josefina can be said to be illustrative of the possibility for a new mestizaje reality that will involve the bridging of the cultural chasm between new immigrants and longtime residents, “us” and them,” even in these difficult, divisive times; of the possibility for people to see themselves in others, or, as Alfaro himself has put it: “to say we are Greek; we are Chicano; we are American. We are all of those things, but we belong to the world” (Derose 2015). This new mestizaje, this
Delikonstantinidou 196
“belonging to the world,” however, requires embracing the world in all its uncertainty, insecurity, and incompleteness, as a process of “perpetual becoming”
(Bataille 1988) that necessitates constant change, or at least the ability and inclination for change, whether minor or major. Josefina exemplifies this very stance. At some point, she says to Medea quite revealingly: “I changed my life once. I can do it again.
I came to this country like everyone—to survive. It’s simple really, you are hungry and you go where there is food. I didn’t know you had to become a new person to do that” (Alfaro, Mojada 56). Josefina does not become a new person in the new world, but she does reinvent aspects of the person she once was in order to survive, and even prosper, in the new environment.
On a slightly different note, the comic relief of Josefina’s and Tita’s quips serve a more important function than releasing the emotional tensions to which the main action gives rise. They operate as a kind of safety-valve for wider feelings of social incongruity. Reflecting class and race, the humor in these quips is founded on a syncretization of barrio Chicano/a and mainstream U.S. culture. Shakira and her dressing habits, the eccentricities of the rich in Bel Air, Payless and King Taco businesses are some of the pop references that get mixed within the framework of the play. Thus, they point to “an anxiety concerning the mingling of cultures,” “the anxiety over hybridity and assimilation,” present in both Euro American and
Chicano/a culture and, at least partly, deriving from “[t]he tension between holding onto tradition and assimilating into a new culture [which] marks a struggle with identity” (Powers 201-2), or rather, a struggle over the issue of which and what kinds of identity one is going to assume, in both cultures and in their different constituencies.
Delikonstantinidou 197
At the same time, all of these “comic pop references punctuate and challenge the class divisions and stereotypes that contribute to the marginalization of working class Latinos[/as]” (202), inasmuch as they are embedded, or integrated, in the backstories of the characters and in their critical commentaries of U.S. society, hence revealing the person behind the stereotype as well as the socially conditioned character of the stereotype. For instance, at one point Josefina tells Medea: “I think every Mexican woman should have a big ass. I do! We should look like the old country—plump and full of possibility” (Alfaro, Mojada 19). Her comment resonates strongly in the light of Josefina’s struggles to become a mother. Earlier, in the beginning of the play, Hason, trying to comfort Medea about the meager pay she receives for her work, made this promise to her: “I promise that when I am in charge, my wife is going to stay home and get fat and make my tamales all day, real ones made with lard” (9). In this specific context, being plump translates into being strong, healthy, and prosperous, qualities not taken for granted within Latino/a immigrant reality, within and without the world of the play. Such slices of Latino/a immigrant experience can prove to be very instructive for the play’s audiences, to the extent that they reveal and familiarize the latter with the person and (hi)story behind received preconceptions, the human actor behind socioculturally conditioned roles, the human face of the “other.”
Admittedly, then, the humor in these instances “feeds on the anxieties surrounding class and racial stereotypes and the social and economic obstacles faced by many U.S. communities,” and is operative in the play as a “poetic tool” that helps
“dismantle these stereotypes and construct in their place a bridge between classes and cultures” (Powers 202). More than that, the play’s humor also serves as a bridge between the unswerving traditionalism that Medea exemplifies and the unconditional
Delikonstantinidou 198 pursuit of the American Dream that Hason does. Taken together, the use of
Spanglish—touched upon earlier in this chapter, Josefina’s character, and the play’s humor find fault with the unforgiving exclusivity of aslpects of both the “old” and the
“new” world. They advocate, alternatively, for a bridging, inclusive, “en medio,” as
Tita puts it (Alfaro, Mojada 5), or a mestizo “in the middle,” sentiment and position of syncrisis and negotiation, both in the private and in the public realm.
On the level of the narrative, the play’s final sequences offer a full-fledged view of the toxicity of both the unquestioning faith in tradition and in the promises of the “new.” Following the revelation of Hason’s and Armida’s marriage, their plans to adopt Acan, and Medea’s eviction by Armida, Medea uses the twenty-four hours she has secured from Armida under false pretenses to exact her revenge. She charges Tita with the task of presenting to Armida her “sign of gratitude for the few hours in this house” that the latter has granted them: a box containing a dress made “of a fabric that glimmers and shines, something with movement for her” (Alfaro, Mojada 77); a charmed dress on which she has placed “un mal de ojo,” an evil wish or charm
(literally, “the evil eye”). Tita tries to dissuade her (78), but Medea has already drifted past the point of no return. Unlike her ancient Greek counterpart, this Medea does not exactly trick Hason into believing she has acquiesced to his wishes and plans.
Whereas in an earlier (their penultimate) confrontation she had violently opposed him, now, in their last encounter, she mildly expresses her disagreement with his view on what is best for their family’s and, specifically, for their son’s future, and responds to his promise that he will come back for her with a meaningful and, as we find out in hindsight, ominous: “Of course you will . . . I’ll be waiting” (79).
It is pertinent to note, at this juncture, that the best future for Acan that he and
Armida are willing to provide him is conceived of by Hason as synonymous with an
Delikonstantinidou 199 individualistic Americanized (or Anglicized) life, whose defining parameters are affluence and social status. According to this future scenario, Acan will most probably grow to reject his origins, his past, the Mexican part of who he is. The only other alternative left for Acan, if he does not follow his father, is, as Josefina a bit earlier stressed to Medea, a life in the impoverished and long neglected inner-city where it will be only a matter of time to “lose him, to gangs or drugs or worse” (73).
Experiencing marginalization in school and society at large, and with conventional opportunities afforded to youth out of reach, he will most certainly undergo cholo/a- ization; that is, initiation and indoctrination into the barrio gang subculture.117
Moreover, feeling neither quite Mexican nor quite American, he will in time grow to despise aspects of his identity and, therefore, probably himself as their composite.
Whichever scenario comes to pass, Medea’s loss of Acan is a near certainty. The murder of her son, then, should be seen in light of this conundrum which imparts a sense of inevitability to her choice to commit her final deplorable act, thus enhancing the play’s tragic import. Although this Medea does not articulate her self-division in the terms that previous Medeas did, ruminating on her act of vengeance and on the reasons for it, the tragic conflict of values that drives the play forward to its horrible ending is anything but lost to us.
At the same time that Hason leaves the charged scene of his confrontation with Medea, Tita re-enters, returning from Armida’s house, “dazed and in shock,” dripping with blood, and narrates the woman’s horrendous, literally explosive death upon wearing the cursed dress (a death reenacted at the same time at another part of the stage). Hason, the only witness to her agonizing end, weeps for her “like a little
117. We will explore the concept and reality of the “cholo/a” further within the context of the subsequent chapters on Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey and Electricidad.
Delikonstantinidou 200 boy” (Alfaro Mojada 80). Now alone on stage, Medea summons Acan and he enters,
“looking fully assimilated.” Their final, heartbreaking exchange is worth quoting:
MEDEA: Do you want to live with her?
[He doesn’t say anything.]
You can tell me.
Do you want to live with her?
ACAN: Yes.
MEDEA: Go upstairs and get your bag . . .
ACAN: Thank you, Mami! (81)
And then he excitedly runs up the stairs. Medea slowly follows after him, gets the machete from the yard, and goes inside the house. Acan’s screams are cut short by the
“bloody hacking sound” of the machete, followed by Hason’s screams. Both he and
Tita enter in a state of desperation to find Medea walking out of the house, covered in blood, and holding the machete. She leaves the yard as a frantic Hason enters the house in search of Acan. His doleful cry seals the play’s final scene. Mojada’s epilogue recalls its beginning: Tita performs a mystical incantation in the yard holding a pair of banana palms. Only now, her prayer is interrupted by the sound of El Guaco emanating from Medea, perched on a corner of the roof, wearing a dress made of
Guaco feathers. Her wings make a loud flapping sound as she looks out over the barrio preparing for flight, and a moment later she is gone, the sound of a helicopter drowning out the sound of her flight (83).
Delikonstantinidou 201
The awe-inspiring last moment leaves us grappling with uncomfortable, even
disturbing, questions: Where is flying to? What world is there for people like this
Medea? Is there a land that can receive her, a different world that does not turn
dispossessed, invisible women into Medeas? We could suggest that this is a world as
of yet not actualized, but certainly imagined and given impetus by projects like
Mojada, whose radical political impulse, an impulse anticipating sociopolitical
change (and) tuned to a tragic key, has been directed in a most immediate manner
toward real-life inner-city communities of and in crisis. If, in La Malinche and in The
Hungry Woman, it is the death/sacrifice of Martín and Chac-Mool, respectively,
which heralds the possibility of social, cultural, and political transformation, in
Mojada it has been, in large measure, the play’s production itself that has sought to
function as harbinger of healing change.
III. Mojada as Social Theatre and as Therapy
Reviewer Roberto Corona lamented the fact that, although “[e]verything about
the script would suggest that it is written for a Chican@ [sic], or at least someone
from ‘el barrio’ or Boyle Heights, where the play takes place,” and although “Alfaro
made Mojada about his people, and he made sure the cast consisted of his people,”
“the production was staged in Malibu, across town from the place it brings to life, and
at an unaffordable price for the people it depict.” Is Alfaro writing for a Malibu,
predominantly Caucasian and upped middle class audience? the reviewer asks (291).
As if responding to the question Corona raises, Jayson A. Morrison, writes in his own
review that Alfaro’s and his team’s choice to stage Mojada at the Getty Villa was
actually a strategic one.
Delikonstantinidou 202
Medea’s and Hason’s ramshackle, bedraggled rental home “was clearly out of place amid the grandeur of the Getty Villa’s skene and the affluent homes surrounding it,” Morrison elaborates. “The visual contrast, combined with Alfaro’s focus on immigrants’ economic exploitation, invited spectators to ponder how their leisure and privilege are made possible by the overwork” and, often, by the tragedies of others.
Transporting spectators to a locale in which they might otherwise not tread (279),
Mojada transposes the ordinary media lens through which the U.S. public views issues related to immigration, assimilation, and the barrio reality, while re-telling an ancient tragic myth in barrio terms. By staging this dramatic mythic revision in one of the city’s most prestigious theatres, the team of Mojada’s creation and production shows this Medea’s tragedy, which is at the same time a new immigrant’s tragedy, to be as much a part of the wider Los Angeles and of the U.S. as of the play’s Boyle
Heights’ neighborhood.
Yet, Mojada not only acknowledges, addresses, and invites spectators to do the same with the sort of identity crises that are related to the immigration experience and assimilation process and that conduce to the fomentation of violence in barrio communities. It does not only function extra-diegetically, as well as intra-diegetically, as we saw earlier in this chapter, to bridge classes and cultures, thus contributing to the process of working through the said crises and the attendant violent ramifications.
Most importantly, Mojada becomes quite literally a forum that fosters dialogue on the issues the play explores; a dialogue exhibiting strong political and (socio)therapeutic inclinations toward dealing with these issues, insofar as it is overtly directed toward mobilizing, if not effecting, healing (and) sociopolitical change at the level of the community with a view to wider application and a more far-reaching impact. In other words, this is a dialogue that seeks to channel the political and therapeutic potential
Delikonstantinidou 203 the play mines from and through the tragic mode toward the contemporary Latino/a
(and broader) American contexts that Mojada attends to and into which it is anchored.
“Social theatre projects,” Lodewyck and Monoson observe, “frequently utilize nonconventional venues instead of traditional theatres and performance spaces.”
However, “the venue is not what defines them. Instead, the key factors are their partnerships and collaborations, attention to social goals and arts-driven processes”
(654). In the Mojada project, a number of theatrical as well as other production- related choices were made so as to advance the social goals the project had set from the very beginning and sustain the partnerships from which it had first sprang and through which it developed, and on which we touched early in this chapter. Reaching out to and interacting with audiences and with inner-city Latino/a communities, in particular, became an integral element of the project, thereby creating a social theatre instance that stimulated change.
Laura Covault’s study of the play’s reception informs us that a talk was organized at the Getty Villa in the wake of the production, led by Alfaro and Los
Angeles Mojada director Jessica Kubzansky. “The seats were filled with teachers and audience members, most of whom had seen the production,” Covault reports, and she continues: “Many of the teachers attended the production with their classes and incorporated Medea into their curriculum. . . . Alfaro has gone to great lengths to reach out to students with the play” (55). The program that was designed for Los
Angeles was, in fact, not very different from the one in Chicago, insofar as it also invested heavily in the engagement of the youth. While working on the Chicago
Mojada, Alfaro “arranged for copies of Euripides’s Medea in Spanish to be donated to each student at a bilingual middle school,” which “has a very large immigrant community.” Alfaro later reported that “the students devoured the play like it was
Delikonstantinidou 204
‘Harry Potter.’ They then attended Alfaro’s production and participated in discussions” (56). Within the context of the similar Los Angeles Mojada program, participants also shared their experiences of the reception of the play on the part of students:
A Los Angeles Unified School district teacher in attendance at the talk
discussed the relevance of the adaptation and how the differences in
Medea and Hason’s degree of acculturation in the form of Medea
clinging to the past and Hason only looking to the future is something
that resonates with first and second-generation Hispanic students.
Mary Louise Hart, a Getty museum associate curator, . . . said [that
Mojada] gives a potential for understanding and bringing community
together. . . . (56-7)
Precisely in order to bring the community together, Alfaro “went so far as to offer free readings and events connected to the play in East Los Angeles” (58), so that its residents could be informed about and encouraged to participate in the Mojada project, as play and forum. His call did not go unheeded.
Mojada brought home to the participants the struggle of the immigrant, letting them wrestle with Medea’s struggle so that they could assume a “whole different point of view about it” (Covault 57). Making sense of Mojada became for the participants, creators and spectators, students and teachers, community members and non-members alike, a way of both seeing “ourselves in our most dire moments” and of seeing ourselves in the Greek tragic myths (Alfaro, Lecture). In other words, it became a way of connecting to some of the most uncomely and tramautic aspects of humanity and of the world, past and present, recognize them as such, so that we can
Delikonstantinidou 205 learn to deal with them more effectively than we currently do, in keeping with the
“teachings” of the tragic mode and its radical, because radically self-reflexive and self-critical, ethical and political potencies. Given the fact that, as we have suggested elsewhere, the paradigm of PTSD “has been expanded and analogized far beyond the battlefield” (Farrell 6), we could safely extrapolate the argument that Jonathan Shay, renown psychiatrist and researcher of PTSD, has mounted with regard to war/combat trauma to also fit the traumas that we have addressed here. We could, indeed, claim that, if one of the ways for the community to heal traumas related to immigration and assimilation is to communalize them, “being able to tell the story to someone who is listening and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community” (2), then Mojada certainly takes a decisive step toward that direction.
In advocating personal and community responsibility for a process of healing and sociopolitical transformation to be mobilized, Mojada, as play and social theatre project, teaches young and less young audiences that “[r]etelling stories of trauma is crucial not only to the recovery and social reintegration of the individual victims, but also to social responsibility and restorative justice. Acknowledging the trauma present in the community, in its members and its practices, can promote healing and solidarity and prevent revictimization” (Kilburn 72), at least and at first, within the context of that community, or “from below.” It could even set off, or provide the grounds for, a process of sociotherapeutic change that, beginning at the level of the community, and with “coalitionary recognition of what we share with each other and what is nonetheless specific and different in our experiences of oppression” (L. Pérez 139), could extend to the super-structural level. Alfaro’s project attempted quite successfully to do exactly that. It grew to become a productive form of immediate, diret and urgent, public discourse or forum of storytelling and listening, and even a
Delikonstantinidou 206 kind of social theatre workshop, and thus an incubator for social processes of healing or psychosocial recovery and, perhaps, even reinvention of at least some parts of who we are now.
With respect to this last point, and although Josefina’s sensibility and position in the play is not offered by Alfaro as a definitive solution to the problems and dilemmas of assimilation, as we have already seen, her forward impulse to survive and prevail in an uncertain, insecure, incomplete world, which is rippled throughout with crises, by means of constantly diagnosing, navigating, negotiating, syncretizing, and, ultimately, modifying her self and her place in that world, exemplifies a mestizaje “trained” in the ways of the tragic mode that has much to offer us in terms of how to “belong to the world,” to evoke Alfaro’s phrase. Yet, besides her resilience, the solidarity that she exhibits throughout offers invaluable insights into the notion that healing sociopolitical change is a labor “that we must undertake collectively and in solidarity”; a notion located at the heart of decolonizing politics (L. Pérez 122).
Ultimately, through it all (text, performance, and production history), and paying heed to Tita’s cue, Mojada emerges as a viable way of politically and therapeutically meeting each other en medio, in the middle.
Delikonstantinidou 207
The scapegoat, itself beyond speech and sociality, becomes a
judgment on that [social] order in its very being, embodying what it excludes, a sign of the humanity which it expels as so much poison. It
is in this sense that it bears the seeds of revolutionary agency in its
sheer passivity; for anything still active and engaged, however
dissidently, would still be complicit with the polis, speaking its language and thus unable to put it into question as a whole. Only the
silence of the scapegoat will do this.
(Eagleton 279)
Delikonstantinidou 208
Part Two
Mestizo Oedipus
Delikonstantinidou 209
I. Preliminary Remarks
In Part One of the present study, we adverted to one of the most tragically self-
divided, ambiguous, and—perhaps because of these very attributes—enduringly
famous figures of ancient Greek myth, Medea; an “always and already hybrid” figure,
to use Orrells’, Bhambra’s and Roynon’s phrase (13), firmly lodged in the mythical-
cultural imaginary of the western and non-western world. We saw that, due to its
responsiveness to a variety of sociopolitical exigencies and ethical issues, Medea’s
myth has received a number of variant readings and retellings, including more
contemporary feminist, postcolonial, and queer ones, across time and space.
Interestingly, since the late nineteenth century, Medea has become one of the most
popular Greek tragic figures on the U.S. stage, while, from the late nineteen-seventies
onwards, a rash of new Medeas, attending to gender as well as to ethnoracial
concerns, has had considerable impact on country’s theatrical scene. Yet, whereas due
critical attention has been granted to recent ethnic Medeas, especially to the “black
Medeas” of the post-seventies U.S. stage, the “brown Medeas” of contemporary
Latino/a theatre have drawn much less scholarly interest.
Attempting a contribution to the diversity of Medea’s reception in the U.S., we
examined three “brown Medeas,” La Malinche, by Carlos Morton, The Hungry
Woman: A Mexican Medea, by Cherríe Moraga, and Mojada: A Medea in Los
Angeles, by Luis Alfaro, as important instances of fin-de-siècle and post-millennium
Latino/a mythic revisionary drama, representing a later and distinct phase in U.S.
cultural and identity politics. We further considered the fact that, besides the myth’s
currency, largely on account of its notable tragic import, it is also Medea’s affinities
to the Latin American mythohistorical and mythical figures of La Malinche and La
Llorona what renders her myth even more relevant, compelling, and inviting of
Delikonstantinidou 210 revisionary treatment for Latino/a theatre artists. In light of that relation, we discussed the ways in which—at least two of—the mythoplays tap into the so-called Medea–
Malinche–Llorona paradigm, thus giving a more inclusive twist to the concept and discourse of mestizaje that undergirds their creation and production.
Additionally, we examined how, in recontextualizing the Medea myth in an early post-Conquest, in a dystopian post-Chicano Movement, and in a familiar contemporary U.S. Latino/a context respectively, the mythoplays not only ground key points of Latin/o/a American history in the said paradigm, but also mobilize a radical reconsideration of that very history. Together, the three chapters comprising Part One show that revis(ion)ing Medea, correlating her with figures/icons originating in indigenous mythico-cultural material, and remotivating her and their actions becomes, in the works under examination, a way of confronting and coming to some sort of uneasy terms with the past and cultural memory, the Conquest and its legacy, and even a way of moving forward. To put it differently, the three mestiza “brown
Medeas” can be understood as an attempt at working through the traumatic encounter of the Conquest and its post-traumatic reverberations throughout the history of
Latin/o/a Americans up to the turbulent present.
In the study’s second part, we turn our attention to a myth that rivals—in longevity and fame that of Medea; namely, the myth of Oedipus. Structurally similar to the previous part, this one offers an account of Oedipus’ mythical biography, its mythographic “journey” down the centuries and onto the American (specifically the
U.S.) stage, as well as the myth’s abiding purchase on American theatre practitioners and audiences. This account leads us to an analysis of Alfaro’s take on the tragic myth of Oedipus in his Oedipus el Rey as it pertains to the contemporary Latino/a experience in the U.S.
Delikonstantinidou 211
As was the case with his Mojada, with Oedipus el Rey Alfaro offers another
instance of syncretic theatre—one of the most effective ways of “decolonizing the
stage” according to Christopher Balme (1999)—that combines spiritual and religious
references, cultures and performance techniques, in an effort to distance Latino/a
theatre from conventional monocultural theatre and illuminate the possibilities that a
mestiza mythopoesis attuned to the tragic mode presents for the Latino/a world and
beyond. In the course of Part Two, we examine Oedipus el Rey for the ethical and
political statements offered both within the play and by the play itself (in terms of its
production history), as we earlier did with Mojada and as we will do with Alfaro’s
Electricidad whose examination forms the focal point of the study’s next part.
II. The Tragic Myth of Oedipus
One is very likely to find oneself at a loss when it comes to presenting
Oedipus. To choose from the abundance of knowledge that has been generated in his
name, or with direct or indirect reference to it, and structure the selected material, so
that a cohesive and modestly comprehensive record of his career, within and without
the mythic cosmos, can be offered, may seem like an overwhelming task. In the
present section, then, we tread the fertile and much-trodden ground of his meaning-
laden myth carefully, and fully aware of its vastness and thorniness. The present
account of the tragic myth of Oedipus is necessarily selective due to considerations of
space, but, hopefully, it makes for an adequate fulcrum upon which the subsequent
analysis of Oedipus el Rey can be built.
Arguably, the first question we should try to attend to is: Why Oedipus? Why
has his mythical figure commanded the interest, attention, and even, in some cases,
Delikonstantinidou 212 the reverence of artists, scholars, and “laymen” from the earliest antiquity until our contemporary times? Why has Oedipus been seen and treated by so many as a figure that “speak[s] powerfully of the human condition,” thus claiming “the largest kingdom in present-day thought” (Edmunds, Oedipus 1), compared to other iconic male heroes originating in myth?
We can begin to tentatively approach these questions in search of answers by means of an overview of the Oedipus myth. Yet, a qualification is in order here. As was the case with Medea’s myth, and as will be the case with the myths of Electra and
Iphigenia to follow, an overview of Oedipus’ myth is coterminous with an overview of the myth’s variants, since there exists no authentic version of the myth. To argue for “the” Oedipus myth is to argue for one specific version of the myth out of many, set apart from the rest for particular reasons to serve particular purposes. Contrary to what one might expect, Sophocles’ dramatic treatments of it in his three Theban plays, namely, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone,118 to whom the myth admittedly owes at least part of its longevity and popularity, cannot be claimed to be anything more than variants, despite their literary merit and the fact that they were thought of as the common sources for the myth up until relatively recently. The same applies to Homer’s Odyssey, the earliest—albeit only ten-line short (11.271-
80)—recorded version of the Oedipus myth.119 That, too, is one out of numerous instantiations of the continuous work on the Oedipus myth, to summon Hans
118. It is important to note that Sophocles’ Theban tragedies do not constitute a self-consistent trilogy in the generic sense. Although all three are elaborations of a single mythic cycle, they were written and performed at different times—Antigone was the first, Oedipus Tyrannus the second, and Oedipus at Colonus the third to be written. 119. In that passage, Odysseus recounts the story of his descent into the underworld where he met Epicaste (another name for Jocasta), and, apropos of this encounter, refers to some of the events of Oedipus’ life.
Delikonstantinidou 213
Blumenberg’s famous phrase back to our discussion (1985). Having clarified this important bit, let us take a plunge into Oedipus’ deep cultural and discursive ocean.
Imagined as a mythic complex, as has been suggested also with regard to
Medea’s myth, and similarly to hers producing a figure so varied that it eschews uncontroversial characterization, Oedipus’ myth can be said to comprise three main layers: the broad nexus of “Greek myth,” accommodating a host of other mythical figures and their stories that interrelate with Oedipus in one way or another; all stories in which he figures prominently and their constitutive mythic episodes (both different versions of the same episode and “a running biography” of many, Graf’s “vertical” and “horizontal tradition” (21)); as well as the wealth of his myth’s distinct manifestations (in whatever medium) appearing over the centuries, or rather, the millennia.
According to Lowell Edmunds’ conjecture, the tradition that brought forth the condensed version of Oedipus’ myth in Homer’s epic (probably the story line of an epic about Oedipus that is now lost),120 reaches back into the second millennium B.C.
And, despite what one may be led to assume given the current canonical status of the ancient tragedians’ treatments of the myth, it did not have any more “canonical fixity” in the fifth century B.C. than it has today. Sophocles himself was “working with slightly different versions of the myth each time” he used it as primary source for his aforementioned Theban plays (2). Additionally, a popular tradition invested in the
120. As a matter of fact, there existed (at least) three epic poems telling the story of the family of the Labdacids in the archaic period: the Oedipodeia (centering on Oedipus’ life), the Thebaid (centering on the events prior and during the Theban War fought between Eteocles and Polynices and the latter’s six Argive allies), and the Epigoni (revolving around the events of the second Theban War waged against Thebes, ten years later, by a confederation of Argive princes, the sons of the Argive heroes of the first war). More information on this point can be found in Edmunds (2006).
Delikonstantinidou 214 oral transmission of the myth run parallel to the poetic tradition,121 it was “attached to hero cults honoring him,” and persisted down into the fifth century B.C. and well beyond.
In fact, Oedipus’ story “flourished as a folktale in oral traditions in modern times,” as Edmunds reports, earning a place in standard indexes of folktale types, under the “Oedipus type,” which is made up of—now quite familiar—motifs, or minimal narrative units (3). Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (1981) identify these motifs, which, according to Terence Turner, correspond to “social (human) acts” or
“meaningful act[s] with an explicit or implicit purpose” (132), thus:
Parricide prophecy
Mother-incest prophecy
Exposure of child to prevent fulfillment of parricide prophecy
Compassionate executioner
Exposed or abandoned child rescued
Exposed infant at strange king’s court
Parricide prophecy unwittingly fulfilled
Mother-son incest
Using the above list of motifs diagnostically, as it were, in order to determine which of them serve as constructing units of different versions of the Oedipus myth, entails both defining the specific form that the motifs assume in each version and identifying new motifs added or supplanted by different interpreters of the myth.
121. Perhaps, both traditions constituted representatives “of one [double] ancient tradition amongst others, for the Oedipus story,” Edmunds hypothesizes (The Ancient Legend 22).
Delikonstantinidou 215
Apparently, in crafting his own versions of the Oedipus myth, Sophocles added a number of motifs to the list (perhaps re-using older ones or inventing new).122
In Oedipus Tyrannus, a play intensely focused on the hero’s developing identity, the
Greek tragedian elaborated on an added motif, namely, the discovery of the hero’s crimes; in his Oedipus at Colonus, which, like Oedipus Tyrannus, “scales the myth down to a short, independent unit of action,” Sophocles expanded on the tale’s ending
(left blank in Aarne’s and Thompson’s list); and, in his Antigone, named after
Oedipus’ daughter/sister, he focused on the aftermath of the said ending and its repercussions for Oedipus’ surviving family members (Edmunds, Oedipus 41). Let us note parenthetically, again by way of Edmunds, that Antigone, a marginal character in the archaic sources of the myth, became, because of Sophocles’ eponymous tragedy, one of the few to vie with Oedipus in the grip of the modern imagination. “Such,” apparently, “is the power of Sophocles over the history of the Oedipus myth,” the scholar opines (Oedipus 41), and the myth’s reception history by no means disproves him.
Acknowledging the dangers involved in subdividing the myth’s continuum, as well as “the inability to eliminate subjectivity and arbitrariness” when doing so, Debra
A. Moddelmog identifies the following as component parts, integral motifs or mythemes of the renowned Sophoclean variants of Oedipus’ myth (12). We reproduce them here, in an effort to enable understanding of the currency of Sophocles’ treatments of the hero’s mythical life pattern, through a relatively uncomplicated schematization of it:
122. Using tragedy, the new medium for the myth of Oedipus, all tragic poets contributed, in one way or another, to the motifs comprising the myth, thus raising the question of innovation; that is, whether it is “fabrication out of whole cloth” that we can detect in their peculiar treatments of the myth, or “variation on traditional [although not currently available] material” (Edmunds, Oedipus 54).
Delikonstantinidou 216
1. An oracle warns Laius that he will be murdered by a son born of him and
his wife Jocasta.
2. The son’s feet are fastened together, and he is given to a shepherd [initially
a house servant] to leave in the Theban hills.
3. The shepherd disobeys the order and gives the baby to a fellow shepherd
who delivers him to King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth.
4. The child, named Oedipus, grows up as the son of Polybus and Merope.
5. Inquiring about his parentage, Oedipus learns from the oracle that he is
destined to kill his father and marry his mother.
6. Attempting to circumvent the oracle’s prophecy, Oedipus leaves [or, more
accurately, decides to not return to] Corinth.
7. At a crossroads, Oedipus has a run-in with a man, who unknown to him is
his father, and his attendants and murders them all [rather, he believes he
has murdered them all, although one, who happens to be the shepherd to
whom his father had delivered him as an infant to be killed, has survived]
8. Oedipus encounters the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes and answers her
riddle, thus causing her suicide and saving the city.
9. Oedipus marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, who unknown to both of
them is his mother.
10. Jocasta and Oedipus have four children two sons [Eteocles and Polynices]
and two daughters [Antigone and Ismene].
11. After reigning peacefully for many years, Oedipus must deal with a plague
that infects Thebes.
12. The oracle relates that the unpunished murderer of Laius is the cause of the
plague.
Delikonstantinidou 217
13. Oedipus initiates an investigation to find the person who killed Laius.
14. Informed of the death of Polybus and of his real relationship to this king,
Oedipus begins to search for his origins.
15. Oedipus simultaneously discovers the truth of his past and that he is the
criminal he seeks.
16. Oedipus’ mother-wife, Jocasta, commits suicide.
17. Oedipus blinds himself with Jocasta’s brooches.
18. Oedipus is exiled from Thebes and cared for by his daughter Antigone.
19. Oedipus becomes favored by the gods, so that good fortune comes to those
who protect him and suffering to those who threaten him.
20. Oedipus refuses to help either of his sons, who are fighting for the throne
of Thebes, and in fact curses them to death.
21. Befriended by Theseus [king of Athens], Oedipus dies in a mysterious way
outside Athens, in [sic] Colonus [more specifically, in the sacred grove of
the Furies, the Erinyes or Eumenides of the Greek pantheon]. (12-3)
However neat the above schematization may seem, as many a scholar has pointed out, there are inconsistencies among the three Sophoclean plays that engage Oedipus’ myth. For instance, by the end of Oedipus Tyrannus, it is not certain whether Oedipus will go into exile or stay housebound in Thebes;123 in Oedipus at Colonus, he dies and is buried at the titular site after been in exile for a considerable length of time; whereas, in Antigone, he is said to have died and to have been buried soon after his self-mutilation in Thebes.
123. In Euripides’ Phoenician Women, Oedipus lives under house arrest in Thebes some time after the events that constitute the dramatic core of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.
Delikonstantinidou 218
Rather than brushed off, these inconsistencies are to be taken, we could suggest, as proof of the myth’s productivity or, as Moddelmog puts it, of its unique properties of “intertextuality and openness to interpretation” (11). It is variation, after all, that constitutes the force driving the Oedipus myth, its longevity and popularity, throughout history, rendering Oedipus “the only Greek hero of whom it could be said that he is as much post-classical as classical” (Edmunds, Oedipus 8). This is a premise of major significance not only for the purposes of the present part, but for the study as a whole, and one that usefully evokes, and lends credence to, Goff’s and Simpson’s
“model of pushing and pulling” for the reception of the Greek sources (Crossroads
53), on which we touched in the introduction to this study.
Still, it cannot be overemphasized that, despite the unabated prestige of
Sophocles’ variants, especially his Oedipus Tyrannus, and despite the “vast and endless influence” they have exercised upon our intellect and imagination for more than two and a half millennia, lending Oedipus an “exemplary status” (Edmunds, The
Ancient Legend 2), they are only some among many already known, and in oral and written circulation, in the fifth century B.C. As Edmunds claims, “[a]lthough we lack any comparably full source for these other variants . . . their existence can be ascertained from fragments of and passages in other poets, from Euripides’
Phoenician Women [as well as from Aeschylus’ versions, especially from his Seven
Against Thebes124], and from the mythographical tradition,” meaning “the principal compilers of the Greek myths and legends, Apollodorus and Hyginus, and also other post-classical writers who mention the Greek myths for one reason or another, for
124. Aeschylus’ tragedy Seven Against Thebes is the only one that survives entire from a trilogy that also included Laius and Oedipus (surviving in fragments)—it was, in fact, the last of the three plays to be presented, while the satyr play that came next was suggestively entitled Sphinx.
Delikonstantinidou 219 example, Diodorus Sicilus and Pausanias” (6).125 Some of these other sources, the earliest, archaic ones, provide a four-generational account of the Labdacid myth, beginning with the shadowy figure of Oedipus’ grandfather, Labdacus, including
Laius’ and Oedipus’ stories, narrating the story of the conflict between Oedipus’ sons
(the great Theban War, probably “the high point of Labdacid myth”), and extending as far as to set forth the exploits of the Epigoni, the next generation (Edmunds,
Oedipus 11).
To complicate the matter even further, one of the later sources by Peisander attributes the origins of the sufferings that befell Oedipus not to some oracle and a divine will animating it, but to the curse that Pelops of Pisa laid upon Laius when, as a consequence of Laius’ abduction and rape of his son, Chrysippus, the boy took his own life out of shame (Aeschylus’ Theban trilogy abides by the archaic tradition of the family curse) (14). In fact, the Delphic oracle and Apollo as agent and divine power behind it (the so-called “Apollonization” of the myth) acquire a central role in
Oedipus’ myth as its motivational force much later, after Delphi became the oracular center of Greece (probably after the sixth century B.C.), Edmunds documents.
However, the mythographical tradition tended to meld the curse and the oracle when it wanted to acknowledge both (The Ancient Legend 8).
With regard to other aspects of the myth, different sources provide different versions of the mutilation and exposure episodes, of Oedipus’ rescue, youth, the reason why he went to consult the Delphi oracle as a young man, and his return to
Boeotia, as well as of his encounter with the Sphinx—an encounter which motivates
Oedipus’ marriage to the widowed queen Jocasta—whom he leads to destruction
125. We know that another poet, Xenocles, had composed a tragedy about Oedipus and presented it in 415 B.C., while only a few fragments remain of Euripides’ own Oedipus.
Delikonstantinidou 220 either directly, by slaying the monster, or indirectly, by answering with the evocative
“man” the famous riddle she poses. Edmunds reports that the Sphinx’s riddle “is perhaps attested for the first time in an inscription on a fragmentary vase of 520-510
B.C.,” while its “complete form is preserved in The Learned Banquet of Athenaeus
(second c. A.D.)”:
There walks on Land a creature of two feet and four feet, which has a
single voice,
And it also has three feet; alone of the animals on earth it changes its
nature,
Of animals on the earth, in the sky, and in the sea.
When it walks propped on the most feet,
Then is the speed of its limps least. (qtd. in Edmunds, Oedipus 16)126
Furthermore, some sources, including Homer’s Odyssey, mention no offspring produced by the union of Oedipus and Jocasta, while, elsewhere, another woman,
Euryganeia, is referred to as Oedipus’ second wife with whom he had children, his previous marriage to Jocasta having been childless. In others, Oedipus’ reign continues even after his crimes are discovered, and, presumably, after he has undergone some form of purification, while the very manner in which the discovery of Oedipus’ identity, and thus of his crimes, comes about also varies among sources— as do his reasons for later cursing his sons, although most accounts converge on some form of impropriety or dishonor perpetrated against Oedipus by them.
126. Edmunds also reports that the riddle “has led a footloose, international existence,” having been recorded in diverse places around the world, while various sources citing different riddles prove that “it was not the only riddle of which the Sphinx was capable” (17).
Delikonstantinidou 221
Moreover, the three traditions that concern the death of Jocasta present her as hanging herself after recognition of Oedipus’ identity (as in the myth’s Sophoclean version), killing herself with a sword over the dead bodies of her sons during the first
Theban War (in Euripides’ Phoenician Women), and being killed by Oedipus himself, respectively. Three are also the traditions that refer to Oedipus’ blinding (of the manner in which it happened and the agent of the action) and three the ones that refer to his death. According to the latter three, he dies in Thebes, either through self- blinding immediately after the recognition of his true identity, or years later in an unspecified battle, while, alternatively, he dies at Colonus after years of living as an exile—this is the tradition established by Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Very interestingly, “[i]n this tragedy, Oedipus foretells the power he will have after death, and his burial suggests hero cult,” yet, “[t]he honor due to the dead Oedipus was not
Sophocles’ invention, but had already taken the form of funeral games in the epic version of the legend” (Edmunds, The Ancient Legend 20), which, in time, “evolved into the Olympic games and similar Panhellenic festivals” (Oedipus 19).127
As might be expected, the many traditions that concern Oedipus’ life pattern complicate his biography and his figure to such an extent that it becomes impossible to delineate a straightforward overview of either of them. Yet, complications emerge with regard to the figure of Oedipus not only as a result of the labyrinthine character of the overarching mythographic tradition that revolves around him, but also as a result of the wealth of interpretations—often quite conflicting—that the most important mythic variant of Oedipus to date, Sophocles’ polysemous Oedipus
127. According to Pausanias, a second cult of Oedipus, rival to that of Colonus, was founded in Athens, on Aeropagus, whose founders, purportedly, “had brought Oedipus’ bones, like a saint’s relics, from Thebes.” The important thing to note about these cults is that the stories attached to them, as Edmunds reminds us, allow us to follow the course of Oedipus’ myth down into historical times (Oedipus 29).
Delikonstantinidou 222
Tyrannus—on which Alfaro’s revision conspicuously draws—has spurred since as early as the fourth century B.C. with Aristotle’s Poetics. The one trait that appears to be constant, though, “a primitive, pervasive trait in the myth,” which “supervene(s) unexpectedly upon a hitherto prosperous Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy,” as
Edmunds puts it (Oedipus 29), is no other than suffering. Let us note, for reasons of clarification, that a summary of all the aspects of the tragic play that have functioned as stimulators of debate, such as its very title (why tyrannus or tyrannos and not
“king”?), the issue of seer Tiresias’ and the Old Herdsman’s relationship to Oedipus
(in many accounts theorized as the hero’s shadowy doubles), Jocasta’s knowledge of the truth or lack thereof, the riddle-posing Sphinx and Oedipus’ answer (was it “man” or “Oedipus”?), or Oedipus’ relation to the spatial dimensions of his surrounding world, are beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, some controversial points that will come to bear on our ensuing discussion in Chapter Five are touched upon in what follows.
As the well-known classicist Charles Segal claims in his seminal overview of the interpretative tradition attached to Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic
Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge (2001), the tragedy stands as one of literature’s
“most searching examinations of the problem of meaning and suffering,” in its condensed and austere presentation of “a kind of nightmare vision of a world suddenly turned upside down” (3). Segal’s concise and quite illuminating summary of the play is worth quoting at length:
A life that seems happy, productive, and distinguished in the service of
others suddenly crumbles into dust. The well-meaning king of
Thebes—an effective, admired, and respected ruler—suddenly finds
that he is not only the source of the calamity from which he has tried to
Delikonstantinidou 223
protect his citizens, the plague with which the play begins, but also
guilty of the two most horrible crimes imaginable: incest with his
mother and the bloody killing of his father. The hero’s determined
march toward the horrifying discovery of these facts produces the
feeling of an inexorable doom surrounding his life, as he recognizes
that he has fulfilled prophecies that Apollo had given to him and his
parents. In fact, the very attempts to avoid these prophesies seem to
have brought them to pass. Thus, on one reading, the play is a tragedy
of a destiny that the hero cannot evade, despite his best attempt to do
so. (3-4)
Yet, counter to (mostly older) readings that expound on Oedipus Tyrannus as— predominantly—a tragedy of destiny or fate, others (more contemporary ones) have argued for Oedipus’ free will, manifest in his unrelenting pursuit of the truth.
According to another important classicist, Bernard Knox, it is precisely “[t]his freedom to search, and the heroic way in which Oedipus uses it, [that] make the play not a picture of man’s utter feebleness caught in the toils of fate, but on the contrary, a heroic example of man’s dedication to the search for truth, the truth about himself.
This is perhaps the only human freedom, the play seems to say, but there could be none more noble” (89). Still, there are also scholars who have offered elaborate accounts of how an understanding of fate, as the ancient mind conceived it, did not
(and does not) cancel out free will, and who have shown how the two (can) co-exist, within and without Sophocles’ play.128 Others, such as R. Drew Griffith, have focused on the issue of Oedipus’ moral responsibility and guilt, discussing Oedipus and his plight it terms of Aristotle’s hamartia (usually, and at least since Romanticism,
128. See Thomas Gould (2007) for a commentary on this and related points.
Delikonstantinidou 224 understood as “tragic flaw”)129: do Oedipus’ proud intelligence and passionate temperament (which makes him prone to fits of rage), perhaps parts of a larger hubris, qualify him as the kind of person that deserves to fall? they ask
The present study agrees with what the majority of contemporary classicists now concede with regard to this question; Segal expresses succinctly this position elsewhere: “Oedipus is not completely innocent, but, as a court of human law might measure it, his suffering and the suffering of those around him (Jocasta, their children, and all those who have died in the plague) are far out of proportion to the degree of guilt” (“Life’s Tragic Shape” 211). It is the very fact that the catastrophe the play dramatizes is out of proportion to the situation and to the hero’s degree of guilt what
“makes up the play’s tragic view of life, a view that presents our control over our circumstances as precarious and our grasp on happiness as always uncertain” (212).
Indeed, the play forces us to rethink our assumptions about guilt, responsibility, and justice in the world order, as well as about the very way in which we conceive order and disorder, within and without human nature, by way of its daring exploration of
“the shadowy areas between involuntary crime, religious pollution, moral innocence, and the personal horror in feeling oneself the bearer of a terrible guilt” (211). Echoes of these dimensions of the play can discerned in most recent, more or less straightforward, takes on Sophocles’ tragedy, as well as in works, like Alfaro’s
Oedipus el Rey, which rely partly on it.
129. Like most—if not all—details of Aristotle’s work of literary/dramatic theory, his hamartia has aroused diverse and often divergent explications. Many critics today favor an interpretation of hamartia according to which the term means “an offence committed in ignorance of some material fact and therefore free of πονηρία or κακία” (Dodds 19). An equally significant number of critics, however, insist that the word “can mean a catastrophic error for which one can blame oneself morally” (Gould 60).
Delikonstantinidou 225
Yet, Sophocles’ tragedy has also been said to constitute and invite meditation on, and even reconsideration of, our assumptions about personal and cultural identity, knowledge of the self and knowledge of the world and reality. How do humans go about searching “for the origins and meaning” of our lives, in “the effort to explore the essential mystery of our selfhood” (Segal, Tragic Heroism 4), within, beyond, and even against—sometimes illusory—external appearances? What are the costs involved in this painful process of self-discovery, in having and further cultivating “a reflexive awareness of the world within,” when one risks “unveiling the potential chaos of [t]his world” or, even, confronting its ultimate meaninglessness (Segal,
Tragic Heroism 4)? Perhaps, Oedipus Tyrannus’ continuous appeal can be traced most readily to the fact that its protagonist does confront, and quite vigorously at that, the mystery and fear “of being alive in a world that does not correspond to a pattern of order or justice satisfactory to the human mind”; to the fact that “[h]e places us in a tragic universe in which we have to ask whether the horrible suffering we witness is all due to design or to chance, whether our lives are random or entirely determined”
(5), and whether all this suffering and uncertainty make life any less worthy.
Nevertheless, neither Sophocles, nor any of his play’s interpreters, artists and thinkers alike, have offered a conclusive answer to the question Segal formulates,
“Why do our lives turn out to have the shape that they finally have?” But, both the ancient tragedian and all those who have addressed his work have opened before us, and even elaborated on, “a kaleidoscopic configuration of different possibilities: the circumstances of our birth, our character, parental nurture or its absence, sheer luck, a mistake or miscalculation or wrong decision at a crucial moment, a mysterious doom or destiny, the will of the gods,” as well as the possibility that it can all “turn out to be a cruel joke” (Segal, Tragic Heroism 5). There is certainly no unproblematically
Delikonstantinidou 226 hopeful vision of self and world to be found in Oedipus Tyrannus. However, we could suggest that there is something very comforting in realizing that Oedipus, as Edmunds puts it, “is as much post-classical as classical” because so many people across time and space have discovered his quest pertaining to their own life journey (Oedipus 8).
To put it differently, there is something very comforting about the way people have engaged with the Sophoclean material over the centuries, analyzing it in a scholarly manner, translating it, adapting it, performing it, reshaping or revising it, and thus making up the never-ending stream of its reception; about the way they have faced and gauged the possibilities mentioned above, posited questions about them, and provided provisional, contingent, exploratory responses. There is, indeed, comfort for us to be found in knowing that the quest to make sense of reality and of our lives in it, despite the ominous prospects, is a shared quest; that the path of self- and world- discovery may not be so lonely after all.
Interestingly, Oedipus was to live a longer life “in the many centuries since the
Greeks . . . than the one he lived as a Greek,” as Edmunds observes (Oedipus 8). In fact, not long after Sophocles’ last treatment of his myth in Oedipus Colonus,
“Oedipus will disappear from the later history of Greek literature, except for brief moments, and will become the property of Latin literature for many centuries” (54).
An important development took place with the Latin “claiming” of the Oedipus myth whose repercussions are still evident today: “With the Romans, Labdacid myth becomes literature in two new senses. First, Greek literature now becomes classical for the first time. . . . Second, Romans, emulating Greek models, create a new Theban poetry” (56). The medieval life of Oedipus was largely due to the Roman tradition, which produced new versions and recastings of the Oedipus myth, beginning with the young Julius Caesar and continuing with Varro, Seneca, and, most importantly,
Delikonstantinidou 227
Statius. It was the latter’s epic, Thebaid, “which was to carry Oedipus on to the
Middle Ages” and Renaissance; thanks to him and Seneca’s Theban tragedies
“knowledge of the Oedipus myth lived on,” even when the study of ancient Greek came (at least officially) to an end in the fifth century A.D. (60, 62). Giovanni
Boccaccio drew on the Oedipus myth for his Latin works in the fourteenth century, while Christian-inflected, largely morally didactic stories that bear close resemblance to the story of Oedipus, proliferated in those years. These stories and folktales lived a long life in oral tradition, reaching modern times and forming the basis for the
Oedipus folktale type.
When Greek tragedy, and Sophocles, in particular, were rediscovered in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century, the history of the myth and its reception started becoming more complex and driven by two impulses: “philological interest” in
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and “creative imitation” (Edmunds 83-4). New editions, translations, commentaries, treatises on tragedy, as well as new versions of the play and the myth appeared, while Sophocles and the so-called Sophoclean model exerted a huge influence on humanist tragedy, thus supplanting Seneca. With the powerful backing of Aristotle’s praise of its construction in the Poetics, which, by that point, had come to dominate literary/dramatic theory/criticism, Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus emerged as the model tragedy and as the cornerstone of French neoclassical drama (82). Indeed, in the seventeenth century, France became “the locus of Theban tragedy” and remained Oedipus’ home on through the eighteenth (87). With
Corneille’s Oedipus began a new phase in the reception of the Oedipus myth which drew Voltaire, among others (including imitators of Corneille’s Oedipus in England, namely John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee), into its orbit (91). Voltaire’s iconoclasm,
Delikonstantinidou 228 and, specifically, his downplaying of the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics’, was to have a notable impact on later thinkers and artists, in the eighteenth century and beyond.
A new impulse came to be added to the aforementioned two with regard to the reception of the Oedipus myth and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in the late- eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which continues to the present day. Besides new creative work in several media and scholarly/literary work, whether historical or critical, based on or inspired from Oedipus, the mythical figure “attains a conceptual status,” when analysis of the Oedipus myth becomes standard practice for
“philosophy, and later anthropology and psychology” (Edmunds 98). Hölderlin,
Schlegel, Hegel, and Nietzsche, among others, discuss Oedipus mainly in terms of what his myth discloses about the workings of human nature and intellect. Most of their meditations center on the issue of the myth’s relation to consciousness and subjectivity (in the sense of an emergent self-consciousness)—contested concepts then as now. “Is there (inner) reconciliation and triumph to be found in the Oedipus myth?” Hegel and Nietzsche ultimately ask and answer their respective questions in the positive, notwithstanding their diverse premises and intents, as well as the different qualifications that apply to their responses.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud takes up the issue of the myth’s relation to consciousness, and thus changes forever the course of the myth’s reception.130 Focusing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, which, by that time, had become the canonical version of the myth, Freud transposes two of the myth’s most important motifs or mythemes, namely, parricide and incest with the mother, into the unconscious and renders Oedipus the name of a complex. The Oedipus
130. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1906) is thought to be “the last creative work on the Oedipus myth which is not in the position of affirming or denying the new psychoanalytic interpretation,” Edmunds documents (Oedipus 111).
Delikonstantinidou 229
Complex supplants Oedipus’ fate as the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and later interpreters of the myth conceived of it. Reconfigured as the Oedipus Complex,
Oedipus’s fate becomes the fate of all of us, “a structure universally bound to human destiny” (The Standard Edition 20: 214131). Freud declares that: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our hatred and our first murderous wish against our father” (The Standard Edition 4: 262, 15: 208).
Despite the vast “amount of disbelief, contradiction, and attack” that Freud’s pronouncements generated (The Standard Edition 20: 214), his reflections on the
Oedipus Complex were to become determining for—even a driving force behind—a number of twentieth-century epistemological and conceptual developments, including the history of the psychoanalytic movement and feminist critique. They also developed into a source of inspiration for artists working in a wide range of media, whether these have been drawing from the ancient Greek (mythic or specifically
Sophoclean) material or not. From the Dadaists, Francis Picabia and Salvador Dali, to
André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Igor Stravinsky, artists who have engaged with the myth of Oedipus have also made explicit or implicit references to Freud’s interpretative work, even if only to reject it (as Gide and Stravinsky famously did).
With these works, Oedipus escapes “from the conditions of the ancient drama into modernity” (Edmunds, Oedipus 117).
Most scholars now concede that Freud’s insights with regard to Oedipus can be illuminating and fruitful, provided that a critical distance is maintained from them, especially “for the dialectical relation between language as a source of clarification and language as an instrument of concealment, denial, and mystification” that they
131. For reasons of readability, the long title, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, has been turned into the abbreviated version, “The Standard Edition.”
Delikonstantinidou 230 reveal, to quote Segal (Sophocles’ Tragic World 13). Freud traced to Sophocles’
Oedipus Tyrannus “a paradoxical kind of knowledge that at every point coexists with ignorance” and applied this distinct model of knowledge to the unconscious (226).
Whatever the shortcomings and limitations of Freud’s methods and conclusions, there is undeniable merit to be found in the groundbreaking model of knowledge that he brought forth and which was to drastically alter (or even transform) the way people had been thinking about the human mind and psyche, their workings and mechanisms of articulation, whether discursive or extra-discursive.
If in the “Hegelian tradition” of the conceptual work on the myth of Oedipus
(exemplified by theorists such as Jean-Joseph Goux and Giorgio Agamben), the myth is taken to be fundamentally about Oedipus’ inner self and subjectivity, and, in the
“Freudian tradition,” about what it reveals for the inner workings of the human mind/psyche, especially its unconscious realm, a third tradition, at once challenging and complementing the other two, can be said to begin and be exemplified by the twentieth-century work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the folklorist
Vladimir Propp on the Oedipus myth. Similarly to Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Propp explain “the myth in terms of origin,” while both historicize the myth. Contrary to
Freud, however, both downplay considerably “the importance of the sexual [code] in human personality” (Edmunds, Oedipus 120), and, like many other modern interpreters of the myth, point attention to its Sphinx episode. For the French anthropologist, who mounted an influential structuralist interpretation of it, the myth deals with “a cognitive dilemma” that concerns the society that tells the myth as a whole (Edmunds, Oedipus 135-6): “the problem of reconciling the belief that man is autochthonous with the knowledge that humans are born from the union of man and woman” (Edmunds, The Ancient Legend 4). For the Russian folklorist, the myth deals
Delikonstantinidou 231
“with the transmission of political power”; it “originated in and is still about power relations” (Edmunds, Oedipus 135-6). More specifically, according to this reading, the myth “contained traces of the passage from a matriarchal to a patriarchal organization of society” (Edmunds, The Ancient Legend 4). In fact, as Edmunds argues, the political interpretation of the myth that Freud left open—given its focus on the unconscious desire to violently usurp the father’s position and thus his power—
“can be assimilated to that of Propp, who saw, at its center, the acquisition of power or the succession to power” (Oedipus 136). This discursive junction, as it were, marked the beginning of important work on the political import of the myth that was to become essential to its creative treatments in the realm of the arts.
Although a detailed elaboration on the twentieth-century conceptual work on
Oedipus’ myth is outside the scope of this study, it should be noted that most, if not all, artistic works on the myth created in the course of the last century and on to the present bear its traces and, in many cases, exhibit direct correspondences with it. A significant corollary of the conceptual work that developed on and around Oedipus in modern times, which is also manifest in a number of contemporary artistic treatments of the myth, was that the mythical figure emerged as “a hypostatized Oedipus, . . . who has come to have an existence apart from any of his instantiations in any particular work on his myth,” “a larger, autonomous figure” (Edmunds, Oedipus 128-
9). Yet, besides Oedipus as a distinct “self,” his (contested) subjectivity, other “virtual spaces,” or underaddressed/underrepresented elements in the myth, have served as mythical “lacunae,” to use Edmunds’ terminology (129), which conceptual work on the myth first discerned and which twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic treatments of it have sought to fill.
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Works such as Night Journey (1947), Martha Graham’s dance foray into the
Oedipus myth, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex (1967), Ola Rotimi’s play The
Gods Are Not to Blame (1971), Jean Anouilh’s Oedipus or the Lame King after
Sophocles (1978), Woody Allen’s film “Oedipus Wrecks” from his New York Stories
(1989), Charles Chaynes’ opera Jocasta and Qu Xiasong’s opera Oedipus (both premiered in 1993), to mention only a handful out of an overflowing basketful, as well as Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey which we will start examining shortly, expand on various lacunae in the myth or, more specifically, on the Sophoclean model of the myth, reducing some and amplifying other aspects of the myth in the process. What all of them have in common is that they are informed, one way or another, by the thick strand of conceptual work on the myth that has been woven into the modern history of its reception as inexorably as Oedipus encountering his “Fate,” whatever meaning we impart to the latter.
The case is not different with U.S. treatments of the Oedipus myth. Here, as well, conceptual work on the myth infiltrated artistic work based on or inspired by it—the dimensions opened up by the former usually taken up and further explored by the latter. The main source of the myth’s appeal for U.S. artists and audiences seems to be that it allows for the propounding of questions which may not be resolvable but, nevertheless, rehearse a confrontation with “the past and cultural memory,” as Helene
Foley puts it (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 2). As a matter of fact, the “issue of a collective confrontation with a problematic past and the possibility of denying it repeatedly and pointedly recurs” in works that draw on the myth, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when American democracy began “to observe itself from an uneasy, perhaps more ‘tragic’ perspective” (168).
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Not unlike the myth of Medea, or the myths of Electra and Iphigenia, which will be discussed in the following parts of this study, that of Oedipus also “permit[s] exploration of the struggle to establish a self in a world that can appear to encourage and allow for self-determination but can finally betray that effort in different ways”
(Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 23). This function of the myth has contributed to render it particularly appealing to ethnic writers, like Alfaro, who, in recent years, have sought to reconsider the U.S. identity politics framework and resituate themselves and the communities they represent within it. After all, few myths have been deemed as useful as Oedipus’ myth for creative forays into the ever un- cartographable territory of identity by modern artists. Indeed, from the first appearance of Oedipus on the American stage in the late nineteenth century, theatre artists have employed his myth so as to either stage “a confrontation with individual identity” or “address controversial cultural and political issues relating to national identity” (3). In the many years of his presence on the U.S. theatrical scene,
“American Oedipus has become above all a figure of the individual struggling to remake himself or change/reinterpret his story in a challenging environment” (11); an environment made all the more menacing due to the disintegration of erstwhile cherished comforting illusions (concerning the self, the family, the nation, humanity as a whole, as well as humanism and its views on the foregoing) that the first half of the twentieth century dragged forth in its wake.
Together, the prestige and authority bestowed to it by its illustrious receptive tradition, especially its “philological” component, which Aristotle’s Poetics served to epitomize, “and the additional luster of a plot that resonated with both Freudian theory and detective fiction,” caused Sophocles’ version of the myth to be regarded as the most stage-worthy of Greek tragedies (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 161). It is a
Delikonstantinidou 234 characteristically “American development” that, in the longest part of Oedipus
Tyrannus’s reception in the U.S., from the nineteenth century until after the seventies,
Sophocles’ play was modified so as to make Oedipus “a scapegoat who departs
Thebes to save his city from the plague at the conclusion of Oedipus Tyrannus”; a revision of the play’s ending that turned Oedipus “into a descendant of the
(Christianized and martyred) heroes of heroic melodrama” (6). Since the seventies,
“an evolving American identification with Oedipus’s search for identity as well as an increasing willingness to confront Oedipus’s role as a compelling yet potentially dangerous leader” emerged, together with the parallel outgrowth of new narrative and directorial trends; that is, whether the focus in new treatments of Sophocles’ play fell on the ritual or mystical aspects of it (as in the Guthrie Theatre’s Oedipus the King in
1972); on the hero’s role “as the unwitting source of various new forms of social pollution or corruption” (as in A.R.T.’s 2004 Oedipus); on paired Oedipus-related plays (as in Douglas Jacobs and Scott Feldsher’s 1996 experimental The Whole World is Watching); on a reimagining or reexamination of Oedipus’ relation to (his) fate in a more contemporary context (as in Frank Galati’s Oedipus Complex in 2004); or, more and more emphatically in twenty-first-century works, on Oedipus’ abandonment by his parents and on the role of Jocasta (as in David Sard’s 2006 The Ballad of Eddie and Jo) (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 162).
Parodic responses to the Oedipus myth, as well as attempts at syncretizing the classical Greek works on the myth with other U.S. social identities, cultural traditions, distinct modes of creative expression, also issued forth in more contemporary times— more and more prominently since the eighties. Lee Breuer’s and Bob Telson’s The
Gospel of Colonus (1983) constitutes an emblematic manifestation of the latter trend.
The play brought together African American culture and the gospel church with
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Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and ancient Greek religion in an effort to reconcile ethnoracial traditions and constituencies co-existing tensely within the U.S. It may not have succeeded completely in making all the traditions and modes of expression it attracted in its orbit interact seamlessly, but the interaction it staged has been in large part successful if only because it ultimately illuminated in a refreshing way the cultural constituents it engaged. This assessment can be said to apply also to Alfaro’s take on the Oedipus myth, which, like his Mojada and his Electricidad, syncretizes an ancient Greek tragic myth with Chicano/a, and, specifically, with barrio, as well as with mainstream U.S. culture: the seams of Alfaro’s “syncretic artifact” may be visible but they are, at the same time, remarkably illuminating.
Alfaro used the myth as source and raw material for his 2010 Oedipus el Rey adverting to its principal thematic axes: “[t]he power of truth, the truth of power, politics, the inability of mankind to comprehend fate, chance, causality, nature, divine intentions, gods and humans alike,” as María Florencia Nelli tersely sums up, as well as to “the subject of taboo,” Oedipus incestuous marriage to Jocasta, “ever so succulent” (611). The incestuous relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta becomes in the play a tragic development that functions as a dramatic vehicle through which an exploration of issues of faith and power, belonging and exclusion, as well as of “a collective historical experience of crisis” (Toscano 29)132 is conveyed. Similarly to
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, “the prototypical model of the theatre of crisis,” as
Diana Taylor has insightfully argued, on which it partly relies, Oedipus el Rey is “a play of and about crisis.” As such, it exhibits two features connected to the theatre of crisis: “the loss of identity and the collapse of boundaries” (54). In the course of the
132. Writes Alberto Toscano on modern tragedy: “It is precisely at the level of a collective historical experience of a crisis—a crisis that can throw up both the immiserating experience of arrested history or the disorienting one of the collision and stratification of different times and subjectivities—that a properly modern tragedy can be thought” (29).
Delikonstantinidou 236 succeeding chapter, we will see how these two features of considerable tragic import evolve in the play as well as their implications, and the implications of the play as a whole, for the urban, gang-infected Pico Union world, where Oedipus el Rey is set and where the playwright originates from, as well as outside of it.133
133. A clarification is in order at this juncture concerning the “case study,” that is, the specific mythoplay, which has been chosen for examination in this part. Indeed, Part Two proved to be particularly challenging in terms of the selection of the play (initially plays) that would be included within its framework. On a personal note, the difficulty I encountered is, perhaps, the corollary of my intention to avert the danger of a procrustean reading of either the myth or the plays; an intention that informs the entire study. I wanted to avoid at any cost making the plays fit the myth or the myth fit the plays in a labored manner, and thus compromising the integrity of both. The “challenge” I refer to is also largely due to the fact that, in the post- Freudian era, the term “Oedipus” has acquired many and widely varying connotations and is attached, in both common parlance and scientific treatises, to a range of so-called “Oedipal mechanisms, processes, and structures”(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 3). If one adds to this the fact that the use of “Oedipus” (and other similarly freighted terms) as tag line has been a remarkably successful publicity strategy for new plays by not (yet) so well-known theatre practitioners, the difficulty becomes quite obvious. Which out of a number of plays that use the “Oedipus tag line” meet the criteria that have been set forth for this study (produced dramatic mythic revisions of Greek tragic myths that attend to Latino/a realities)? For instance, Andrea Thome’s well-written Undone (2003), a play about the struggles of a Latin American refugee, Odile, and her young daughter, Valentina, to create a life for themselves in an inhospitable and violence-ridden U.S. urban district, was marketed as being loosely inspired by the Oedipus myth and its literary treatment by Sophocles. Studying the play, however, I discerned no such inspiration animating the play or at work in it, not even a “loose” one; if the Latina playwright has indeed been inspired by the Oedipus myth, this does not show in her text. That, along with the fact that it has not been produced yet, disqualified Undone from inclusion within this study. Oliver Jai’Sen Mayer’s poignant Young Valiant (premiered in 2002) dramatizes compellingly a young boy’s (the generic BOY’s in the play) sexual awakening which, at an initial stage, involves the boy’s infatuation with his mother (MAMA) and his concurrent fits of jealousy towards his father (DAD). Yet, although the play certainly elaborates the parricide and incest motifs of the Oedipus myth and looks back to Freud’s Oedipus Complex, it makes no overt reference to the Latino/a social, political, and cultural context and does not attend at any point to distinctly U.S. Latino/a sociocultural experiences. In reality, the play could be described more accurately as a dramatization of aspects of the Oedipus Complex with a Latino/a tint, than as a dramatic mythic revision of the tragic myth of Oedipus addressing Latino/a realities. Therefore, that too was disqualified from inclusion. Mayer was so kind as to send me for research purposes the playscripts of his very interesting Blade to the Heat (1994) and its sequel, Members Only (scheduled for premiere in 2018), treating mainly the theme of the homoeroticism inherent in the sport of boxing. The playwright claims to have drawn inspiration for his two plays from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Whereas, obviously, I am not in a position to assess the actual origins and sources of Mayer’s inspiration, I do not see how his plays can qualify as dramatic mythic revisions of the tragic myth of Oedipus; the resemblances, correspondences, or references to the myth being, perhaps, too subtle to allow for a connection, even an implicit one, to be unambiguously built between the myth, the figure of Oedipus, and the themes present there, with the stories, lead character (Quinn), and the themes of Mayer’s two plays. In that respect, his plays resemble Thome’s Undone. More difficult still was the case of Law Chavez’s Señora de la pinta (2012). The play was marketed as “based on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King with the Chicano emphasis of loyalty and honor as well as cultural complexities of sexual
Delikonstantinidou 237
identity and gender expression” (See http://albuquerque.eventful.com/events/seora-la- pinta-law-chavez-directed-daniel-ba-/E0-001-047203536-5). The play is essentially about a young man (Vicente or “Gringo”), who, upon his return from the penitentiary (la pinta) to a New Mexico barrio, where he is to become the leader, falls in love with a woman (Yvonne or “Bon”) whose son (Tito or “Tattoo”) was his lover in prison. According to its marketing strategy, which scholar Patrice Rankine seems to be partially, yet hesitantly, justifying in her interview with the play’s director, Daniel Banks (although it also seems that she assumes this position more to avoid disobliging Banks than because she truly agrees with the play’s marketing blurb), in Señora de la pinta, the plague of the myth is “the darkness of the prison experience” (the plays touches upon the New Mexico Penitentiary riot of 1980), while “the taboo that makes Gringo Oedipus-like” is his “homosexual relationship with the son of his lover” (685-6). Rankine grants that “Chavez’s is neither a one to one adaptation of the classical play nor an easy case of classical reception” (686). According to my reading of the play, it is much less (or, in another sense, more) than a difficult case of classical reception. In fact, I find the claim that there is indeed a connection between the myth of Oedipus and/or Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus and the play, to say the least, forced. The reasons undergirding my assessment go beyond the fact that there is not even one of the myth’s, not to mention Oedipus Tyrannus’, motifs or mythemes to be found in the play, not even in loose approximation, thus disqualifying the play as a dramatic mythic revision of the tragic myth. More disturbing is the fact that the tag line “Oedipus the King” was used “only . . . because that’s the dominant western cultural frame of reference,” as the play’s director somewhat scandalously affirms in the same interview, thus in a single statement also belying the play’s professed integrative aspirations (referring to an integration of multiple cultural heritages and traditions) (695). The play was described as “Oedipus the King” because the myth has “a certain currency” that would secure purchase and “trigger interest” for a play that might otherwise go unnoticed, and because it “allows a certain framing and certain ‘in’ for the audience”(690); that is, for reasons of marketability, convenience, and success prospects, despite the fact that a relation between the play—the story it tells, its characters, its conflicts and other themes—and the myth proves to be, when one studies the play itself, entirely unmotivated and unwarranted. Even the director himself struggles to defend and substantiate the play’s claims to a connection to Oedipus’ myth, as, literally in the same breath, he speaks of the lead characters, Gringo and Bon, as Oedipus and Jocasta respectively, and admits that the final blinding of Gringo “comes out of, in a way, nowhere” (691). In an imaginative, if somewhat desperate, sleight of hand, he directed the play so that Gringo is not self-blinded at the end (as Chavez’s script would have it), but blinded, instead, by the chorus of three speaking owls or lechuzas originating in Mexican lore, so that the play’s ending does not strike as entirely false, being completely unmotivated by the events that preceded it (691). It becomes painfully obvious after a point during Banks’ interview that not even the director believes that the play is truly a “[“tragic kind of”] mashup of Chicano culture and the Oedipus myth.” It could accurately be described as a “New Mexican play,” set in a barrio, “about challenges that this region has,” which used the Oedipus tag line in order to be given the chance to survive in the highly competitive and unforgiving, American theatre ecosystem and its economy where Latino/a theatre remains underrepresented (694). It seems to me that the play is stifled under the weight of a number of unsupported pretensions. For reasons of courtesy and respect, I will not touch upon some (hard to miss) similarities between Chavez’s play and Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, produced two years before Señora de la pinta. Because of all the above, I refrained from including Chavez’s play in this part. Subjective though my choice inevitably is, I firmly believe it would be endorsed by anyone who has watched or read the play.
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Chapter 5
Oedipus el Rey
I. Setting the Stage for Oedipus as el Rey of East L.A.
Seven years after Electricidad’s world premiere in 2003 and five years before
Mojada’s opening in Los Angeles in 2015, Oedipus el Rey, Alfaro’s second take on
Greek tragic myth was performed, for the first time, at the Getty Villa Outdoor
Theatre, in Chicago, under the direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera. The play was
subsequently produced in several venues across the country for more than five years,
evolving along the way—as all of Alfaro’s works for the theatre do, often
incorporating local social and cultural nuggets—and winning audiences and critics
alike.134 Alfaro’s second “contemporary correlative” (Chirico, “Divine Fire” 532) of a
Greek tragic myth set out to enlist its diverse audiences to its reexamination of “our
ideas about destiny, fate, and faith,” as the playbill for the Getty Village performance
put it.
Sophocles’ tragic work—in this case, his treatment of the Oedipus myth—
served as inspiration for this play, as it did for Alfaro’s earlier Electricidad. Yet,
much of the inspiration for Oedipus el Rey also stemmed from Alfaro’s work with
youth caught in the cogwheels of the Californian penal system135 and often morally
134. Contrary to Mojada and Electricidad, however, Oedipus el Rey retained its original, East L.A. setting in every production of the play, while the script has not undergone changes so extensive as to warrant special focus to be placed on them. 135. It is a system that has been described by many a cultural critic as a veritable prison industrial complex.
Delikonstantinidou 239 and materially pulverized in the process. Similarly to his other two dramatic mythic revisions, Oedipus el Rey grew out of a community need: this time it was the need to acknowledge, effectively deal with, and remedy the multifaceted problems of recidivism and of “the cradle-to-prison pipeline” as these affect, predominantly, the lives of young people coming from low-income and ethnoracial minority groups. In the context of the play, emphasis has been placed on youth of Latino/a descent and background whose lives are tied, in one way or another, to the gang subculture of the barrioscape and its geopolitics. Interestingly, although the play is set in the East L.A. barrio, the audience was asked, during the pre- and post-show discussions and other events flanking each production, to consider the themes the play addresses in terms of what the situation is in other major U.S. urban centers. Indeed, the aforementioned need to which the play responds can be extrapolated to the national level, as the social impact of recidivism and “the pipeline” reverberates across the country, albeit bearing more heavily upon its inner-city communities. A number of studies have appeared in recent years which explore the two related phenomena and describe the situation in terms of crisis. Alfaro could have hardly found a more apposite source from which to draw in order to address this crisis than Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, “the prototypical model of the theatre of crisis,” to reinvoke Diana Taylor’s words (54).
Contemporary governmental and non-governmental studies offer some sobering facts in relation to recidivism and “the pipeline.” According to the 2011 report of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,136 Latinos/as make up 20,6 percent of the prison population in the U.S. and 16,3 percent of the population in the country (while African Americans make up the 39,4 percent out of a total population of 13 percent). In California, seven out of ten prisoners will return to
136. Here, the choice has been made to cite from the report that is chronologically closer to the play’s premiere.
Delikonstantinidou 240 jail within three years of release, marking the highest rate of recidivism in the U.S. In
Kern County and its crammed prison houses, where the play is partly set, the recidivism rate rises up to a staggering 70 percent, while the three-year recidivism rate of Latino/a prison inmates is also worrisome at 59,5 percent. Additionally, and relatedly, the bleak scenarios that the Children’s Defense Fund report (2007) presents are disturbing. The long-term effects of the two phenomena on the lives of poor young people of color include life-long social exclusion, marginalized lives, and, very often, premature death. The correspondence between the contents of the said report and the thematic contents of the play is so striking that one wonders whether Alfaro consulted this or similar factual accounts in crafting his play. A specific passage of the report referring to the “pipeline” reality is of direct relevance to the analysis of the play that will immediately follow: “The Pipeline is not an act of God or inevitable; it is a series of human choices at each stage of our children’s development. We created it, we can change it. We know what to do. We can predict need. We can target interventions. We can prevent damage. We can monitor progress” (4). Oedipus el Rey seems committed to probe the position advanced by the report.
Along a similar vein of thought (and critique), the coro (or chorus) of Oedipus el Rey asks in the play’s San Diego production: “Is our young homeboy [Oedipus] doomed to live out his destiny as described in a tragic prophecy, or does he have the power to transcend his fate and define his own future?”
(http://www.scatenadaniels.com/san-diego-repertory-theatre-presents-the-san-diego- premiere-of-oedipus-el-rey/). In the context of the play, where “the statistics of prison incarceration and recidivism” often seem to be functioning as “a stand-in for Fate,” as reviewer Chris Jackson (2014) notes, the coro’s question could be rephrased as: “Is
Oedipus doomed due to his ethnic and class origins to a life marred by the sordid
Delikonstantinidou 241 realities of the prison system and the gang-infected barrioscape, or can he overcome the chance of his origins and determine his own future?”137 Yet, insofar as Alfaro’s
Oedipus stands for many a “young homeboy,” the question ultimately becomes, to borrow from Teresa Marreno’s review of the play (2014): “[T]o what degree do the opportunities that our nearest social context affords determine our future?” and “Can the future of at-risk youth be improved by creating the conditions to better their choices, like better schools and social models that offer viable alternatives?” The questions posed by the play gain their special poignancy from the very fact that they are being asked at a time when more and more members of America’s growing lower class are being “condemned at birth to fulfill an ugly, impoverished, criminalized destiny” (Adler 2012). Most importantly, the particular way in which the play probes these questions calls for a proactive approach to the issues at hand.
For social change to be set in motion, the national response to the pernicious phenomena that make up America’s prison culture, as well as the attendant interventions on the part of political/civic authorities, should turn from reactive into proactive. This is what official studies indicate, thus corroborating the play’s stance toward the issues it treats. The “risk factors” that contribute to the perpetuation or exacerbation of recidivism and “the pipeline” should be acknowledged, controlled, and optimized, and, wherever possible, vigorously corrected. Treatises on juvenile justice models, practices, and processes, such as Juvenile Justice (2013), offer insightful analyses of these risk factors, some of the most notable of which are pervasive poverty, inadequate access to health coverage, gaps in early development and inadequate early care, disparate educational opportunities, abuse and neglect, unaddressed mental and emotional needs, substance abuse, inefficient school
137. It is worth remarking here that Alfaro does not rationalize his, and our, way out of a metaphysical sense of fate; rather, as we shall soon see, the two coexist.
Delikonstantinidou 242 discipline policies, an overburdened and ineffective juvenile justice system. The greatest challenge, according to the Children’s Defense Fund report, is to start investing in the front instead of the back end of “the pipeline.” Funds and efforts should “focus on decreasing the likelihood of prisoners returning to the very prisons from which they have been set free,” one of Oedipus el Rey’s Production Notes concurs (Moriarty 2013). Sociological studies underline that positive change in the lives of America’s young men and women can be effectuated “with firm resolve and true commitment” (Juvenile Justice 123), and Alfaro has exhibited both on the level of Oedipus el Rey’s production. In fact, the play has served not only as “a call to action,” as Chay Yew, the director of the play’s Chicago production stressed in the playbill, but also as action itself.
Heavily invested in the concept of the citizen-artist and in the social (and) theatre praxis that goes along with the concept, Alfaro “fuses his sense of social purpose with his sense of playwriting,” as Howard Shalwitz, the artistic director of
Woolly Mammoth Theatre where the play was mounted in 2011, has stressed (qtd. in
Marks 2011). Driven by the wish to “change the face of theatre in some way,” in the playwright’s own words (qtd. in Marks 2011), Alfaro “draw[s] into his professional orbit people from backgrounds not considered traditional sources for theatergoers— troubled teens, ex-offenders, members of disadvantaged minorities” (Marks 2011). By forging real connections with such communities of crisis and their various constituencies as mainstream theatres and theatre practitioners usually neglect, and by expanding their agency as well as the agency of all other participants in the process of producing the play, his mythopoetic, revisionary theatre work contributes, not only by means of its content, but also in the very act of production, to a “democratic turn” in the engagement with classical material. In other words, it contributes to a democratic
Delikonstantinidou 243 multiplication of “the possible meanings of the text and its performance” (Gamel
186), as well as of the voices of the usually underaddressed and underrepresented co- creators of the revision, be they production or audience members. What we discussed in the context of Alfaro’s Mojada and its production history, then, applies also in the case of Oedipus El Rey: theatre-making conjoined myth-making as social practice here as well, thereby “creating deeply affecting experiences about utterly contemporary matters” (Lodewyck and Monoson 652) for the temporary communities of transition that are forged among all participants in the play’s productions.
In engaging racially/ethnically and economically diverse audiences other than a theatre-going elite for the play’s productions; in flanking the productions of his play with such events as forums with guest panelists (including community leaders, professionals working in fields and areas relevant to the themes the play addresses, social scientists and other social agents and stakeholders), pre- and post-show conversations, online dialogue and blogging; in collaborating with the intervention organization of the Homeboy Industries138; and in creating professional opportunities not only for Latino/a and Chicano/a performers and other theatre professionals, but also for at-risk and gang-involved youth, Alfaro created by means of his Oedipus el
Rey a multifaceted remedial opportunity (and “stage”). As social theatre project,
Oedipus el Rey carved out some space, in an otherwise inauspicious milieu and at an equally inauspicious moment, for neglected issues to be re-considered and even radically treated, and for an equally neglected population to gain voice and visibility.
138. Homeboy Industries is the name of an organization that serves endangered gang-involved youth with services and programs constructed to meet their practical and educational needs. The organization has grown to become “the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation and re- entry program in the world.” See, http://www.homeboyindustries.org/.
Delikonstantinidou 244
It is not that the play provides the audience (or the characters) with any single,
simple, uncomplicated answer to the questions it poses. After all, the events of the
play are not solely caused by an omnipresent prison culture and a barrio culture that
intersects with it in noxious ways. Other imponderable parameters, such as desire,
psychology, character, and family ties are “deeply entwined in Oedipus’ story, leaving
our contemporary audience to ultimately grapple with the same questions faced by
those in Ancient Greece about the limits of free will and how to best break free of the
tragic ties that bind into a more hopeful, liberated future,” the Production Note for the
Dallas Theatre Center production of the play grants (Moriarty 2013). To wrestle with
these questions, however, is the most important battle we have to fight toward willing
this future to life; to embrace its inconclusiveness and yet continue fighting is to point
the way to a breakthrough. At least, this is what the agonic and agonistic mode of the
tragic has shown us in the several millennia of its existence.
II. Oedipus: Oedipus as a “Destined. / To be. / Destined. . . .” Homeboy
The multilayer syncretic interplay between the ancient Greek sources into
which Alfaro has tapped for the creation of Oedipus el Rey and the Latino/a
(specifically, Chicano/a) culture into which his mythoplay is firmly grounded is
established from the very first lines of the Prologue. In the course of the play, it
becomes more and more evident that the same productive “en medio” sentiment and
stance toward cultural syncrisis, negotiation, and translation, borne of the mestizaje
ethos that imbues Alfaro’s revisionary theatre work, furnish the conceptual and
aesthetic grounds for this play as they do for Mojada.
Delikonstantinidou 245
If, as Francis Fergusson has pointedly observed, in Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus, on which Alfaro has partly relied, the chorus constitutes the counterpart of
Oedipus’ part in the development of the play’s action, holding the balance between the hero and his antagonists, marking the progress of their struggles, and restating the main theme, and its new variation, after each dialogue or agon (7), Alfaro has in large part preserved this function of the chorus in his play’s own coro. Whereas the complex relation of the tragic chorus to the action, the demands of different performance traditions and their audiences, and the specific expediencies of modern plays (sometimes even reasons of practical logistics) have led many theatre artists who work on Greek tragic myths and/or plays to abandon altogether the element of the chorus, Alfaro has chosen otherwise. As in his other two dramatic mythic revisions (albeit much more noticeably in Electricidad as we shall see), here, as well, the playwright has fashioned the chorus in such a manner as to render it an instrument for voicing the opinions, beliefs, and values of the community; for giving expression to the communal spirit that animates the play.
The “twist” in the play’s idiosyncratic chorus, however, lies in the fact that it does not only represent the point of view of the community of citizens, Latino/a,
Chicano/a or otherwise, and, by analogy, of the theatre audience, on what transpires on stage. The character of this coro is double, insofar as it both stands for the aforementioned community and serves as the protagonist’s surrogate family of tough, heavily tattooed inmates, each having his personal story etched on his skin. In taking on this double role, this double group personality, the coro mediates between the two communities both literally, via its interaction with and in its choreographed stage presence amidst the audience, and symbolically, via representing alternately the community of prisoners and the community of citizens within the play. This is a
Delikonstantinidou 246 mediatory role that becomes all the more poignant and effective given the participation of actual former prisoners and gang members in the play’s productions and their inclusion as attendees in the audience. In a sort of theatrical sleight of hand, one ingeniously conceived and expertly staged, Alfaro creates a bridge between the two communities, thus permitting each to reach out to the other across a long-upheld cultural divide. In this sense, the mestizaje-inflected, bridging and inclusive modus operandi of the play is palpable in the choral aspect of it.
Yet, the coro’s doubleness obtains not only in regard to its character in
Oedipus el Rey, but also in regard to its cultural origins, which, of course, come to also bear on its mode of being in the play. As a matter of fact, the play’s coro both looks back to the tradition of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre and extracts from the
Latino/a choral tradition of El Coro: a performance tradition and acting style once prevalent in the Chicano culture which “owe[s] much to the Mexican popular theatre”
(Rahner 48). Although scant scholarly work is to be found expounding on El Coro tradition, and none on its relation to the Greek chorus, Alfaro explains its basics in an interview with Jane Ann Crum. The Coro involves storytelling and requires “very intricate work” on the part of the playwright, the director, and the performers, as many different voices overlap and finish each other’s (qtd. in Heymont 2010). “It’s musical and it shares a history with folkloric dancing. In the 1970s, lots of teatros did
Coro work and you’d go see it because it was sort of like watching ballet—beautiful, highly technical, and hard to do,” Alfaro comments elsewhere (qtd. in Heymont
2010). The Prologue of Oedipus el Rey is literally bodied forth, articulated and choreographed, in the manner that is typical of the Coro tradition and style, as Alfaro describes it above, by the six coro members of the play, each of whom is also charged with a number of other roles—a vital element of the play that makes performing in it a
Delikonstantinidou 247 veritable tour de force for all participating actors.139 Syncrisis is at work in Oedipus el
Rey, then, on several levels, with the aesthetic or formal one, of distinct yet—we may safely presume—related performance traditions, doubling and deepening the one that marks the narrative and thematic/conceptual content, thus lending the play its idiomatic theatrical flair.
Operating as the expressive/discursive “organ of a highly self-conscious community” (Fergusson 7), the play’s coro metatheatrically identifies the play as an act of polyphonic, communal storytelling140 that allows for meaning-making reflection and moral commentary from the play’s very beginning. Surrounded by the ambient sound of a desolate Highway 99, which quickly becomes the sound of prison doors opening and then slamming shut (the play’s non-verbal introduction of its structuring metaphor of the prison), the six-member coro of inmates stand in a square formation, facing each other, and pondering on the nature of storytelling before foraying into the particular story they will bring to life, that of Oedipus. As if not yet gripped by the disenchanting forces of modernity, they seem at home in the almost religious emptiness of the Kent County State Prison’s yard and in their quasi-mystical composite role as, at once, story-bearers, storytellers, and audience members, which blurs the boundaries between the three modalities.
Initially, the notion of story itself becomes a locus for critique and projection; together, their voices will propose multiple ways of understanding and experiencing
(one’s) stories. “What’s the point of all these damn stories?” one coro member asks.
To serve as “a reminder” or as “escape”; “to pass the time”; to “keep us alive,” the others retort, each one grounding his response on his own untold personal story
139. According to the playscript, only the actress who plays Jocasta does not undertake another role in the course of the play. 140. See Ricoeur (1980) on the concept of “communal storytelling.”
Delikonstantinidou 248
(Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 4). And, then, the question immediately becomes: “Who writes the stories?” Does “everybody write their own stories” or are our stories written for us since we were born? Can we change them and make them about us or about “the system” in which we find ourselves (5)? The coro members speculate whether stories are fated like people are, and whether stories and people can both tamper with their fate; that is, with their ultimate author.
This last point marks a shift in the course of their conversation as they all focus their attention on the thorny issue of fate. What’s the difference between destiny and fate, if any? And, what is the relation of either to “the choices you make” and the
“choices that are made for you”? they ask, thus introducing us to the play’s core problematics (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 5). None of them seems to have an answer, but they all turn and look in unison at Oedipus (previously, coro member number six) who is working out in the yard. It is precisely at this point that they all silently concede to join in the act of retelling Oedipus’s story and, in a manner typical of communal storytelling, to re-create it collaboratively “by many different voices along the way” (McLellan 1997). The young man, intensely focused on his push-ups and apparently oblivious to his surroundings, becomes the occasion for the dramatization of a fateful(l) tale that is also an instrument for the investigation of fate as author and authority/ies.
At the same time that Oedipus’ story becomes incorporated into the coro’s communal communication through the communicative event of storytelling, it also becomes a site of social exchange and negotiation of the coro members’ different positions on the various issues that emerge as the story unfolds. Yet, the story cannot start unfolding and the chorus members cannot each find their place within the narrative before the most important question of the play is answered: “Quien es este
Delikonstantinidou 249 hombre?”/ “Who is this man?” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 7). Once again, the coro is unable to respond in consensus. The fact that the question multiplies and branches out in the very process of the coro’s attempt to answer it points early on to its complexity and contingency. It is the identity of the young Oedipus that now becomes the locus of reflection and critique:
Who is this man/ that we should consider/ his story? . . . Who is this
man/ who lived in prison/ and was raised in “the yard”? . . . Who is this
man/ feared by many/ yet was one of our own? . . . Who is this man
who lived like an orphan/ even with a father at his side?/ . . . / who
threw the first punch/ and stayed for the last kick?/ Who is this man/
they called/ Oedipus?/ (a.k.a. Patas Malas).141 (6-8)
Their answers, although fragmented and inconclusive, help to create a discursive mosaic that offers a preliminary short biography of the hero—albeit one suggestively centered on his character and not on his identity. This Oedipus is a boy whom the coro has long called “the accursed” (9)—although the origins and nature of his curse(dness) are left, for the time being, shrouded in mystery. He is a boy who
“wanted to be something,” “something more,” “el mero mero” or “the one”: “A man of principle”; “A man with a plan”; “A man with no limits”; “A hungry man”; ultimately, and quite revealingly, “A man destined to be./ . . . / Destined./ To be./
Destined. . . .” (9-11).
Silence falls in the wake of the coro’s last remark with respect to Oedipus.
The intertextual and metatheatrical self-consciousness that the coro poignantly
141. “Patas Malas” is the Spanish translation of the Greek “Οιδίπους” that means both “swollen” or “wretched feet” and, quite presciently, “bad luck,” as Thomas E. Jenkins notices in his discussion of the play (179).
Delikonstantinidou 250 exhibits here contributes as performance practice, in more form-related terms, to the impact of the entire theatrical event, insofar as it disrupts the dramatic illusion and allows for commentary on aspects of the revisionary theatrical praxis itself. Yet, in more narrative-related terms, it anticipates the play’s dramatization of and commentary on other destiny-resembling (or fate-resembling) forms of sociocultural entrapment and pressure conditioning and misshaping the individual that will ensue in later parts of the play. Additionally, it anticipates the self-awareness that, first, Jocasta and, later, Oedipus will demonstrate in the course of the play; an awareness of themselves as the subjects (mythical and literary) of a story that someone else authored, which allows them to recognize themselves as entities belonging to an intrinsically myth-inflected and story-like cosmos.
The issue of destiny or fate is left aside or, rather, suspended for the moment as another coro member, the fifth one, slips into his non-choral role and becomes
Tiresias. “I am the father,” the man sporting the cholo shades and the collapsible white cane declares (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 11). Importantly, Alfaro’s Tiresias is constructed as a compound of a number of different characters in the Oedipus myth and in Sophocles’ treatment of it: the servant/herdsman who took pity of Oedipus as an infant and did not kill him, King Polybus who raised Oedipus as his adoptive father, and the homonymous blind seer. Whether Alfaro chose to “hybridize” Tiresias in this manner due to reasons of economy or in order to enhance his dramatic efficiency in the context of this play, or both, can only be guessed upon, but his choice proved to be quite successful. The affective import of Tiresias’ and Oedipus’ relationship is strong and constitutes one of the play’s most stirring and rewarding assets, one comparable only to the relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta.
Delikonstantinidou 251
It is useful to note at this point that the Theban seer Tiresias (also transliterated as Teiresias), “a mythical prototype of the seer, the specialist in predicting the future from signs,” is a “fixture” in the Oedipus myth since the archaic times, constituting “a major figure in the [Theban] epics,” long before the oracle of Delphi and Apollo were annexed to it (Edmunds, Oedipus 43, 23). Later, in the sixth century B.C., the blind sage was associated with Apollo and this association was to become a central feature of Sophocles’ treatments of the Oedipus myth (according to the play’s chorus,
Tiresias “sees the same things as Lord Apollo (284)). In Oedipus Tyrannus, Tiresias is summoned by the hero when the latter finds himself perplexed by the response that the Delphic oracle offered on the subject of the plague that torments the city of
Thebes: the plague will cease only if the murderer of Laius is found and killed or expelled from the city of Thebes. Oedipus consults the sage on the identity of Laius’ murderer and, when confronted with Tiresias’ unwillingness to proceed to a revelation, the two engage in an agon which quickly devolves into a bitter quarrel. In the course of their quarrel, an angered Tiresias unambiguously incriminates Oedipus, declaring that he is the murdered of Laius, and Oedipus, in response, unable to truly grasp Tiresias’ words, accuses the seer of treason, of conspiring with Creon, who has his eye fixed on the throne of Thebes, and plotting against him. Before his exit,
Tiresias predicts Oedipus grim future: “This day will beget you and destroy you”
(Sophocles 442). His final prophecy, that Oedipus “will go as a beggar to a foreign earth” (455-6), in fact, “defines the version of the myth that this tragedy presupposes,” as Edmunds observes (Oedipus 43).
It is important that, in Oedipus Tyrannus, as in Antigone, Tiresias “displays the interconnectedness between the human community and the natural and supernatural worlds” (Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World 122). Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey
Delikonstantinidou 252 plays into the said interconnectedness but downplays significantly Tiresias’ own connection to (or connectedness with) the supernatural realm. He attributes to Tiresias a sort of heighted spirituality or spiritual awareness, and confers him a quasi-religious or quasi-mystical aura and authority, but makes sure to establish that his wisdom is mostly, although not exclusively, secular and street-born. Alfaro’s Tiresias sees (that is, perceives and knows) more than the other characters of the play do about the past, the present, and the future, mainly because of his knowledge of this world and its material facts—facts that the other characters ignore. The insightful old man is a
“Servant to God in all ways” and “a mystic” who regularly counsels them, the coro reverently affirms, although they also admit that the authority of his consultations is somewhat undermined among the more simple-minded of the inmates due to the seer’s blindness (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 11-3). However, both the reason due to which his eyes gradually “eclipsed” and the crime that led him in prison are unknown to the coro. They are, thus, left indulging in conjectures with regard to the source of
Tiresias’ guilt.142
142. The subject of Tiresias’ guilt could be said to be the most obscure narrative element of Oedipus el Rey. Near the end of the play, the old man tells Oedipus that his blindness was a punishment for saving him when he was only an infant. This act of mercy, however, constitutes an act of transgression against the divine will that somehow justifies retaliation only if we accept that the fate that Oedipus was to live through was not really divinely, or at least, God ordained; that God (or the gods) preferred for the boy to die instead of carrying out his terrible fate. This, in turn, contradicts what the play intimates in other instances, namely, that Oedipus’ fate was for some unknown reason sanctioned by God. Early on in the play, for instance, El Sobador tells Laius regarding the prophecy of the parricide that “[t]his is the work of God” and, a bit later, that “[t]hat [the truth contained in the prophecy] was God” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 21, 23). Similar instances are dispersed throughout the play. Whatever reading we choose to adopt concerning Tiresias’ guilt and whatever meaning we choose to attribute to his belated confession, it is worth noting that the former reading accords with the ancient Greek conception of moira or fate as a force superior to and far more powerful than the gods. Nevertheless, we should not fail to mention that the relation between moira and the gods is revealed from surviving sources to have been rather equivocal in ancient Greece. Sometimes moira and the gods are presented as “two different principles of power” and even as “radically opposed principles” (Versényi 29). The gods appear to be in charge of moira as often as they appear to transgress it and live through the consequences of their transgression. Most often, though, they appear to be implementing events whose pattern “has already been devised—by moira” (Eidinow 32).
Delikonstantinidou 253
Three more characters are introduced from within and by the coro before the
Prologue’s conclusion: Laius, Creon, and, finally, Jocasta. Laius, “The King,” is distinguished by a chain necklace with an attached crown link which is placed around his neck; the insignia of barrio royalty (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 15). He is the one
“[w]ho had the woman” and “[m]ade the rules,” a ruthless politician who “[e]arned his respect . . . / [t]he hard way,” a God-defying man on whom God’s lessons had little influence (16). And, then, there is Creon, “the brother-in-law,” Jocasta’s brother.
One of those who want power and strive for its acquisition, always alert for the opportunity that will allow them to move upwards on the ladder of leadership, but who are “not built for” it; who are “[j]ust not right” (17). Finally, there appears
Jocasta, the beautiful barrio queen with the glowing wings tattoo on her back, and the soft, smooth skin to whose presence the coro responds with an almost starry-eyed adoration. This woman who is “[n]ot afraid/ to be yours” is “[t]he woman I want/ I need/ I could live for,” the coro declares, anticipating Oedipus’ passionate love for
Jocasta, but she is “. . . taken/ [b]y a man/ [n]ot worthy of her” (18-9).
Unlike the majority of treatments of the Oedipus myth along its historical trajectory, this one gives Jocasta an amplified role and explores her character and her part in Oedipus’ life pattern. Just like all other interpreters of the myth, though, Alfaro locates a lacuna—an empty, silent, or, in this case, a relatively underaddressed space—in the myth and attempts to fill it with narrative and meaning. In doing that, he is “reusing a mechanism which creative work on the Oedipus myth has used ever since antiquity” (Edmunds, Oedipus 129). It is worth noting that the refocalization of extant treatments of the Oedipus myth on Jocasta, and, specifically, the enlargement of her role within the Sophoclean model, although much more widespread in
Delikonstantinidou 254 contemporary times, began in the seventeenth century with the works of Corneille,
Dryden, and Voltaire, and persisted “through the nineteenth-century reorientation of
[the myth’s] reception” (133). Similarly to other post-millennium treatments of the
Oedipus myth, Oedipus el Rey not only expands but also updates and recontextualizes the amorous relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta. Indeed, their relationship becomes in the play a prism through which other issues, mainly sociological in nature, are refracted without being diffused as we shall see in the course of our discussion.
With all the major players of this Oedipus drama introduced and identified for us, the coro can now proceed with the presentation of the “story proper.” As the first five scenes of the play illustrate, Jocasta’s character and the relationship between her and Oedipus are not the only lacunae that Alfaro seeks to fill in with his play.
Diverging from the Sophoclean model, the playwright amplifies, by dramatically elaborating on, several episodes that in the Sophoclean version are only reported upon
(having occurred long before the play’s action begins). Unlike other contemporary interpreters of Greek tragic myths (Charles Mee springs first to mind), Alfaro does not take the audience’s knowledge of the primary mythic material that he uses for granted. In providing us with the backstory of the main events, his Oedipus el Rey also offers us a useful perspective on the events, conflicts, and struggles that constitute the dramatic core of the play, while, at the same time, it enhances the humanity of all the involved actors. A number of these episodes get condensed and are dramatized in the first five scenes: the parricide prophecy that Laius receives when his child is still unborn (although, in this version, young Jocasta is already pregnant), the birth of the ill-fated hero, his exposure as an infant, and the servant’s/henchman’s (here Tiresias’) noncompliance with Laius’ order to murder the infant.
Delikonstantinidou 255
Eager not to jeopardize his position as a barrio gang leader, an otherwise hardly pious, Laius invites El Sobador, a healer, to reveal the future of his unborn child. The healer senses the terrible truth while rubbing Jocasta’s belly but is unwilling to divulge it to the king. Only after he is terrorized by Laius, and in the absence of Jocasta who has been sent away by her husband, he complies and communicates the message of “God’s poem”: “That baby is going to kill you. . . .
Killed by your only son. . . . Who will grow up to be un rey. . . . At your last breath, he will look you in the eye, and you will know. Te lo prometo. . . . But there’s more. .
. .” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 22-3). The suffering king dismisses the healer before his interpretation of the God’s “vague poem” is complete. The second part of the prophecy will remain hidden until the end of the play, when all tragic actors will have played out the roles that have been “willed” for them.
The brief second scene, in which Jocasta is shown tenderly reproaching her
“restless” unborn son, becomes all the more sad in view of her ignorance of the awful destiny that has been laid out for her and her loved ones: “What are you waiting for?
Come on. Come out. . . ./ I need someone. . . . To love me. . . .” (Alfaro, Oedipus el
Rey 25). Her words, as well as the sorrow and loneliness they betray, resonate deeply with those of us who are cognizant of the prophecy’s second part. And, if the second scene is undeniably affecting, the third one, where she has her child taken away from her immediately after she has given birth to him and before she even has the chance to hold him once, is heart-wrenching. “In the still of the night,” heavily doped up by a
Laius resolved to kill the child, postpartum Jocasta slowly gets up and follows him,
“drain and empty” (26), in a futile attempt to stop him.
The newborn child is given to Tiresias, the king’s “right hand,” to be murdered. “Now go to Griffith Park and hang him from a tree, like a chivo. Let the
Delikonstantinidou 256 life drain from him. The coyotes will do the rest” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 29), Laius orders him. Tiresias, initially more than willing to serve his “carnal” (27), resists strongly when he realizes that the small bloody bundle that Laius carries is no other than the king’s son, the bottom of his feet cut by his father for fear that the boy will be chasing him in the afterlife—his challenging attitude toward God and God’s ways now obviously shaken up in the light of the decidedly crooked, fatal turn his life has taken. “I’ve never hurt a child, compadre,” the henchman tells Laius, to which the latter retorts, “It’s a tiny death. We’ll laugh about it later” (28). Tiresias entreats him to spare the child and ask for God’s forgiveness so that He may lift the “curse,” but
Laius is adamant in his resolve. Threatened with his life and realizing that Laius is beyond persuasion, Tiresias finally takes the child and leaves. At the same time, and as the effects of the heroin with which Laius had injected her subside, Jocasta becomes fully aware of her loss. Scene Five closes with her desperate screams resounding throughout the now empty stage. This backstory from the past gives way to the present.
The seventh scene serves a double function: it constitutes Oedipus’
“proclamation” of sorts (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 31) and dramatizes, using syncretic imagery typical of Alfaro’s dramaturgy, Oedipus’ reception of the oracle that he will kill his father. As is familiar from other versions of the Oedipus myth, this oracle will mark the turning point that will set the hero inexorably on his tragic life path.
Oedipus’ voice, Tiresias’ voice, and choral voices blend, overlap, and finish each other’s sentences during the hero’s (quite ironically) multivocal proclamatory speech in accordance with El Coro’s performative style.
First of all, we learn that Oedipus has grown up believing that he is “[t]he only son of the widowed Tiresias (Gomez),” and of a mother who left him “to a life of
Delikonstantinidou 257 picking pockets, selling pot and juvenile detention,” as mothers “sometimes . . . do”
(32). The issue of neglectful mothers is barely touched upon in the play, as emphasis falls mainly on father-son relationships, but in Alfaro’s earlier Electricidad it is identified, as we shall see in the next chapter, as one of the sociological factors that contributes to the creation and perpetuation of the cholo/a gang subculture within
Latino/a and Chicano/a cultures. The “neglectful mothers” parameter in the social and cultural life of U.S. Latinos/as and Chicanos/as acquires special importance in view of the fact that it is tied to the loaded assumptions surrounding the portrayal of women in these cultures. The myth of La Llorona/La Malinche that we examined in the previous part of this study reveals the extent to which the power, fluidity, and adaptability (or
“adaptable relevance”) of myths can be harnessed for less positive purposes than the reconstruction of a people’s mytho-history and the promotion of cultural awareness, unity, and pride. The two myths have, in effect, being employed as disciplinary tools, threatening women “into behaving and as an instrument of social control by labeling
‘amoral’ and neglectful mothers as Lloronas in the hope of preventing women from acting outside prescribed societal roles” (Vidal 362). It is quite revealing how, in the context of this play, Oedipus describes the mother he never knew as neglectful and the man he believes to be his father as anything but (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 36-7).
Knowing what we know, namely, that it was, in reality, his (biological) father who was more than neglectful, indeed murderous, and his mother who was condemned to a life of unmitigated grief due to the loss of her son, Oedipus’ view of his past and his parents strikes us as highly ironic.
Indeed, his asumptions could be read as the product of a number of convenient patriarchal (if not misogynist) stereotypes that he has grown to accept. Yet, little blame can be attached to young Oedipus for the views that he harbors. He does not
Delikonstantinidou 258 know better; or rather, he had never had the opportunity to learn better. As he touchingly confesses, he longs to dream of his mother, neglectful or not, but he cannot
(32). In the kind of life that he has led and in the life that he still leads in prison, dreaming of loving mothers, dreaming at all is dangerous. “To wish for things. It makes you soft,” the hero admits, “It makes you crazy. . . ./ It makes you sad. . . ./ It’s better to have nothing in your night, but sleep. . . .” For people like our Oedipus, the night is either “deaf” (33) or plagued by nightmares.
It is during a nightmare that Oedipus learns about the parricide he is fated to commit. In Oedipus el Rey, a “parliament of” wise (barn) owls/owl oracles, referred to as telocotes in the play, take up the role of the Sophoclean human oracle. “We have some wise old philosophy for you,” they tell Oedipus, who is looking down on them defiantly (34): “. . . your father/ . . . [is going to die] [a]t your hands. . . ./ It’ll be brief./ And not your fault./ We won’t hold it against you./ It’s your nature. . . ./ For you are,/ el maldecido”; “The accursed” (35-6). Abiding by Oedipus’ mythographical tradition, Oedipus el Rey melds curse and oracle, acknowledging both. As in
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, it is not clear, however, whether Oedipus is the source or the recipient of a curse, and why. Importantly, and also similarly to the Sophoclean play, this one presents both oracles and curses as “destructive forces that always shadow human life” (Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World 591). From this point onwards,
Oedipus will live in the shadow of the nightmarish future scenario the telocotes have laid out to him. Every attempt to escape it will tragically entangle him more and more deeply in it. Yet, besides the narrative function of the telocotes with respect to
Oedipus’ life pattern, Alfaro’s choice to substitute the human oracle of most of the versions of Oedipus’ myth with owl oracles is in itself also worth considering as an
Delikonstantinidou 259 artful instance of mestiza mythopoesis—more evidence of the impulse of transculturation that propels Alfaro’s theatre work.
We can interpret his choice in light of a cross-cultural bond or similarity that obtains between the ancient Greek culture, on the one hand, and the indigenous
(Central American) and Latino/a culture, on the other: owls constitute symbols of knowledge in both contexts. If, in ancient Greek mythology, an owl was the avatar of the goddess of wisdom, Athena, and represented knowledge and wisdom, according to indigenous and Mexican lore, a certain kind of wise speaking owls, also referred to as lechuzas, will blind anyone who looks at them straight into the eyes, thus punishing both the ignorant and those who proud themselves of too much knowledge. The fabled creatures are also said to lay curses on those who challenge or provoke them
(Women’s Tales 384), but, most importantly in view of our play, they supposedly enforce “the moral admonition to honor one’s mother” (Miles 46). The issues of knowledge, ignorance, and honoring one’s mother (or not) being so pertinent to the
Oedipus myth that Alfaro revises, his choice of the owls as the conveyors of the prophecy which lies at the heart of the myth and of the life pattern of his own Oedipus appears particularly felicitous, if not ingenious.143
As in the Sophoclean tragedies so in Oedipus el Rey, oracles and curses express a shadowy vision of the world and of human life in it. In Segal’s words,
“primitive past, the primitive strata of human existence” have a “demonic hold” on our world; a world “from which they are banished but not fully exorcised.” Yet, as it is the case in other treatments of the Oedipus myth, in the present one, the destructive, otherworldly forces (whether demonic or divine) with which the world is fraught are
143. Lévi-Strauss was apparently the first to draw a connection between the myth of Oedipus and the owls when he found by way of a Native American myth the equivalent of the Greek riddle-posing Sphinx in the mythical owls of the Algonquin people (Edmunds, Oedipus 123).
Delikonstantinidou 260 at once “[s]omething apart from, yet also interwoven with, human responsibility”
(Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World 588). Mythical Oedipus’ responsibility has been construed as a moot point over the years, as the earlier part of our discussion has pointed out. The issue of the responsibility of Alfaro’s Oedipus is also difficult to settle. This Oedipus is largely the product of the unavoidable circumstances in which he was raised and under which he was forced to live—by forces beyond the control of the “Oedipuses” of this world.
We can easily imagine that Oedipus had to toughen up early on in order to survive, first, on the streets, next, in the juvenile justice system, and, later on, in prison. His anything but salutary background accounts at least in part for his present arrogance and impiety. Indeed, contrary to his father, Tiresias, who one day “looked down,” “saw the blood” on his hands, and acted on his “epiphany” (an epiphany that cost him his eye sight),144 hence changing his life drastically, denouncing violence and deciding to spend the rest of his life “in the presence of God,” Oedipus declares that he does not want God (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 37-8): “He wants you to do everything he says or he’ll punish you for the rest of your life. I can do better than him. . . . His ego’s too big. . . . For me there is no heaven—just sky, chunky blue sky.
. . . My father’s journey is inside. Not me. . . .” (39). We can assume that the hero’s arrogance and impiety are consistent with his youthful insolence, as well as that all of these qualities have been inflated by the distinct shape and character his nurture has hitherto had. We can even think of them as comprising a sort of defense mechanism, indispensable in a world were even dreams are viewed with suspicion for the cost they entail. Yet, for all his quasi-blasphemous declarations, Oedipus will not risk harming a father he is so fond of: “I would never kill him. He is my life. I owe him my breath,”
144. Although, as has been also commented in an earlier footnote, the reason why and the manner in which this development came about remains vague in the play.
Delikonstantinidou 261 he affectionately tells of Tiresias (40). He, thus, makes up his mind to apply for parole and be released from prison as soon as possible to avert the fateful outcome.
As Oedipus had already guessed, Tiresias, in keeping with his prophetic attributes, was cognizant of his son’s decision before the latter divulged it to him.
Their parting scene has been written and staged as a lyrical tribute to father-son relationship; terse but emotionally powerful. The dialogue between father and son unfolds as the two of them are engaged in a tightly choreographed Tai Chi routine.
The flow of disciplined and graceful Tai Chi movements underscores physically, by way of contrast, the emotional turmoil of the two men, but, at the same time, it serves to contain the tension of their encounter and even release some of it. Besides displaying effectively (and affectively) the emotional and spiritual connection that obtains between the older and the younger man, the scene is compelling in its function as the occasion for the first explicit commentary on the peculiarities of the U.S. prison system that the play offers. “Don’t worry,” Tiresias tells an Oedipus concerned at the prospect of having to deal with the world “out there” all alone and without any back- up, “the line to get in here is way longer than the one to get out, I won’t even do half my time” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 41). “This is an industry, mijo,” he continues,
“[e]very time someone comes in, a ker-ching ker-ching goes off at the State Capitol.
They gotta kick us out so that we can get back in. Over one million served. . . .” (41-
2). Tiresias’ rough estimation is, in fact, far more modest than the reality that research findings with respect to the U.S. prison industrial complex represent.
According to studies by governmental agencies, civil rights organizations, as well as independent researchers, and the accompanying statistics, the U.S. prison industry, “an offspring of the military-industrial complex” (Ho and Loucky 94), has octupled since the nineteen-eighties (“from about $7 billion dollars in 1980 to nearly
Delikonstantinidou 262
$80 billion in 2010” (Stevenson 2014)). A “prison nation,” according to Beth E.
Richie (2012), the U.S. “has the highest incarceration rates on Earth” (Ho and Loucky
94); it “houses 25% of the world’s prisoners while having only 5% of the world’s population and imprisons people at the rate of 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, five times the worldwide average of 158 per 100,000” (Webb qtd. in Ho and Loucky 94).
Prison privatization, the industrial “advantages” derived from cheap inmate labor, as well as the rise in immigrant detention in the past twenty years constitute different, yet related, factors that contributed to rendering the U.S. “the second largest incarcerator in the world,” surpassed only by Russia (Walker and Tarutani 66).
One side effect of this development is the “boosting [of] connected industries, such as prison food corporations, prison medical care, prisoner transportation services, and telephone companies,” which, in turn, feed back into the prison industry
(Kunichoff 2010). “With so many vested interests in maintaining the prison-industrial complex, it is no wonder the system has become self-perpetuating,” notes scholar
Ernest Drucker, whose brilliant Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass
Incarceration in America (2011) demonstrates that the unprecedented rates of incarceration in the U.S. have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
This point relates to another side effect of the “omnipresent” U.S. prison culture: the shifting of material and other resources, including education, away from areas whose communities benefit greatly from them—often due to very presence of a prison establishment in the area (Lochner and Moretti 2003). Precisely because so much money is diverted to incarceration, as well as to the building and maintenance of prisons, “other public services that might play a role in keeping down crime in these communities are defunded. . . . Programs including health care, job training,
Delikonstantinidou 263 retirement benefits, housing, and community development have all suffered a loss of public revenues, even as funding allocated for mass incarceration has grown exponentially,” especially since the 2008 economic downturn, Drucker argues (47).
The destabilization of communities, as the scholar, by way of criminologist Todd
Clear (2007), shows, is “[a]nother way in which the plague of prisons has become self-sustaining.” In Florida, for instance, crime rates in communities “with high incarceration rates can be traced directly to increases in imprisonment”:
In other words, what started out as a punishment for crime—prison—
has now become a source of the very crime it seeks to control. Clear
argues that massive levels of arrest and imprisonment concentrated in
certain communities damage the social bonds that sustain life,
especially for poor communities. By corroding or destroying this most
common basis of social capital, mass incarceration sets up a perverse
relationship: punishment leads to increased crime, as it replaces the
moral mechanisms of family and community. (47)145
Additionally, lack of resources, especially social, health, and educational public services, and the corrosion of community ties have been shown to concern predominantly poor communities of color and to correlate with the ethnoracial disparity in imprisonment, which is itself also correlated with a similar disparity in police stops and arrest, which, in turn, is correlated, to a large extent, with overt or even unconscious ethnoracial bias and the implementation of policies and practices evincing ethnically/racially disparate assumptions and effects, such as law enforcement profiling (Behnke 2017; Tony 2016).
145. This is not to say, however, that there are no communities in the U.S. that see prisons as a source of economic development; a rather misguided assessment in view of the long-term effects of the prison culture.
Delikonstantinidou 264
Research conducted in the past three decades has shown that the overrepresentation of the African American and the Latino/a minority in the U.S. criminal justice system, and, more specifically, the higher rates of incarceration among African Americans and Latinos/as in comparison to those among “white” Euro
Americans, reflect both “differential involvement in crime” and “differential treatment by the criminal justice system,” or even a combination of the two (Spohn
177).146 The former determinant, however, is shown to be directly linked to other institutional, economic, demographic, and social structural variables, including economic discrimination, poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, constraints on access to educational, health, and other services, as well as to material resources of many kinds, or, rather, their lack thereof (America’s Courts). The foregoing variables are ultimately associated with social class inequities and, evidently, with the rootedness of racism in the U.S.; “a discomfiting revelation” of “the noxious poison in the mine’s air that kills the canary,” to recall Saldívar’s elaboration of Lani Guinier’s and Gerald Torres’ (2002) ingenious figural articulation of race in the U.S. as the miner’s canary (93).
The relevance of these findings to the East L.A. community that will soon replace the prison as the play’s main setting, and to Oedipus’ life, in particular, is distinctly demonstrated in the context of Oedipus el Rey. If the U.S. prison industrial complex emerges from the aforementioned studies as a self-perpetuating system, and, if, in Drucker’s view at least, mass incarceration can be understood in terms of a self- sustaining epidemic, then racial/ethnic and class biases, the discriminatory treatment
146. Relevant studies differ considerably in the emphasis they place on each of the two determinants, some prioritizing the former and some the latter. Generally, their findings on the matter can be characterized as inconsistent, but, as a recent study-overview has shown, “the results of the most recent and methodologically sophisticated studies evidence that the contemporary sentencing process . . . is . . . not racially neutral” (America's Courts 416).
Delikonstantinidou 265 they fuel, and “the regimes of surveillance, vulnerability, economic insecurity, and lack of support” that are instituted as a result and impinge on the life of many prisoners, “prior to, during, and after incarceration” (Whitt 183), should be seen as setting a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy which contributes to the escalation of deviance and violence in U.S. communities of crisis; barrio communities in the case of Oedipus el Rey.
By means of Tiresias’ succinct capturing of the reality of the U.S. prison culture and his attempt to communicate it to Oedipus, the play demonstrates clearly that Oedipus’ tragic story is as much motivated by divine prophecy as by the self- fulfilling prophecy of the said prison culture. In the course of the play, this self- fulfilling prophecy crystallizes and takes the shape of a negative feedback loop, or reciprocal relationship, between the barrio, gang-infected community of East L.A. and the prison apparatus. It is important to note, however, that the divine prophecy is not replaced by a secular, socioeconomic counterpart in Oedipus el Rey; rather, the two co-exist, as we shall see, mutually affirming and illuminating, and propel the story forward to its tragic climax.
Tiresias, for his part, strives to prevent both prophecies from being fulfilled by means of the guidelines he provides to Oedipus for his post-release steps. He specifically advices his son to “[g]o back up north,” to the neutral territories of Las
Vegas, where “old cholos go to retire and young cholos go to start over,” and where he is to lay low, find employment, and work his way up (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 44).
When Oedipus, desiring much more than what the scenario that Tiresias proposed entails, expresses his wish to go to L.A. in pursuit of “a place, possibility,” the old man tries to dissuade him; he even makes Oedipus promise him that he will not disobey him (44). Oedipus does promise him, kisses his father’s tearful eyes, and the
Delikonstantinidou 266 two part ways. It is likely that the seer knew at that very moment that Oedipus’ promise would very soon wither, but it is also likely that the parental tendency to trust in the best version of one’s child overshadowed his prophetic insight. Knowing what we do about how Oedipus’ future will play out, the farewell “veterano nod” father and son give each other becomes loaded with both meaning and feeling, while the affectionate eye-kissing gesture of Oedipus takes on a Judas-like quality.
Another lacuna, or virtual space, in the Sophoclean model of the Oedipus myth that Alfaro seeks to fill in with his play is the fatal encounter between Oedipus and Laius at a literal and metaphorical “middle of the road” which results in the latter’s death. In Oedipus el Rey, this mythical episode is amplified, dramatized instead of reported. If the insolence that the hero has exhibited in earlier scenes and the betrayal of his promise to his father are indices of his proneness to act impetuously, his encounter with Laius suggests that Alfaro’s Oedipus has the temperament of the kind of person who might have committed at least some of the crimes that he did, even without the involvement of a divine prophecy in the events making up his life pattern.147
Although it is Laius and not Oedipus the one who first overreacts and bursts into a fit of rage against the stranger who blocks the narrow one-way lane with his car, taunting, insulting, and threatening him, Oedipus quickly joins in the display of macho bravado, ultimately outmatching Laius’ exaggerated, masculine histrionics. “I have a problem with my temper,” Laius warns the younger man; “We have something in common,” Oedipus replies (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 49). The irony of this exchange is telling and almost too obvious to warrant comment. Still, as artist and cultural critic
147. The play evokes discussions on whether Sophocles’ Oedipus was the kind of person who would commit a terrible crime even without the involvement of a fatal prophecy or curse.
Delikonstantinidou 267
Rudolfo Anaya argues regarding machismo, there is nothing hereditary about the macho behavior, namely, the kind of behavior that both Laius/father and Oedipus/son exhibit in this scene. Nevertheless, there are certain “intangibles,” Anaya explains, lying beneath it, mainly entrenched ideas and values concerning maleness and femaleness, family, power, and honor. These are, in turn, underpinned by the workings of a sort of “unconscious influence,” by the “deeper currents” of an
“unconscious energy” manifest in the myths that are part of the Latino/a inheritance; an inheritance that is as much passed on in stories as by “osmosis” (n. pag.).
The cult of machismo, as a model of masculinity, and machismo, as a learned, conditioned behavior, are far more complex and diverse phenomena than is commonly presumed, writes Alfredo Mirandé in his study of masculinity in Latino/a culture (1997). Anaya says specifically of the latter, machismo, “that [it] preceded us” and “was learned from the cultures from which it evolved,” both European, and, specifically, Mediterranean, and Native American. Nevertheless, what began as a gender and sexual game, akin to the foreplay part of a primordial mating ritual, attracted many negative elements over the years, due to the many forces that came to impinge on Latino/a cultures, and “has taken on a manipulative aspect.” “The game turned ugly in many ways,” it devolved into a superficial power play that often proves destructive for family, friendship, and community (n. pag.).
More specifically, cholo violence became over the years tantamount to a demonstration of machismo and, although it is primarily directed against rival gangs, it is “sometimes directed toward local community events” too, Ellen Huegle observes.148 The scholar explains that it is this state of affairs that has contributed to
148. In Huegle’s account of el choloismo, “the violence among many cholos may be traced to Hispanic World War II veterans who brought drugs and street fighting to the pachuquismo
Delikonstantinidou 268 the marginalization or even the casting out of the cholos/as by Chicano/a and other
Latino/a communities across the U.S. (although el choloismo continues to be regarded as “a way of forging a cultural identity” among many U.S. Chicanos/as) (185). The said development is associated with a specific “turning point,” as Karin Michonski terms it, in the evolution of the Latino/a (mainly Chicano/a) gang subculture: a murder committed in 1947, widely known as the “Sleepy Lagoon case,” for which seventeen members of Chicano gangs were convicted. Police raids and mass arrests followed, and anyone sporting the typical gang-member attire of that time, the zoot suit, was targeted. At the same time, “[t]he media and law enforcement began to portray the gangs in racist ways,” and thus gangs and the lifestyle they entailed became part of a media stereotype for Latinos/as (25), a mass-produced image of
Latino/a identity.
Gradually, and due to the extra pressure exerted on the gang subculture by other sociocultural and political sources and streams of influence, often related to the need to preserve “sovereignty” over one’s territory against rival gangs and to other, systemic-structural, threats, it “came to accept the label and so did the rest of the population. Chicano gangs adopted the cholo way of life” incrementally, which meant, among other things, displaying macho power, control, and strength in violent ways (Michonski 25). “Drunkenness, abusing women, raising hell (all elements of la vida loca, that is, the choloismo lifestyle) are some mistaken notions of what macho means,” yet these are the constitutive notions of the macho code of behavior and ethics currently exercised within the contours of the gang subculture, Anaya observes.
A code of behavior and ethics that was once communal, focused on survival amidst adverse circumstances, and regulated by cultural norms and considerations of honor
culture of the 1950s [the Latino/a (mainly Chicano/a) gang subculture that preceded the emergence of choloismo]” (185).
Delikonstantinidou 269 has been twisted almost beyond recognition in the gang context (Anaya n. pag.).149 In its place, a compensatory model, of sorts, has been established in which the male’s obsession with power and domination is but the futile attempt to mask social and economic inferiority and/or failure. The well-known macho assertion “I’m the King” rings hollow in this context as a flamboyant disguise of a lamentable reality of dispossession.
The gang has replaced the traditional social enclaves of family and ethnic community for many a dispossessed and marginalized youth of the U.S. inner city ecosystem, shaping their behavior, providing initiation and belonging.150 With, first, the pachucos, the Mexican American street youth of the nineteen-forties and -fifties, and, later, after pachuquismo faded by the sixties, with the cholos, the cultural inheritors of the formers’ gang legacy (that is, their attitudes and symbols), machismo
149. The question of honor has been a long-contested issue with regard to the gang subculture. In theory, honor, along with the related desiderata of respect and reputation, is employed within the gang context to manage the members’ emotions of frustration, fear, and ambition to avoid violence, according to gang scholar Martin Sánchez-Jankowski (342), despite the fact that “the cholo gang life-style is willing to use violence to avenge questioned honor,” as another gang scholar, William S. Sanders, adds (132; emphasis added). Sanders, in fact, explains that “gang violence in the cholo world is a matter of one long unresolved feud”: “at one time a gang’s honor was offended, which led to an attack of revenge. The revenge led to an offense to the honor of the other gang, and all gang warfare since then has been a vendetta with no end.” Most importantly, “[s]ince honor is defined in the Chicano community as including one’s family, and presumably one’s gang, new members in a gang are introduced to the unresolved honor conflict, thereby preserving the conflict from one generation to the next.” Alfaro’s Electricidad responds, as we shall see in the next chapter, precisely to the operation of the (sub)cultural, inter- and intra-generational “schema” that Sanders has laid out, and to its pernicious repercussions for the individual and the collective. Suffice it to say, for the purposes of the present chapter, that the elements that (would potentially) constitute an offense to a gang or a gang member’s honor remain, to put it mildly, unclear. The ways in which matters of honor motivate violence within the gang context are characterized by inconsistency. In some cases, for instance, what one would presume are “real threats” to a gang’s honor, such as the murder of a gang member or encroachment on a gang’s territory by an adjacent gang, do not trigger violent reactions on the part of the “dishonored” cholos. Also, whereas “[w]hites in general had long been accused of taking honor away from the Mexican-Americans, . . . they were not a favored target of gang violence” (132). As Oedipus el Rey indicates, incidents such as a road altercation that would be treated as trivial matters in another context can, under the influence of macho subcultural dynamics, be interpreted as threats to one’s honor that demand immediate and aggressive retaliation. 150. A more extensive discussion of the cholo/a gang subculture will take place in the next chapter on Electricidad.
Delikonstantinidou 270 became radically redefined. As the play demonstrates, machismo is still, in a twenty- first-century social environment, taken to involve defense of one’s territory. Laius is indeed defending “his” territory, as the designated “King” of the East L.A. barrio, when he first accosts the stranger, Oedipus, who has forayed into “his” streets without authorization. In the brief scene that preceded this one, Laius is shown heading off to consult the veteranos about the encroachment of the neighboring Salvadorians on his barrio “’hood.” Moreover, machismo continues to be, at least partly, a reaction to the hegemony of el gabacho, or white (Euro) America. The road-rage exchange between the two men, essentially a “quien es mas macho” vignette that goes awry, can be read as an instantiation of a state of affairs that Jerome Weeks pointedly sums up in his review of the play: in a world where “ethnic identity and masculinity are threatened and embattled” they “only roar and curse the louder” (2014). Laius, in particular, embodies the kind of machismo which does little harm to the hegemony that oppresses him and his people, but which harms those closest to him, the very people that as an older “macho” man he is supposed to take care of and protect: la familia.
Macho means, or used to mean, precisely that: “taking care of la familia,”
Anaya explains, “[p]erhaps this is the most important definition of macho, the real, positive meaning of the word. And yet, it is often given short shrift” by “machos” themselves and cultural critics alike (n. pag.). In the course of the play, we have witnessed Laius curtly dismissing Jocasta as he would a servant, doping her up to take away their infant son, handing his child to his henchman to be murdered, admitting to
Tiresias that he is anything but a good father, and, in the preceding scene, beating
Jocasta in a feat of paranoia when she suggests that they try to have another child to whom they will bequeath their “kingdom,” since he misinterprets her suggestion as a challenge to his kingship. The barrio “king” can be said to exemplify the kind of
Delikonstantinidou 271 macho man who turns his frustration and aggression toward his family, especially his wife; a well-documented instance of powerlessness and dispossession turning against the sufferers themselves and wreaking further destruction upon an already battered world, especially its familial and communal costituents.
Indeed, today’s cult of machismo has been said to constitute a compensation for the powerlessnes6s and dispossession many Latino men experience, as Yvette
Flores-Ortiz (1993) and Octavio Paz (1985; originally 1981) have convincingly argued; a sort of reflex borne of a complex that can be traced back to the traumatic experiences of the Conquest and colonization. In a very real sense, then, the macho acts out an internalized historical aggression/violation perpetrated against him, in “an attempt to deflect or detach from the traumatic pain” of the said experiences, Julia
Sanchez writes in her study of the phenomenon. In identifying and enacting the role of the aggressor, the macho man performs a “defensive maneuver” to protect himself
“from feelings of helplessness” (92). Given that racism and racial oppression continue to enforce conditions of dependency and powerlessness among Latino men, machismo is perpetuated as “a form of misdirected or ‘negative’ resistance, . . . shaped by the challenge to the hegemony of the socially dominant white male”
(Mercer and Julien 113). Yet, the form it ultimately assumes is oppressive to Latinas, children, and, often, to Latinos themselves, to the extent that it “entail[s] self- destructive acts and attitudes” (113). In the context of the play, the hypermasculine identity that both Laius and Oedipus have adopted manifests itself through violence and crime, and serves only to perpetuate a cycle of violence and crime which disrupts/distorts communal and familial continuity, and which distances all those involved in it from the possibility of healing the conditions that give rise to it.
Delikonstantinidou 272
As El Sobador had foreseen, Laius recognizes that it is his own son who is punching him to death moments before he breaths his last breath. He even yells out to him, but his voice and the truth it contains do not register with Oedipus, who is, by that point, in a murderous amok-like state: he punches Laius “in the face repeatedly with an absolute savagery and lack of emotion. It’s hard and quick, like in a prison yard” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 50). This is what the stage directions prescribe, thus indicating a meaningful conflation of inside and outside which further underscores the fact that “[e]ven outside of the prison yard, Oedipus seals his fate as if inside a prison yard: there is no outside, outside” for him (Jenkins 180). Admittedly, there is something fated in the way that the aforementioned cycle of violence and crime operates in the play that has nothing to do with metaphysics, divine prophecies, prophetic dreams, or curses.
Prison culture, macho gang culture, and the perverted masculine ethics of both have been ingrained in Oedipus since the dawn of his life, sinking deep roots into him throughout all those years of living, alternately, on the streets and in correctional institutions. Without altogether defenestrating Oedipus’ personal responsibility for the distinct shape his life assumed, the play illuminates the way in which the above factors have conspired to push him beyond the point of no return, insofar as they have exerted upon his life a force as indomitable as the force of an overarching, divinely- ordered fate or that of a hereditary curse, or both. After all, “‘life’ for Oedipus,” as
Jenkins remarks, “has been, and is still largely, an existence between institutional walls,” one in which “[p]rimal ties of kinship . . . are . . . assimilated to the tyranny of the county prison” (179), and thus his ultimate “self-demolition” cannot but be directly related to the constant shuffling between the barrio streets and incarceration that has characterized his childhood and early adulthood.
Delikonstantinidou 273
By the time he reaches downtown Los Angeles Laius has been dead for days, but Oedipus is, in a very real sense, already socially dead. Like many other young people who have treaded on a life path similar to his, Oedipus is a criminalized individual reduced to subcitizenship within the “hierarchies of membership, security, and agency” instituted by the prison apparatus “inside and outside prison walls”;
“what is sometimes called ‘social death,’” as Matt S. Whitt remarks. Although, formally, he is a member of the political community, he is “substantively stripped of citizenship benefits and social recognition.” According to Whitt,
the prison apparatus does not merely segregate ‘dangerous’
individuals’ from the ‘public.’ Rather, it criminalizes some individuals
and differentiates them from other members of society by dislocating
them, filtering their access to the bases of social recognition and
political agency, disciplining them, and relegating them to
subcitizenship. In so doing, the prison apparatus actively creates the
populations that it is said to merely separate. (184)
Thus, a caste of “internal outsiders” is created by the hypertrophied penal system over against which the rest of society, the population of “free” full citizens, is defined via negativa. Ultimately, everyone gets interpellated in this way and is thus grounded in an “us versus them” opposition which is constitutive of the U.S. political community.
The disproportionate criminalization of lower-class people of color, however, means that it is they who are predominantly designated as the internal outsiders of the dominant U.S. political community. The prison culture phenomena on which we touched earlier in this chapter, bear testimony to Whitt’s arguments, particularly in so far as they relate and affect for the most part young people from racial/ethnic minority and lower-class backgrounds; people like Alfaro’s Oedipus.
Delikonstantinidou 274
The high rates of recidivism and “the pipeline” can, in fact, be understood as two distinct manifestations of the situation described by Whitt and of the workings of the U.S. prison culture as described in the preceding segment of our discussion. Both derive from the particular way in which the prison apparatus operates in the U.S. Both emerge as aspects of the self-fulfilling prophecy on which we earlier expounded. The ethnoracial and class targeting of mass incarceration in the country creates and recreates the conditions of its own perpetuation, entrapping the country’s more vulnerable (in terms of race/ethnicity and class position) youth in a mechanism of
“social and political constitution,” which establishes and preserves race/ethnicity and class dominance, at the same time that the country proclaims the energies that keep this mechanism going obsolete (Whitt 185).
The protagonist of Alfaro’s play is one of those young people who, due to
“festering social and economic disadvantages,” are not only “at-risk” but, in a very real sense, “destined” “to end up in prison or to die a violent, most likely gun-related, death,” to borrow the words of journalist Kevin Chapell from the introduction of his interview with the President of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), Marian Wright
Edelman. It is not that they were derailed from the right track somehow and at some point during their life; rather, they never had the opportunity to get on it. In that same interview, Edelman explains that “[p]rison is the end of the pipeline and caps off a sad journey that begins at birth, sometimes before birth,” “before taking a single step or uttering a word” (152). The people to whom Edelman refers are, much like Oedipus is both literally and metaphorically, “scarred” since birth, bearing a social stigma that prohibits them from becoming fully integrated into society, and thus frequently outlawed and multiply victimized.
Delikonstantinidou 275
The alarming reality of the “bulging prison pipeline” and the fact that once
“introduced” into the penal system early on in life most poor people of color keep returning to it—most often until they meet an untimely death on the streets—is associated to an overdetermined socioeconomic compulsion, “a result of a public health crisis that fails to address youth issues early on” (Edelman 152). “[T]he fate of a child can be ‘predicted’ early in life by assessing factors from poverty, abuse and the lack of health/mental health coverage to poor schools, dangerous communities and little or no quality early-childhood education,” Edelman asserts. In prioritizing incarceration and punishment instead of early intervention (by families, communities and community elders, institutions and political leaders) and prevention (by means of
“implementation of proven child-development strategies”) U.S. society victimizes disadvantaged young people from a very young age (152). The CDF, along with allied organizations and independent activists, urges that attention and resources need to be invested in “crucial points in a child’s development, where risks and disadvantages converge to disrupt the successful transition into productive adulthood.” To put it differently, it calls for “a fundamental paradigm shift in child policy and practice”
(153) that will enable the dismantlement of the pipeline.
The resistance encountered by endeavors like the CDF’s, unfortunately, issues not only from the nodes of the country’s political, economic, and sociocultural superstructure, but also from the country’s very foundation, including the lower strata of the U.S. system—the lower strata of its class system as well as its ethnic and racial minorities. Significantly, it is not only the “white supremacist and classist” political community of the U.S. (Whitt 184) that relegates young people like Oedipus to the status of a submember. The political, social, and cultural divide between youth essentially reared within and by the penal system, the “pintos,” those that never stood
Delikonstantinidou 276 a chance to escape “the pipeline,” and the barrio community as a whole is evident in the way first, Creon, and, then, Jocasta treat Oedipus. Although Jocasta’s initial distrust of Oedipus will soon melt away, however, Creon will remain wary of
Oedipus’ presence until the very end. Knowing what we know about Oedipus’ past and future, Creon’s suspicions would seem justified if they were not obviously fueled by an entirely different set of concerns, self-serving and centered on the acquisition of power.
If Chicano/a communities generally hold conflicting views of cholos/as and exhibit an ambivalent stance toward the gang subculture, at once dismissing its violent, (self)destructive modus operandi and finding in it a locus of struggle and resistance, the attitude of the community toward pintos, including current or former prison gang members, is much more squarely negative. During the Civil Rights
Movement of the sixties, cholo/a gangs began to be considered by some as potential or actual allies in the struggle against Anglo/Euro American hegemonic oppression.
Many Chicano/a community leaders even “sympathized with the pintos . . . as a segment of the community needing reintegration into barrio life—not rejection or further stigmatization” (Moore 8). However, the sympathy and acceptance that had been extended to the gangs and to pintos, in particular, began to be withdrawn in the eighties, “as their reputation changed yet again,” Michonski documents and goes on to provide the “backstory” of this change:
the media blamed Chicano gangs for the violence occurring in many
prisons throughout the country and for the distribution of heroin in the
Mexican neighborhoods. Major changes in police practice led to
widely publicized indictments of Chicano gang members for
trafficking heroin. Gang programs established by communities and the
Delikonstantinidou 277
police to guide and help gang youth were subsequently eliminated, and
a more aggressive approach appeared in the form of sheriff’s and
police department anti-gang units. (25)
Therefore, pintos, youth much like the play’s protagonist, and even potential pintos for that matter, those stigmatized early on due to the unfortunate circumstances of their birth and their impoverished and unstable lives, became increasingly isolated, relegated to the fringes of the community, and were left to their fate. It was a fate that came to take the form of law enforcement. Gradually, as our discussion so far has showed, the problems associated with these contiguous developments spiraled out of control, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Divisions emerged within Latinidad and Chicanidad that concerned one’s cholo and/or pinto status, besides those that concerned gender and sexual identification, and cemented over the years. Like gays and lesbians, pintos are largely regarded as outcasts from/by the community and are treated as such. The treatment they receive—again, like the treatment received by gays and lesbians (as we saw in the chapter on Moraga’s The Hungry Woman)—illustrates the existence of internal social hierarchies within Latinidad/Chicanidad. Monica Brown argues, with regard to
Latino/a gang members, that “[t]he adjective ‘delinquent’ precedes the term ‘citizen’ because this sense of Latino/a gang members . . . precedes all conceptions of citizenship within mainstream rhetoric,” both Euro American and Latino/a American.
Her argument can be readily applied to Alfaro’s Oedipus, who carries “the mantle of delinquency and danger” (xxiii), like many an urban Latino/a youth that has grown up on the streets, getting swept in and out of prison regularly.
Delikonstantinidou 278
This accounts largely for the cold greeting he receives from Creon when the latter recognizes him in the streets of the East L.A. barrio. It was “the walk” that gave him away to his former acquaintance from “the juvie” (Juvenile Detention),151 while he was wandering, lost, “trying to hide his timidity” and his bloody shirt from the barrio folk (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 51). Oedipus has to try to convince Creon that he is not “an enemy” and that he is only looking for “a place to crash.” The brother of the barrio “queen,” Jocasta, has staked a claim to the kingship in the wake of Laius’ death and he has to distance himself from any troublesome wandering vatos (homeboys). It is only after Oedipus has appealed to his sense of sympathy and tradition, evoked the ethics of cholo brotherhood, and reminded him of the times they saved each other’s life at the “Young Authority,” pleading him all the while and assuring him that he will stay out of trouble, that Creon accedes to let him stay at his place for a week, “tops.”
On one condition: that he will call him “king” (54).
Once in La Casa, Creon warns Oedipus to stay away from his recently widowed sister—a warning that like Tiresias’ earlier one will go entirely unheeded by the hero—and enlightens him on the basics of cholo gang “business” of trading in distinct kinds of services and “merchandise”: “We’re masters of the vehicle. Strip down cars. Mostly Hondas. We rent out the neighbors garages, bring in a coche and strip it in minutes. Contribute to the local economy by moving all the parts quickly along. Better than Wal-Mart, if you ask me.” He also lays out his grand plans for the future of the Pico Union barrio business: “But I’m going to change all that. What we’re doing is 1970’s stuff. I am going to go down to Mexico and get us on the pipeline. None of that small town mota shit either. Heroin and anything else they’re making at the Coca Cola factory down there. We can be the pipeline. Straight into
151. “I’m not crippled enough to be crippled,” Oedipus has earlier in the play explained in reference to his name (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 32).
Delikonstantinidou 279 downtown” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 57)—the associations that the word “pipeline” trigger do not go unnoticed here. Locked up most of his life, Oedipus has a hard time hiding from Creon his ignorance of the specific workings of the cholo world.
Although he will need some time to tune fully into the East L.A. gang subculture and its singular ways, however, he demonstrates notable readiness to respond defiantly to the belief system that undergirds barrio life, or, at least, the version of it that Creon puts forward: “. . . here, we still believe things in this barrio. About what happens to us. Our fate. We’re very Old-School here. We got our cell phones and internet, but we also got our prophecy, prediction and oracles. We follow the old traditions.” “Yeah I don’t believe in all that stuff. It’s kind of a prison,” Oedipus responds dismissively
(58). It is the arrogance that suffuses his response what grinds against Jocasta’s hard- won faith and piety, and teases her out of her self-imposed reclusion.
A little earlier, Creon had used the word “hiding” to describe his sister’s state
(58). Indeed, the play intimates in subtle yet unmistakable ways, as we shall also see later on, that Jocasta has long lived as a fugitive, fleeing from the dangers whose source was her own home and barrio, her own version of an inside/outside conflation, just like Oedipus has been fleeing from dangers, threats, and omens, originating in both the inside and the outside, throughout his life. The said conflation of inside and outside, immanent in Oedipus el Rey, and the play’s overriding prison metaphor, of which the former is an integral component, serve to establish early in this scene—a scene that has been characterized by most of the play’s reviewers as the heart of the play—a profound bond between Oedipus and Jocasta. Knowing that the bond they share metaphorically was once a very literal one, the literal umbilical cord between a mother and her child, renders the verbal mating dance that the two of them begin, albeit on a polemic note initially, uncomfortable, if not painful, to watch.
Delikonstantinidou 280
Still, their belief systems and worldviews are so dissimilar, even diametrically opposed, that, at first glance, one wonders how these two people can come to share the same space, let alone engage in a relationship. But, as we have noted above, the bond that binds them together reaches far below the surface. In fact, it reaches far too deep. Their “Pinter-esque dialogue,” as Jenkins describes it, “which pirouettes around the idea of stasis and repetition” is illustrative of the former point (180):
OEDIPUS: . . . I don’t think God punishes you unless you want him to.
JOCASTA: You saying we look for pain?
OEDIPUS: Do you?
…………………………………………………………………………..
JOCASTA: Explain yourself.
OEDIPUS: I’m just saying that for some people, God is a stick you use
to beat yourself up with.
…………………………………………………………………………..
JOCASTA: You think the people in this barrio—the elders, the healers,
los hueseros—beat themselves up with a “God Stick”?
OEDIPUS: I don’t know the people in this barrio.
JOCASTA: That’s right, you don’t!
OEDIPUS: Are they as beat up as you?
JOCASTA: Fuck you, asshole! (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 59-61)
Delikonstantinidou 281
When, in the course of their quasi-theological discussion, Oedipus is asked by Jocasta what he believes in, he proudly proclaims: “I believe in myself” (68). We cannot but concur with Jenkins’ reading of Oedipus’ assertion as the play’s “metaliterary comment on the entire reception history of [Sophocles’] Oedipus,” although our reading of Alfaro’s Oedipus diverges from that of Jenkins in a crucial aspect. The
Oedipus of the Sophoclean model, and, particularly, of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, exhibits a strong belief in his self-determination and, concurrently, challenges the ancient Greek (pre-Hellenistic, pre-Stoic) concept of moira (or fate) (although, contrary to what Jenkins claims, he never denies it). However, Alfaro’s Oedipus rejects not moira as Sophocles and his contemporaries conceived it, but the “vaguely
Calvinist doctrine of predestination”152 (177-8), which, over the years, came to largely displace the Greek correlative, until at least the early part of the previous century.153
According to the said doctrine and the specific understanding of fate that it entails, and which still exerts great influence over popular interpretations of the
Sophoclean Oedipus, humans are mere puppets in the hands of fate (or God or gods), essentially deprived of free will.154 Nevertheless, as a prevalent contemporary vein of
152. It is important to note, however, that, even within Calvinism, the doctrine of predetermination has been a vexed issue, stated with more or less moderation in different periods, by different people, and on different circumstances. 153. Here, we are referring to the interpretive turn regarding the Sophoclean model of Oedipus signaled by Tycho von Wilamowitz, in 1917, and later taken up by E. R. Dodds and others. 154. Although a detailed elaboration on the issue of moira (fate) as it relates to Sophocles’ treatments of the Oedipus myth lie outside the scope of the present study as noted before, a couple of comments would, perhaps, shed more light on the above passage. Oedipus Tyrannus, as Charles Segal has pointed out, “is not a play about free will versus determinism.” In fact, “[t]he Greeks did not develop a notion of a universal, all-determining Fate before the Stoics in the third century B.C.E.” Although, “supernatural elements are important [,] . . . the play does not label any of these as the certain causes of suffering. . . . For all its concern with prophecy and oracles, the Oedipus has a startling modernity precisely because these supernatural elements are not only kept in the background but are also hidden and mysterious” (“Life’s Tragic Shape” 205). Bernard Knox also grants “that the opposition of fate and free will, providence and chance, determined and open universe, is not explicitly formulated until much later than Sophocles’ time, in the philosophical discussions of the late fourth and third centuries,” although it could have been conceived as a problem (81). All discussions of Oedipus’ freedom or his subjection to fate from the late
Delikonstantinidou 282 thought has suggested, fate and free will were not conceived of as incompatible, mutually exclusive alternatives in Sophocles’ day (Gould 33). Indeed, we are not in a position to accurately gauge the extent to which the coexistence of predictable pattern and free will was considered problematic when Sophocles was writing Oedipus
Tyrannus (if at all), but we do have plenty of evidence pointing to the fact that it is precisely the problematics of this coexistence that functioned as the source of much of the play’s tragic import throughout its long reception history. Alfaro taps into this very source in placing his Oedipus at the crux of the uneasy symbiosis of his hero’s free will with a predictable pattern. Only this pattern is construed and constructed by the playwright less as divine providence and more as “the mundane social institutions and customs” of the U.S. prison culture and the gangland tradition (Jenkins 177-8).
Transplanted into the contemporary U.S. milieu, this least easily translatable and
“least ‘American’ aspect of Sophocles’ play” (177-8), a metaphysically ordained— and apparently divinely sanctioned—moira is transformed as the play unfolds, in large part, to the conjoined systems of the prison and the gang culture. The workings of the latter forces, however, are no less mysterious, or rather, obscure for being visibly active in the lives of Alfaro’s heroes.
If Oedipus’ belief in himself, strongly evocative of the western cult of individuality (or individualism), is noble in some sense, as Jenkins claims, is all the more tragic for it (180-2). Contrary to him, Jocasta abides by a fatalistic notion of predetermination that hearkens back to medieval philosophical debated and alludes to the Calvinist doctrine. The beliefs of Alfaro’s Jocasta, however, are markedly
fourth century onwards have been noticeably inconclusive (82), while the advent of Christianity and Christian philosophical thought only compounded an already contested discourse. The issue is no more resolved today than it was in the Hellenistic period or in the nineteenth century, and one should always bear in mind that it is hardly possible to avoid anachronisms when meddling with this issue, as each era finds it hard to think away its prevalent notions of fate and free will when dealing with it.
Delikonstantinidou 283 different from, if not opposite to, those of Jocasta in Sophocles’ version of the myth.
As Jenkins observes, although Sophocles’ “Jocasta is a keen skeptic of moira,” the
Chicana Jocasta of Alfaro’s play “redefines fate and destiny through the prism of barrio culture and the borderlands” (180-2). In one of the play’s most captivating monologue, Jocasta retorts to Oedipus’ self-assured proclamation:
Well you know what, don’t run around telling that to the people here,
We’re border people. We’ve always been. It’s who we are. We’re the
stuff underneath the cement. Do you get that? . . . This city, it is just
borders and beliefs. It’s about the old ways here. In this barrio—we
still lay hands and kill chickens and go to church and do what the
shaman says. Look at the way we look, like our ancestors. We haven’t
changed. This is the way we live. You might think you have the power
to make the world you want to make, but there’s someone upstairs
pulling your strings. You think you got here on your own? We all got
destiny. We all got a story that was written for us a long time ago.
We’re just characters in a book. We’re already history and we just
started living. Our story has already been told. We’re fated. (Alfaro,
Oedipus el Rey 69)
Besides the metatheatrical element of her monologue, which nods to the reception history of the Oedipus myth and serves to underscore her philosophical/religious outlook, as well as add intricacy to her function as Oedipus’ counterpart in the play, her words are consequential for what they reveal about diasporic barrio culture and
Jocasta’s position in it. The kind of fatalism that Jocasta represents is, indeed, a manifestation of borderland existence and thought, the product of the syncrisis of
Greek, European, and Native American beliefs. It is also one of the many instances in
Delikonstantinidou 284
Alfaro’s Greek-based and –inspired mythoplays via which the playwright gives concrete expression the ethos of mestizaje and lends credence to the view that
Latinos/as, in general, and Chicanos/as, in particular, “embrace at least two views of reality, considering that they embody [at least] two distinct bloodlines—each with a deep civilization, prehistory, and history,” as Ned Crouch puts it (n. pag.).
Greek, Spanish, and other European, as well as Aztec strains continue to animate the Latino/Chicano/a mind which Jocasta verbalizes in her monologue. Her words are importantly informed by the notion of “aguantar,” which is taught to
Latinos/as from an early age and which basically translates into: grin and bear suffering—a notion central to the macho mentality that we earlier discussed.
“Aguantar,” in turn, resembles, on the one hand, fatalism as the Stoics first developed it and as the Christians later elaborated it. As Earl Shorris usefully explains, contrary to the pre-Stoic, Greek understanding of fate as “a force beyond the gods, the foundation of natural law, and the springboard of ethics,” opposing which meant committing hubris, fatalism “absolves man from thinking.” It “does not admit the notion of hubris nor does it allow man to seriously contemplate the morality of his actions, for what is fated will happen no matter what he thinks or chooses; in fatalism everything is predestined, man’s will is useless” (112). Whereas “[f]ate made the rules of cause and effect inevitable” and the “consequences of actions as immutable as natural law,” fatalism makes the said rules “irrelevant” and the consequences unknowable (112-3). On the other hand, “aguantar” has even closer affinities to the
Aztec brand of fatalism, one that exhibits the same extraordinary combination of sophistication and animism that other swathes of Aztec culture do. Miguel León-
Portilla writes of the distinctive Aztec fatalism that “[a]lthough the Nahuas certainly believed in the strong influence of the various signs and dates of the tonalpohualli
Delikonstantinidou 285
[the Aztec divinatory aspect of the calendar, literally meaning “count of days”], it is also true that they considered self-control an important force in overcoming a destiny”
(120). Aztec fatalism also diverged from absolute fatalism in that it accommodated the belief that “the gods could be influenced by prayer or ritual,” besides the fact that it was distinctly self-referential, since the Aztecs believed they were alone in the universe (Shorris 113; Crouch n. pag.).
The mestizaje-inflected, syncretic, aguantar-like fatalism of Jocasta contrasts sharply with Oedipus’ worldly optimism which, in turn, echoes more closely the
European and Euro American genealogical strand of the Latino/a and the Chicano/a plural cultural organism. The two protagonists can, in fact, be said to embody the
“optimism versus fatalism” dichotomy as well as the “optimism and fatalism” combination that, according to Ned Crouch, “still exists and informs us” of Latino/a peoples’ “beliefs in multiple realities” (n. pag.). By the end of the play, Oedipus will have been disenchanted of his misplaced, naively sanguine hopes of worldly success and will be forced to learn aguantar the hard way. For the time being, however, his willful optimism and youthful arrogance, both embroidered with endearing vulnerability, have upon Jocasta the effect of a strategy of seduction—and a quite effective one at that.
Jocasta is fatally attracted to Oedipus’ headstrong desire to rewrite history, finding in him the only chance she had ever had to (re)invent her own past and her self. As their conversation unwraps so do secrets, regrets, and dreams: “I want things,” Oedipus admits, “A family. A dog. A car. TV. Anything. That I can hold on to” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 72); and she finds it hard to resist the unreserved trust he shows her. Longing gradually bridges the gulf between them and they reach across to each other in hope and desperation. Once they find themselves in one another’ arms it
Delikonstantinidou 286 takes them three months to part for a worth-mentioning amount of time, as we learn in one of the coro’s subsequent interventions—the coro now representing the community of the barrio instead of the community of inmates, and expressing barrio concerns. In the meantime, they reveal their stories to each other. Oedipus tells
Jocasta of how he was essentially raised “in the Young Authority,” where he first met
Creon; of how he robbed a Costco on his seventeenth birthday and then stayed outside waiting for the cops to put it him “in the big house,” the only place he knew well, unwilling and unequipped “to live on the [unfamiliar] outside” world; and of his father, who kept robbing stores to get “himself to North Kern” in order to start raising him (80). Jocasta, in turn, tells him of how her family “flew across the border [from
Mexico] . . . looking for work” and of how her late husband claimed her as his property, his moll, when she was only a girl, as well as of the baby she lost years ago
(79-82).
Although she is surprised and becomes slightly apprehensive upon learning that Tiresias Gomez, her husband’s erstwhile henchman, is Oedipus’ father, she does not press the matter further, too busy reeling in the haze of newfound love to carefully process the registered piece of information. “I’m filling up with you,” she tells
Oedipus at some point during the play’s controversial, steamy postcoital scene:
Doesn’t that sound strange? Even thinking it makes me feel. . . . All the
empty spaces inside of me, it’s as if they were always yours. The touch
of your skin, your smile, the way you look at me—they complete me. .
. . I know I sound like some teenage puta, but it’s different, I swear to
you. When a woman my age says that to a man—it’s different. . . .
You’re part of me. I don’t know why. (75)
Delikonstantinidou 287
But we do, and thus her words, as well as the quite explicit coital and postcoital scenes that they seal, strike us as more than awkward. Indeed, as most reviewers of the play concede, audiences have responded to the two scenes with a mixture of enthrallment and shock. Even the most experienced and shock-proof among the members of the audience found it difficult not to flinch in discomfort at the carnal spectacle of the desire between a mother and a son being consummated. One can only imagine how mortified the less well-versed audience members of Oedipus el Rey must have been.155
Similarly to Sophocles, Alfaro creates an Oedipus who is neither entirely morally innocent nor exempt of blame for his actions, making sure to foreground repeatedly throughout the play his violent temper, insolence, and arrogance. Yet, also similarly to Sophocles, Alfaro emphatically problematizes the forces that exert their destructive influence upon Oedipus’ tragic life pattern. In fact, he does so even more conspicuously than the ancient tragedian (the difference being that, whereas
Sophocles investigated mostly otherworldly forces, Alfaro targets mostly quite worldly ones). If Sophocles’ attested personal piety has, over the years, troubled readings of the way in which he represents the intentions and workings of divinity in his treatments of the Oedipus myth, having interpreters struggle over the question of how he can reconcile his belief in divine excellence and justice with his belief that divinity/ies can ruin the lives of essentially good and well-intentioned people,
155. In his interview with James Hebert (2015), the playwright narrates an amusing incident that took place during a post-show talkback in Pasadena. At some point during the discussion, a man stood up to say: “I hate this play. This is a disgusting, morally offensive play. How could you even think of something as awful as a man (sleeping with) his own mother?” Alfaro explained that the plot element which exasperated him originated with another dramatist named Sophocles, to which the man replied: “Well I haven’t met him, but I’ll look him up and tell him the same thing I told you!” In this same interview, Alfaro says that he “loves the story because of what it says about the visceral impact of Greek tragedy—and how it can serve to raise both hackles and consciousness today.”
Delikonstantinidou 288
Alfaro’s own piety (also well attested) could be said to clash with the way in which his play presents Oedipus’ terrible destiny as willed by God (21, 23, 27, 40, 120, 121,
125). Granted: there is no easy way out of the foregoing conundrum and we are, certainly, not in a position to assess Alfaro’s personal relationship with the godhead.
The ways of God appear no less inscrutable in this play than they do in the lives of real, ordinary men and women. Yet, Alfaro makes sure that, in Oedipus el
Rey, emphasis falls not on the reasons behind God’s intentions—his play is not crafted as a springboard for a meditation on God’s justice or its absence thereof—but on the specific means by which these inherently indecipherable intentions get implemented in the life of the hero. Besides the omnipresent prison culture, the gang- ridden barrio culture is presented in the play as another “tool,” as it were, by which some supernatural will hammers down its dreadful plans for Oedipus, for whatever reason. Thus, in a sense, the two are made the equivalents of the ancient gods which, according to a pre-Stoic Greek conception, were the “implementers” of an overarching moira/fate to which they, too, submitted. The fact that the playwright is a native of the Pico Union district of Los Angeles in which the second part of the play is set renders his critique of barrio culture all the more potent and convincing.
Barrio life, as Jocasta describes it to Oedipus when they first meet, is as much suffused by the supernatural as by the natural; a site where the mundane, the magico/mytho-religious, and the philosophical realms overlap. As the play draws near its conclusion, we get a fuller and even more complicated view of the barrioscape in terms of the realities with which its inhabitants are daily faced. The barrio emerges as a border space in the heart of urban America, where people live in a “paradox of crime and kindness,” to borrow an evocative phrase from one of Ernesto Quiñonez’s
Delikonstantinidou 289 novels (161). It is an ambivalent space that arouses contradictory attitudes and feelings among its borderland residents.
On the one hand, it is a kind of “transnational home” to the many displaced and dispossessed peoples that co-exist within its boundaries and to their cultures—
“the rallying point for community feeling” (Beals 33). As “home,” the barrio allows for a sense of belonging and for a sense of identity to be created on the part of its inhabitants. In this respect, the barrio can be considered, to borrow from Carmen Flys
Junquera’s analysis, as “a primary territory,” the extended part of the more private home, or a sort of mediator between one’s private home and the public streets: “at times there is no [internal] border and the barrio is lived as a primary territory, an extension of the home where the characters move freely and have no trouble regulating boundaries. The boundary is clearly distant, at the end of the barrio where the Anglo world begins. Within the barrio it seems as if there is one big family” (99).
On the other hand, the barrio is, in many senses, alienated, especially socio- economically, ghettoized, transitory, and thus unstable (recalling, in fact, Phoenix or
“Tamoachán” of Moraga’s The Hungry Woman). It is a place plagued by social problems and internal divisions as we have already noted earlier in this chapter; an obstacle in the way of its more upwardly mobile residents as they struggle to fulfill their ambitions (as Hason of Alfaro’s Mojada has served to point up).
“Paradoxically,” then, “the same space, the barrio, can become a secondary territory. .
. . [where] [p]sychological and cultural boundaries are continuously erected,” claims
“and fights for primacy and control” take place, and mental borders are being set up, due to insecurities of various kinds (Flys Junquera 99), constricting the freedom of its inhabitants.
Delikonstantinidou 290
Jocasta illustrates this peculiar barrio dualism overtly. On the one hand, she passionately enunciates the cultural, conceptual and moral, foundations of barrio culture, as we saw above, and points to their discursive and extra-discursive dimensions, defending them against Oedipus’ agnostic humanism, or rather, humanocentric theism. On the other hand, in various instances throughout the play she explicitly states that she feels sad and angry because of all the things of which barrio life has stripped her (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 64, 71-2); afraid (67); trapped and persecuted (76-7); even “dead for a long time,” due to the mental, emotional, and spiritual deprivation she experiences within the confines of barrio culture (67). If
“[y]ou choose to live our kind of life you have to accept the rules,” she tells Oedipus and makes sure he understands that these rules are quite strict. “[I]n this damn neighborhood,” Jocasta remarks, even the dead pester the living beyond the grave:
“they do that to you—the dead—they can get into your head and make you stop living, even from the grave,” she explains (82), and her words are a nod to Alfaro’s
Electricidad where the dead are, indeed, the plight of the living.
Moreover, as in Electricidad, especially by means of the figure of
Clemencia/Clytemnestra, so in Oedipus el Rey, the point is made that, although, in appearance, the “Viejas,” that is, the older women or matriarchs, seem to be running the barrio business, it is men who dominate the barrio’s public life. In fact, it becomes more than apparent in the play that, when Laius was alive, Jocasta was expected (and compelled) to submit to his wishes, and that, now that he is dead, she has to “[h]old on to her power,” while “[e]verybody is already circling./ . . . [w]aiting for the new king,/ [o]r new territory,” as the coro puts it, “[b]ecause out here. . . ./ we need kings. .
. ./ and systems. . . ./ to operate the system” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 86-8). Instead of empowered by the barrio culture and, especially, by her current position as the
Delikonstantinidou 291 dominant gang’s sole leader, Jocasta appears as disempowered as she was when her tyrannical husband, Laius, was alive. The skewed dynamics of power and control that she experienced in her relationship with her husband are reenacted in her relationship with the barrio people, the gente. It is almost as if the collective of her gente and the rules by which they abide has assumed in her life the place that was her husband’s, and she feels as oppressed by them as she was by him. “We don’t make the rules—we just get around them” (97), she responds to Creon when the latter confronts her about the gratuitous power and responsibilities that she has conferred on her lover in his absence. Her statement sheds light on her lifelong struggle to navigate through the meandering paths of barrio beliefs, values, opinions and judgments. Arguably,
Jocasta’s ambivalence toward the barrio could be attributed to Laius’ abusive treatment of her. In other words, we could assume that, in a complex and, perhaps, not entirely conscious way, she has conflated the barrio, particularly its gang constituency, with Laius himself, and has come to fear in the barrio everything that
Laius represented.
In view of all the above, Jocasta’s appointment of Oedipus as her lieutenant while Creon is in Mexico—trying to advance his narco plans—can be read as more than a gesture of affection and trust. By having Oedipus run the gang’s business in her place, she, in fact, spares herself the drudgery of having to deal with the most unpleasant aspects of (border-land) barrio life and her position in it. Creon, however, is indignant to find out upon his return about the new state of affairs that has been established in the barrio unbeknownst to him. For him, Oedipus is but a “homeless convict,” ignorant of the barrio people and the way they live, and incapable of truly understanding their rules because of his prison background (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey
Delikonstantinidou 292
93). Oedipus is, after all, only a pinto, not a “heir apparent” like him (93). He accosts both Oedipus and Jocasta, and reproaches his sister:
You see, here we have real women we marry. We have lineage and
tradiciones that we have to follow. That’s what they expect. Our gente.
I have not been able to take a wife, because, guess what, dry ducts—
we grieve, we mourn our King. We give him the respect that his
position requires. We don’t lock ourselves in the bedroom and screw
ourselves out of our sadness. (94)
Upon learning that the two of them are planning on getting married, he becomes furious, feeling betrayed both on a familial and on a political level. His ensuing altercation with Oedipus is revealing of the barrio mentality that he represents and, in this instance, voices:
CREON: . . . Do you know what they say about him?
OEDIPUS: Nothing!
CREON: Have you ever heard these people say nothing? How do you
think this community survives? Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s
how they keep the myths alive. . . . You misjudge them. When they
smile, it’s because they don’t like you, and when they like you, they
don’t. I’ll give you that one for free. (97)
Interestingly, Alfaro transfigures the mythical plague that set in motion the process of discovery of Oedipus’ true identity into the rampant discontent that has taken hold on the people of the barrio. Like an ancient plague, discontent with the new order of things has pervaded the body of the community and threatens to destabilize it.
Delikonstantinidou 293
Intent on disabusing both Oedipus and Jocasta of what he considers to be a folly, but especially Oedipus of his confidence that he can be not only unproblematically integrated into the social fabric of the barrio and the ruling gang, but also ascend to its leadership (or kingship) without any credentials, Creon appeals to the authority of the community’s healers-cum-holy tricksters who traditionally sit at the “king’s” side, collectively known as “Esfinge”—the play’s equivalent of the mythical Sphinx. Oedipus has to get their permission to marry the “queen” and thus rule over the “kingdom.”
Like the rest of the barrio, this element of barrio culture is simultaneously secular and religious, reflecting and safeguarding at once supposedly divine imperatives and all too human expediencies centered on the maintenance of order. It is also another border erected in front of Oedipus, another one he has to cross in his way to rewrite history. As such, the Esfinge speaks to the barrio, to borrow again from
Flys Junquera’s words, as a “hybrid site with dividing lines that are continuously transgressed, crossed over in both directions, a contact zone where the terms of belonging are under constant negotiation” (99). Before going to meet the Esfinge in a modernized, pre-crowning rite de passage, however, he has to undergo a ritual beating by the members of the coro which strongly alludes to the initiation ritual or ceremony employed in most gangs for the recruitment of those members that have not been socialized into the gang from an early age, usually called “turning,” “quoting,” or “jumping in” (Juvenile Justice 203). In the meantime, Creon—much like his ancient Greek counterpart but, unlike him, on his own accord—decides to “to go do a little Sherlock Holmes” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 100), in order to learn more about the young usurper of the barrio “throne,” the source of the plague of discontent that threatens to destabilize the barrio community, so that he can ward him off.
Delikonstantinidou 294
Although the Greek mythographic tradition is host to many sphinxes, “which go back to Egypt and/or the Near East,” the Sphinx that terrorized the city of Thebes has become famous because of her association with Oedipus; an association whose first known visualization comes in the form of a vase painting dating from around 540
B.C. (Edmunds, Oedipus 15). In some versions of the Oedipus myth, the hero kills the monster, but it is the versions in which he defeats the monster by answering the riddle it poses that have had the greatest impact in the myth’s reception history. As we have noted early in this chapter, by way of Edmunds, the Sphinx has served in the myth of
Oedipus “as the link between parricide and incestuous marriage,” while “[t]he riddle motif ought to somehow reinforce the link,” in keeping with the widely attested
“Bride-Winning-Riddle” folklore motif (18). According to the myth’s logic, “the absence of the king of [Thebes] by itself was not enough to bring about Oedipus’ marriage to the king’s widow, nor, apparently, was his status as the son of the king of
Corinth [in most versions of the myth]. The myth presupposes that he had to win the
Theban’s gratitude in order to marry their queen” (16). Jocasta was, thus, the
Thebans’ reward to Oedipus for having saved them from the terrible nuisance of the
Sphinx.
Interestingly, the Sphinx episode constitutes a lacuna in the Sophoclean model of the Oedipus myth that later interpreters sought to fill, considering it integral to the myth as a whole. If Hegel, on the level of conceptual work on the myth, and Jean-
Auguste-Dominique Ingres, on the level of artistic work on the myth, redirected thought to the said episode, other workers on the myth, thinkers and artists alike, also chose to “face the Sphinx,” even most conspicuously in the course of the twentieth century, including Lévi-Strauss, Otto Rank, Klaus Heinrich, Giorgio de Chirico, and
Pablo Picasso, among many others. Throughout the previous century the Sphinx has
Delikonstantinidou 295 been both theorized, depicted, and occasionally dramatized as “a doubling of the mother,” a representation of “some ineluctable matriarchal power” and/or of the primordial female nature, a part of the Oedipus’ (failed) initiation, or even as
Oedipus’ lover (in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Death of Pythia) (124-5). Similarly to other modern (re)interpreters of the myth, then, Alfaro recontextualizes and remotivates the Sphinx episode. Only, his Oedipus does not have to get rid of the monster in order to win the gratitude of the people; rather, he has to win its/their approval. Furthermore, his Sphinx or Esfinge is a far cry from a mother double or a representation of matriarchal power/female nature. Instead, it appears in the play as another, albeit more authoritative, and unmistakably masculine, manifestation and guardian of the community spirit and feeling, one of the primary sources and loci of the community’s cultural life, entrusted with the role of ensuring the rightful succession to barrio leadership.
Before they turn into the Esfinge, the entities that Oedipus encounters when he arrives at the place to which Creon directed him appear as Los Healers—El Mistico
(Mystic), El Huesero (Bone Healer), and El Curandero (Shaman). It is not until
Oedipus demands that they are to pay “an operating fee” for the healing they perform for the community, insults both them, and declares his defiance of God—whom they purportedly serve—that the healers transform into the Esfinge. Importantly, the monster itself is a product of syncretization, one more instantiation of the play’s mestizaje sensibility. Although named after the Greek monster of the Oedipus myth, the Esfinge does not have a lion’s body, a woman’s head, and wings like a typical
Sphinx, but, instead, has the form of the mythical three-headed Aztec serpent. It tries to terrorize Oedipus, circling, punching him, and leaving onto his chest the tattoo-like impression of a crown with its bites, but, otherwise, it is willing to let him leave
Delikonstantinidou 296 unharmed—after all, it does know that Oedipus is Laius’ son and thus his claim to the
“throne” is legitimate. It is almost as if Oedipus’ repeated challenges forces it/them to ultimately pose the riddle (most probably another gesture toward the meta-theatrical):
“ESFINGE #1: Senor, how many legs does a creature of the morning have?/
ESFINGE #2: And how many legs does a creature of la tarde have?/ ESFINGE #3:
And how many legs does a creature of la noche have?” to which Oedipus’ answer is:
“Humanity” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 109). Immediately, the Esfinge returns to its initial form of the three healers whose prophetic words re-evoke the play’s overriding prison metaphor: “EL MISTICO: Prison may have set you free. . . ./ EL HUESERO: . .
. but freedom will imprison you forever. . . ./ EL CURANDERO: Cabron!” (110).
Swollen up by his victory over the Esfinge, Oedipus’ arrogance culminates in a hubristic display of macho power, a rant at the divine and at its earthly representatives: he rips up the Bible that the healers have offered him as a welcoming gift, littering the floor with the pages as if they were confetti, and, ultimately, to humiliate them even more, he forces the Healers to eat the pages under threat of death: “We will pray for you!” the Healers magnanimously tell him; “Don’t pray for me. Pray to me!” he retorts, as if “possessed by the power of Power” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 110). If his Sophoclean predecessor has been “suspected of wanting to be a god in Thebes” (evidence for which can be found in the play’s parodos when the Chorus address Oedipus as suppliants, “as if to a god,” as well as in Oedipus’ agon with
Tiresias (Bushnell 95)), Alfaro’s Oedipus explicitly asks to be equated with “God.”
Nevertheless, for Oedipus, God, or, more accurately, the “official,” secularized “God” that the healers supposedly represent, means an essentially secular instead of sacred spiritual locus of power, as he reiterates in a number of instances throughout the play (as when he speaks to Jocasta about the “God Stick” with which
Delikonstantinidou 297 people beat themselves up). Although his impious outbreak against the community’s divine representatives is shocking, then, it is motivated not by “evilness,” as we conventionally conceive it, but by the hero’s belief that the religious edifice is little more than a scam and God’s appointed representatives mere charlatans who exploit people’s gullibility and trade on their hopes. Ultimately, his blasphemous act provides further evidence for his immaturity—which is also his greatest liability—and serves to underscore that, instead of a victory against fate or moira or God, his overpowering of the Esfinge/Healers is but a prelude to his defeat; one more brick on the walls of an existential trap that has been fortified by his inflated illusions of grandeur.
The marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta is literally built on the wreckage of his blasphemy: the entire event—wedding preparations, march, ceremony, and dance—is enacted on the Bible-littered stage. Oblivious to the gravity of his previous actions, the hero is beaming with happiness and pride, “a youthful innocence in his smile.”
Jocasta cherishes the moment and places the “King’s chain” around Oedipus’ neck in utter ignorance of what has passed at Oedipus’ meeting with the Healers (Alfaro,
Oedipus el Rey 111). Only after the wedding is over, one of the Healers approaches her and informs her of Oedipus’ blasphemous actions. Realizing what the confetti-like bits that are covering the floor really are, she is shaken.
Before the shock of this realization has worn off, Creon enters and forcefully demands that Jocasta either leave Oedipus or kill him to save all of them from a greater ruin:
If we don’t, they will—the old school way. A chisme [gossip] will
become a belief—a belief will become a motive—a motive will be
justified. You know how they do it. And they won’t stop with him.
Delikonstantinidou 298
They’ll trap you in here and they’ll exact their revenge on the both of
you. And then they’ll move on to me. La familia. I ain’t gonna die for
that idiot. . . . If the King loses respect, so do his people. They turn on
you. There’s nothing modern about our gente—they still poison your
tacos. It’s our way and our history. This little boy, he dares because
he’s got no fear—he’s just a convict. (113)
Besides reinscribing “the play within the long reception history of [Sophocles’]
Oedipus as detective fiction” and highlighting “the criminal undercurrents of the play’s mise-en-scène,” as Jenkins correctly observes (182), the Sherlock Holmes-like investigation that Creon has conducted also underscores a very important point that the play has been bringing forward throughout: the rules by which the barrio abides are not only “ancient” but also as binding and unforgiving as the prison rules. For all his extravagant confidence and arrogant self-centeredness, Oedipus has been no more free agent in the barrio than he was in prison. Both the context of the barrio and prison culture have revealed Oedipus to be a largely overdetermined, “peerless subject,” as
Jenkins puts it (182-3).
The “fact-finding mission” and the revelations of Creon in this scene replicate those of the herdsman and the messenger in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Jenkins
182-3): the hero learns that he has killed his father and, not realizing that Creon talks about Laius, believes that Tiresias is dead. Scared and confused he attacks Creon but is stopped by Tiresias himself. It is the latter’s confessions that bring the play to a gripping climax. He tells Oedipus of how he saved his life, a life that was not his to save,156 and reveals to him that the man he killed was the “King of this barrio” and his
156. It is in this passage that Tiresias makes the rather obscure statement, on which we have commented earlier in this chapter, that he “once was a man who defied the Gods and
Delikonstantinidou 299 biological father. Confronted by a desperate Oedipus about his decision to take him away from his biological father and raise him as his own child, Tiresias is forced to disclose Laius’ murderous intentions. In the second most affecting monologue of
Oedipus el Rey, the blind seer expands on the meaning of being a father:
You think a father is made of blood?
A father is a made of sweat—
running to keep up in your youth,
and praying that you’ll survive when you’re older.
A father is made of bruises—
from taking your punches,
and then kicking himself for the things he never did.
A father is made of breath—
from blowing into your lungs the ideas of life,
and gasping in fear at what you’ll do with them. (Alfaro, Oedipus el
Rey 119)
Powerful as his words may be, they seem to have little impact on Oedipus who is distracted with despair, sunk down to his knees under the weight of the realization of his crimes.
because of that they punished . . . [him] by taking away all that . . . [he] could see” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 118). Also, interestingly, the singular “God” of the rest of the play becomes plural, “Gods,” at this point. We could interpret this shift as a nod to the plurality of faith that is idiomatic of most Latino/a peoples’ syncretic religious belief systems. As for the former point, as earlier noted, we can only conjecture on what its meaning may be.
Delikonstantinidou 300
As is the case with Sophocles’ hero, this “Oedipus’ simultaneous discovery of his identity and his crimes entails not only admission of guilt but also consciousness that his attempt to thwart the prophecy has failed”; thus, the discovery entails the “a burden of self-consciousness” that only adds to his suffering (Edmunds, Oedipus 45).
In an evocative display of self-referential awareness, which recalls Jocasta’s earlier one (and which is very similar to that of Svich’s Iphigenia that will be discussed later in this study), Oedipus speaks of himself as a subject of/to a larger destiny that he was never able to change. Indeed, he eventually realizes, as Jenkins pointedly remarks, that he is “a subject in multiple sense, including contemporary pedagogical ones”
(Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 183). In a heart-wrenching confession he tells Tiresias: “I wanted to make a new story. Something no one had ever seen. I wanted to tell it my way. And I wanted to be able to control my own destiny. But I never had the chance.
All of this was decided way before I got here. Isn’t that right? Am I the way the lesson looks? Am I? AM I THE WAY THE LESSON LOOKS?” (120). Tiresias’ response points to the fact that the story was, in fact, Oedipus all along:
I just didn’t have the heart. . . . to see history play itself out the way the
Gods wanted. So I made a new story. That story was you. I gave it the
best chance I knew how—to make sure it lived. But I’m not a God, I’m
not a creator. I’m just a man. A weak man who looks inside now for all
of his answers. I cannot see them in the world. So, I look inside. (121)
The lesson that the old man intended to teach the world through Oedipus was that a life can be spared, can be saved if given a chance. Instead, the forces ruling the/ir world—here, the bitter realities of the world rather than some abstract divine interventionist being(s)—made another lesson out of Oedipus: wanting to save a life, giving it a chance is not enough, just as “intelligence and good intentions are never
Delikonstantinidou 301 enough to protect one even from the most horrible errors,” to employ Gould’s words about Sophocles’ own Oedipus (48). Despite Tiresias’ noble intentions and worldly wisdom, the “inside” in which he has been looking “for the light” (Alfaro, Oedipus el
Rey 37), ever since he saved Oedipus’ life, was to become an existential and literal
“inside,” a prison for his son; or, to paraphrase Jenkins, it was to link every aspect of
Oedipus’ selfhood to incarceration (182-3). In an important sense, then, the same
“destiny” that destroyed Oedipus also destroyed the well-intentioned and knowledgeable Tiresias. One could even claim that this is not only Oedipus’ tragedy but also Tiresias’.
The final scene of the play renders the “lesson” of Oedipus all the more painful to witness. The anagnorisis (or recognition) that took place in the previous scene is here complemented by a second one, as Oedipus discloses the terrible truth to his wife and mother. They stand before one another, in close proximity and yet “a world apart,” as the play notes, horrified by the truth they now see in each other.
“We’re all guilty of the lies we choose to live with. The ones we choose to believe,”
Jocasta tells Oedipus, blaming herself for what she believes to be the willful ignorance she demonstrated in her relationship with him. “You filled spaces, spaces that weren’t yours. I should have known. . . .” (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 123). Their ensuing, agonizing interchange could be arguably described as monological in character, given that Oedipus and Jocasta essentially echo each other, and, as such, it serves to painfully foreground the bond between them, a bond in which the play has invested much of its dramatic focus as we have seen. It culminates in Oedipus’ begging of Jocasta to blind his eyes with her own hands. She does, kisses tenderly each bloody socket, and, then, takes her own life with his small prison-made blade.
He frantically tries to reach for her and stop her but it is all in vain. He cannot see her
Delikonstantinidou 302
anymore. At the same time that a coro member is leading Oedipus to Tiresias, “the
stealthy sound of one silencer bullet being shot” marks the end of Creon’s kingly
aspirations. His earlier warnings have come home to roost; the barrio has exact its
revenge on him in “the old school way” (113).
“Can no man be feliz/ until he’s six feet under?” the coro members ask
(Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 127), now donning the “prison character” once again and
addressing the audience with the reiteration of the ancient Greek gnomic statement
which Sophocles used for the chorus’ final words at the end of his Oedipus Tyrannus
(1678–84). “Pero for now/ Let him be./ Free,” they continue (127); the mutually
constitutive inside/outside, imprisonment/freedom, categories conflated once again.
The age-old question is to remain suspended, mediating the existential distance
between the ancient past and the present, and showing it to be closer than one would
expect. The “clickety-clack” sound of Oedipus’ and Tiresias’ canes fills the space as
the two men roam around the stage in search of one another. Once he has found his
father, Oedipus puts his hand on Tiresias’ shoulder and lets the older man slowly lead
him back to prison. The sound of prison doors opening is heard and the play closes at
the same time as the doors do. Oedipus is back to prison and we are left wondering
whether he ever truly left it. The play closes as it opened, with the overriding prison
metaphor of the play making its appearance one last time.
III. Oedipus el Rey as Social Theatre and as Therapy
We cannot but agree with Jenkins in that the prison soundscape of the play’s
exodus indeed “reinforces the playwright’s argument that lives in the barrio are
Oedipal not in the Freudian sense, but in a far more devastating narrative sense.” As
Delikonstantinidou 303 in Sophocles’ play, he explains, “the plot of Oedipus’ life is determined by the circumstances of his birth: this isn’t fair and isn’t just, but neither is Los Angeles”
(183-4). We could, however, slightly modify his observation and “qualify” the lives to which Jenkins refers and Alfaro dramatizes in his play, as lives wasted in the process of compulsively treading back and forth the woeful path between prison and the gang- ridden barrioscape. The tragedy of this Oedipus’ life lies in the fact that his efforts at self-determination are betrayed by forces far beyond his control; the very circumstances of his birth and upbringing determine the plot of his life as they largely did that of his ancient counterpart and as they do that of thousands of young people in the contemporary U.S.
The predicament of Alfaro’s Oedipus mirrors that of the latter so conspicuously as to make it impossible for the spectators not to become conscious of the realities of injustice, discrimination, and dispossession that the play treats, and self-conscious of their own responsibility for their perpetuation. Oedipus el Rey not only “lays bare the complex system of economics and ethnicity that dooms America’s youngest citizens to a life of crime,” “a mix that’s fatal to any deliverance from fatalism” for many Chicanos, as Jenkins remarks (183-3), but also makes the spectator’s responsibility explicit. The coro’s intonations in the play’s “Epilogue” dispel any doubts as to this last point, insofar as they serve to underline precisely our responsibility:
Look at this hombre.
His story.
Our story.
Will we remember our stories,
or are we doomed to repeat them?
Delikonstantinidou 304
Will our stories
be your history?
Oye, gente
A man in search of his destiny.
But fate found him instead.
Do we lay down
and take the fate
this world has given us?
or
can we break esta cycle
and tell new stories? (Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey 128)
With Oedipus el Rey, Alfaro maps the “intimate otherness” of an ancient Greek mythical figure “onto a contemporary issue of particular urgency” (Jenkins 183-8): the contemporary prison crisis that bears testimony to how misdirected America’s attempts at reform truly are. But also, and perhaps most importantly, he places the
“otherness” of his hero and his “fate”—which is also the “otherness” attributed to many a “homeless convict,” as the play suggests (93)—in the midst of the communities that he addresses and engages in each of the play’s production, that is, largely barrio communities. He, in effect, shows it to be integral to their social fabric, and thus, in large part, their responsibility.
The idea that the play puts forward is that this is not simply the tragedy of
Oedipus that we are witnessing, that is, the tragedy of an isolated individual, a”peerless subject,” lost in “the pipeline” plight. Rather, it is the tragedy of Pico
Union, of Los Angeles, of many a U.S. urban context, and of U.S. as a whole. This story is part of U.S. history and of the Latino/a and Chicano/a strand of that history, in
Delikonstantinidou 305 particular. In every venue where the play has been produced, both the more privileged members of the audience and the more underprivileged, whom Alfaro has invited to attend the performances, have been asked to look upon Oedipus as the product of all the bitter realities they leave unattended; the direct corollary “of the lies we choose to live with,” “[t]he ones we choose to believe,” to employ Jocasta’s words (Alfaro,
Oedipus el Rey 123), which ring loud and strong with those audience members who discern their implications.
The play indicates, in line with official reports on the same subject, as we have seen in the course of this chapter, that the way out of the prison crisis, out of recidivism and the infamous “pipeline,” can be found (from) within the community.
As long as the barrio culture works in tandem with the prison culture, the social ills that are brought forth and fostered by this symbiotic relationship will only lead to the proliferation of tragedies like Oedipus’; of lives destroyed while struggling against the binds of a fate made inexorable, not by some divine force, but by our all too human neglectful ignorance. The need for large-scale, structural responses to this crisis is dire. Still, no large-scale changes are going to be effective, at the structural level and in terms of law- and policy-making, unless people like Oedipus are given real and better chances by the small-scale community context too, at the more immediate sociocultural level, and in terms of acceptance and belonging, everyday needs and strategies of survival, in order to lead different lives than the ones dictated to/for them by a deplorable combination of unfavorable origins, systemic neglect, and lifelong social exclusion. In other words, the play issues a call for (pre-emptive) action toward the creation of the conditions that will allow for effective agenda setting and implementation, both at the national/policy level and, more directly, at the community level, aimed at the reintegration of endangered youth in such terms as to immunize
Delikonstantinidou 306 them against the “plague of prisons,” to reinvoke Drucker’s formulation. This, however, as the play (and Alfaro by means of the play) emphatically shows, involves concurrent efforts to remedy divisions within Latinidad and Chicanidad that are conducive to the social and political disease targeted by Oedipus el Rey.
It is no coincidence that Alfaro and his production teams have opted for small theatrical venues for the play’s performances; arena-shaped, prison-like spaces like the Studio Theater in Dallas, where one of the play’s most recent productions took place. The goal in choosing such venues, in which the audience was often necessarily—due to lack of space—encircled by the actors, is not only to create a highly visceral experience of claustrophobia for the audience that would correspond to and be compounded by the claustrophobic atmosphere of the play itself. It is also to give a more tangible feel to the idea of (the urgent need for) togetherness or connectedness that inspires and motivates his Oedipus el Rey, as it does his Mojada and his Electricidad.
Certainly, the idea of connectedness is distinctly present and given concrete expression by means of the syncrisis of cultures and cultural forms that makes up the play. And, in this sense, Oedipus el Rey is admittedly another articulation of Alfaro’s politics of affinity,157 informed by a new mestizaje ethos. Still, most staging choices in the context of the play’s productions, including the one mentioned above, evidently political in origin and effect and evincing aspects of Alfaro’s social theatre, allow this idea to have an even more immediate impact on the audience. In that particular case,
157. The term “politics of affinity” denotes a politics that works through the political formation of alliances and coalitions building across difference of every kind, however temporary, provisional, and contingent such “constellations of allies” might be. For a discussion of the concept, consult Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez’s and Nancy Sapoarta Sternbach’s Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance & Identity in U.S. Latina Theater (2001). For a discussion of how it relates to Luis Alfaro’s theatre and performance work, see David Román (1995).
Delikonstantinidou 307 with the distance between audience and action spatially eliminated, the audience is literally absorbed in the action; literally made to partake in the conflation of inside and outside that pervades the play thematically. The audience members are simultaneously inside and outside of the actual space of action, inside and outside of the narrative, of the tragedy unfolding all around them. Thus, they are made to experience the play as a site of connectedness and as a starting point from where new ways of be(com)ing connected can be discovered. Yet, the play’s staging is only one of the ways in which it channels its radical political energies and (socio)therapeutic intentions toward the communities that it engages and addresses in its production(s).
The social and political “agenda” of Oedipus el Rey has been advanced through strategies similar to the ones that we discussed in the context of Alfaro’s
Mojada, and which show the play to partake, like Mojada and Electricidad, of the
“complex process of interdisciplinary performance” which is constitutive of social theatre projects (Thompson and Schechner 12-3). These strategies rendered Oedipus el Rey, similarly to Alfaro’s other two dramatic mythic revisions, into even more than a public forum of storytelling and listening, indeed, into a kind of itinerant social theatre workshop which offered to the participants a multifaceted, socially remedial opportunity and urged them to act upon it.
In a manner apparently typical of Alfaro’s theatre praxis, the playwright reached out to each community within the context of which the play has been produced, placing special emphasis in the engagement of the more vulnerable or troubled constituencies of the said communities. Ex-felons, ex-gang members, and, especially, at-risk youth were invited not only to attend the play but to also participate in the pre-show and post-show discussions or talkbacks and related events, where they were given the opportunity to converse and interact, within the contours of a safe
Delikonstantinidou 308 environment, with community leaders, officials, professionals working in fields and areas relevant to the issues the play addresses, social scientists and other social agents, as well as with members of the more mainstream public and the theatre-going elite.
Thus, the play’s productions furnished the occasion for voices usually muted and reticent within the dominant societal structures—and within mainstream theatre—to be amplified and share moments of commonality with society’s more stentorian voices. They also acquired a pedagogical function to the extent that they allowed participants to both learn more about the issues treated in the play and teach from their own life and/or professional experience. At the same time, online dialogue in various theatre-related platforms and blogging concerning the play extended the productions’ outreach, thus enlarging the play-as-forum.
The sort of public discourse that the productions prompted became a means of mediating across a cultural and class divide, and the temporary communities that were created as a result showed that this divide is not unbridgeable. If anything, they foregrounded the possibility for theatre events to function “and help sustain alternative deliberative spaces or ‘public spheres,’” to borrow from Lodewyck’s and
Monoson’s discussion of “Twenty-First-Century Experiments in Greek Theatre in the
U.S.A.” (654). New ways of be(com)ing connected were sought in the course of the discursive, interpersonal interaction between different constituencies of the communities, while “fleeting moments of understanding another’s very different experience” were given emphasis for their potential to generate “concrete action”
(654). And there is no changing the certain “fate” of the children to which Alfaro’s
Oedipus el Rey calls our attention without taking concrete action against the very forces that lend this fate its tragic shape. Therein lies also the radical political impulse and potential of Alfaro’s revision, mined from the tragic mode of Oedipus’ myth.
Delikonstantinidou 309
The parameters for the said concrete action to be undertaken have been drawn, in more specific terms, by means of the productions’ collaboration with the Los
Angeles-based, gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry organization, Homeboy
Industries, the Community Partner of the play’s productions at Boston Court (2010).
Through this collaboration, Oedipus el Rey connected with and advanced the transformative mission of the Homeboy Industries in a number of ways. Initially, it was the organization’s founder and executive director, Father Gregory J. Boyle, who helped Alfaro navigate through the gang and pinto world while the playwright was still doing research for the play at the early stages of its creation.158 Later, members of the organization informed the participants to the events flanking the play’s performances about the causes of recidivism and discussed with them the steps that need to be taken in order to reduce the recidivism rate. More than that, the play contributed to the mission of the organization by being included in the job training program, that is, by offering professional opportunities, for the clients of Homeboy
Industries, at-risk and formerly gang-involved youth—a testament to the play’s political and social commitments. The partnering of Oedipus el Rey with the
Homeboy Industries has been the most significant part of the play’s outreach programme or “campaign.” It led to the formation of political and social coalitions, permeated by a self-critical and self-reflexive ethics and committed to respond radically, immediately and much more effectively, to the prison crisis, or Drucker’s
158. See OSF’s 2017 Illuminations, a guide to the season’s plays. There, Alfaro says, among other things, that he started writing Oedipus El Rey during an artists’ residency at a California state prison. Through Father Gregory J. Boyle, founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, he met a young man who had been incarcerated for 16 years, nearly all of that in solitary confinement. Alfaro met him the week he was released from prison. The man recalled being hugged by a guard and realizing how many years it had been since he’d felt human touch. ‘“In the moment of that hug,” Alfaro remembers him saying, “I realized I understood redemption. And I would never go back to prison. I must apologize. I must forgive, and I must be forgiven.’”
Delikonstantinidou 310
“plague of prisons.” Ultimately, it can be construed as one of the most consequential aspects of Oedipus el Rey’s political and sociotherapeutic import.
“Are these our children or not?” That was the question that dominated the post-play discussions during the play’s world-premiere, run in Chicago, reviewer
James Hebert notes in his interview with Alfaro (2015). The question is of crucial importance, insofar as the ways in which it is answered sheds light on the kind of future that awaits these children. “Unless we think of them as our children, it’s ok for us to let them die,” Alfaro says, spelling out the harsh reality of our world. If changing this reality altogether would make for an overambitious attempt, doomed to failure from its inception, tampering with it can prove much more promising. This appears to be the thought that served as the incentive behind the creation of Oedipus el Rey, the objective being to have people, the play’s various audiences at least, conceive of these children, children victimized from birth, as their children, and thus engage in direct civic action in order to save them; that is, dismantle “the pipeline” and help them reintegrate successfully into society.
As we saw in the context of our previous discussion on Mojada, in advocating personal and community responsibility for a process of healing and sociopolitical transformation to be mobilized, Alfaro’s play/social theatre project advances new models of civic investment and interaction, social responsibility and restorative justice, so as to promote healing and prevent revictimization. Once again, Alfaro’s is not an attempt to somehow alter the tragic modus operandi of the world his play depicts, but to find new ways of growing into it or at least make sense of its scarcovered visage through a socially engaged storytelling and theatre-making informed by the tragic mode itself.
Delikonstantinidou 311
Sometimes the story sets you free. Sometimes it holds you back.
But there is always a story waiting to be told, waiting to be heard,
waiting to be witnessed. Everybody has a story to tell. Likewise, I
think we are all drawn to looking for ourselves in stories.
(Alfaro qtd. in López 2005)
Delikonstantinidou 312
Part Three
Tragic Daughters I:
Mestiza Electra
Delikonstantinidou 313
I. Preliminary Remarks
In the previous two parts of this study, we reflected on specific aspects of the
mestiza mythopoesis practiced by a number of Latino/a playwrights as it relates to the
tragic myths of Medea and Oedipus, placing emphasis on the ways in which the
works under examination make use of the tragic import of the myths they engage and
revise. More precisely, we saw that, even as they draw from supposedly distinct
mythico-cultural heritages, these new mythoplays are attuned to the tragic mode,
which works its way into and through them. We also discussed how they reveal the
possibilities that the tragic mode harbors for a radical politics and for a healing effect,
as well as how they channel these possibilities toward the Latino/a communities
whose issues and ailments they primarily address, but also beyond them.
In the third part of the present study, we will take up another mythoplay, a
dramatic mythic revision of the tragic myth of Electra, again by playwright Luis
Alfaro. Like his Mojada and his Oedipus el Rey, and similarly to the other plays that
we have examined so far, his Electricidad, not despite of but in being attuned to the
tragic mode, partakes of “la cultura cura” strand of a transformative decolonizing
discourse and praxis which integrates the political and the therapeutic. Before we
plunge into the world of the play (the one with which Alfaro began his Greek-inspired
three-part cycle), however, an introduction to the Electra myth is in order. Here, too,
there will be no deviation from the pattern set in the preceding sections, in that a
concise account of Electra’s mythic biography, its journey down the centuries, and its
reception by U.S. theatre and culture will be initially offered. This will hopefully
smooth the way to the subsequent discussion of Electra’s “Latino/a-ization”; that is,
the way her myth is made to respond to issues that concern the Latino/a community in
the U.S., by Luis Alfaro.
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II. The Tragic Myth of Electra
Besides the myths of Medea and Oedipus, one of the most favored tragic
myths that has been frequently reinterpreted, recontextualized, and rehistoricized in
recent years, in order to address important sociopolitical and ethical issues, and even
help artists and audiences alike make sense of crises of many sorts, is that of Electra.
Like Medea and Oedipus, Electra is an enigmatic and controversial figure, eliciting,
often at one and the same time, feelings of admiration and pity, fascination and
horror. Like Medea and unlike Oedipus, she is not an obviously sympathetic figure,
since her passionate desire for revenge and her strong hatred of her mother complicate
the sympathy that other elements of her story arouse, but, like Medea and Oedipus,
she is rich with possibilities. These possibilities came to the forefront with renewed
force and urgency in the twentieth century, a century “obsessed” with Electra,
according to Jill Scott (6), after almost two and a half millennia of her myth’s relative
submergence following the age of Attic tragedy, when the myth received its renown
dramatic treatments by Aeschylus (Oresteia trilogy, and specifically, its second part,
Choephori),159 Sophocles (Electra), and Euripides (Electra and Orestes).160
The resurgence of Electra as “as a dominant [cultural] trope” in the previous
century lends credence to the Scott’s claim that her “myth has been shown to have
enduring relevance for times of revolt” (2). For Helene P. Foley, “the attraction” the
Electra myth exerts on our imagination and intellect rests in its focus on the “war-
scarred, dysfunctional” royal family of the Atreides “and on Electra’s fierce resistance
159. Aeschylus’ epic trilogy, the Oresteia, consists of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. 160. Whether Euripides’ Electra preceded or followed that of Sophocles is still a matter of debate among scholars. “The chronological relationship of the two Electras is one of the great puzzles of classical scholarship,” Justina Gregory informs us (xxi).
Delikonstantinidou 315 to being silenced and victimized by it” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 12). Writing in regard to the U.S. context, Foley argues that it is, more specifically, Electra’s “tragic self-division and sense of entrapment . . . in an increasingly uncertain and oppressive environment” that which resonates with the modern world and which contributed to rendering her “one of the three most popular Greek tragic figures on the U.S. stage, along with Medea and Oedipus” (12-3). To glean an understanding of Electra’s tragic self-division and entrapment, as well as of her complexity, which has proven so compelling and “good to think with” for artists and audiences, both in antiquity and in more recent times, it is necessary to first delineate the mythical environment in which she is embedded by looking at her mythic biography.
Once again, we could suggest that it is opportune to approach Electra’s myth similarly to how we did with those of Medea and Oedipus; that is, as an intricate, multilayered mythic complex consisting of: first, a nexus of stories about other figures to which she is linked and to which she relates—the wider “Greek myth”; second, a constellation of stories specifically about her, made up of both “different versions of the same mythic episode” (vertical tradition) and “a running biography” of individual episodes (horizontal tradition)—to adapt once more Fritz Graf’s useful schematization
(21); and, third, the totality of specific instantiations or treatments of her myth (or parts of it) developed over the course of centuries, each shaping and/or altering it to serve specific purposes.
Supplementarily, we might want to conceive of Electra’s myth as belonging to two concentric mythical and generational cycles: the wider one comprising the early generations of the family of the Atreides, beginning with the mythical figure of
Tantalus, and the narrower one comprising the latest (as far as we know from the extant sources) generation of the Atreides: the children and grand-children of Atreus,
Delikonstantinidou 316 who are also the principal actors of the Electra plays that have come down to us.
Hanna M. Roisman and C. A. E. Luschnig have offered a very useful summary of the two cycles which is reproduced in an even more condensed (and somewhat adjusted) form here:
Tantalus tested the gods’ omniscience by inviting them to dinner
[specifically, a sacrificial feast] and serving them his son, Pelops. . . .
Pelops was restored to life through divine intervention [but Tantalus
was punished by being placed in Tartarus where he suffered notorious
tortures]. He too was later cursed for an act of treachery. He cheated on
a chariot race in which he had to beat Oenomaus to win the hand of his
daughter Hippodamia [with the help of Oenomaus’ charioteer,
Myrtilus, thus causing Oenomaus’ death]. . . . He then murdered
Myrtilus (instead of fulfilling his promise to let him lie with
Hippodamia). With his dying breath Myrtilus cursed Pelops and his
descendants. In the next generation, Pelops’ sons Atreus and Thyestes,
disputed the kingship of Argos, and Thyestes seduced Atreus wife. . . .
In revenge Atreus . . . invited his brother to a conciliatory dinner and
served him the flesh of his own sons. When Thyestes realized what he
had eaten, he called down his own curse on Atreus’ house. (6)
Yet, the afflictions that befell the line of Tantalus do not end here. Thyestes’ curse, its weight heavy upon the next generation, finds its fulfillment in the violent events that
Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles and Euripides’ Electra plays famously dramatized. Roisman and Luschnig sum them up:
Delikonstantinidou 317
Menelaus and Agamemnon, Atreus’ sons, also had dysfunctional
family relationships. Menelaus’ wife, Helen, left him for [or, according
to other versions of the myth, was abducted by] Paris, prince of Troy,
precipitating the Trojan War, and Agamemnon, chosen Panhellenic
general, sacrificed [or attempted to sacrifice, according to Euripides’
Iphigenia in Tauris] his daughter Iphigenia . . . en route to Troy. Upon
his return home Agamemnon himself was murdered by his wife,
Clytemnestra, and her lover [his cousin, Aegisthus, Thyestes’
surviving son]. . . . Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were killed in their
turn, by Agamemnon’s son Orestes, with the support (whether verbal
or physical) of his sister Electra. The three [or four, if we count
Euripides’ Orestes] Electra plays focus on the last installment in this
curse: the revenge taken by Agamemnon’s children on their mother
and her lover. (7)
In the Greek tragic sources, Electra, the second daughter of Agamemnon and
Clytemnestra,161 who in her father’s absence was humiliated,162 treated as a servant/slave by both Aegisthus and her mother, and even labeled a madwoman,
161. Teresa E. Choate notes that, “[i]n the Iliad, Agamemnon names his four children as Orestes, Chrysothemis, Ladike [sic], and Iphianassa, but most commentators concur that Laodike [or Laodice] and Iphianassa were earlier names for Electra and Iphigenia. The first known reference to the name Electra is in the Oresteia of Stesichoros [or in Hesiod’s Catalogue, according to J. R. March] (20). Another scholar, Anastasia Bakogianni, records that “Aelian in his Historical miscellanies wrote that it was Xanthus, a lyric poet, who first explained how Electra was given her name in his Oresteia [which Stesichoros then adapted]. According to Xanthus she was originally the Laodice mentioned in the Iliad. After her father's murder her name was changed to Electra owing to her enforced virginity” (19): a-lektros means unbedded in Greek. In fact, as Bakogianni observes, “[b]efore fifth-century BC tragedy [namely, in the surviving fragments of epic and lyric poetry] Electra was at best only a minor character” (20); “It is only in Greek tragedy, . . . , that she becomes a crucial participant in the story of Orestes' revenge” (17). 162. In most versions of the myth, Electra is banished from her home, ostracized from her community, and forced to marry beneath her rank. In these versions, Clytemnestra is seen as complicit in Electra’s humiliation by Aegisthus.
Delikonstantinidou 318 appears passionately lamenting her losses and unwavering in her intent to avenge her father’s death and the wrongs she suffered while awaiting Orestes’ return and retribution. In some variants of the mythographical tradition, after the brutal and bloody matricide, Orestes is persecuted and driven mad by the Erinyes (Furies), but he is eventually given full acquittal by the Aeropagus through divine intervention, while Electra is to marry Orestes’ friend and accomplice, Pylades.
As is the case with all Greek myths, there is no canonical version of the myth of Electra. Yet, despite the mythical figure’s many metamorphoses (as many as the literary, visual, and other treatments she has received), some elements remain constant and provide links between different versions and the traditions, or receving contexts, in which they belong. These are: death, mourning, and revenge. They can be considered as recurrent themes or emphases with which tragic Electra has come to be identified and which have come to be perceived by the “receivers” of her myth as comprising her myth’s fundamental core, as it were. As such, they have been very rarely altered by artists who have, otherwise, produced highly imaginative variations of this astonishingly flexible myth.
The continuous (albeit not constant) stream of art and literature that engages directly or indirectly with the Electra myth indicates that the relevance and resonance of her “tale of murder, revenge, and violence,” in Scott’s words (1), have hardly diminished over time. The myth of Electra has been treated differently not only by
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, authors of the best-known dramas about her, and later authors, such as Seneca, John Pickering (Renaissance), Baron de Longpierre and Voltaire (Neoclassical period), Alexandre Dumas (Romantic era), but also by more contemporary artists, from Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss
(opera), to Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugene O’Neill, Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux, Michael
Delikonstantinidou 319
Cacoyiannis (film), and more recently, Joseph Chaikin, the Women’s Experimental
Theatre (WET), and, of course, Alfaro—to mention but a few. As a matter of course though, most post-classical treatments of Electra draw elements from the tragic plays of the ancient Greek dramatists, in one way or another—and Alfaro’s Electricidad is no exception.
It is probably because Electra is not the focus of Aeschylus’ Choephori that his version of the mythical figure has not been as popular as Sophocles’ and
Euripides’ with later, especially twentieth- and twenty-first-century playwrights.
Indeed, she has a limited role to play in that narrative, only as the female supporter of
Orestes, and after the anagnorisis (recognition of brother and sister) and kommos
(prayer for divine aid and appeal to the ghost of Agamemnon for help), she disappears before the murders are committed. On the contrary, both Sophocles and Euripides give Electra a central role in their eponymous plays and expand on the moral ambiguity of her actions; namely, her involvement in the murders of Aegisthus and her mother.
In their two Electra plays, the heroine becomes much more transgressive than she appears in Aeschylus’ play. Anastasia Bakogianni puts the matter succinctly:
“Sophocles’ heroine comes close to actually participating in the matricide. She goes into the palace with Orestes and Pylades, but comes out again to act as a messenger to the chorus. Euripides' Electra takes matters a step further and place her hand on
Orestes' sword, while he is killing their mother” (38). Overall, whereas “Aeschylus emphasized her role as a daughter and a sister,” “Sophocles examined more closely her personal motivation for helping her brother” and placed emphasis on her suffering and passion, “while Euripides uncovered some of the more negative aspects of her motivation,” dwelling on its more selfish aspects (14, 39). Most importantly, the
Delikonstantinidou 320 issues that the two later plays raise with regard to the ethos of vengeance, which
Electra seems to exemplify, remain largely unresolved (even despite the deus ex machina at the end of Euripides’ play),163 thus rendering the heroine’s portrayal much more disturbing, adding to its uncertainty, and opening it up to multiple and diverse readings and interpretations.
Still, it is Sophocles’ Electra—the version on which Luis Alfaro primarily draws for his Electricidad164—that has exerted the deepest and most enduring appeal for scholars and theatre practitioners. Bakogianni, among others, attributes this to “the ambiguous way in which he deals with the matricide,” thus allowing “the play to be used to support a variety of causes” (70).165 It is this (version of) Electra that “most resists a standard reading,” Choate reminds us (24), and she goes on to elaborate on this point:
In fact, scholars have come to opposite conclusions on each of the
following questions. Is the ending happy or sad? Does Electra display
male or female characteristics? Is she passive or active? Is she driven
by hate or love? Is she a proper or an improper woman? [And
163. To borrow again from Bakogianni, in spite of the fact that Euripides “created a remorseful Electra and Orestes, . . . his ending is just as disquieting as Sophocles’ open-ended one. On the surface he offers the audience a happy deus ex machina ending, but he undermines it in subtle ways, leaving it up to the audience to decide what to take from it” (63). 164. As Helen E. Moritz notes, “Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad draws heavily on Sophocles’ Electra in the dramatic dominance of its title character, but in its larger thematic concerns it is a contamination of works by all three . . . Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides as well as Sophocles” (122). 165. According to the scholar, it is the controversial nature of Euripides’ works, which have been often “judged to be inferior and decadent,” and “[h]is problematic reputation” that account “in part for the fact that there are fewer adaptations of his Electra.” The fact that he tackles the thorny and controversial issue of matricide in his play but refuses to offer a solution, coupled with “his less than attractive portrayal of Electra made his drama less appealing. . . . Since the second half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first, however, academic and popular interest in Euripides is ‘at its strongest across the world.’ This renaissance of Euripides work is explained in terms of his modernity and relevance to today's world. The ambiguous nature of his oeuvre leaves it permeable to penetration by a variety of different interpretations” (70-1).
Delikonstantinidou 321
according to whose standards?]166 Is Clytemnestra evil or justified? Is
she an uncaring or a caring mother? Is she fearless and guilt free or is
she fearful and guilt ridden? What about Chrysothemis [Electra’s sister
and foil in Sophocles’ play]? Is she a coward or is she practical? Is she
totally passive or does she act? And the chorus . . . Are they passive or
active? (24)
Different productions of the Sophoclean Electra, as well as plays that have been inspired and partly based on Sophocles’ version of the myth, like Electricidad, have had to contend with these questions and their offshoots. Arguably, then, each known
Electra is unique precisely because she emerges out of a distinct set of answers to the foregoing questions.
At the same time, it is because no easy and uncomplicated answers can be provided to the said questions—and because they most often cannot avoid contradictions, and thus remain contested—that Electra appears, in most variants, tragically self-divided. Foley clarifies the point of her self-division eloquently:
Tragic Electras desperately want to avenge their much-adored but
often barely known murdered fathers; they are furious at their
unfaithful [in more than one sense] mothers, both for killing their
fathers and for mistreating them, and they project all hopes (and nearly
incestuous passions) onto their brothers. They can be self-conscious
about and fear their mother’s own vengefulness but they
166. Some scholars have construed Electra as typical of the passive role of women in ancient Greece, offering passive resistance and affecting the course of political events only in acting through a man (Orestes) and on behalf of a man (Agamemnon). Others, however, have construed her as a hero (in the word’s conventional sense) for her devotion to her father, her commitment to avenge his wrongful death, and, in more recent—and, particularly, in feminist—analyses, for assuming the initiative and taking aggressive action against those who wronged her.
Delikonstantinidou 322
enthusiastically echo it. They experience a relentlessly corrupted life
verging on drudgery in the wake of Agamemnon’s murder and struggle
with how best to react to the situation. As women with a living though
absent brother to play the role of avenger, they are not by ancient
Greek standards [or by patriarchal standards, in general] initially in a
cultural position to act, and their humiliating paralyzed lives can push
them close to extremity or madness. (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 13)
Electra is thus entangled in a nest of conflicts and contradictions involving both her relation with herself and with others—both family members and society at large. The fact that many of these conflicts and contradictions center on or derive from her demonstration of both masculine and feminine characteristics, as these have been traditionally defined within patriarchal culture, that is, engagement in public debate, threats to act with warlike violence, strength and firmness of purpose, on the one hand, and “awareness of her unwomanly verbosity and rage, a declared longing for marriage and children,” limited physical action (Choate 27), on the other hand, has not been lost on scholars and artists. In fact, normative conceptions of gender roles, as well as of “appropriate” female behavior and/versus tragic hero proper behavior as mutually invalidating, have complicated assessments of Electra in scholarship and art.167
It is germane to underline that, like Medea, Electra “sways between pride [and the attendant desire for revenge and restitution of honor] and accountability as though between masculine strength and feminine weakness” (Moss 45). She rejects a
167. As Choate observes with regard to this conundrum, “what was considered correct behavior for a woman was often not considered correct behavior for a tragic hero (who was inevitably judged by standards of maleness), but what was correct for a tragic hero was seldom correct for a woman” (27).
Delikonstantinidou 323
“proper,” respectable feminine attitude, since to remain silent and obedient to her mother and Aegisthus would mean to be dishonorable in the light of the wrongs her family, and she, personally, has suffered, but, at the same time, and as a result of holding onto feminine attributes, she remains fully cognizant and deeply pained by her very impropriety (in terms of both her transgressive actions and the transgression of “proper” gender roles that they entail). She, ultimately, adopts a masculine/ist attitude and ethics of revenge, but this highly overdetermined choice (by forces beyond her control) only precipitates her family’s destruction and her own (ethical) defeat.
Much like tragic Medea and, ironically, much like Clytemnestra, whom she hates precisely because of her non-feminine transgressiveness, then, Electra “borrows heroic masculine ethical standards to articulate her choice” to avenge her wrongs and deliberately imitates “a heroic brand of masculinity,” albeit more by means of speech acts than by physical actions (Female Acts 264). However, by imitating a heroic code which “oppresses women, both because it traditionally excludes and subordinates them and because it gives priority to public success and honor over survival and the private concerns of love and family,” to quote from Leonard Moss, she becomes, like
Medea, even more isolated and alienated from herself, her family, and the social order. Like her, in crossing the boundary between masculine and feminine norms,
“she reveals the limitations of each as a sufficient basis for behavior” (Moss 45).
Eventually, she remains stuck in the same paradoxical quagmire as Medea, in as much as, “[l]ike all disfranchised rebels, she can tragically imagine no other self or self- defense to imitate [and perform] than” those of her oppressors (Foley, Female Acts
264). Yet, in allying herself with the male members of the family and in condemning or disregarding its female members, she enacts a sort of absorption of the feminine
Delikonstantinidou 324 into the masculine self in a much more pronounced way than Medea, while still remaining a fiercely resistant (and unmistakably) female and feminine—despite her usurpation of male prerogatives—figure. Moreover, she is the one who, again quite ironically, ends up disrupting the very society she wishes to uphold and liberate from the tyrannical reign of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, by wreaking more havoc on society’s building-block, the oikos.
More contemporary artists and theorists, especially since the latter half of the twentieth century, have been particularly drawn by the fact that Electra’s “blatant violence and aggression initiates a shift in gender relations, accroaching the role once reserved for male heroes alone,” to borrow again Jill Scott’s words (2). Perhaps quite fittingly, then, a number of women theatre practitioners in the U.S., particularly those working within the context of the avant-garde and/or radical feminist theatre that emerged in the nineteen-seventies, saw in Electra “an archetypal split female psyche,” as Foley has noted (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 17), that could (and should) be recovered from the legacy of patriarchy to serve feminist agendas. Thereby, they created theatre pieces about her in order “to re-write the received mythic heritage,” which they believed has been corrupted and distorted by patriarchal culture (Canning
533), or, at least, “to rewrite certain aspects of the mythological corpus to discover whether mythical appropriation could work to counter the effects of the alienating dominant imaginary” (A. Jacobs 178), a conspicuously male-centered one.
As Foley writes in her essay “Bad Women: Gender Politics in Late Twentieth-
Century Performance and Revision of Greek Tragedy,” feminists’ emphasis, at this period of time, on myth and Greek sources represented “part of a larger move in feminist psychology to restore psychic health through female archetypes” (99). It was a move that almost immediately informed other disciplines, epistemological domains,
Delikonstantinidou 325 and, of course, the arts. The mythical and tragic figure of Electra, which had been earlier seized by the paradigm of Freudian psychoanalysis,168 was, consequently and in accordance with these developments, associated, in her roles as victimizer and victim, mourner and survivor, with an anti-Oedipal model of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. According to this emerging model, a range of issues, including hysteria, nostalgia, anarchy, and the feminist politics of mourning and renewal, had to be—and were, indeed, quite successfully—reinterpreted so as to counter patriarchal hegemony.
The attraction of the Electra myth for feminist theatrical receivers, in the U.S. and elsewhere, evidently relates to the foregoing shifts, which served to foreground
“the force of some of the female characters” the myth features; figures “who, even if within the narrative framework are ultimately beaten down, won over, or defeated, nonetheless assert themselves and their desires,” Julie Malnig stresses. Apparently,
“the sheer depth of these heroines . . . has proven irresistible to feminist interpretation” (21). In some of these feminist reconfigurations of the myth of Electra, such as Electra Speaks of the Women’s Experimental Theatre (1974), the post-tragic version of the heroine “moves tentatively to self-recognition, separation, speech, and
168. The “Electra complex” is Carl Jung’s coinage for a model of female psychosexual development according to which “a daughter develops a specific liking for the father, with a corresponding jealous attitude towards her mother“—essentially, the symmetrical counterpart to the Oedipus complex (Jung and Kerényi 154). Although Freud used the term briefly, he later refuted Jung’s concept “and replaced it with his own term, the female Oedipus complex.” In reality, “[t]he greatest cultural myth surrounding Electra,” Scott maintains, “is that there is no Electra complex per se. Jung made only fleeting reference to the complex without ever fully defining or describing it. The very existence of the term may have been an attempt on his part to distance himself from Freud, to stage a subtle critique of the Oedipus complex by suggesting there is a female counterpart” (8). It is well-known that Jung’s and, especially, Freud’s formulations with regard to the development of female psychology and sexuality have come under severe criticism in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Feminists and other critics have scored valid points against the arguments mounted and methods pursued by Freudian psychoanalysis and, particularly, against what they see as “Freud’s discriminatory and ill-conceived theories of female sexuality.” However, one should consider the possibility “that without the backdrop of psychoanalysis and its focus on the myth of Oedipus, we would not have seen the renaissance of Electra adaptations on the twentieth century” and beyond (4).
Delikonstantinidou 326 survival,” and, ultimately, to a liberated (American) self, through the reconstruction of her life-affirming bonds with the women of her family—bonds that had been severed after years of feminine indoctrination (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 18-20).
Alfaro’s Electricidad, as we shall see, echoes WET’s question: “Whose interests are served by the institutionalized division between women in the family?” (23).
Alfaro’s mythoplay, not unlike WET’s Electra Speaks, albeit in a much different manner, probes some of the ways in which patriarchy meddles with the interaction of psychological, social, and mythohistorical worlds in the life of his heroine(s). Also similarly to Electra Speaks, the play interrogates the ways in which gender roles are reinforced (often through coercion) in various, contiguous cultural contexts so that they, eventually, become uncritically and often (self-)destructively embedded in women’s consciousness, instead of healthily integrated into the fabric of their lives through critical negotiation. Unlike Electra Speaks though, Alfaro’s play presents us with a much darker vision of the human condition. His Electra, or
Electricidad, proves to be unable to transform from overdetermined to self-determined subject/agent. In fact, with the exception of his play’s Iphigenia figure, no other character in Electricidad is able to escape their “prescribed” tragic fates.
Nevertheless, attention has not only been paid to the gender politics that the myth of Electra involves and enacts in its many instantiations, but also to the tension between individual and collective, and the ensuing self-division that the myth foregrounds in that respect. Less attracted by the myth’s revenge theme per se and more by its dramatization of profoundly problematic familial relationships, American playwrights, including Alfaro himself, have created new versions of the myth in order to comment on American family crises, on the crises of identity, and on the self- division contemporary individuals face “in a violent and corrupt political and social
Delikonstantinidou 327 world” (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 12, 25-6). Foley’s comments on the relevance of Electra’s dysfunctional and disintegrating family for American
(specifically U.S.) audiences are revealing:
What makes the house of Agamemnon particularly compelling to
Americans is the self-consciousness with which characters confront
and make often highly overdetermined choices in the context of their
dysfunctional family. Agamemnon chooses in the face of conflicting
political, religious, and social pressures to sacrifice his daughter
Iphigenia in order to make war on Troy, and Clytemnestra chooses to
kill him for it (along with engaging in adultery and later tyranny with
Aegisthus). An often-reluctant Orestes has a divine mandate to kill his
mother but must face the consequences of his action . . . [while] the
innocent sisters Electra, Chrysothemis, and Iphigenia . . . can only
resist or submit. (12)
Admitedly, Electra is caught in a no-win situation. She chooses resistance, but resistance implicates her in matricide, and thus it translates into the betrayal of a fundamental ethical imperative and points to (or anticipates) dissolution of the social and moral order. Yet, submission would have meant condoning mariticide, and thus it would translate into the betrayal of another fundamental ethical imperative and the compromise of the social and moral order thereof. Either way, she is unable to temper the brutal reality or avert the catastrophe; either way she poses a threat to the social fabric.
Even the excessive nature of her permanent, self-indulgent lamentation, or threnody, is seen as a potential threat to the values of her community, insofar as it
Delikonstantinidou 328 clashes with the precept “nothing in excess,” and thus she has been criticized for it
(Loraux 21). Electra’s very name, literally meaning the “unbedded” or “unmarried one” as we have noted earlier, “is a negation, a symbol of emptiness”; it is a name appropriate for “a protagonist who has . . . been emptied of life by the unnatural political and domestic situation in which she finds herself,” and which has enforced upon her an unnaturally prolonged and frustrated virginity, as Mark Ringer pointedly observes (145). It is the name of someone who by reason of both her domestic predicament and her prolonged virginity is rendered unsettling, liminal, or even socially aberrant.169
Ultimately, several aspects of Electra’s mythical figure and story came to
“reflect forms of victimization familiar . . . in U.S. popular culture and psychology”: the heroine’s “tragic self-division and sense of entrapment,” her estrangement from her rightful oikos, psychic vulnerability “in an increasingly uncertain and oppressive environment,” unstable sense of self, failure to conciliate past and present, as well as her circumscribed future—by both her family and prescribed social roles (Foley,
Reimagining Greek Tragedy 13). It is into this very familiarity that Luis Alfaro taps with the play that we will soon embark on analyzing, as he dramatizes his mestiza
Electra’s struggle to recognize her self and solidify a stable sense of identity within a fragmented and troubled world which not only mirrors but, in fact, at least partly spawns and certainly exacerbates Electra’s personal crisis.
169. Graham Wheeler has explained the significance of Electra’s virginity, discussing, in particular, ancient Greeks’ wariness towards female virgins: “Electra’s very status as a παρθένος [virgin] renders her unsettling. The Greeks constructed women as liminal, half-‘natural’ beings, and virgins—liminal females—predictably sited themselves towards the wild/‘natural’ side of the limen. . . . Electra's virginity has been disturbingly prolonged, and ancient physicians linked παρθενία with mental instability, suicidal tendencies and hallucinations in a pseudo-biology which helped buttress the dominant ideology of patriarchal patriliny” (380).
Delikonstantinidou 329
Resonantly, his heroine’s failure to escape her tragic destiny is shown in the course of Electricidad to be the corollary of her inability to forge and maintain strong, meaningful familial and social bonds, female or otherwise, in a hostile, violent sociopolitical environment. Lacking “togetherness,” empowering bonds of philia
(with reference both to the polis and the oikos) the project to change history is and will continue to be a lost cause, Electricidad seems to imply, hence leaving us with a lingering half-bitter, half-sweet—because hopeful and anticipatory of change, as we will see—aftertaste.
Delikonstantinidou 330
Chapter 6
Electricidad170
I. Setting the Stage for Electra as an El Barrio Chola
The idea of the citizen-artist permeates Luis Alfaro’s community activism and
theatre work, as we saw in the chapters on Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, conferring on
both a distinct “brand” of sorts. To borrow from Joseph W. Polisi’s description of the
citizen-artist’s function, Alfaro gets to know the individuals and communities that
exist around him and, then, creates ways to enhance and improve the human
experience with which he has become acquainted through his art, while, at the same
time, working with community members to make substantive change happen (95).
Inextricably intertwined throughout his long and productive career, the two
modalities, activism and theatre, have been informed by his Latino/a, working-class
background as well as by the vast urban, social and psychic space of Los Angeles
where he grew up. In fact, we could argue that the development of both Alfaro’s art
and activism can be understood properly only in the light of the Latino/a, working
class culture from which he draws and which he addresses and engages, especially as
this culture evolves through a constant friction with the dominant U.S. culture, and in
170. Earlier versions of parts of this chapter have been published in “Questing for 21st Century Mestizaje in the Realm of the Greek Tragic Myth: Dramatic Mythic(al) Revisions by Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Caridad Svich” (2016) and in "Luis Alfaro's Chicano Take on Electra: A Barrio-bound Electricidad," in Cultural Palimpsests: Ethnic Watermarks, Surfacing Histories (Forthcoming).
Delikonstantinidou 331 the light of his own position as a queer subject within both cultures.171 It is as an
“other” in terms of both ethnicity and sexuality that Alfaro, through his social theatre projects, performs the links between oppressions, contextualizes and thus demystifies difference, and points toward a cultural politics of affinity—a politics that works through the political formation of alliances and coalitions building across difference, as we have seen—and toward immediate, therapeutic responses to social ills.
As a social theatre project, his first Greek-inspired and Greek-based one,
Electricidad reflects the profound interdependence of Alfaro’s activism and art, insofar as it not only theatrically articulates his preoccupation with the individual subject’s and the community’s struggle for a sense of self-definition under various conditions of domination and subordination, but also partakes actively in it. In the context of the Electricidad project, the tragic myth of Electra became a conduit for the expression of Alfaro’s critique of various circumscribing systems, including the familial environment, the cultural community of the barrio and Latinidad/Chicanidad, as well as the dominant U.S. culturescape, which often ground the individual and the collective to a idealized past, prevent it from entering strategic coalitions in favor of a struggle for social emancipation, and render it unable to adopt “a route to a new self”
(Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 22). Moreover, Electra’s myth provided Alfaro with the appropriate material that allowed him to adapt to contemporary reality and deal with a number of ancient strands that are still relevant today, concerning, among
171. Although Alfaro’s “queerness” informs the politics and ethics of his work for the theatre, is a prevalent component of his solo performance pieces, and features, sometimes more and sometimes less prominently, in some of his plays, it is not an element in which he has invested heavily in the works under examination here. Only in Electricidad, as we shall see, it is, at some point, implied that one of the characters, Electra’s sister, Iphigenia or Ifi, is a homosexual. It may not be a wild conjecture to say, in the light of Ifi’s overall import in the play, that this can be interpreted as Alfaro’s way of acknowledging the generous input and legacy of Latina/Chicana lesbian feminists in Latino/a culture, in general, and the theatre, in particular. Nevertheless, this quality of Ifi, besides contributing to reinforce her difference from the other (especially the female) characters of the play, is not otherwise given a determining, or in any way significant, role in the narrative.
Delikonstantinidou 332 other things, matters of faith and religion, sacrifice, intergenerational familial relations, and the legacy of violence. As we shall see further on, the tragic predicament of his Electra (resonantly renamed “Electricidad,” meaning “electricity” in Spanish, a name that suits perfectly her highly charged personality) exudes a strange dark light which, ultimately, serves to illuminate differently some of the most critical sociopolitical issues that affect the Latino/a community, especially within the barrio setting, thus enabling not only their reconsideration, but also, and particularly in terms of the play’s production history, their radical treatment.
Like Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, Electricidad “started,” as the playwright has acknowledged, “from a community need” and from his own need to tell one of the
“terrible stories” of a community in/of crisis “in all of its parameters” (López,
“Theatre’s Place” 19). More specifically, his “journey” of reconfiguring Greek tragic myths began in Tucson, Arizona, he explains, “working with teen felons in the Youth
Authority program.” There he met a thirteen-year-old girl “who had murdered her mother because her mother had put a hit out on the dad who was a drug dealer from the south side of Tucson” (21). The playwright “was incredibly struck by her quest to reinvent herself apart from the family violence and gang life in which both she and her parents had grown up” (López, “It Takes a Neighborhood” 8). In an interview with Cassandra Johnson, which accompanies the 2006 published version of the play,
Alfaro mentions that, shortly after this encounter, he read Sophocles’ literary treatment of the Electra myth and came to the realization that: “it’s basically the same story. Nothing’s changed.” Thus, his Electricidad essentially grew out of the need to explore and, perhaps, even provide an answer to this fundamental question: “Why do we still have a need to avenge?” (Johnson 64). “This is a tremendously important question to pose during a time of war and during a cultural moment in which images
Delikonstantinidou 333 of violence have become so normalized,” he argues (López, “It Takes a
Neighborhood” 9), and we can hardly disagree.
Through(out) Electricidad, Alfaro probes this question, now reframed so as to refer, more specifically, to gang communities with(in) which he has been working and which he has been researching for the last fifteen years. These real-life North
American communities, whether Tuscon’s Southside, Chicago’s Pilsen, or East L.A., correspond, according to Alfaro, to mythical Argos, insofar as they abide “by social codes at odds with the rest of society; the friction generated between the two systems” producing tragedy, “then as now” (Jenkins 66). Indeed, Electricidad, as play and female protagonist, becomes a point of tense intersection, or ever tragic conflict, between old and new systems, or, rather, worlds: between the mythical world of
Electra and the mythified “old” Latino world of the barrio, on the one hand, and twenty-first-century U.S. and its Latino/a communities (which are being increasingly penetrated by the mainstream U.S. culture as well as drastically influenced by various forces of change), on the other. Like its ancient Greek counterparts, this revision of the Electra myth provides compelling insights into the social, political, and cultural circumstances that give rise to violent reactions to change, different kinds of justice, and the need for revenge, as well as their sometimes dreadful implications for both the individual and the collective.
In that same interview to Johnson, Alfaro refers to and expounds on two other aspects of the Electra myth that drew him to it and led to the creation of Electricidad; namely, the ambivalent mythical figures of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra. The former, the heroic martyr of the Greek myth, the tragic figure of the virgin daughter sacrificed for dreams of political power is, in this play, “literally ‘born again’” in and as his
Delikonstantinidou 334
Ifi.172 In course of the play, she becomes the means by which Alfaro introduces the whole idea of forgiveness and resurrection, the notion of being symbolically reborn after having made amends with a traumatic past. The playwright connects his forgiving, healed and healing, Iphigenia with a “way of avoiding violence” in a gang- infested culture (Johnson 65). His Ifi becomes, in fact, the embodiment of “the moral and spiritual voice of the play,” a figure who operates in contradistinction to
Electricidad who, unable and unwilling to forgive and move forward, remains ensnared in the past and in a misconceived notion of “the old ways, the indigenous ways” (64). As we shall discover during our discussion, in managing to reach a provisional and contingent resolution regarding the traumatic relations with her family and her barrio community, Iphigenia emerges as the most enabling figure of the play.
On a less positive and promising note, the figure of Clytemnestra, renamed
Clemencia in his play (a name assonantly related to “Clytemnestra,” but literally, though quite ironically, meaning “mercy”) becomes the means by which Alfaro weaves into his play “the idea of the matriarchy taking over patriarchy, which is something that exists a lot in gang culture,” and introduces the question of whether
“the matriarchy become[s] a patriarchy in order to survive” (64). Electricidad’s
Clemencia, like the Clytemnestra of the Greek myth, is a woman who takes political action in order to overthrow her husband’s brutal regime and establish a new, and supposedly better, status quo. In that respect, she deviates from the dominant mythical pattern according to which women work for or within the realm of political power exclusively through or on behalf of a male (relative). As Foley notes, “Clemencia’s crude attempts to create a new order gain a certain feminist plausibility in a world that
172. Foley pointedly observes that Alfaro’s Iphigenia figure “derives from Euripides, whose Iphigenia in Tauris survives her sacrifice, becomes a priestess, and learns through love of her brother to move past revenge to a form of reconciliation” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 25).
Delikonstantinidou 335 ignores and abuses women” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 25), especially given the fact that Clemencia herself was the victim of abuse by her husband Agamenón, or “El
Augie” in the play.
However, as we shall soon see, instead of emblematic of feminism’s struggle against male oppression, Clemencia is, rather, representative of a feminism gone astray and, in the course of the play, she will prove to be as self-defeating as her vigilante daughter. Moreover, and similarly to an earlier, 1995 depiction of
Clytemnestra in Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Alfaro rejects the notion of Clytemnestra as an adulteress—an element of the play which serves to complicate the already vexed issue of Clytemnestra’s culpability. Ultimately,
Electra’s, Iphigenia’s, and Clytemnestra’s “competing claims to history” (Malnig 34), and their remarkably different reactions to their experience of “a man’s world” as
(re)presented in Electricidad reveal, as we shall soon see, the deep fractures that masculine/ist prerogatives create to the complex matrices of social (including the familial) relations to which (female) personhood is embedded, and, therefore, to personal identity itself.
At this juncture, it would be useful to round off the introductory discussion to this chapter by bringing in it a particularly valuable point that Melinda Powers has raised with regard to Electricidad—and from which we have borrowed in the analysis of Alfaro’s Mojada and Oedipus el Rey: the fact that the play actualizes a productive syncretization the mythical narrative of Electra with a number of different U.S. identities. Like Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, “Electricidad pursues a more diversified trajectory in the adaptation and performance” of the ancient Greek mythical texts
Delikonstantinidou 336
“through the syncretic corporeal173 interplay between ancient Greek and cholo culture” (203). In fact, with Electricidad, Alfaro began a process of resignification “of the traditional association of [Greek] classics with a monolithic Anglo-American identity,” at the same time challenging “any singular view of [Latino/a] American identity itself” (Powers 193); a process that he continued in his two later plays.
Instead of reinforcing pernicious stereotypes of cholos/as, the play’s hybrid(ized) performances—especially that of the Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum production,174 directed by Lisa Peterson, which is the most important to date—used the grassroots-inflected, at once popular and provocative, performance techniques of
Carpa175 and Tanda176 to combat them, not only by telling a complex story about people usually reduced to a simplistic image, but also by allowing these same people to “imagine themselves outside of the limited range of identities that have been imposed upon them or that they cling to out of tradition, safety or limited opportunity” (López, “It Takes a Neighborhood” 9). In other words, Electricidad’s
173. In keeping with Susan Leign Foster’s view on corporeality and with her theory of “choreography,” Powers defines the corporeality of a theatrical play as the embodied social codes exhibited through costume, gesture, voice, setting, and other means, in a play (193). 174. The play initially opened at the Borderlands community-based, activist theatre, in 2003, and has since been produced more than six times. Interestingly, in each production the setting is adapted to the “host environment” in order to enable the drawing of direct connections between the world of the play and the real world where the performance takes place. “In Chicago it was the Midwest version. Tuscon was the desert version. Now [in Los Angeles, for the Mark Taper Forum production] this is the East L.A. version,” Alfaro has stated (Farber 2005). In contrast to his later Mojada and its production history on which we have already commented, however, the play text of Electricidad has not changed so drastically in each production that its alterations would merit special mention. 175. Rafaela Castro explains that “[a] carpa is literally a tent, but it is used to mean the traveling folk theatre that became an important institution in Mexico and the Southwest during the nineteenth century. . . . Carpas were an important popular cultural tradition at the turn of the [twentieth] century. . . . The carpas included circus entertainment such as acrobatics, clowns, and vaudeville acts, but they also functioned as ‘popular tribunals, repositories of folk wisdom, humor, and music, and were incubators of Mexican comic types and stereotypes’” (38). 176. The word “tanda” is sometimes used interchangeably with the word “carpa.” It denotes a variety or vaudeville show that draws from folk and popular cultural traditions. Janet Lynn Sturman explains that with tanda we usually refer to “[a] segment of an entire evening of entertainment created by linking together several independent and unrelated works, including one-act plays, circus segments, dance numbers, and zarzuelas” (184).
Delikonstantinidou 337 performances combated cholo/a stereotypes by representing cholos/as, and by enabling cholos/as to envision themselves, as intricate and integral parts of a larger community; what Alfaro views as the basis of sociopolitical change.
Powers explains that the use of artistic practices drawn from age-old
Latino/a—specifically, Mexican—theatre traditions and styles, which lend an indispensable communal dimension to the play, and, more generally,
the hybrid structure of the play, from its use of Spanglish to its cholo
costume, metatheatrically177 addresses the identity issues at the heart of
the cholo community, whose trouble identifying with mainstream
America has been cited as one of the root causes of gang formation. In
this way the form of the play functions as a sort of therapy for the
sociological problems that contribute to violence in the cholo
community and to the marginalization of the community at large. (193)
Later on, we examine in more detail how Electricidad has, also, and even more directly, been used as a vehicle for the education, empowerment, and even healing of
“at-risk youth” with whom Alfaro has been workshopping the play. As Powers reports,
the play’s performance on major U.S. stages has become a means to
educate the public at large about the concerns of the . . . cholos and the
sociological factors that contribute to the alienation of those residents
177. The diverse dramaturgical practices and techniques employed in the play’s performance, besides contributing to the revision of theatre conventions that we have come to commonly associate with the tragic genre, also self-consciously theatricalize (or theatricalize the theatricalization of) and, thereby, call attention to the historicization of the issues that the play treats. The multilayered dramatization/historicization of these issues allows Electricidad to become, formally too, a forum for their debate, transferring to the audience both means and the responsibility for making sense of and working through them.
Delikonstantinidou 338
who experience identity issues in assimilation to mainstream U.S.
culture. In the process of this social project, Alfaro invigorates
Electricidad’s ancient precursor with a contemporary American
language, culture, and identity and, at the same time, demonstrates the
importance of Electra to the modern inner-city. (203)
In fact, it demonstrates that the myth of Electra “belongs as much” to a mestizo/a
“cholo culture as to any other” (194).
Similarly to the other mythoplays that we have examined so far, Alfaro’s
Electricidad can be read as a transcultural chart, Greek, American, and Latino/a,
mapping a topography of the contemporary Latino/a, or, more specifically, the
Chicano/a self; a self situated within a hybrid, mestizo/a political, social, and cultural
context. Like them, Electricidad, especially by means of its “syncrisis of cultures,”
raises provocative questions about what it means to be a Latino/a (or Chicano/a) and a
mestizo/a in the contemporary U.S., and even invites the audience to attempt at
formulating tentative answers. Most importantly, it also invites the audience to engage
with the difficult task of breaking the cycle of violence that power and powerlessness
perpetuate in twenty-first-century Latino/a contexts. The enthusiastic responses the
play has received by both audiences and critics bear testimony to the fact that the
“invitation” that Electricidad extended has been more than welcome.
II. Electricidad: Electra as a Barrio-Bound “Old School Chola”
In line with ancient Greek drama, Alfaro employs the dramatic chorus to
introduce us to Electricidad’s world, set in the “[r]ight now” and in the “live wire”
Delikonstantinidou 339 city of Los Angeles (5), specifically its East Side. The chorus in this play consists of
“Las Vecinas,” or female neighbors, wielding brooms and trying, rather in vain, to clean up the barrio, both literally and symbolically. It is “a chorus of mujeres from the hood [who] have seen it all” and who represent “the voz of the city” (6).178 Las
Vecinas, namely La Carmen, La Connie, and La Cuca, embody the spirit of the community, and thus they not only set the action in its specific frame, but also voice this community’s values, beliefs, and viewpoints. It is through their often quite comical chisme—that is their extensive gossip network and pervasive flow of rumors—that we come to know the basics of the cholo/a culture and the predicament of “La Casa de Atridas” within this culture. Moreover, it is by means of the vecinas and their chisme that Alfaro first lays out “his analogies between the old world [of the
Greek myth] and the new [of the North American barrio],” which he “juggles” throughout the play, as Thomas Jenkins argues. His chorus “provide[s],” in fact, “a sort of interpretative road map, demonstrating how the play slides between Greek and
American tragedy” (167).
More specifically, Las Vecinas’ “prologue” informs us about Agamenón’s, their (metaphorical) King’s, murder by Clemencia, as well as about Electricidad’s keeping of the decomposing body of her father in the front yard. They also tell us of
Ifigenia’s running off and of her present uncertain runaway status, as well as of
Orestes’ alleged murder, ordered, according to the rumor, by Clemencia herself. The
178. As Choate has written with regard to Sophocles’ treatment of the myth, Electra’s chorus, “[t]heir relationship to Electra and their relationship to the action of the play have met with neither a uniformity of critical opinion nor of directorial opinion.” Directors, in particular, have interpreted the chorus “in a wide variety of ways” (207). To this we could add that adaptors and revisers of the Electra myth have also experimented extensively with the theatrical element of the chorus. In the context of this play, Alfaro creates a chorus of quasi- individualized characters that have a very human, partly sympathetic, partly adversarial relationship to the female protagonist. As for his conception of the chorus as a group of chatty local women, the idea for that may have come from Eugene O’ Neill’s renowned Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), in which the chorus similarly consisted of gossipy townspeople.
Delikonstantinidou 340 vecinas appear to be sympathetic toward their “little” Electricidad, the now “all confused,” “living dead” daughter, whom they “practically raised for . . . that mother
[Clemencia]” (Alfaro, Electricidad 9-14). Yet, although, on the one hand, they sympathize with Electricidad, commiserate with her plight, and lash out at Clemencia who killed their king for want of “algo,” or power, “[h]er own business,” and “[h]er own territory” (“[s]omething no woman in this barrio can get”), on the other hand, they are concerned that Electricidad’s excessive mourning, and, particularly, the retaining of Agamenón’s mutilated corpse on a makeshift altar in front of her house,
“can’t be good for barrio pride” (13, 9). They are extremely worried that: “LA
CARMEN: We’ll never get any sleep./ LA CONNIE: We’ll never get this barrio clean./ LA CUCA: We’ll never get back to una vida normal” (9). Hence, throughout the play, they assume a partly sympathetic, partly adversarial stance toward
Electricidad. With regard to their overall operation within the play, apart from delivering the aforementioned “prologue” that delineates the background to the play’s action, Las Vecinas also express foreboding at anticipated violence, opine about divine response to human actions, and pronounce the closing assessment, very much in the manner of ancient choruses, to compress Helen E. Moritz’s lucid exposition on the matter (124).
Additionally, and again in the manner of many an ancient tragic chorus, mutatis mutandis, Las Vecinas also serve another important function: they provide the
“hi/story” of the culture that makes up the play’s broader context. More precisely, they familiarize their “comunidad,” and, by extension, the audience (whether
Latino/Chicano/a or non-Latino/Chicano/a, cholo/a or non-cholo/a), with a
“canonical” version of the hi/story of the cholo/a culture (Alfaro, Electricidad 11). It is through the chisme of the three chatty vecinas that we learn about the emergence of
Delikonstantinidou 341 the cholo/a within, or, more accurately, from the periphery of the larger Chicano/a community:
LA CARMEN: In the beginning.
......
LA CARMEN: Before the great wars of the seventies and eighties.
LA CONNIE: Before the Chicano moratorium.
LA CUCA: And the death of Ruben Salazar.
LA CARMEN: There was the cholo.
LA CONNIE: And the cholo was no myth.
LA CUCA: He wasn’t even a god.
LA CARMEN: No, he was made by man.
LA CONNIE: The product of racismo.
LA CUCA: And neglectful mamas.
LA CARMEN: The cholo was just a homeboy.
LA CONNIE: With his zoot suit.
LA CUCA: And his switchblade.
LA CARMEN: Pushed out by la cultura.
LA CONNIE: Chased out of the neighborhood.
LA CUCA: Kicked out of the Chicano tribe.
Delikonstantinidou 342
LA CARMEN: Like a coyote he hid in the shadows.
LA CONNIE: In the coolness of midnights. (11)
Thus, the vecinas offer a “creation story” of the cholo/a that is more sociological than mythical as it ascribes the origins of the cholos/as, the Chicanos/as’ “otro yo,” their
“dark side,” to historically grounded social conditions and ills (11), rather than to cultural mythologies.
Their version of cholo/a creation affirms “choloism”’s liminal status and existence at the physical/geographical and metaphorical/social margins of the
Chicano/a, Mexican (American), and mainstream U.S. society, as we have also discussed in the previous chapter. The very definition sociologist James Diego Vigil offers for cholos/as calls attention to their marginality. It reads: “A Chicano street style of youth who are marginal to both Mexican and Anglo culture; [the term is] also used historically for cultural marginals and racial hybrids in Mexico and some parts of
Latin America” (177). Another sociologist, William B. Sanders, notes with respect to the relationship between Chicanos/as and cholos/as, in particular, that “[i]n the larger
Chicano community, the cholo/a is variously viewed as anything from a transitory youthful style to a ‘low life’” (129). Although there may be some sympathy for cholos/as and their predicament within the Chicano/a community, most Chicanos/as now place themselves at a distance from them due to various cultural pressures, especially cultural pressures against the subversive, quasi-anti-assimilationist stance that cholos/as almost invariably adopt—a crucial point on which we have touched in our analysis of Oedipus el Rey.
The vecinas’ “creation story” accords in many respects with Frank de Jesús
Acosta’s account of the emergence of the barrio culture and the cholo/a subculture
Delikonstantinidou 343 across the American Southwest. According to Acosta, following the re-contestation by conservative forces of most of the gains Latinos/as, in general, and Chicanos/as, in particular, had achieved during the period of the Civil Rights Movement by the mid- nineteen-eighties, young people and families marginalized, or even abandoned, economically, socially, and culturally, by mainstream society found refuge in the barrio culture. The scholar explains that
[t]he process of social dislocation affecting these forgotten Americans
has created, for many decades now, large intergenerational groups of
abandoned young men and women who dwell in their own barrio
subculture across the American Southwest. Over time, these groups
have woven themselves deeply into the consciousness and social fabric
of the Chicano community. . . . (5)
From the eighties onwards, urban street (gang) subcultures populated by mestizos/a—
“a street based amalgam of Anglo-American and Mexican features with innovative syncretisms” according to Vigil (41-2)—have been formed and have, gradually, pervaded and taken control of the barrios. “[T]he young men and women in this danger zone come to be known by many names other than their own, including cholo/a, pachuco/a, homeboy/girl, and gangster—all designations that have been embraced by those who have lived, died, or survived by the accords of the street,”
Acosta reports (5). It is the same people whose predicament Alfaro treats in Oedipus el Rey.
The evolution of these barrio subcultures has been characterized by some social commentators and scholars “as a statement of social defiance and cultural resistance” and “as a survival strategy in an oppressive society” (Acosta 5). The barrio
Delikonstantinidou 344 subcultures themselves have been sometimes described as a means by which
Chicano/a youths find expression and establish a sense of identity, status, and belonging within an alternative family and communal structure (5). For instance, scholar Jon D. Rossini takes to task Vigil’s analysis of the cholo/a culture, discerning in it “an unwillingness to recognize the potentially subversive ideal of a well- developed subculture” (Contemporary Latina/o Theater 110). Others, however, “have labeled the phenomenon more clinically as maladaptive socialization, deviance, and self-hatred,” and have focused on the “real negatives associated with involvement” in the Chicano/a urban cholo/a subculture, Acosta explains. For these latter sociocultural critics, the cholo/a subculture “has become a potent vehicle for directing” the sights of
Chicano/a individuals “to racism, sexism, substance abuse, violence, and crime,” its
“negative values and norms” breeding self-destruction, homicide, and community warfare (Acosta 5). As we come to understand in the course of this play, the “old order,” onto which Electricidad has been hanging, fits perfectly the said critics’ grim description of the contemporary cholo/a world.
Besides offering the cholo/a “creation story” and painting a picture of the cholo/a world in dark colors, the vecinas also admit, quite revealingly, that they tolerate the cholos/as and (or, rather because) they use them, as they used El Rey,
Agamenón, to protect them:
LA CARMEN: But from what?
LA CONNIE: The elements, mujer.
LA CUCA: The city.
LA CARMEN: The other gangs.
Delikonstantinidou 345
LA CONNIE: The thieves.
LA CUCA: La policia.
LA CARMEN: And the politicians.
LA CONNIE: Thank dios for cholo protection.
......
LA CUCA: We don’t dial the 911 no more.
LA CARMEN: No place for la policia in these barrios now.
LA CONNIE: We handle our own now. (Alfaro, Electricidad 10, 12)
The vecinas’ comments confirm that “to many inner city communities in Los
Angeles, the police appear to be a worse evil than the gangs,” as Powers also remarks
(196), with the tension between barrio residents and law enforcement often reaching explosive points.
The scholar records a number of scandals of corruption in the Los Angeles
Police Department and other relevant incidents that explain the impaired relationship between citizens and police in certain neighborhoods of the urban metropolis, including the acquittal, in 1992, of several officers on trial for the brutal beating of
Rodney King. These, she argues, “have contributed to the distrust, fear, and anger with the U.S. justice system which eventually erupted into the L.A. uprising/riots of
1992. Such situations have led to antagonism toward the police, which is among the strategies into which barrio youngsters are socialized” (196). This state of affairs, in effect, not only upholds and even reinforces the insularity of the communities in question, but also legitimizes, in a sense, the exercise of extra-legal power within
Delikonstantinidou 346 them, as well as the adoption of extra-legal measures in their residents’ dealings with intra-community issues and with each other.
Throughout Electricidad, we witness the titular protagonist’s internalization of the aforementioned antagonism, insularity, and confidence in extra-legal norms, customs, and ethics. Like the ancient Greek Electra, Alfaro’s protagonist belongs to a world where she can discern no reliable system of justice that she can trust; a world which breeds in her the conviction that “she has no recourse to legitimate institutions.” This conviction only exacerbates her experience of “family stress, isolation, and adolescent struggles for identity, all factors associated with gang formation and violence” (195-6). Therefore, she remains caught in the vicious circle of a system of violent retribution governed by “an eye for an eye” mandate that leaves little hope of escape. Her tragedy, like the tragedy of her mythical counterpart, lies in large part in that she relies on an antiquated and outlawed form of justice-taking which generates further injustice and leads to her and her family’s demise.
It is through this system of violent retribution, as it affects the life of both the mythical Electra and her chola teen counterpart, Electricidad, that Alfaro joins the myth’s plot with the plot of the play. The “murder-for-justice motif” that one finds in the ancient myth of Electra, a motif foregrounded in its ancient dramatic treatments, approximates remarkably to the cholo/a code of gang violence. Received through the prism of this aspect of Latino/a experience, the myth helps us navigate with sharpened understanding through “situations of violence in the contemporary [cholo/a] world,” to use Powers’ phrasing. As the scholar illustrates, “[i]n the myth of the House of
Atreus, each transgressor’s murder must be requited in a system of retribution:
Orestes must kill his mother, who killed his father, who killed his daughter, whom
Artemis demanded as a sacrifice to make the winds sail the ships to Troy” (194-5).
Delikonstantinidou 347
Similarly to the mythical world of Electra, in the world of Electricidad “[v]iolence begets violence begets violence” (Johnson 65). This vicious circle, a hermetically sealed system of violent retribution, characterized and was perpetuated through the so-called “old” cholo order of the Boyle Heights that Agamenón embodied.
Electricidad’s obsessive attachment to her father and adherence to the “old” cholo regime are, in fact, presented as coterminous. Her lament serves to clarify this point:
ELECTRICIDAD: . . . You are the old ways, Papa.
You are the history and the reason we know how to live.
I want to live the old cholo ways, Papa.
Simple and to the point.
You mess with me, I mess with you back.
You want to party, party in your own backyard.
You shoot, I shoot back.
It’s simple. (Alfaro, Electricidad 23-4)
Quite interestingly, however, although, initially, the play appears to be tracing the beginning of the cycle of violence in Clemencia’s treacherous murder of Agamenón, we soon learn that it was him who actually triggered it by repeatedly abusing his wife.
“[H]e beat her,” “[a]nd ignored her” the vecinas admit in a rare (and somewhat compromised by its quick retraction) instance of compassion extended to the new queen of the barrio (13). Later in the play, Clemencia tells Electricidad of her father’s abusive behavior, offering graphic reasons for deciding to murder him:
Delikonstantinidou 348
CLEMENCIA: . . . Everyone forgets what a bully he was.
He made us think that we couldn’t grow and change and make
something better than what we are.
He beat me and made me scared of the world.
Scared of crossing over these bridges.
It was the only way he could control us. (46-7)
Elsewhere, she confides in Electricidad that Agamenón took her virginity in the back of a car when she was only thirteen and then “bought” her from her father because:
CLEMENCIA: . . . This is what they do.
Did I get to escojer?
No my stubborn daughter, I didn’t get to choose.
And neither will you.
History just keeps repeating itself.
Cholos don’t move forward.
They just keep going farther into the past.
Oldies, oldies, oldies.
And I want to change it.179 (49)
179. Clemencia’s grievances against Agamenón—similarly to the grievances of Svich’s Clytemnestra figure against her Agamemnon figure in her Iphigenia Crash—echo a variant of the myth in which Agamemnon murdered Clytemnestra’s first husband, Tantalus, killed her infant son, and took her for his bride by force.
Delikonstantinidou 349
As in WET’s Electra Speaks, the Clytemnestra figure of Alfaro’s Electricidad, “is portrayed as domineering but also as a victim of male brutality” (Malnig 29), the complexity of her character resonating “with the wide range of representations of
Clytemnestra in the ancient tragedies” (Moritz 129).180
The play intimates that Clemencia killed her husband in an attempt to escape from the violent history of the cholo world, and in order to obtain power within a household and a community where she had been isolated as “the outsider” (Alfaro,
Electricidad 21). On the one hand, Clemencia wants to do something that no one from
La Casa de Atridas ever did, namely “bring the Four Directions together,”181 run the household, and make everything better (80), while, on the other hand, she “wants to move on, and sell her Boyle Heights bungalow to pursue a more economically and emotionally liberated life” (Powers 195). Yet, despite her somewhat convincing motives in killing Agamenón and despite her legitimate aspirations for a better life,
Clemencia is—no less than Electricidad—trapped in the “old” cholo order that she so despises. Therefore, she ends up perpetuating the cycle of violence on the basis of which this order runs and from which she supposedly longs to break free. Eventually, it becomes obvious that she merely appropriates and mimics the masculine/ist “old
180. Emily Allen-Homblower and Anastasia Bakogianni, among others, have offered useful commentaries on the different treatments of the figure of Clytemnestra in the works of the three ancient tragedians. The former observes that Aeschylus’ portrayal of Clytemnestra as a “gloating, vindictive, and perverse queen” differs significantly from her portrayals in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ plays (n. pag.). The latter writes with respect to the Sophoclean Clytemnestra that she is “a deeply unsympathetic character,” lacking “the monumental quality of her Aeschylean predecessor” and expressing no remorse (53). On the contrary, Euripides’ “Clytemnestra voices a combination of self-reproach and regret, which makes her increasingly worthy of sympathy in the audience’s eyes.” Euripides veers away from both Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ portrayal in humanizing the queen (Allen-Homblower n. pag.) 181. The play makes frequent mention of “the Four Directions.” Depending on where and by whom the phrase is used it sometimes denotes, literally, the four dimensions (south, north, east, and west), at other times it denotes, metonymically, the four sides of the Los Angeles barrio, each corresponding to a quasi-self-regulated neighborhood and faction, and, at still others, it is charged with metaphysical and supernatural associations that hark back to Aztec religion and cosmology.
Delikonstantinidou 350 ways” (or system of justice and ethics) of (cholo) patriarchy that have victimized her, thus further victimizing herself and the members of her family. By the end of the play, as we shall soon see, Electricidad, in a very real sense, emerges as her mother’s double.
In spite of Clemencia’s seeming blunt defiance of traditional gender norms, as exhibited in her efforts to distress male-authored normalcy, replace the patriarch
Agamenón in the top echelon of cholo power, and reverse the extant gender(ed) roles/structures of power in her favor, the matriarchal regime that she seeks to establish remains self-defeatingly caught in the violent practices and patterns of patriarchy, unable to transition into a just, empowering, and liberating new order.
Several instances throughout the play attest to that. She accuses Electricidad of acting like a man (Alfaro, Electricidad 24), but, in murdering her husband and attempting to murder her son, she, essentially, does the same. She claims that she does not aspire to more killing but, rather, wants to “take back every bruise” Agamenón gave her “and turn it into a dollar,” and yet, when she fails to persuade Electricidad of the validity of her plans, she decides to “kick her ass” (39, 65). Alfaro’s Clytemnestra figure, much like her mythical counterpart, is trapped within the dominant patriarchal paradigm as this relates to both family and wider community. The female expression that she ostensibly bodies forth is tied to, and thus inevitably undermined by, the male- authored and the male-dominated sociocultural narratives against which it is almost obsessively defined. The very fact that she wishes to capitalize on her victimization— translating agency into the relentless pursuit of profit and power, and measuring progress in acquisition according to the precepts of the urban U.S. culture in which she longs to partake—instead of trying to heal and move on, evinces that much.
Delikonstantinidou 351
Although Clemencia desperately longs to rebel against the system that has deprived her of command over her own self and to assert her (political) agency, cultural as well as structural factors, some of them barrio- and cholo-specific, ensure that she, as well as Electricidad, remains isolated and powerless within it, unable to overturn the patriarchal social and political hierarchy that organizes it. As a parenthetical aside, in this respect, she also evokes Alfaro’s Jocasta, the “ganga queen,” another victim of macho brutality, bounded to the ambivalent barrio space and oppressed by its masculine/ist politics and ethics. It is no coincidence that, throughout the play, the two women, mother and daughter, remain literally confined within the bounds of La Casa des Atridas. The staging points to the sad reality that both of them are equally bounded by the patriarchal order of the cholo culture within the domestic sphere.
Moreover, as is the case with most women who want to turn agency into civic action and make the leap from the domestic to the public domain, Clemencia needs the impetus that only collective action can provide, and thus requires her daughter’s allegiance. However, as we are given to understand, this option is out of the question.
Among the most serious consequences that patriarchy exhibits, after all, and one of the most significant—if not the most significant—mechanisms of its self- perpetuation, is the phenomenon of women placing their allegiance to men before their allegiance to women. As a case in point, Electricidad is adamant in her decision to choose father and brother over mother. Like the mythical Electra, Alfaro’s
Electricidad remains unconvinced by her mother’s reasons for killing her father and continues to obsessively lament “his death, which also represents the death of the old cholo order,” Powers underscores. “[H]anging on to the ‘old order’ of the cholo gangs” (195), she rejects Clemencia’s offer to join their forces and work together
Delikonstantinidou 352 against the order of the “hombres,” and, eventually, resolves to kill her. The destruction of female solidarity is shown in the play to result in the disunity of women, which, in turn, further reinforces patriarchy and its violent manifestations, including the masculinist mode and ethics of vengeance.
By means of Electrididad’s and Clemencia’s problematic relationship and— verbally, emotionally, and, ultimately, physically—violent confrontations, Alfaro mounts a cultural critique of the ways in which patriarchy, even when disguised as matriarchy, pits the women of the (immediate and the larger, communal) family against one another so as to legitimize, sustain, and expand its hegemonic status. The reiteration of the old, patriarchal ways, which both Clemencia and Electricidad fail to overcome or, at least, modify to their and their community’s advantage, “suggests the difficulty of breaking the cycle of violence that continues to perpetuate itself from generation to generation,” as well as its internalization by both women and men, who
“fall victim to its replication” (Powers 203). Ifigenia’s unsuccessful intervention and
Orestes’ tragic predicament in the play will serve to illustrate further the difficulty of escape from the “ancestral curse” of violence that is organically linked with the patriarchal order and with women’s socialization in it.
Electricidad’s tenacious adherence to the old cholo order is mostly due to the fact that, in her mind, this order and her beloved “papa” are inextricably entwined, if not rendered one and the same, and thus she clings to the cholo past in order to preserve her father’s memory. However, her unwavering loyalty to the old cholo ways is, also, underpinned by a religious imperative. As Helen E. Moritz observes
[t]he staging of Electricidad is borrowed from Aeschylus’ Libation
Bearers, where Agamemnon’s tomb in front of the palace was a focus
Delikonstantinidou 353
of his children’s actions, especially of their incantation to his spirit and
to the gods of the Underworld to effect vengeance for his death. (124)
In Alfaro’s play, invitations to vengeance have been translated from ancient Greek gods to Aztec gods (Jenkins 168). Similarly to Aeschylus’ play, then, in Electricidad the mourning protagonist, convinced that she must re-tell the stories her father told her “[a]bout who we are and where we came from” (Alfaro, Electricidad 28), “tries to get in touch with the gods at her Papa’s altar by recounting her father’s version of cholo origins, an adaptation of the Aztec cosmogonic myth” (Moritz 124); specifically, the creation myth of Coatlicue.
According to the contemporized creation story that Electricidad recounts,
Coatlicue, presented here as “the mujer god of human sacrifices,” “made the first cholo,” and then gave him the switchblade, the baggy pants, house parties and Schlitz, the low rider and car club, the boulevard, and taught him how to dance. Her account is comically replete with intertextual references to contemporary barrio culture,182 an element that functions contrapuntally to the anticipatory nod that Coatlicue’s description constitutes to the terrible sacrifices that will come to pass by the end of the play:
ELECTRICIDAD: But then, one of her four hundred daughters,
Coyolxauqui, stood up to her and was like, “Why you get all the
power, vieja? Why you get to decide everything for us?”
182. As we saw in Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, the humor in the popular culture references and anecdotes that we find dispersed throughout Alfaro’s mythoplays, feeds on the anxieties surrounding stereotypes and obstacles faced by many U.S. communities, such as the cholos/as, and operate as poetic tools to dismantle them “and construct in their place a bridge between classes and cultures” (Powers 202).
Delikonstantinidou 354
And that’s when Coatlicue cut her up in four, carniceria style, and
made the four corners cholo world.
......
And then she cut her daughter’s head off and did a fly ball into the sky,
and her head became the moon.
And that’s the one I’m trying to see every night, Papa.
But she won’t show me her expressions.
She’s a stone-cold chola, that daughter. (28-9)
Like Coatlicue’s daughter, Coyolxauhqui, Electricidad decides that she must kill her mother in order to reinstate justice and the rule of the old cholo law. Electricidad’s
(partial) identification with the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, whose expressions she unsuccessfully tries to capture, is intended to confer mythical credence and a sense of ethical legitimacy to her decision to violently challenge her mother’s authority.
However, her identification with Coyolxauhqui is as misinformed and misplaced as the creation story she reiterates after her father. Both seem to issue from a vision of the world that is distorted by an exclusive masculinist perspective. One could arguably claim that the mythical figure and narrative of Coyolxauhqui is much more strongly related to Clemencia’s than to Electricidad’s predicament, insofar as the power struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy is deeply embedded in both
Coyolxauhqui’s and Clemencia’s stories. Perhaps, Electricidad is as unable to discern
Coyolxauhqui’s expressions as she is to understand Clemencia’s partly justified claims to political power, leadership, and property.
Delikonstantinidou 355
Despite its shortcomings, Electricidad’s (by way of Agamenón’s) version of the “cholo creation [not only] accords the cholo an ancient mythic and divine status denied him in the vecinas’ tale” (Moritz 124), but also, situates the otherwise marginalized, and in many senses “illicit,” cholo/a world within a re-created
Chicano/a mythos which allows it to partake of the Chicano/a pride in the mythico- cultural history of their mestizo/a people. As far as the version’s extreme distortion of the ancient Aztec creation story is concerned, although it certainly bears the traces of masculinist distortion and is evidently subsumed into the patriarchal paradigm and its narratives of legitimation, Moritz calls our attention to another aspect of it that is of commensurate importance to understanding cholo reality. The scholar pointedly argues that “[s]ince Chicano mythico-cultural history is ignored, if not denied, in
American schools, it is less wonder that Agamenón’s version is distorted than that he has any familiarity with the myth as all” (134). As is the case with Morton and
Moraga, though, Alfaro’s evocation and invocation of the ancient Aztec myths should not be attributed to the seduction of nostalgia or to some sort of reactionary impulse.
Rather, it should be construed as a twofold attempt, on the part of the dramatist: “to restore its history to a population limited to oral tradition and to counter the American tendency to forget or repress the past” (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 217), on the one hand; and to critically approach and negotiate this tradition and past so as to draw forth long-neglected facets and expressions of it, especially those that concern the presence and contributions of the female constituency, on the other.
Additionally, we should stress that, like these other dramatists, Alfaro not only carries on a long-standing tradition in the Latin/o/a American theatre of dealing with aspects of contemporary reality through timeless concepts of the human condition (in the case of Electricidad, the concept of the power struggle between matriarchy and
Delikonstantinidou 356 patriarchy), but also enacts a mestizo/a-ization of mythico-cultural traditions through which to approach the concepts themselves. As we saw in earlier chapters, this process and practice of mestizo/a-ization, which involves drawing from Greek and indigenous, ancient and modern resourses, is of outmost importance for the advancement of the vision and ethos of a new, inclusive mestizaje. Significantly, in the context of Electricidad, among all the characters, it is Ifigenia who seems to somehow approximate an embodiment of the said ethos, insofar as she occupies the fertile intersection of many different mythical and cultural strands, and is empowered by it.183 Ifigenia, or La Ifi, is constructed as the voice of love and wisdom that, unfortunately, remains, as Jenkins points out, “entirely unheeded” (168) by the other characters.
As “[t]he members of the ancient House of Atreus are variously driven by individual Olympian gods, primordial gods of vengeance, and problematic solidarity demands for vengeance,” so the members of “La Casa de Atridas are analogously influenced by competing religious views—Christianity, Aztec mythology, and a vague but insistent cholo code—[while] [n]otions of rebirth are manipulated in both,” as Moritz correctly remarks (124). In counterpoint to Electricidad’s quasi-religious vows to the ancient Aztec gods to avenge her father’s death and to her final incantations with which she encourages Orestes’ murder of their mother, her sister’s,
Ifigenia’s, awkward yet honest exhortations to Christian-like forgiveness appear to be offering an alternative to the violence that plagues La Casa de Atridas. In the course of the play, “the born-again La Ifi becomes an embodied manifestation of the futility
183. Ifigenia’s physical characterization in the play’s performances underscores the fact that she is the most productively syncretic figure in the play. With reference to Electricidad’s Mark Taper Forum production, Powers writes: “La Ifi is clad as a dowdy nun donning a puffy, black goose-down jacket. Tattooed in skull and crossbones, she has a very butch appearance in spite of her nun-duds and humorously swings between her past aggressive behavior and newly found pious demeanor” (197).
Delikonstantinidou 357 of retribution and hope in the Christian forgiveness . . . to heal the wounds of history”
(Powers 199). However, as we shall see further on, the wounds of La Casa de Atridas, particularly as embodied by the figure of Electricidad, seem to be beyond healing, at least as long as their root causes persist.
It is important to stress, though, that La Ifi is presented in the play as anything but the passive mouthpiece of religion, spouting Christian rhetoric and offering
Christian faith and experience as a one-size-fits-them-all solution with the intent to proselytize others. Rather, La Ifi fleshes out and gives expression to a personalized
Christian belief and practice that are unmistakably human and thus inevitably fallible, but meaningful and convincing because of their humanness; products of constant, active and conscious, negotiation among the many contrasting aspects of the self. She puts forward and self-consciously performs her own, intimate version of Christianity as but one more life narrative, yet, the only life narrative of the few that are available to the members of La Casa des Atridas that does not require or justify violence and the shedding of kindred blood.
Instead of “a model of reform,” Ifigenia is presented “as a complex character groping for another way,” exploring, tentatively yet resolutely, possibilities for reinvention as well as for sisterhood and solidarity (Martin and Rossini 2007); that is, for breaking (away from) the cycle of violence and crime, for forging meaningful social and emotional bonds with others (members of the immediate and larger family and community), for investing in togetherness, and thus for acting upon a more inclusive, generous, and, eventually, viable “belonging to the world,” to evoke our analysis of Mojada. In this respect, she calls to mind Mojada’s Josefina. Not unlike
Josefina, Ifigenia is constructed by Alfaro as a syncretic self/site that opens up the possibility for a new mestizaje reality that will involve the bridging of divisions in
Delikonstantinidou 358 however unfavorable circumstances. Or, to put it differently, in Bonnie Honig’s terms, she presents “the possibility of [different] action in conditions of impossibility”
(9). Thereby, her import in the play is no less politically inflected than Electricidad’s and Clemencia’s, insofar as it can be translated into a concrete course of sociopolitical action, self-reflexive and life-affirming, distinct from the destructive one that is conventionally established in the cholo world and that both Electricidad and
Clemencia eventually serve to legitimize, at the same time as they are both victimized by it.
Despite its being set in a Christian-inflected vocabulary, Ifigenia’s position exhibits a kind of political radicality that is unmistakably allied to, even lodged in, the tragic mode. In effect, she alerts us to the limits of accepted values (barrio- and cholo- specific as well as Christian), to the existence of ineluctable yet contradictory options
(loyalty to one’s community of origin and duty to herself and her own conscience, love/loyalty to her mother and love/loyalty to her sister and father), as well as to the inevitability of often pursuing incommensurable goods (stay by her family and fall with them or save herself). Simultaneously, she elicits from the very ambiguities, paradoxes, contingencies, and overdeterminations structuring her world a will for individual and social transformation that, however, does not promise unproblematic reconciliation or redemption. It is almost as if Ifigenia was intended, in this play, as a means by which to foreground the tragic mode as a necessary condition for a self- critical and transformative ethical and political praxis.
Still, if “by aligning herself with the ancient Aztec gods Electricidad has separated herself from the rest of the community, for whom the shared religious belief is Catholicism” (Moritz 125), Ifigenia’s newfound beliefs in unconditional love and forgiveness do not appear to be securing her a place within that community either.
Delikonstantinidou 359
Even if her commitment to radically change her life in line with non-violent, quasi-
Christian dictates is serious—after all, she does provisionally join a convent and strives for forgiveness and virtue—her reborn self is met with skepticism and incredulity, especially on the part of her mother.
Drawing on Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Iphigenia is alive and serving as a priestess at the temple of Artemis in Tauris, Alfaro introduces an
Iphigenia character184 that, as the vecinas claim, “used to be the meanest of them all”: cutting boys up “for no razon,” and dancing “with girls” (14). Alfaro’s “La Ifi” has been “born again,” having, like the ancient Iphigenia, “eluded apparent death” (Moritz
125). She gave up the old “vida” of violence and crime and is reborn to a new life of religious service with “[t]he sisters at Immaculate Conception” and of striving for goodness (Alfaro, Electricidad 38). Unlike Electricidad, La Ifi “rejects the destructive consequences of her father’s royal realm among the cholos” and tries to sensitize her sister to the reality of Agamenón’s sacrifice of his family to the cholo life (Moritz
126). The two sisters’ conversations bring into sharp focus their conflicting, irreconcilable views of their father and the cholo ways he represents:
IFIGENIA: Don’t forget what he was.
......
IFIGENIA: Hermana, he gave us these tattoos.
But these tattoos are also scars.
184. In the ancient tradition, “Clytemnestra’s mother-love for this daughter was her expressed motive for murdering her husband in all three versions of the Electra story” (Powers 129). Therefore, “Alfaro’s introduction of an Iphigenia character in place of Electra’s Sophoclean sister Chrysothemis seriously undermines Clytemnestra’s claim in all the Greek versions that Agamemnon’s murder is merely in retaliation for the king’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia” (197).
Delikonstantinidou 360
......
IFIGENIA: He was a cabron.
Look at what he left us.
Our own jails.
ELECTRICIDAD: Yo no.
IFIGENIA: Oh yeah, you. Mama. Me.
All trapped.
Even in his muerte, he still won’t let us go. (Alfaro, Electricidad 34,
36-7)
Convinced that her sister’s obsession with killing their mother constitutes a spiritual—that leads to a literal—jail, Ifigenia rejects Electricidad’s demand for help in going through with the murder. She tries to no avail to show Electricidad a way out of the barrio and its violence through unconditional love, resonantly described as
“love, . . . like beyond the barrio” (63). She exhorts her: “IFIGENIA: . . . Listen, hermana, . . . . You demand so much of cholo-hood and its ways. I kind of get your religious loyalty now. But it’s time to call a truce and let the House of Atridas mourn and move on.” Electricidad, however, seems to have made her choice:
“ELECTRICIDAD: I would rather die on a cross than forgive her” (35). As Alfaro has explained, “it was important for everyone to see the choice Electricidad is making. She sees other options, Ifigenia presents one, and yet she chooses to do what she does” (Johnson 65). This is a departure from the canonical versions of the Electra
Delikonstantinidou 361 myth that, in stressing the combination of pre/overdetermination and active choice, renders his protagonist’s situation particularly striking.
“Pitting mother against daughter, sister against sister, and son against mother,
Electricidad localizes the all too repetitive questions of if, when, and how the cycle of violence, cholo gang violence, will end” (Powers 198). On the interpersonal and familial level, the play suggests that the cycle will continue “as long as it takes to forgive” (Johnson 65), and we are given to understand that this might be a long time for some of the members of La Casa des Atridas. The message of “unconditional love” and “forgiveness” that Ifigenia tries to get across is received neither from
Electricidad, nor from Clemencia. If Electricidad is unwavering in her desire for revenge, Clemencia is all ambitions and aspirations, ultimately unable to “reciprocate or embrace Ifigenia’s offer of unconditional love, which in this play appears to be the only way beyond the barrio” (Powers 203). After a strained meeting with the
Clemencia, during which she tries to emotionally blackmail Ifigenia in order to enlist her help in fighting Electricidad, Ifigenia flees “as if she is running for her life”
(Alfaro, Electricidad 69), literally and spiritually—the theme of her rebirth intimated a final time at her highly-charged exit (Moritz 126):
CLEMENCIA: IFI? . . .
IFIGENIA: I have to go.
Now. (Starts to leave)
ELECTRICIDAD: We could have been friends.
Ifigenia stops and wonders if maybe this could be her calling.
IFIGENIA: We can be sisters!
Delikonstantinidou 362
CLEMENCIA: IFI?
So many choices. Trying to imagine them all so quickly. Make one,
make one, make one. . . .
ELECTRICIDAD: Vete.
Go, cabrona.
They look at each other. They give the cholo nod to one another.
Ifigenia begins to run as if she is running for her life.
CLEMENCIA: Ifi? . . . (Alfaro, Electricidad 68-9)
Ifigenia has spared herself from witnessing what we will witness by the end of the play: Electricidad’s and Clemencia’s, as well as Orestes’s, whirling down a spiral of violence and bloodshed with little hope of redemption.
As we will discuss more thoroughly in the following pages, in setting up the undeniably political, as well as social/sociological and cultural plight of cholo violence in the midst of the interpersonal, familial environment, Electricidad, in effect, intensifies its urgency. More than that, however, in dramatizing the familial, social and cultural costs of this crisis or disease of Latino/a communities, while interspersing the play with hints, allusions, and direct references to the systemic- structural factors contributing to it, as we have already seen, the play brings home the point that concerted efforts in both spheres of life and activity, in the more private and in the more public domain, should be undertaken to remedy not only the manifestations of this social nosos, but also, and more importantly, the conditions that contribute to it and lead to its (intergenerational) perpetuation. The significance of the
Delikonstantinidou 363 connection between the two spheres, especially as it pertains to the life of the community, is forestaged by another member of des Atridas, Abuela.
Besides Ifigenia, Alfaro introduced in his revision of the Electra myth an additional female figure, Electricidad’s paternal grandmother, Abuela: a survivor strapped to the past and to the loved ones that she has buried during her lifetime, “one of the living dead. A chola in limbo”185 (Alfaro, Electricidad 59). Like Ifigenia,
Abuela repeatedly tries but, ultimately, fails to dissuade Electricidad both from her mourning and from her plans for revenge. She also fails to orient both Electricidad and Clemencia toward a bloodless change of mind and change of heart. Her words gain in power and poignancy in view of the fact that she lost both husband and sons to gang warfare: “It has to stop./ All these guns, all these drogas, that’s not who we are./
Murdering our own, and for what?” Abuela exhorts the two women (Alfaro,
Electricidad 58).
In the wake of the burning of Agamenón’s corpse by Clemencia, in a profoundly touching scene which leaves both women emotionally spent, and
Electricidad’s consequent breakdown, it seems that the old vieja will succeed in her mission and change the barrio’s destructive history of which she is a living product. A final confrontation between grandmother and granddaughter ends with the latter asking for the former’s help, having lost both her nerve and resolve, at least for a while. With the help of the vecinas, Abuela performs a limpia, or purification, on
Electricidad who, by the completion of the purification ritual, emerges looking
“strangely angelic” (83). In formalistic terms, as Powers observes, “[t]he ritual stages a rebirth less reminiscent of Catholic ceremonies than of rituals in syncretic religions
185. “This idea of being a chola in limbo is Alfaro’s symbol for the Chicano community: a people stuck between the past and the future, caught immobile in the liminal borderline between tradition and cultural progression,” the Dramaturgical Statement grants.
Delikonstantinidou 364 such as Santería and Candomblé which help to protect believers from evil spirits”
(198). Yet, in comparison to Ifigenia’s symbolic rebirth, Electricidad’s appears (as it is staged) more like an act, labored and insincere; a temporary reprieve of sorts that, because it raises a fleeting hope for a peaceful resolution, renders the play’s conclusion all the more painful to witness. Immediately after Electricidad has bidden goodbye to her father, agreed to abandon her vigil at her his altar, and decided to walk away and forgive Clemencia, Orestes’ return brings a new twist to the play, rekindling his sister’s consuming passion for murderous revenge.
“In the ancient [mythical] tradition the gods spoke most clearly to
Agamemnon’s son Orestes,” who, even if “[i]nitially absent from the paternal home as his sister(s) dealt with the aftermath of their father’s death, [returns] under divine mandate from Apollo to avenge his father’s death and assume his birthright,” Powers sums up with regard to our play’s primary sources (129). In Alfaro’s play, Orestes was sent away by his father to Las Vegas in order to be protected and trained to become a real cholo with the assistance of Nino, his godfather and one of
Agamenón’s lieutenants. Upon completion of his training, which had been intensified after an almost successful attempt against his life, presumably ordered by Clemencia,
Orestes returns from exile (humorously referred to as “X-file” in the play),186 encouraged not by some divine mandate but by the motivational speeches of his tough-cholo godfather. Contrary to other (especially ancient) versions of the Electra
186. The comic relief that this and other instances in the play provide (such as La Ifi’s humorous quips and Electricidad’s spitting contest with Abuela), no less than the play’s frequent references to popular culture, instead of minimizing the effect of the story, function so as to bridge the story’s mythical past with the barrio present more effectively for contemporary audiences—especially for the non-privileged and often not formally educated audiences that Alfaro addresses with his work. As we have already discussed, by way of Powers, in previous chapters devoted to Alfaro’s Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, humor and pop culture emerge in the playwright’s dramatic mythic revisions as key syncretic sites where ancient, mainstream, and cholo cultures merge (202).
Delikonstantinidou 365 myth, Alfaro’s Orestes is uninformed of his father’s death, yet eager, like his mythical counterpart, to reclaim patrimony. In fact, also contrary to most of the myth’s ancient treatments but in keeping with its more contemporary ones, Orestes is background figure, a secondary, shadowy character in Alfaro’s play, despite his final act, more effeminate poet than cholo crown prince. The drama in Electricidad plays out among its female characters.
Believing her brother dead all along, Electricidad is rejoiced to find him restored to life and decides that “it must be Orestes, reborn as a cholo and calling on the god of human sacrifices [Coatlicue], who fulfills” the old “instinct” for revenge
(Moritz 128). Nevertheless, Alfaro’s Orestes, much like Euripides’ Orestes, questions the necessity of murdering his mother, obviously unwilling to submit to a model of masculinity built on violence:
ELECTRICIDAD: This is bigger than you and me.
This whole barrio is calling on you.
She killed him with her bare hands, Orestes.
And that is how she must die.
An eye for an eye.
And you must do it.
ORESTES: But, she’s my mama.
......
ELECTRICIDAD: She isn’t your mother anymore.
Delikonstantinidou 366
She is the murderer of your father. (Alfaro, Electricidad 91)
In the spirit of Euripides Electra, Alfaro’s Electricidad goads a reluctant Orestes to a deed that permanently traumatizes his gentle nature.
After the murder, Orestes emerges from the house “covered in blood,”
“laughing”: “He has gone mad” (Alfaro, Electricidad 100). Electricidad’s
(mis)interpretation of the ancient Aztec religion and of the cholo imperative causes
Orestes to commit a murder that renders himself the “human sacrifice” of Coatlique
(94). However, as Foley has commented, “[t]he heroine’s brutal sacrifice of her timid, fundamentally unpugnacious brother to her own local sense of revenge becomes even more futile than in Euripides’ version, where the siblings consciously share an awakening to their mistake” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 25). Instead of awakening to the reality of their crime and its implications both for their family and oikos, and for their community or polis, after Orestes goes mad, the only thing the two of them can do is “hold each other” (Alfaro, Electricidad 101) amid the dirt, shrubs, and stones filling the yard, and amid the ashes of Agamenón’s body; a visual tableau that is as powerful as it is sad.
We never learn whether Orestes’ “madness” is a temporary fit of sorts or a permanent condition triggered by the traumatic deed of matricide. More than that, the play does not provide us with any conclusive hints as to whether his madness is the dramatist’s way of exempting him from responsibility, and thus compounding
Electricidad’s, or not—this is left to audience to decide. In any case, though, we are given to understand that the gods to which Electricidad had been praying all along do answer her prayers, only not in the way she had been hoping for.
Delikonstantinidou 367
Eventually, as “Las Vecinas continue their relentless sweeping, they begin to realize that all hope for peace and acceptance has disappeared” (Powers 198). In the final scene of the play, one ironically entitled “Together,” they comment:
LA CARMEN: Let’s close the doors.
LA CONNIE: On this mito.
LA CUCA: En La Casa de Atridas.
Beat.
LA CARMEN: What is to be done, vecinas?
LA CONNIE: What can be done?
LA CUCA: We never learn. (Alfaro, Electricidad 102)
Electricidad’s story ends on a dark note: with the exception of Ifigenia, and, perhaps,
Abuela, no other character is reconciled with their suffering or ennobled by it. As for
Electricidad, “[a]t the play’s conclusion she is no nearer adulthood than she was at the beginning” (Howard 137); her liminal status remaining unresolved.
Still, as we shall see in more detail in the chapter’s last part, the characters’ suffering(s) are not shown by Alfaro to be absurd or devoid of meaning or purpose, especially since, throughout the play, we are encouraged to recognize the causes of the characters’ terrible predicament, sympathize with them, and become witnesses to their plight. Certainly, Alfaro’s characters do not attain or advocate some kind of hard-fought-for, sublime wisdom, but, by showing us the worst for what it really is, they allow us, the witnesses/participants of their tragedy, the hope of surpassing it.
And it is precisely because of this function of theirs that they can be said to be tragic.
Delikonstantinidou 368
Despite some darkly comic aspects, Alfaro’s “Electricidad is still very much the
‘tragedy of Electra,’” Moritz argues, in as much as “the human relationships in his play remain as conflicted and challenging as they were in antiquity” (133; emphasis added); or, in as much as Alfaro’s “Chicano take on the tragedy of Electra,” as was the play’s initial subtitle, enacts the world view that human life is always in a state of ineliminable conflict. Yet, Electricidad does declare neither the world nor human life as being essentially tragic. Rather, the tragic is shown to occur “on the border between human existence and its environment,” including the ensemble of the agitated relationships of philia in which the individual subject is involved, “where engaged human beings face their limits and experience the discrepancy between human existence and the surrounding world,” to borrow the words of Lourens
Minnema (28).
In Electricidad, the temporary and critical suspension of hope, so characteristic of the tragic mode, derives from the dissolution of the characters’ bonds of philia, the disintegration of the forms of familial, communal, and social life in which the characters partake and with(in) which they are struggling (often against their better judgment as Orestes’ example indicates). Suggestively, throughout the play, and up until its end, this hope, “the hope of all the major players is for” la familia (Moritz 133):
ELECTRICIDAD: Finally, a chance for la familia, to be together . . .
......
CLEMENCIA: . . . Now, we can be a family . . .
I was never good at making one.
Delikonstantinidou 369
I didn’t know how.
Pero, now you and I, y Electricidad, if she wants.
We can be a family.
......
LA CONNIE: Now we can go back to our lives.
LA CUCA: To the way we live.
LA CARMEN: The family.
LA CONNIE: Together again. (Alfaro, Electricidad 95, 97, 102)
By the time the vecinas close their doors on the mito of Electra/Electricidad, the hope
for a familia—both in its narrower and in its broader sense—reconceptualized or
reinvented so it no longer victimizes its members, has been betrayed by La Casa des
Atridas. The ultimate betrayal of this hope lies at the heart of the tragedy of
Electricidad/Electricidad, as it did in the play’s ancient precursor. The political
implications of that predicament, and the ways in which Electricidad sought to act
remedially in relation to it, not only intra-diegetically, but also extra-diegetically, in
terms of production, thus enacting a radical politics of community and commitment,
will form the subject of the next part of our discussion.
III. Electricidad as Social Theatre and as Therapy
“Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the ‘Chicano take’ [on the myth of
Electra] in Alfaro’s play derives from the importance in Chicano culture of the
Delikonstantinidou 370 family,” immediate and larger, Moritz pointedly argues (131). Indeed, in the discussions that took place in earlier chapters of the present study, the concept of la familia Chicana, as the backbone of Chicano/a culture and as a point of contention in more recent times, was touched upon several times. As we have seen, the concept has been criticized as being “saturated with sexism, homophobia, and internal oppression,” perpetuating traditional, patriarchal structures, at least in the way it was employed as part of the ideology of the Chicano Movement (Arrizón, Latina
Performance 8). However, revised understandings of the concept have been forged and advanced by Chicana feminists in the past few decades. Still, la familia, whether radically reinterpreted or not, remains an anchoring theme in Chicano/a cultural production. It also continues to “play a potent and pervasive role in shaping the collective” Chicana/o consciousness; its power residing “in the deeply rooted communal, relational self-understanding of Chicanas and Chicanos,” according to scholar Nancy Pineda-Madrid (“Notes” 250).
The validity of Moritz’s argument granted, however, it is requisite to add to it that, as we briefly mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the idea of family and, specifically, family disintegration are of crucial importance to the U.S culture at large.
U.S. theatre, in general, and theatrical treatments of myths related to the House of
Atreus, in particular, have not ceased to express, and, in the best of cases, even attempt at explaining American culture’s fascination with the causes, realities, and traumatic effects of disintegrating families. Alfaro’s play can be certainly placed within this larger context.
Yet, Moritz’s argument merits further attention, especially to the extent that the scholar expounds on a peculiar relation that she discerns between the tragic and the Chicano/a sociocultural context. “Already in ancient times,” she writes, “Aristotle
Delikonstantinidou 371 wrote that the most affecting tragedies take place in families . . . , but the tragic nature of family breakdown is magnified in the Chicano environment” (131), in which threats to the family are readily understood as threats both to the self and to the community, and in which notions of “self” invariably mean “self in community.” In that same environment, loyalty to the family is “invoked as a means to suppress discord” and mitigate conflicts and antagonisms (Pineda-Madrid, “Notes” 251), so that when the family itself is the source of discord, conflict, and antagonism, catastrophe lurks at the corner, able to consume the community in its entirety: “For all the anticipated threats from gang members, the corrosion of cholo life is perpetrated within La Casa de Atridas,” Moritz points out (131). Electricidad does not simply and abstractly reflect on an ominous prospect then; it actually reveals, by dramatizing, its becoming a reality in Chicano/a culture’s “darker side,” namely, the cholo/a subculture, while, at the same time, it places the generative sources of this alarming development under scrutiny.
Admittedly, in Alfaro’s play, as in the ancient tragic myths, “family dysfunction is multigenerational,” with domestic violence, child-neglect, and the resultant disruption of familial bonds perpetuated over time, and with each older generation embodying the “power of an inescapable curse on the younger,” inculcating it with the violent and family-destructive “cholo rules.” Nevertheless,
Alfaro does not present violence as intrinsic to the Chicano/a cholo/a subculture.
Instead, by humanizing all the main actors of the drama, and by demonstrating the ways in which their inner-city environment has corrupted them (Powers 199), he suggests that the social and psychical ills embodied by the main characters of his play and plaguing the cholo/a world at large derive from and are, in turn, reinforcing a fundamental identity crisis exacerbated due to the material and spiritual
Delikonstantinidou 372 impoverishment of barrio-dwelling Chicanos/a within the U.S. context. It is worth remarking, at least parenthetically, that, in fact, the tension between holding onto tradition and attempting to participate in a new, reinvented culture that marks a struggle with identity in the context of the play reflects a similar tension in the larger
Chicano/a and Latino/a culture, and in the U.S. at large, in the light of twenty-first- century challenges to inherited notions of identity, family, and community.
“There are many roots,” activist, writer, and ex-gang member Luis Rodriguez argues with reference to the detrimental situation in the barrio setting, in particular, and he identifies among others:
joblessness (including the destruction of most major industry during
the late 1970s and early 1980s), rotten schools, corrupt law
enforcement, the drug trade (after the so-called War on Drugs, more
drugs, even drugs that didn’t exist before . . . infiltrated the poorest
neighborhoods), social neglect (community centers, teen posts, after-
school programs, drug and mental treatment centers—all suffered from
Proposition 13, the Nixon cuts, social cuts during the Reagan-Bush
years as well as drastic welfare “reform” under Clinton), and even war.
(P8)
Therefore, he adds, it is not the gangs themselves we should be trying to get rid of, but the conditions that give rise to them. And, in order to successfully remedy the conditions that lead to the formation and perpetuation of gang life, culture, and ideology, “we’re going to need authentic community, with adequate resources, caring adults, and viable institution, to fill the ‘empties’ created by the economic, social, and political neglect,” Rodriguez underscores (P8).
Delikonstantinidou 373
Alfaro’s work aspired precisely to the creation of this sort of community by using theatre tools; a community that can fulfill the longing of young people residing in extremely embattled settings “to belong, to be cared for and to be embraced,” so that they “won’t have to sacrifice their lives to be loved and valued in this world,” as he puts it (López, “It Takes a Neighborhood” 9). This was manifest both in the workshopping process out of which Electricidad developed and in its history of productions, with each production becoming a means by which “gang-involved youth could find a common ground and a sense of belonging” (Dramaturgical Statement).
The implications of this kind of sociocultural action if it is to operate in tandem with structural re-formations within and without the context of the barrio make for hopeful prospects. Lacking any guarantee that the latter is actually going to take place, however, the future, and our hope, remains suspended and we confronted with the imperative of beginning to think about and act upon our ethics and politics in a tragic key.
As a number of sociologists and cultural critics have observed, the cholos/as feel that they belong neither to the Mexican nor to the U.S. culture, and they identify in the marginalization that Mexican American youth experience in school and society at large two of the key socio-cultural factors responsible for their cholo/a-ization
(Powers 199). Banished to the periphery of the Chicano/a world and of the dominant
U.S. culture and with conventional opportunities seemingly out of reach, troubled youths act out, responding to their predicament with participation in street gangs, where they internalize and adhere to alternative norms and modes of behavior, and acquire a sense of importance, self-esteem, and self-identity (Powers 199; Vigil 63-4).
“In short, rather than feeling neglected and remaining, socially and institutionally marginal, the gang members develop their own subcultural style to participate in
Delikonstantinidou 374 public life, albeit a street one” (Vigil 63-4). All of Electricidad’s characters, from the veterana Abuela, to Clemencia, Electricidad, Ifigenia, and Orestes, “are bred from
[these] violent circumstances,” yet, “they still show potential for goodness”; “their actions, like those of their ancient counterparts, are violent, but their vendetta justice is . . . part of the world in which they live” (Powers 199). As Abuela tells
Electricidad: “[I stay in the barrio for] the same reason we all do, young chola./
Where do cholos go in a world that won’t have us?/ This is the mundo we know.
Good or bad./ Es lo que is” (Alfaro, Electricidad 59). It is precisely because the world won’t have them and because the only mundo they know is the cholo/a one, that it is so difficult for them to break away from the latter’s violent ways. There is no easy way out of their predicament.
This, of course, does not mean that Alfaro seeks to absolve his characters of their personal responsibility for their actions, or downplay the impact of these actions on the surrounding community. Las Vecinas serve to remind us of this very impact when they exclaim:
LA CARMEN: The moon drips blood.
LA CONNIE: For them.
LA CUCA: Los cholos.
LA CARMEN: Con sus ways.
LA CONNIE: Con sus gangs.
LA CUCA: Con su violence.
LA CARMEN: So different.
Delikonstantinidou 375
LA CONNIE: But yet . . .
LA CUCA: They look just like us . . . (Alfaro, Electricidad 42)
Rather, Alfaro seeks to take to task facile generalizations and counter the media reduction of cholo/a subculture to stereotypical representations by demonstrating that:
“Not everyone in the barrio is a cholo. Not all cholos kill, and those that do don’t have to.” As Powers eloquently puts it, the play “offers this complex view of the cholo life,” in order to wage “its own gang war [of words] on both the circumstances and individual choices that perpetuate violence” (200).
The play’s political radicality, however, is not simply tied to the aforementioned function, but also extends beyond it to confront prevalent, but simplistic, construction(s) of Chicanidad (or Chicano/a-ness) as dominant “Anglo” culture’s peripheralized monolithic “other.” To put it more precisely, like Cherrie
Moraga’s The Hungry Woman, and Alfaro’s own Mojada and Oedipus el Rey,
Electricidad challenges by means of an ancient myth another myth, that of a fixed and pristinely unified Chicanidad in opposition to Anglo/Euro America. In fact, Alfaro’s play belies the existence of a unified, cohesive, culturally homogeneous Chicanidad.
In engaging cholo/a reality/ies, it forestages, instead, the insistent presence of layers and of patterns of center/periphery relations within Chicanidad, or rather the presence of multi-tier Chicanidades, and, by extension, Latinidades, with substantial disparities regarding the needs and problems of their members increasing the gap between the centered and the peripheral ones.
As we have seen in the course of the present chapter, the play’s depiction of the complex reality of choloismo serves to not only complicate what it means to be a
Latino/a and a mestizo/a in the contemporary U.S., but also bring the audience closer
Delikonstantinidou 376 to an experience of the noxious effects that relegation to a peripheral status has for under-privileged Chicanos/a and mestizos/a; individuals that hardly differ from
Electricidad, Orestes, or Ifigenia. Yet, as social theatre project, Electricidad, like
Mojada and Oedipus el Rey, sought to do more than inform the public and raise awareness of the complexities and concerns of choloismo on the level of narrative. As much politically provocative as theatrically daring, it actually grappled with these issues on the level of production, engaging the community, and, especially, its at-risk members, in order to stimulate open talk, challenge established attitudes and beliefs, and create a supportive environment for social therapy and change.
As we have already noted, Alfaro involved gang youths in the workshop process, thus integrating “the world of the barrio and the world of the play” and contributing to the amelioration of some of the marginalization experienced by young cholos/as—marginalization directly related to the formation of gangs as one of its root causes (Covault 46). Moreover, before and during each of the play’s productions, he reached out to the respective community addressed in the production (whether
Tuscon’s Southside, Chicago’s Pilsen, or East Los Angeles) via hosting meetings with local community members, and collaborated with social services agencies and the church. For the play’s world premiere at the Borderlands Theatre in Tuscon, Arizona,
Alfaro and the play’s production team collaborated with the Borderlands’ education program outreach. Within the framework of the Boyle Heights production, Joanie
Harmon reports, Alfaro “was able to connect with former gang members who had turned their lives around,” with the help of Fr. Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy
Industries—an organization that serves endangered gang-involved youth (2008;
Dramaturgical Statement). “I knew about gangs, but I didn’t really know about gangs,” the playwright admits, “Father Greg turned me on to a bunch of ex-cholos
Delikonstantinidou 377 who had been jumped out of their gangs, and they decided they were going to help me with the play. They showed me everything from dress code to the signs to . . . everything that has to do with gang life, territory, history” (qtd. in Harmon). The material he drew thus became integral to the play and its production history.
Additionally, Alfaro invited students from local schools to attend the play’s performances with their teachers, and also gave lectures to schools and college departments, in which he expounded on the issues Electricidad addresses. In his discussion of Electricidad, Jenkins refers to the playwright’s comments on the effect that the play had “on several thousand high-school kids in the Los Angeles area” that attended the play:
for them, the corpse rotting in the front yard had its own cultural
translations: “It was unbelievably thrilling to have only kids that age in
the audience, and the body was a big part of it. They saw it differently,
maybe because rap stars get killed every day. The symbolism for them
was present; they were glued to this idea that Electricidad would be
there protecting her father’s body. She became kind of a rock star.”
(170)
Transplanted to the East Los Angeles barrio context, the mythical Electra emerged, at least for the young students, as “a hero in the modern sense of a celebrated local star—while fulfilling her grimmer, mythic function as the site of contested cultural values” (170).
Electricidad’s last, 2012 production at Teatro Carmen Zapata, at the Bilingual
Foundation for The Arts, in Los Angeles, was created again in collaboration with
Homeboy Industries (to which 15% of the ticket proceeds was donated), as well as
Delikonstantinidou 378 with Project Twenty12, “a collection of old college friends who formed for the sole purpose of producing” the play. Most notable about this production was its direct affiliation with Los Angeles’ gang youth. As a matter of fact, the production offered them “an opportunity to participate in the construction of the set through a Stagecraft
Apprentice program,” and thus to see themselves as “thriving members of their community” (Dramaturgical Statement).
If, as Jill Scott argues, the mythical figure of Electra “cannot be reduced or distilled down to a single archetype but must be viewed from different angles and allowed to play several roles: the aggressor, the victim, the mourner, the survivor”
(Scott 60), Electricidad’s trajectory on social theatre tracks points to the fact that the
Electra myth as a whole can be allowed to have multiple functions. In tapping into the
“polysemy” of Electra and the “multifunctionality” of her myth, and, specifically, in mapping her story onto the sociocultural context of his familiar Chicano/a cholo/a world, Alfaro indeed affirmed that there is more to Electra “than the mere fact of her signature characteristics of courage, cleverness, and cruelty” (Scott 7). His
Electricidad project attested that Electra’s tragic myth lends itself for trenchant sociological analysis as well as for the development of social theatre/therapy initiatives, indispensable within the current combative political climate.
As a kind of social theatre/therapy project, Electricidad facilitated understanding and implemented strategies of dealing with the experiences of and related to gang violence, including the challenges facing young cholos/as as the result of impoverishment, dysfunctional familial environments, lack of education, cultural stigmatization and marginalization, and the widening gap between barrio and mainstream U.S. society. It finally resulted, for the communities of transition that it formed, in a “collective and common premise of the search of identity and community
Delikonstantinidou 379 in the world” (Dramaturgical Statement). Yet, it also became a model, as it were, on which Alfaro patterned, with certain necessary modifications, both his Mojada and his
Oedipus el Rey, thus creating an individual “formula” for the revision of the Greek tragic myths in a—perhaps highly unlikely at first sight—new context; a formula that evinces in itself a sort of political radicality insofar as it entails a distinct “democratic turn” in the engagement with classical material, as we have already seen (Gamel 186).
“Democratized” in this way, the classical material of the Electra myth allowed Alfaro to not only explore a number of identity issues affecting twenty-first century
Chicano/a, Latino/a, and American culture, as well as, more specifically, their mestizo/a cholo/a variant, but also orchestrate an effective contribution to the mobilization of sociopolitical change.
With the myth’s ancient Greek dramatic treatments as his structural models,
Alfaro created a “syncretic” play that combines ancient Greek, Aztec, as well as contemporary Latino/a and Chicano/a material, and that draws on a number of
(Latino/a and non-Latino/a) theatrical traditions and performance styles. His mestiza
Electricidad, like the other plays we have discussed so far, illuminates some—still quite nebulous—aspects of mestizaje, outside of the restrictive boundaries of Chicano carnalismo and its identity politics; aspects of mestizaje resistant not just to Euro
American supremacy but to essentialist conceptions of identity within the Chicano/a comunidad. Electricidad’s mestizo/a, cholo/a world, not unlike its mestiza subjects themselves, is evidently plural and heterogeneous, yet struggling to come to terms with its own plurality and heterogeneity; it is oppressed in many different ways and yet still able to engage in resistance to intermeshed oppressions; it lives with ambivalence and strives, albeit not always successfully, to balance opposing powers;
Delikonstantinidou 380 it has lived through it all and continues to fight—“a parallel to the Chicano people and their history” (Dramaturgical Statement) that bears the mark of the tragic.
Like the other Latino/a dramatists whom we have addressed so far, Alfaro does not present the quest for a new mestizaje as uncomplicated and/or unproblematic. The path toward an empowering mestizaje consciousness, in the sense of “a critical practice of cultural negotiation and translation” (McLaren 142), is littered with thorny obstacles, it is painful and, in many senses, as the theatre works examined here serve to reveal, attuned to the tragic mode. Yet, there, in its vibrating, struggling dynamic lies its empowering, if not emancipatory, potential for contemporary audiences, within and without the mestizo/a (cholo/a and non-cholo/a) world.
Delikonstantinidou 381
[W]e are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of
fact, but to the fragile, fluctuating centre which forms never reach.
And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at
the stake, signaling through the flames.
(Artaud 13)
Delikonstantinidou 382
Part Four
Tragic Daughters II:
Mestiza Iphigenia
Delikonstantinidou 383
I. Preliminary Remarks
In Part Three, we examined the tragic myth of Electra and Luis Alfaro’s dramatic mythic revision of it, namely, his Electricidad. As we have seen, despite the fact that it appears third in the order of discussion adopted here, this mythoplay
(and—similarly to his Mojada and Oedipus el Rey—social theatre project) constituted, actually, Alfaro’s first attempt at revising a Greek tragic myth. It was the one with which he set out on a “journey” of creatively engaging with the ancient
Greek mythical material.
In the previous part, then, we touched upon the mythic matrix of the House of
Atreus and Electra’s myth as an integral component of it, and we discussed how the
Electra myth, in all of its remarkable complexity, has been used as a means by which to question as well as respond (albeit, more exploratorily than conclusively) to important public, social and political, issues, from antiquity and up to the present.
Moreover, we placed Alfaro’s revision within the context of the American (mainly the
U.S.) reception of Electra and saw how his play/project not only confronts and expands on, but also seeks to ameliorate the repercussions of intricate issues concerning identity and cultural politics—U.S., Latino/a, and Chicano/a. These are issues that impress themselves with urgency on twenty-first-century U.S. society and, especially, on its more marginal sections.
Yet, we also discovered that Alfaro’s Electricidad goes beyond dwelling on the suffering that the real-life implications of the said unresolved issues can engender for those who are helplessly in their thralls. In fact, we discussed how, without forsaking investment in the tragic mode and import of the myth it recontextualizes, but, rather, by means of it, Alfaro’s Electricidad points to ways of remedying
Delikonstantinidou 384 suffering and treating the corrosive (and cumulative) effects that marginalization and exclusion—whether sociocultural, economic, political, or all at once—have on socially disenfranchised individuals and communities, particularly when these extend across generations.
In the fourth and final part of the present study, we remain in the mythic cosmos of the Atreides, but we shift focus to another of its integral parts: the myth of
Iphigenia. In the course of this part and, specifically, in Chapter Seven, we will examine a contemporary dramatic mythic revision of the tragic myth of the ill-fated daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, namely, Caridad Svich’s Iphigenia Crash
Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart: A “Rave” Fable. This is a play/project that attempts something similar to what Alfaro does, insofar as this too deals with and seeks to function therapeutically on social ills associated with marginalization, in a different yet equally grim American context: the borderland between Mexico and the U.S. If Alfaro orchestrated with Electricidad an encounter with an urban interstitial zone that has been made conducive to extra-legal conventions (or customs), the emergence of gangs due to woefully inadequate (or downright empirically harmful) official policies and practices, as well as the resulting disintegration of familial and communal bonds, Svich’s Iphigenia Crash transposes us to another—geographically and socioculturally—interstitial zone where violence reigns unrepressed and its traumatic consequences weight down on a whole society: to a liminal space where trauma becomes a public disaster.
In place of the virtually inassimilable minority populations living at the limits of citizenship in the U.S., with which Alfaro’s mythoplay is concerned, Iphigenia
Crash acknowledges and discloses traumatic realities faced by U.S.-Mexican borderland populations and, especially, by its female constituency. Yet, the play does
Delikonstantinidou 385
more than uncovering a collective/sociocultural trauma and the conditions that breed
it, or, rather, that render a social milieu like the one in which the play is set
susceptible to the occurrence of it. Similarly to the other mythoplays we have
explored thus far, Iphigenia Crash does not only convey insights regarding the
integration/internalization of a heritage of perpetration, victimization, and ongoing
collective trauma by a certain (in our case, Latino/a) culture, but is also oriented
toward the undertaking of remedial action. As a matter of fact, it intends to make a
radical—in terms of both its aesthetics and its politics—contribution to the
sociocultural therapeutic process of working through and going beyond trauma, all the
while staying attuned to the tragic mode. Before turning our attention to the specific
instance of mestiza mythopoesis that Svich offers with her Iphigenia Crash, its tragic
and remedial import, however, we, initially, consider, albeit necessarily briefly, the
myth of Iphigenia in itself, its trajectory, and the responses it has elicited by the U.S.
theatrical scene.
II. The Tragic Myth of Iphigenia
As we have seen in the previous part, “the convoluted myth of the accursed
House of Atreus,” as Mitchell Greenberg calls it (167), has been broadly and
variously employed and modified by ancient and contemporary theatre artists
interested in expanding on the myth’s family tensions in ways that often reveal larger
political and social issues. The complicated “relations among several generations of
the family of Atreus,” which we earlier outlined, “have sometimes served to enhance
a dramatic focus on personal or familial identity” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 229),
Delikonstantinidou 386 and, in more recent times, on communal and social identity, to add to Helene P.
Foley’s commentary on the myth’s dramatic instantiations.
As is the case with all the myths that we have addressed so far, the myth of
Iphigenia is part of a rich mythic complex, and thus should be considered in relation to the entire Greek mythical cosmos, to the configuration of stories featuring
Iphigenia herself and including various versions of the same mythic episode (vertical tradition), as well as distinct episodes of her mythic biography (horizontal tradition), and, finally, to the aggregate of treatments the myth has received in the course of its long trajectory (Graf 21). Moreover, to supplement the above schematization, similarly to the Electra myth, the myth of Iphigenia can be regarded as constituent part of a mythic schema made up of two concentric mythical and generational cycles: the wider one comprising the early ancestors of the family of the Atreides and the narrower one comprising the latest generation of the Atreides: Tantalus’ descendants, the children and grand-children of Atreus, that is, Iphigenia’s parents, Clytemnestra187 and Agamemnon, and siblings, Electra (or Laodice), Chrysothemis, and Orestes.
Like Electra, Iphigenia is not mentioned in the Homeric epics, at least not by that name. In Part Three, we noted Teresa E. Choate’s observation that, “[i]n the Iliad,
Agamemnon names his four children as Orestes, Chrysothemis, Ladike [sic], and
Iphianassa, but most commentators concur that Laodike [or Laodice] and Iphianassa were earlier names for Electra and Iphigenia” (20). In fact, the post-Homeric epic of the Cypria “is the only archaic epic source to use the name Iphigenia,” according to
187. According to some variants, however, “Iphigenia was not Clytemnestra’s daughter at all: she had been adopted to conceal the fact that her real mother was Helen of Troy, who had been raped as a child by Theseus. As a daughter of Zeus, Helen was a deity, so Iphigenia had one mortal parent and one immortal parent—in this, she was like the heroes, men of mixed parentage. Iphigenia is thus sometimes regarded as the first heroine” (Lyons 740). Other variants present Iphigenia as the daughter of Agamemnon and his mistress, Chryseis.
Delikonstantinidou 387
George Adam Kovacs’ comprehensive study of the mythographic tradition as it pertains to the Iphigenia myth (49). To state the obvious, as another scholar, Robert
Emmet Meagher, grants: it is not possible to put a postmark on the story of Iphigenia, and, specifically, on perhaps its most important—and certainly most famous— episode, the one which unfolds at Aulis and which recounts her sacrifice by her father and king of Mycenae, Agamemnon, so that the Greek army can embark on the Trojan expedition (vii).188
It is worth pointing out, however, that the earliest archaic accounts of her story, in line with their main preoccupations and the practice of privileging the masculine hero(es) instead of the suffering (female) victim, tend toward the salvation of Iphigenia. In the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, as in the Cypria epic, Iphimedeia
(another name for Iphigenia) escapes death through the intervention of Artemis who also confers immortality upon the girl. The Cypria tells us specifically of Artemis’ substitution of a deer for Iphigenia as well as of her lifting the girl away to the land of the Taurians on the Black Sea—elements that Euripides was later to incorporate in his
Iphigenia in Tauris. “By the fifth century, the name Iphigenia is used almost exclusively” (Kovacs 50), and the heroine appears a number of times on the tragic stage. Only, now, the finality of her sacrifice is not always mitigated by salvation or substitution.
According to Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ (as well as Pindar’s) versions of the
Aulis episode of Iphigenia’s myth, in the former’s Oresteia and in the latter’s
Iphigenia at Aulis, the king of Mycenae, decided to sacrifice Iphigenia, his virgin daughter, after consulting his diviner, Calchas, in order to appease Artemis. The
188. Although it is hardly possible to place a date on Iphigenia’s story, “[t]he defining historical event at the center of” it, namely, the Trojan War, may be placed “roughly where Herodotus put it a long ago, in the thirteen century before the common era” (Meagher vii).
Delikonstantinidou 388 goddess, having a grudge against the king of Mycenae, would not allow the Greek warships to set sail for Troy, and thus the Greek fleet that was to attack Troy remained for a long period of time assembled at Aulis to the great frustration of the troops. Eventually, king Agamemnon had his daughter brought to Aulis under false pretenses in order to proceed with the sacrifice. He sent word to his queen,
Clytemnestra, that she should bring Iphigenia to Aulis so that she could be betrothed to Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons and renowned Greek hero, but when the two arrived at Aulis he offered his daughter up for sacrifice. After the sacrifice, the winds blew and the fleet sailed for Troy.
Yet, although in Aeschylus’ (and in Pindar’s) account of the myth Iphigenia definitely has her throat cut on the altar, in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, on which
Svich’s play draws,189 the ending is ambiguous and strongly contested.190 Indeed, most scholars now dismiss the traditional ending of the Greek text, and the girl’s substitution by a deer at the last moment via Artemis’ intervention, as the contribution of a later anonymous donor. The dismissal of the surviving play’s ending is supported by the fact that Euripides, in other plays, such as Electra, Orestes, Andromache, and
Trojan Women, makes explicit or implicit reference to Iphigenia’s death. “Even in
Iphigenia among the Taurians,” Kovacs stresses, “the tradition that she died at Aulis
‘plays a definite part.’ In the one play that certainly depicts a surviving Iphigenia, her death has been assumed in Greece for many years” (73). As a matter of fact, in
Euripides’ dramatic treatment of the Tauris episode, the second most important
189. Caridad Svich has commented on her own as well as other contemporary playwrights’ repeated returns to Euripides’ versions of “the great myths,” as she calls them, claiming that “for each generation his deeply human, cutting, dramatically varied and briskly paced plays resonate with the horrors of the time” (11). 190. Iphigenia at Aulis was one of the last plays Euripides wrote and one posthumously produced in the Dionysia, together with The Bacchae and Alcmaeon, months after his death. These last plays earned Euripides the first prize in that year’s festival.
Delikonstantinidou 389 episode in Iphigenia’s mythic biography, the heroine describes, in line with earlier archaic sources, how Artemis substituted a deer for her on the altar, thus saving her life at the last moment and, subsequently, made her into a priestess at her temple in
Tauris—a barbarous land and a place of exile and cruelty. These are developments that occurred unbeknownst to her family or the Greeks, in general.
With regard to this Euripidean version of Iphigenia’s myth, Iphigenia in
Tauris, written and produced approximately ten years before Iphigenia at Aulis, primarily deals with Iphigenia’s and Orestes’ adventures long after Iphigenia has been rescued. More specifically, the play involves an imminent fratricide on the part of
Iphigenia as priestess of a people who ritually sacrifice the foreigners that land on
King Thoas’ shores; the mutual recognition of brother and sister; Iphigenia’s purification of a long tormented Orestes; and the siblings’ and Pylades’ escape to
Greece having stolen the sacred statue of Artemis that, according to Apollo, will set
Orestes free from the Erinyes—who continue to persecute him even after his acquittal in the Athens’ trial. It should be noted, parenthetically, that a post-sacrifice Iphigenia features also in Sophocles’ Chryses and Aletes, both of which are now lost. Aletes provides, in fact, the sequel to the Tauris episode and is set at Delphi, where, following a number of misrecognitions and misunderstandings (due to which
Iphigenia almost falls victim to her older sister’s wrath when the latter believes
Iphigenia has killed their brother), Electra, Iphigenia, and Orestes are finally re- united.
The episodes at Aulis, in Tauris, and at Delphi, constitute, according to Jean-
Michel Gliksohn, a mythic and tragic unit, “characterized by the imminent killing of a child” or sibling, “and by the exertion of various wills whether or not they are working in conjunction, which try to prevent this happening” (599). Iphigenia’s myth,
Delikonstantinidou 390 as a unit, serves to, ultimately, problematize the issue of the legitimacy of (human) sacrifice, a practice or an act which, however unthinkable or unspeakable, constitutes
“a mark of the human” and “a foundation stone of civilization” going back to the
Paleolithic period, as Meagher admits (x). Indeed, her myth does more than articulate a confusion in terms of rituals (marriage and human sacrifice at the Aulis episode), as well as a confusion “of the entire spectrum of the religious hierarchy, . . . [that is] the association of the animal with the human and the mortal with the immortal” (in the
Aulis and Tauris episodes) (Gliksohn 598). It also shows the boundary separating sacrifice from slaughter to be fuzzy at best, if not evanescent, especially when the sacrifice is required for reasons of political expediency disguised as moral or national and/or religious imperatives (for example, Agamemnon and Thoas are both primarily—if not exclusively—concerned with the preservation of the political unity of the group over which they preside), or for reasons of personal revenge, even when the latter are related to the death of a loved one (for example, in the case of Electra).
Taken in its entirety, the myth of Iphigenia can be said to be “the drama of raison d’etat and private affections, [as well as] of the dangerous relationship between ritual and massacre” (Gliksohn 597). Over the centuries it has been discussed through a variety of lenses as a myth of war, a religious myth, a family myth, a heroic myth, and a tragic myth, Gliksohn explains (597-9). The many approaches through which it has been interpreted and assessed, as well as the many variants it has spawn, provide proof of its vitality. They, further, attest to its status as “one of the most captivating stories in all of ancient literature” and as “a story of our time as much as for any other,” by means of which “we come to see that the past is not past and that the darkest and brightest truths never change,” as Meagher reverently puts it (viii).
Delikonstantinidou 391
The history of the reception of Iphigenia’s myth continued well beyond the fifth century B.C. and Euripides’ two Iphigenia plays—the “bookends,” as it were, of the saga of the House of Atreus (Eller Wolfe 313). As is the case with the myths of
Medea, Oedipus, and Electra, the myth of Iphigenia transitioned from lyric and epic poetry and tragedy to non-performed literary genres (inter-generic reception), as well as to other artistic media (inter-medial reception) (Gildenhard and Revermann 2010).
And, as was to be expected, given the sheer intensity and pathos of the Aulis episode,
Iphigenia’s sacrifice became the primary focus of most of the post-fifth-century treatments of her myth, irrespective of genre and medium, although, of course, refigurations and rearticulations of the Tauris episode did appear, only less frequently.
Also, and perhaps quite naturally in view of its impact on any attempted critical interpretation, the question of her sacrifice or salvation emerged as a fundamental crux in the myth’s reception.191
In the course of its long trajectory, the myth was treated as “an ‘exemplum’ fixed in tradition and used in an illustrative capacity,” by Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, and as “the subject of exercises in rhetoric,” Gliksohn reports (599). It inspired a number of Roman adaptations, by Ennius, Lucretius, and Ovid, and, much later, it received “moralistic” treatments, in the Middle Ages, as well as neoclassical ones, by
Rotrou, Racine, and Gluck, among others—the latter ones adding the motif of love to the story (599-601). Moreover, it was famously invested “with new poetry and depth” by Goethe, whose eighteenth-century instantiation of the Tauris episode proved remarkably influential for his contemporaries as well as for later artists (602). In the nineteenth century, Iphigenia’s popularity waned considerably. Kovacs attributes this
191. For Kovacs, it is the very instability of the myth and its Aulis episode, in particular, anchored in the said crux, which has enabled the highly “varied and flexible” reception history of Iphigenia (256).
Delikonstantinidou 392 development to the “major shift in literary taste . . . occurring in Europe at the time,” involving Neoclassicism’s fall out of favor, and to the rise of nationalism, which fueled the resurgence of myths that could be more easily reconciled to a multiplicity of specific . . . political ideologies,” like that of Antigone (240). Rachel Margaret
Eller Wolfe, on the other hand, attributes it to a diminished interest in the topic of human sacrifice following Europe’s first “fraught encounter with cultural and religious ‘Otherness,’” and to a shift of focus from a concern with innocence to a concern with “criminality and guilt” in the wake of the French Revolution (313-4).
That same century, however, brought about an interesting twist in Iphigenia’s reception. With Nietzsche and Burckhardt, among others, opposing “a new, Dionysian image of Greece to Goethe’s Apollonian interpretation,” the myth became “(or reverted to) a myth of war, cruelty and chaos in which the main issue is to court death” (Gliksohn 602). This development is echoed in twentieth- and twenty-first- century instantiations of the myth, with the elements of cruelty and disgust, paroxysm, horror, and the sublime being brought more and more conspicuously and urgently into play in the myth’s treatments, and with Svich’s own treatment being no exception.
The foregoing last point merits a more detailed elaboration. Although, during the first half of the twentieth century, Iphigenia proved to be more popular on the stages of college campuses than on the professional stage, especially in the context of the U.S., in the second half of the century, it enjoyed some measure of mainstream success, frequently adapted to both feminist and pacifist agendas. In the post-sixties and post-Vietnam War era, in particular, Iphigenia’s myth was shown to “be appropriate to the anti-war sentiment of the era, particularly in America” (Kovacs
243). Michael Cacoyiannis’ contributions, both his production of Iphigenia at Aulis in
1967 and his 1976 film Iphigenia, in which the titular heroine emerges as a model of
Delikonstantinidou 393 female resistance in a war-crazed, patriarchal world, had a lot to do with this change of attitude toward Iphigenia. Still, despite the fact that “late in the twentieth century . .
. Iphigenia returns to the public’s attention in . . . [a] wide-spread, meaningful way, through mass media and complex performance traditions not earlier possible” (222), with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1994), Colin Teevan’s and David Grant’s Iph.
. . (1999), and, of course, Svich’s Iphigenia Crash (2004) constituting telling examples of this more recent trend, quantitatively speaking, she generally enjoys little presence on professional stages. This, certainly, does not mean that the tragic figure of the young Iphigenia, sacrificed for her father’s and her people’s political and economic ambitions, has ceased to inspire theatre artists. The powerful, albeit more scarce, stage incarnations of the myth of Iphigenia prove that her story, not unlike
Medea’s, Oedipus’ and Electra’s, has an enduring hold on the American imaginary and theatre tradition, as well as increasing importance for non-western traditions.
It cannot be overstated that Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ versions of Iphigenia’s myth, as presented in their world-known tragedies, “inscribed themselves so completely in the mythographic tradition that they constituted the definitive version[s] of the myth for later generations,” including our own (Kovacs 257). Meagher writes, specifically with respect to the Iphigenia plays by Euripides, that, in the latter’s hands,
“the stories of the past were given precisely that light and slant and shape required for them to mirror the present with candor” (ix). More contemporary American (U.S. and non-U.S.) playwrights found in Euripides’ treatments the primary material that enabled them to mirror their/our own present(s) in a similar, revealing manner. Foley documents that Euripides’ Iphigenia plays have been increasingly produced since the nineteen-nineties (although she does not distinguish between college/university and professional stages). The scholar makes specific reference to what she sees as a
Delikonstantinidou 394 renewed interest in his Iphigenia in Aulis which, according to her, affords the most striking contrast to U.S. professional productions and new versions of the myth of
Electra.
Contrary to Electra, Foley argues, the Iphigenia myth as it unfolds at Aulis and, particularly, Euripides’ treatment of the Aulis episode “brings the family of
Agamemnon face-to-face with the violence of war rather than its aftermath”
(Reimagining Greek Tragedy 231). This allows contemporary theatre artists, as it did their ancient predecessors, to explore “the prices paid by innocent people for their leaders’ changing, inconsistent, and apparently dubious reasons for undertaking the venture [to levy war against (usually, if not always, invented) enemies],” and thus explains the myth’s relevance “in the light of U.S. military ventures of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.” More than that, however, Iphigenia’s conversion, or change of heart, concerning her fate, moments before her sacrifice,
“has served to confront a public rhetoric and a media that can abuse and even brainwash their victims” (232). Meagher hits a raw nerve when he observes with regard to this last point that it is, after all, “cursedly the case that the inexperience, idealism, passion and naiveté of youth conspire to make them prey to the speeches of their elders [in experience if not in age],” whatever the means of persuasion employed. “The timeless scandal . . . [is] that the latter, like Agamemnon, know both the power of their words and their emptiness” (xv). Like Electra, Iphigenia is in different—and, we could claim, even sadder—ways a victim of war, vicious propaganda, and familial disaster, yet, “while events force the resistant and bruised
Electra to turn inward and confront her family,” as we saw in the previous part,
“Iphigenia must turn outward to respond directly to larger historical forces” (Foley,
Reimagining Greek Tragedy 233).
Delikonstantinidou 395
Admittedly, unlike Electra, tragic Iphigenia “knows she is lost” no matter how she reacts, the only choice lying with her being “whether to die a hideous death at the hands of a father turned maniac or to die a martyr” to a seemingly, though not really, bright cause (Meagher xv). Foley expounds on the comparison between Electra and
Iphigenia, and we reproduce her argument here as most fitting in the context of our discussion, involving both this and the previous part:
unlike Electra, Iphigenia begins IA with a solid bond with both parents
that she struggles to maintain. Although worried about the separation
from her family that marriage to the glamorous Achilles will bring, she
finally turns her sacrifice into a lethal symbolic marriage to all of
Greece. By bringing Panhellenic politics and family into direct
confrontation and even infusing the plot with a lost romance, IA moves
beyond the claustrophobic focus of revenge and injustice central to
Electra for an era in which political resistance can seem increasingly
futile. (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 233)
This is not to claim that a reading of the Aulis mythic episode and its Euripidean treatment as defeatist—as defenestrating the possibility of successful resistance from the back window, so to speak—is warranted. Rather, they should be read as underscoring the particularly painful and destructive facets that the inevitable interpenetration of the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, can assume in times of war and war-like crises, especially when the often conflicting, but concurrent, demands their make of the individual and the collective complicate the undertaking of resistance on the part of both.
Delikonstantinidou 396
More explicitly than the Electra myth, that of Iphigenia challenges, stimulates, and enriches our understanding of the said interpenetration as well as of war’s costs, at once extremely burdensome and scandalously hollow of (life-affirming) meaning, at the same time demystifying, or even debunking, male-authored and masculinist cultural narratives of heroic resistance. It is not that Iphigenia’s myth points to the futility of resistance in extremely adversary social climates, but to the fact that it is futile to believe that resistance will come into fruition as long as the conditions and circumstances that render resistance necessary in the first place persist unencumbered.
It is partly on account of their disabusing of illusions of stature, grandeur, and heroism, when these exist only at the expense of those who are victimized, sacrificed or left behind profoundly warped by the sacrifices they had to make, that Iphigenia’s myth and, specifically, the Euripidean version of its Aulis episode have proven appealing to late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century theatre artists in the U.S.
Their various, more contemporary treatments, produced during and after the Vietnam
War and attuned to an anti-war mode, including Michael Cacoyannis’ production that we have already mentioned, “have taken an increasingly assertive stance to the public issues raised by IA” (232). Most of them have dramatized the hijacking of faith, whether national or religious or of any other kind, by advocates of U.S. narratives of exceptionalism, patriotism, democracy, and belonging, in the context of ongoing U.S.- led, so-called humanitarian, military interventions and wars. Most of them have functioned as, responded to or sought to evoke, a public outcry whose premises seem at present as relevant as ever.192
192. This last point gains credence (and urgency) in view of the fact that this part’s writing takes place only a couple of weeks after the 2016 presidential elections whose results have elicited strong responses, including protests and other kinds of fierce reactions.
Delikonstantinidou 397
Importantly, late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, modernized
Iphigenias have become more active participants in the events surrounding and leading to their sacrifice. Feminist portrayals of the mythical figure of Iphigenia heighten her (as well as Clytemnestra’s) humanity and emphasize the suffering and victimization of women within patriarchal culture. “Whether to argue with it, expand on it, or fill in the perceived missing gaps, feminist playwrights and directors have engaged with this influential, foundational” myth, as they have done with the myths of Medea and Electra, “in order to revise deeply imbedded and traditionally-held assumptions about women’s relationship to patriarchy, family, and society,” Julie
Malnig suggests (21). A notable example of that practice, and of feminist revisionary praxis, Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters (1995), on which we touched upon during our discussion of Electra, reworks the Oresteian myth in a decidedly feminist-postmodernist context. It places dramaturgical emphasis on the female subjects of the myth as they are represented in and by history, suggesting, forcefully, “that their identities are in flux and subject to change” (31). In construing and constructing the myth’s female figures, including Iphigenia and Clytemnestra, as the “tortured eyes (and tongues) that witness the past and keep it alive,” as Foley eloquently puts it (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 235), and in rendering them acutely
“aware of their place (or lack of it) within the history and politics of their own society,” McLaughlin gives them a voice that articulates, according to Malnig, the tensions among women “that are laid bare in the wake of patriarchal coercion” (32). It is a voice not only new, but also very powerful. Svich’s play, as we shall see below, shares McLaughlin’s intention to reclaim the myth of the House of Atreus for her own generation and sociocultural frame, as well as her desire to give the story a decidedly feminist sensibility by amplifying the resounding voice of the myth’s female figures.
Delikonstantinidou 398
It is worth noting, additionally, that recently staged American (mainly U.S.) versions of the myth of Iphigenia (drawing implicitly or explicitly on Euripides’ two
Iphigenia plays) “have multiplied . . . Iphigenia as a (more-commoditized) every girl who confronts and is traumatized by the dark side of history . . . in order [to] make her representative of an era” (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 234). These are versions remindful of recent U.S. treatments of Electra that ground the heroine on mundane reality and focus attention on her split and/or double psyche. “Simultaneously privileged and persecuted,” often, “these modern day Iphigenias experience a worse fate than the Classical heroine’s as there is no higher cause to fight for, nor will they receive honor for their sacrifice,” writes Vassiliki Kotini within the framework of her analysis of one such Iphigenia, although hers is a European instead of American “case study” (16).193 Foley’s arguments show Kotini’s observation to be true for U.S.
Iphigenias, too, when she writes that, like Medea’s and Electra’s myth (and, we could add, Oedipus’ myth), the myth of Iphigenia “permits not only a confrontation with both personal and national identity,” but also a reconfiguration of tragedy and the tragic on the part of contemporary American society, “on its own, increasingly beleaguered, image,” as well as a recognition of “women’s growing but still problematic move into the public world” (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 237). In her
Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave
Fable)—whose poetic title is “emblematic of the kind of experience the play offers to the audience,” according to the playwright (García Barca 92)—Svich seizes upon the resonance and relevance of Iphigenia’s myth for contemporary audiences as adumbrated above.
193. Specifically, Kotini offers an engaging analysis of Ismail Kadare’s work (novella) Agamemnon’s Daughter set in 1980s Albania.
Delikonstantinidou 399
In the seventh chapter of this study, we will discuss how Svich’s play dramatizes Iphigenia’s isolation and sense of entrapment by both family and society, as well as her hectic, and, ultimately, compromised attempts to establish a sense of self amidst the bewildering complexity of her strained relationships of philia. In the course of her mythical voyage, Iphigenia finds the self she has been struggling to be or become multiplied yet still implicated in nightmarish and inevitable forms of objectification, commodification, and victimization. By the end of the play,
Iphigenia’s tragedy has put “on brutal display a cracked-lens world of surveillant dreams, sacrificial bodies and societies adrift in a globalised marketplace where everything, including murder, is for sale” (Svich, “Notes” 7). As we shall see, the crossing of boundaries (between life and death, male and female, mythical and real, high and low), masterfully staged by Svich, provides Iphigenia with a fleeting sense of expanded identity but proves unable to save her from her tragic fate; a fate scripted long ago by forces seemingly beyond the control of the world’s Iphigenias.
Delikonstantinidou 400
Chapter 7
Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was
Once Her Heart: A “Rave” Fable194
I. Setting the Stage for Iphigenia as a Rave Celebrity
Caridad Svich’s plunging into the world of Iphigenia’s myth with her
multimedia play Iphigenia Crash is consistent with the playwright’s persistence in
engaging with the past and its ancient forms and traditions in order to learn from them
and (re)discover new ways of seeing a mestizo/a world through them. Frequently, in
interviews, essays, and, of course, in her work for the theatre, the playwright fleshes
out her conviction that “[e]ach generation ‘kills’ what has come before it, and
resurrects it at the same time,” including art, which is itself made through a process of
“active renewal and reinterpretation” (Svich, “Divine Fire” 11). Her Iphigenia Crash,
which premiered at 7 Stages in Atlanta, Georgia, under Melissa Foulger’s direction,
and after several workshop versions in Los Angeles, New York, and Greece, is the
product of precisely such a process of “active renewal and reinterpretation” of the
Iphigenia myth.
194. Earlier versions of parts of this chapter have been published in “Questing for 21st Century Mestizaje in the Realm of the Greek Tragic Myth: Dramatic Mythic(al) Revisions by Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Caridad Svich” (2016) and in “Caridad Svich's Raving Iphigenia as Mythical Celebrity and Female Pharmakos," in The American Imaginary and its Challenges: Explorations and Negotiations of the American Culture in the 21st Century (2018).
Delikonstantinidou 401
Yet, this play is only one of six plays “inspired by the Greeks” that she has developed over the last twelve years, although not all of them have been produced yet.
These include Antigone Arkhe (part of the Antigone Project: A Play in Five Parts),
Lucinda Caval, Wreckage, Steal Back Light from the Virtual, and The Tropic of X.195
Taken together, her mythoplays “signal the reclaiming of a long-held tradition in theatre of reworking stories, reconfabulating them, and reconfiguring them for a new generation” and a new century (Delgado and Svich 12). With Iphigenia Crash, in particular, which draws conspicuously from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, as well as from Racine’s and Gluck’s versions of the myth of Iphigenia,196 Svich attempts to reclaim the myth and give to the mythical figure of Iphigenia the voice she believes has been denied to her by most dramatists that have worked with and reworked her myth. The play may not recontextualize Iphigenia’s tragic myth in full, but adopts a
195. On a personal note, I troubled myself quite a bit over whether Svich’s Wreckage, Svich’s reconfiguration of the myth of Medea, should be included in the first part of the present study, among the other mestiza Medeas. Wreckage, premiered in 2009 at Crowded Fire Theatre, under Erin Gilley's direction, is a poem-play that imagines the journey, or rather “cycling” of the sons of Euripides’ Medea in a kind of limbo. It is a kind of “sequel” to the version of the myth that Euripides offered almost two and a half millennia ago, set in a neo- Shakespearean register. However, Svich’s “distaff rendering” of Euripides’ version of the Medea myth (Svich, Blasted Heavens 7), which very loosely riffs off the myth itself, does not feature a recognizable Medea figure but only a couple of female figures that only distantly resemble her in their role as children murderers. Medea is to this play—as it is to the two Sons (designated “First Son” and “Second Son” in the play) whose strange, otherworldly tale Wreckage lyrically narrates—merely a vague memory, or, better, shards of memories lodged “deeply [in the] Jungian recesses of cultural memory, like shared dreams,” as the playwright has put it (Maxwell); traces of an archetype, to put it more plainly. Yet, the play could still be assumed under the rubric of “dramatic mythic revision” (after all, this is a quite hospitable term, as we have seen in the beginning of this study) and included here as such. Eventually, I decided against including it for another reason: because Wreckage makes no reference whatsoever to the Latino/a context, but this was one of the main criteria according to which all of the texts examined in this study have been chosen—the other two being that the plays should be dramatic mythic revisions of Greek tragic myths and that they should have been produced at least once. I read and researched all of Svich’s plays that have been “inspired by the Greeks” before reaching the conclusion that only her Iphigenia Crash fulfils all three of the aforementioned criteria, so this is the play that was finally chosen for examination here. 196. As Svich has quite poetically put it, she considers this play as “a tale told from the breath of myth (or some would say, the breach of myth) through Euripides’ pen through to Calderon de la Barca’s The Monster of the Gardens (1667), Racine’s Iphigenia (1674), and Gluck’s opera (1774) to Garcia Lorca’s lost manuscript to versions told again and again, and now resting in my mouth, in my body, coursing through my veins” (Svich, “Notes” 1).
Delikonstantinidou 402 kernel of it “for a meditation on where we are now or where we are going” (13).
Further, it illustrates the playwright’s critical understanding, as an intercultural artist who identifies as a Latina,197 of “Latino/a theatre as a space of baroque and poetic language” (Rossini, “Teatro” 282). It also, and perhaps most importantly, illustrates her critical understanding of the global, mythical, historical, and cultural
(cross)currents that course through collective and individual, political and erotic bodies, and that transform them in the process, hybridizing them and changing their responses to culturally inherited memory, as well as their reflections on the cultural mirror, past and present.
Time and again the playwright has expressed her fascination with the practice of bringing her voice to bear on age-old stories and has suggested that she sees working with classics as a way of crossing borders and as a way of testing the classics’ very “liveness” in a media-saturated world (Delgado and Svich 12). Seeking
“out the edges of language and media, myth and reality,” her work crosses cultures and the limits of time and space, and celebrates the weaving and mixing of American cultural strands (whether indigenous or not) with non-American ones, inter/transcultural collaboration and exchange (Svich, “Legacies for a New
Tomorrow” 2). Importantly, the playwright places the quest for identity at the very center of her inter/transcultural narrative construction and of the concomitant process of exploring the different ways stories can be told, and the ways in which memory restructures perception of a tale and its effects on the body of culture (8). The Greek tragic myths with which she has engaged over the years have allowed Svich not only
197. Svich’s parents are from Cuba and Argentina, while her family line extends to Croatia, Austria, Italy, and Spain. Her mixed origins and bilingualism have inevitably affected her sense of identity as an individual and an artist. As she states in an interview with Tanika Gupta: “I cannot help but think of myself as a Latina even though at heart I feel ultimately that my work is about being an American” (Svich, “An Advocate for Change” 99).
Delikonstantinidou 403 to re-tell and re-author prevalent cultural life-scripts and interrogate the identity positions these scripts usually prescribe, but also to retrieve mythico-cultural and emotional memory and display the effects of this retrieval for theatre making, for audience “education,” and even therapy.
In fact, her frequent (re)turns to Greek myths can be said to be triggered by an archaeological impulse. Svich herself has described her writing as “a kind of archaeological dig—into memory, culture(s), imagination, Eros and the politicized body, and . . . , into the lines of poor-rich song that ring out in the land through and past history and real and imagined lives” (Svich, Blasted Heavens 7). The artist scavenges, digs, recalls, reclaims, and exhibits words, voices and histories almost forgotten or long neglected in order to liberate texts (broadly conceived), memoryscapes, and life-worlds from the obscurity and thraldom in which they have been kept by oppressive traditions, past and present. The new mestizo/a (hi)stories that she crafts by means of the Greek mythical material in a number of her plays ultimately complicate the reading of (and the living according to) extant historical and mythico-cultural texts/narratives and invite their radical reconsideration, as well as a grappling with all that they omit and exclude.
Motivated by the belief that literature, in general, and drama, in particular,
“can empower the visibility and awareness of the darkest realities which haunt the twenty-first century,” Svich argues that, as a writer, she has “a duty to record what is not being recorded, to shed light on the stories hidden in plain sight”: “Our job is to wake audiences up,” she points out (García Barca 93). Critically revising and reconfabulating our myths in view of twenty-first-century realities constitutes a necessary condition for remedying the violence, corruption, and injustice in which the said realities are mired, according to her. In her first Greek-inspired play, Iphigenia
Delikonstantinidou 404
Crash, Svich seems to be realizing her intention to make “the screams of the innocent, the tortured” heard, and the stories of “the children of the tortured, and of the torturers, [whose] only inheritance is violence” known (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 13,
69), so that a change in awareness, as well as a behavioral and attitudinal change in everyday practices and even in small and large scale policies, can be activated. It is hard to miss an obvious correspondence here: the “children” to whom Svich refers above have been described by Raymond Williams in a related context as the tragic- born “children of the struggle who because of the struggle live in new ways and with new feelings, and who, including the revolution in their ordinary living, answer death and suffering with a human voice” (204), question “what it is to be human” (Leonard
Location 311), and alert us to “the possibility of action in conditions of impossibility”
(Honig 9). Therein lies, in large measure, as we shall see further on, the play’s radical political and therapeutic import, unmistakably tragic both in its origin and in its operation.
“I’m interested in the remains/ghosts of culture,” Svich admits, “and also [in] the inheritances that are borne and marked in our very bones by these remains,” but that most often remain unrecognized as such. In Iphigenia Crash, it is the screams and stories of those whose remains or ghosts cycle “through stages of their afterlives” and through a “savage space,” simultaneously outside and inside of historical time, mappable space, and the culturescapes upon which hegemonic forces exercise their power, which demand to be acknowledged and dealt with (Svich, Blasted Heavens 6-
7). Svich summons them to the surface of perceptible reality by way of borrowing loosely and freely from the myth. Her play follows a pattern or revision designated
“catalytic conversion” by Miriam Chirico. This means that she depends “on the myth as impulse or catalyst,” and, “[b]y relying upon the audience's common knowledge of
Delikonstantinidou 405 the myth,” she then uses “the story as a springboard to explore certain issues,” such as desire, violence, oppression, resistance, and sacrifice, without being bound by its plot
(“Divine Fire” 531-2). Indeed, the insights that can be gleaned from the sacrificial mythobodies encountered in Iphigenia Crash reveal uncomfortable aspects of the aforementioned issues which still nag and tear at the social fabric. Most importantly, however, the perspective offered by them becomes the perspective of all those who are sacrificed and lost in/to this “savage, salvage” world; a world at once timeless and
(post)contemporary, “composed of fragments of rooted but consciously blurred geographies and multiple historical time frames that bleed into each other” (Svich,
Blasted Heavens 6-7). It is the perspective of those who are lost but want to be found and find themselves.
As a trans-local, politically and socially engaged artist and activist, one
“committed to the particular within the universal” (Svich, “Legacies for a New
Tomorrow” 9), Svich has been stretching global (hi)stories to include some meaning for her local, Latin/o/a American concerns. With Iphigenia Crash, Svich reshapes the well-known Iphigenia myth and recontextualizes it in a despoiled landscape composed of fragments, in a world of cultural mestizaje that resonantly alludes to the borderland between the United States and Mexico. In an interview with Elena García
Barca, the playwright explains that the play evolved out of her attempt to narrativize and dramatize the feminicides, or sexual assassinations, that have been taking place in the notorious Mexican border city of Juárez (García Barca 93). These crimes constitute, at once, a sexual and a social trauma that does not only entail the cruel loss of the lives of girls and young women, and thus the victimization of their families and friends, but also the terrorization and victimization of the wider Juárez community where, as might be expected, no woman feels safe anymore.
Delikonstantinidou 406
According to Amnesty international, between 1993 and 2008, more than eight hundred women were murdered in Juárez, with approximately one third of these deaths labeled as sexual homicides—actually, sexual-torture killings. From 2008 onwards the violence has worsened (some interpreters of the phenomenon speak of it as a second wave larger than the first), while over three thousand women are still missing in the broader border region separating the United States from Mexico
(Monárrez Fragoso 2010; Sarria 2009). Most of the victims were young women, aging
12–19, mainly workers in the border city’s factories or maquiladoras, famous for their abusive working conditions, but also waitresses and students. Betty Garcia, among others, identifies the victims’ shared risk-inducing characteristic: “They are primarily from impoverished backgrounds” (392). A few arrests have been made over the years, but at least one investigation has shown that police and government officials are involved in the violence. And if authorities and institutions have failed to effectively deal with the reality of this human-caused disaster, which, like other collective traumas, has inflicted heavy injuries to the social, cultural, and physical ecologies of the Juárez population, media, more generally, and news reports, more particularly, have largely responded with “superficial dramatizations” of the crimes perpetrated against these women, or even “played [them] off as a kind of billboard warning to women who want to assert themselves” (Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation 29).
More shocking still is that the romanticization and sensationalization of the feminicides emerged as standard media practice, with the media often offering highly titillating accounts of the crimes.
Svich’s play challenges, precisely, the trauma-sustaining tendency to downplay or normalize, sensationalize, romanticize, or spectacularize feminicide.
While in the process of trying to write a play about the Juárez tragedy, Svich re-read
Delikonstantinidou 407
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and realized that what she was in fact writing was a contemporary Iphigenia, as she has admitted in a number of interviews. Trapped in time and myth, Svich’s Iphigenia comes, in the playwright’s words, “to the present to project the injustice that many women have to suffer just for the reason of being born women and beautiful” (García Barca 94). Yet, instead of focusing exclusively on women’s victimization, the play engages other “branches” of injustice, in overtly using the mythical story of Iphigenia to also incite reflection on the (media) cult of celebrity deaths and its increasing marketability/profitability from the mid-twentieth- century onwards,198 as well as to, more broadly, shed light to and fight against widespread violence directed toward other disadvantaged social groups, stigmatized and marginalized due to their gender, sexual orientation, and class position in ethnically marked contexts.
Still, Svich’s revision of Iphigenia’s tragic myth primarily attempts to rescue from obscurity a “cycle historically of repetition—of historically treating women as disposable, second-class, . . . and objectifying and dishonoring women’s bodies and psyches,” to borrow García Barca’s words, so that this cycle of violence can be stopped. By means of General Adolfo’s figure (meaningfully, a pun on Hitler’s name), the father of Iphigenia in the play and a character less patterned upon
Agamemnon than on “the images projected by hyper-masculine dictators in Latin
America—that kind of machismo associated with totalitarian power,” the playwright caustically comments on the sociocultural conditioning of men toward hyper-
198. As the playwright has stated in her note for the 2006 production of Iphigenia Crash, while working on the play she was thinking about “the media cult around the death of Lady Diana, and how this lovely, fragile, and perhaps not too intelligent young woman was used in life and death for political reasons, and subsequently how she also entered in death the hall of young pretty dead stars like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, etc.: images disembodied grafted onto T-shirts, handbags and the like: always for sale” (“All the Pretty Girls”). Therefore, while drawing conspicuously on the Euripidean heroine and on the Juárez’s women and girls, Svich’s twenty-first-century Iphigenia is also modeled a bit on “Lady Di.”
Delikonstantinidou 408 masculinity and on hyper-masculinity’s function, in combination with class and ethnic disadvantages and attendant anxieties, as a potential cause for feminicide.
Furthermore, in creating an alternative, less aggressive masculinity, bodied forth by an androgynous, AIDS-carrier Achilles, a provocative (anti)hero, she critiques “the canon of the flawless, masculine and statuesque hero” and introduces a new model of masculinity (94), at the same time calling attention to the HIV/AIDS condition and the inadequacy, or even failure, of official and media responses to it.
Her effort to restructure strict gender roles and sexual norms, and the insidious power structures that these help maintain, extends also to the inclusion in the play of the choral “Fresa Girls,” ghosts of poor factory girls, actually the play’s version of the
Juárez victims, brutally murdered by patriarchal power’s “anonymous hands,” who, according to the Production and Script Notes of the play, should be preferably “played by men” (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 4). As the playwright says: “The Fresa Girls embody both the masculine and the feminine—the victim and perpetrator. They are in some ways like the Furies. I . . . wanted to destabilize the gender roles right away in the play with their appearance” (García Barca 95). In the course of the chapter, we discuss how her Iphigenia Crash succeeds in destabilizing dominant gender roles, but also in forestaging and vehemently critiquing forms of violence, intimidation, and oppression against the non-materially privileged, as well as against sexually marginalized individuals and groups. We, further, and more specifically, examine how she effects the latter through Achilles, but also through the figure of Violeta
Imperia (simultaneously an allusion to 18-year-old feminicide victim Violeta
Alvíedrez Barrios and a pun on “violencia imperial,” one of the designated root causes of the Juárez feminicides), the earth-bound apparition of a lesbian woman who has been brutally abused by General Adolfo’s regime.
Delikonstantinidou 409
Arguably, Iphigenia Crash constitute one of Svich’s most significant contributions to the collective endeavor of Latino/a artists to respond to the need to translate ancient and contemporary, public, family, and personal tales into literary and performance texts, in order to treat aspects of the Latino/a experience in the U.S.; an endeavor which involves bringing gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other different(ial) cultural experiences of U.S. Latinas/os in the public light. Her play can be said to share more similarities with Moraga’s The Hungry Woman, insofar as it, too, focuses more closely and explicitly on femininities, masculinities, and
“queernesses” than the other plays that we have studied so far, yet it is united with them all by two common bonds. The first one concerns the emphasis placed on contemporary, real and imagined, mestizo/a Latin/o/a American contexts, with the aim being to explore new and illuminate extant and alternative aspects of mestizaje
(as discourse and reality), and thus to denounce Euro American hegemony and uncritical Latino/a ethnocentrism. The second, and most important one for our purposes, relates to the play’s confrontation by means of a tragic myth and through the tragic mode of collective trauma and its sociocultural dimensions, as well as to the fact of its squarely facing the possibility of healing without undermining the tragic import of its structuring myth and material.
Indeed, despite its having “a catastrophic quality as drama,” the play succeeds in somehow remaining hopeful, Svich says, if only because it allows us to “consider how we treat and think about sacrificial women,” since “[t]o even think about it means possible change in awareness may come/occur” (García Barca 95). We could
(and do) argue that Svich’s critically acclaimed and awarded Iphigenia Crash does more than herald a change in awareness. It also prompts for remedial action to be taken up against the very conditions of injustice, inequality, oppression, and privation
Delikonstantinidou 410
that underlie, as causal factors, traumatic experiences for the individual and the
collective; remedial action for and with all of those who are forced to lead a liminal
existence as the pharmakoi (or scapegoats) of a world still unable, thousands of years
after the inception of the pharmakos practice in ancient Greece, to cure itself from its
ills without sacrificing innocents.
II. Iphigenia Crash: Iphigenia as an Old Victim for a New-But-Not-That-
Different Age
Beginning with its very title, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On The Neon Shell
That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable), the play places the eponymous heroine at
the center of “a network of suggestive meanings” and, in a sense, functions as the
harbinger of the heroine’s “journey of chaos and gloominess,” García Barca pointedly
observes (22). From early on, the play intimates that we metonymically interpret
Iphigenia herself as a damaged aircraft that crashes on the “neon shell” of a hangar,
which is also, quite suggestively, the play’s main setting—an image that alludes to
Heiner Muller’s famous Hamletmachine. The fact that, in our earliest encounter with
it, the play divulges to us that its titular “neon shell” was once the protagonist’s heart
can be construed as Svich’s attempt to draw our attention to and even prepare us for
Iphigenia’s imploding experience of victimization and heartbreak that constitutes the
dramatic core of the play. At the same time, the play’s self-conscious characterization
as “a rave fable” establishes the techno and house dance mood of the play and likens
the experience of it to “an acid trip . . . meant to saturate and provoke” (Littlefield).
Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, it hints at the constant interplay, or
rather, at the interpenetration of myth and reality in the play, within whose tension
Delikonstantinidou 411
Iphigenia as well as the counterparts of other familiar, mythical figures “flanking” her—either precipitating, mirroring, or witnessing her tragedy—are inexorably caught.
Along the lines of Miriam Chirico’s analysis of one of the fundamental approaches to or patterns of adaptation and revision of mythical material, namely, diegetical transposition,199 Svich’s play can be said to be transposing the diegesis of
Iphigenia’s myth to a present-day, autocratic regime, somewhere in Latin America
(20).200 Yet, despite the diegetical transposition of Iphigenia’s myth, and, specifically, of its Aulis episode, to a different context, the playwright, as Chirico correctly observes, “embraces the customary characterization of Iphigenia as a martyred woman,” as “an emblem for women murdered in the name of state-sanctioned violence,” and as “an ideal representative for mistreated women, particularly in countries that violate human rights.” In crafting this dramatic mythic revision,
Svich engages in a dual maneuver regarding the myth’s axiology: first,
she maintains the myth’s value system by deploring the brutalization of
women both past and present; secondly, she introduces the practice of
glamorizing celebrities as the contemporary approximation of
mythologizing a character. (27-8).
199. According to Miriam Chirico, diegetical transposition involves moving the diegesis of a myth from its original historical moment and geographical location “to another time and place, or both, potentially altering the region, class, or ethnicity within the process” (18). “A diegetical transposition reveals specific analogies between the earlier depiction of the myth and the latter-day revision; even as anachronisms appear, they underscore both the dissonance and similarity between classical antiquity and the contemporary moment and ignite a spark of recognition that is the hallmark of this genre” (Chirico 18-9). 200. All citations from Miriam Chirico that appear in the present chapter come from her work “Hellenic Women Revisited: The Aesthetics of Mythic Revision on the Plays of Karen Hartman, Sarah Ruhl and Caridad Svich” (2012).
Delikonstantinidou 412
In the process of revis(ion)ing the Iphigenia myth, Svich, also, recasts its characters by assigning them radically dysfunctional traits. She reconfigures Iphigenia as a sheltered girl “of privileged means”; Agamemnon, as the hyper-masculine, ambitious dictator, Adolfo; Clytemnestra as Camila, “a narcotized prop” wife consumed by cruel vanity; Orestes as a crack-addicted baby carried around inside a Gucci shoe box; and Achilles as an androgynous rock star, as beautiful as he is damaged (Svich,
Iphigenia Crash 3).
In Svich’s version of the myth of Iphigenia, an out-of-favor dictator, General
Adolfo, intent on ensuring his reelection and, subsequently, taking the helm of an unnamed Latin American country—a country generically represented as suffering from great unrest, terrorized by guerrilla soldiers, drug wars, and natural disasters201—condemns his celebrity daughter, Iphigenia, to a life of confinement and silence, and, eventually, sacrifices her in order to rehabilitate his public persona. The
General is convinced that he can capitalize on a personal tragedy, such as the loss of a child, in order to regain his country’s approval, in sentimental, if not in political, terms, and thus secure his public office. Indeed, before the play is over, we have witnessed his couching of his daughter’s murder in the saccharine, ingratiating language of nationalist and pseudo-religious propaganda. The News Anchor, whose constant presence throughout the play, together with that of the Virtual MC voiceover, serves to explicitly point to twenty-first-century media omnipresence, predicts early in the play that:
201. This is not to erase the particularities of Latin American countries, but to call attention to the fact that, as María Florencia Nelli observes, the said countries “share an unfortunate history of violent colonialism and imperialism, totalitarianism, and chronic military rule; civil war, abuse and violation of human rights; shaky returns to democracy, economic crisis; dissipation, corruption, and impunity leading to political disillusionment, anger, and disbelief in socio-political institutions.” If, as Nelli claims, Latin American theatre became a “theatre of crisis” in an effort to respond to these realities, “an unforgiving reflection of its countries’ turbulent history” (621), Svich’s play can be said to be partaking of this kind of theatre.
Delikonstantinidou 413
The general will need a miracle to stay in office.
......
But if some great personal tragedy were to befall him, it is possible the
country would embrace him again.
No one can resist the tug of the human heart.
One senseless death, of a rich girl
and we will be united in grief, sorrow, and peace.
Do you hear me, Iphigenia? (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 7)
The dramatic action of Svich’s play follows the myth as it unfolds at Aulis, despite the fact that the play is transposed to the current day. Iphigenia does gradually accept her destined role as sacrificial object for the state’s well-being; the “miracle” General
Adolfo needed transpiring via her death. Contrary to most, earlier versions of the myth, however, the playwright transfocalizes the story to Iphigenia’s “point of view”202 and foregrounds the self-referential awareness Iphigenia possesses, given that she knows all too well what awaits her in fate’s unchanging pattern (Chirico 28).
In that respect, the play itself functions self-reflexively, critically reflecting on its transit across cultures even as it stages it.
202. Chirico explains that the pattern of “transfocalization,” by which theatre practitioners, especially playwrights, engage with material drawn from myth, involves sustained focus “on an individual character’s story,” instead of focus on the narrative per se. The latter is, in the process of transfocalization, pruned, so to speak, so that narrative branches not immediately related to the (new) focal character are removed. “[T]he intentional focus on a different character,” than the one(s) “starring” in the primary material, “renders a distinctive reading of the play.” This is exactly the effect Svich is after in pursuing a narrative shift to Iphigenia’s point of view, although the very term “point of view” is employed catachrestically here, since, as Chirico notes, it “is not an appropriate descriptor for dramatic literature” (19).
Delikonstantinidou 414
Svich imagines Iphigenia as a woman trapped inside a corrupt society that will give her neither a voice nor a body she can call her own, but will demand that she offers both to an abstractly conceived “state” and its obscure notion of well-being.
Yet, her heroine is, also, much like the other heroines and their ancient mythical predecessors that we have encountered in the present study so far, trapped by a male- authored notion of heroism which does not belong to her, but which has been imposed on her and which she has been made to believe is noble, despite her being cognizant of its shortcomings (Svich, “Notes” 1). In the course of the play, we are invited to partake of Iphigenia’s impulse to be rescued, to escape the fate to which she seems destined at Aulis. At the same time, however, we are also invited to recognize that it is her eventual willing acceptance of her forced destiny, her death, as inevitable, even as she seems to be aware of its futility, which lends her story its tragic import.
Moreover, the latter is only enhanced by another realization that Svich’s play inches us toward: that Iphigenia’s tragedy reflects the general tragedy of wo/men victimized
(in a number of—more and more complicated—senses) in a savage twenty-first century world, marked by increasing outbreaks of violence (whether terrorist, counter- terrorist, or intra-societal), the ubiquity of corruption, (pro)fascist deviations, conservative regression, individual isolation, and the impotence of existing political and social structures to mediate between the individual and her/his overdetermined
(and often tragic) destiny.
From the play’s very beginning, Svich sets Iphigenia “in a landscape of dirt, and rituals”—including human sacrifice, as we are to learn by the play’s end—“all too alive” in our contemporary world. For the construction of her neo-mythical setting,
Svich conjures up several images, crafting, as a matter of fact, “a collage of countries:
Nicaragua, Mexico, Columbia, Panama, Argentina, Cuba, Bosnia, the UK, the US,
Delikonstantinidou 415 etc.” (Svich, “Notes” 1). Resonantly, the first setting in which we find Iphigenia is
“the city,” then, “the hangar,” and, finally, “the city” again. This arrangement, as it were, makes for a circular route which brings the protagonist back to the same point from which she initially run away, death, and which serves to reinforce the play’s claustrophobic, eerie ambience, point to its dramatization of inevitability, as well as nod to what is perceived by the playwright as history’s hermetic, circular logic.
It is pertinent that we add to the aforementioned remark on the play’s setting that, in the course of the play, Svich undermines spatial oppositions, and, specifically, the contrast between the “inside,” associated with protection/confinement, and the
“outside,” associated with danger/freedom, by, ultimately, presenting both the aircraft hangar, placed in the middle of an open field and expected to recreate “freedom” for the heroine, and Iphigenia’s house as cages. We cannot but endorse García Barca’s view that “the hangar is, in reality, a big cage where freedom is a utopia” (33-4), and further note that the very field where the hangar lies alludes to the archetypical field of death, since, as we come to realize, most of the characters populating it are, in fact, ghosts. Despite its “impossibly high walls,” the hangar is as frightening and oppressive as “the small house . . . [with] the low ceiling [that] hurt her head” (Svich,
Iphigenia Crash 5); that is, the paternal house in which Iphigenia finds herself in the opening scene of the play.
While in the hangar, characters are invited to partake in a vulgar illusion of freedom that only robs them of their ability to critically assess the actual and projected data and sound engulfing them, and that renders them into a single, apathetic, acquiescing mass, unable to resist the media encroachment on and usurpation of their privacy, identity, and power(s) of resistance. Immersed into the swarming, psychedelic trance world of the hangar and under the spell of Virtual MC’s
Delikonstantinidou 416 incantational exhortations for reckless, wanton abandon, ghosts and living characters alike are tempted to be stripped of their humanity and made into mind-numb, lustful zombies. In its association with objectification, oppression, and death, the hangar also resembles Orestes’ surrealist “house,” the designer shoebox, another physical and psychological cage in which an utterly objectified, infant Orestes, an “always already” defeated male hero, lives thoroughly confined and in a state reminiscent of
Schrödinger's famous cat-in-box thought experiment: at once dead and alive, as irrelevant to the course of history as to his sister’s story.
At the same time, the play’s intentionally vague, broader temporal and spatial context, which Svich has described as the “electric wound of a magnified, amplified society” (“All the Pretty Girls” n. pag.), alludes to a volatile, phantasmagoric “global marketplace and all its histories in the whirling bits and bytes and bleeps that do not even let us take in one disaster before another strikes”203 (Svich, “Notes” 1). Svich points our attention to the fact that, whether in her city house or in the open field hangar, Iphigenia remains trapped within the mental and imaginary walls of a rave, globalization-oriented culture204 littered with consumerist totems: drugs, “designer
203. “Who remembers the ‘disappeared ones’ in Argentina besides the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who stand there day after day?” Svich rhetorically asks: “That was in the mid-1970s. Ancient history. Who recalls the bitter fights in Nicaragua? Who opens their eyes and looks at what is truly happening in Columbia? The rush to move on to the next and next had produced a culture of people who only wish to look away, or look up: individuals addicted to release. The Western world is in a state of constant departure” (“Notes” 1-2). 204. Alan France has offered a very useful study of the “rave culture” phenomenon. The eighties and nineties, the scholar explains, saw the “arrival” of the rave whose “history has been well documented . . . , showing how ‘acid house’ music, combined with ecstasy, created a new youth cultural phenomenon that became known as ‘rave culture.’ Underground music from the USA, and new styles of record mixing, transformed not only the music industry but also dance culture. Ecstasy became known as the new ‘recreational drug’ having a close association with particular dance and music. This created a music industry that aimed to construct a total experience, drawing on the needs and wants of ecstasy users. Venues and producers created lighting and sound systems that played on the pleasure-seeking sensations of the drug experience. Ecstasy increased the sense of community and sociability where dancing, rather than romance, was to become the major pleasure. A whole new industry and lifestyle emerged that replaced the individualism of Thatcherism with a
Delikonstantinidou 417 clothes that elaborate on infantilism, kitsch, S&M, and retro hippie-ness,” enacting
“their own mad neo-mod game; a repetitive mix of loops and hard-driving beats that live somewhere between glam, disco and Philip Glass” (Svich, “Divine Fire” 332).
Although Iphigenia descends into the nocturnal wonderland of this culture to find herself (Svich, “Notes” 2), it is only the promise and not the reality of self-reinvention that she eventually finds—the trick played on her all the more painful because of the temporary relief it granted her and the hope it ignited for a different outcome to her story. Uncomfortably evocative of neoliberal globalization narratives, the pseudo- inclusive rave culture that Svich (re)creates in her play trades into the illusion of obsolescence or irrelevancy of center/periphery models and of their attendant qualitative hierarchies by projecting a utopian globalized future where social inequalities of all sorts have been transcended. However, as we come to realize, this culture, like its real-life counterpart, only functions so as to disguise in extravagant garments and hide under florescent lights the said persisting inequalities. The utopian future vision it puts forth is only a drug-induced dream, a shared collective fantasy that lasts only as long as the effects of the Ecstasy do; a cruel joke at the expense of suffering humanity.
On the symbolically charged day of her birthday, Iphigenia sets herself loose onto this psychedelic realm, one relentlessly surveyed, policed and conditioned by the
“eye of the media” and “built around the rapt stare, which entrances its citizens in front of the many screens which populate our midst,” as Svich puts it (“Notes” 2), targeted by the media eye and as the object of her people’s “rapt stare.” Conflicted by a sense of strange dislocation, on the one hand, and by a sense of loyalty toward the very people who have traumatized her, those closest to her, on the other; frustrated by
collective sense of being . . . , while also celebrating hedonism and pleasure-seeking as core values to youth culture” (134).
Delikonstantinidou 418 the awakening of as yet unacknowledged and unnamed desires; perplexed by this world that she does not understand, Iphigenia abandons the archetypical “garden of bougainvillea” and strained innocence where her father had confined her in pursuit (of the promise) of rebirth. She removes the literal and figurative blindfold she had willingly placed over her eyes and “roams outside the cage which has held her over time and centuries,” begging for the relinquishment of self-direction, cast off. Thus, her “stumbling toward something which can be found through the body’s own desires begins” (Svich “Notes” 2). This “something” Iphigenia will be searching for throughout the play is, as we shall soon discover, some kind of empowering integration. But before she can be integrated, albeit provisionally, she will first have to experience utter fragmentation and witness her parts being reflected onto the bodies and phantom bodies of others who are, like her, trapped in history.
Chirico comments that being “the famous daughter of a political leader,
Iphigenia has grown up with a double-consciousness about her, seeing herself as an object of the public gaze.” At the same time, the scholar goes on to argue, she is fully
“aware of herself as a mythic figure, caught in a larger destiny she is unable to change” (29). Indeed, the protagonist explicitly ponders on her mythical story:
IPHIGENIA: Iphigenia was born centuries upon centuries ago.
I have watched her grow up, only to see her die over and over, story
upon story.
I have lived inside her skin
......
I have let myself be adored by the far-away gaze
Delikonstantinidou 419
Of a crowd who wants to get a look at the girl,
......
And now on this day of days,
On this day of saints,
All I want is to be free of Iphigenia,
To be free of her certain fate. (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 8)
Nevertheless, we could modify Chirico’s argument and postulate that Iphigenia experiences, in fact, a triple, instead of double, consciousness. She is conscious of herself as a celebrity (the object of the public gaze), as a mythic figure (at once object and subject of myth and history), and as the person beyond these two “identities,” other than what they prescribe; that is, the subject of her “own” story, one which is, however, not authored by her.
The digitally-mediated environment within which the play progresses, and in which videotape, live streaming, and live onstage performance “formats” co-exist, is created precisely for the purpose of capturing the sense of triple-consciousness that pervades Iphigenia, as well as for the purpose of representing celebrity culture and critically accentuating Iphigenia’s public identity and its manipulation by the said culture. Throughout the play, Chirico reports, not only Iphigenia, but also the other
“actors play both live people and images; surrounded by television monitors, the characters onstage interact with the characters projected on the large on-stage screen, while their own ‘live’ actions are simultaneously captured by televisions.” In the meantime, all events involving Iphigenia are scandalously distorted by the news agencies whose sensationalist accounts bombard the audience (29). Thus divided,
Delikonstantinidou 420 visually, performatively, and narratively, between her media-persecuted public self,
“her mythic self, which knows of her coming sacrifice for the state, and a desire to reclaim her body/sensuality for another life,” as Foley succinctly puts it, Iphigenia longs for integration (Reimagining Greek Tragedy 234). She longs to become a more viable version of herself by (re)discovering pleasure and her own body; a body multiply violated and objectified both within and without this play’s context—in this and in all the other versions of Iphigenia’s myth.
Yet, even though her split self longs for integration, the over-arching “State” makes it hard for her to do so (Svich, “Notes” 2). It is important to stress that the insidious presence of the “State” in the play directs attention to two different, yet not entirely unrelated entities, yielding power over Iphigenia (and her likes, as we shall see). On the one hand, and according to a more literal reading, the “State” can be taken as referring to the coercive, impersonal, bureaucratic state (or state-like) entity, which far exceeds in power, authority, and violence its bully of a leader, General
Adolfo. It is an inhumane system, a certain state of order and affairs, which governs, regiments, censors, and dismantles bodies, and which grinds freedom into oblivion.
On the other hand, the “State” can be said to allude to the entire corpus of texts engaging Iphigenia’s story and restaging over and over again her “certain fate.”
Thereby, it constitutes a metaliterary comment on the part of the play on the reception history of Iphigenia’s myth. According to this interpretation, the “State” stands for
“Text,” that is, for the entire reception history, the fiction, and textuality (meaning the constellation of ideologically charged discourses featuring her in one way or another) from which Iphigenia strives to escape. In her struggle with a seemingly omnipotent, impersonal and lethal, “State,” in any of its senses, she is not alone: her predicament is mirrored in that of several female figures populating Svich’s play.
Delikonstantinidou 421
In the playwright’s own words, “Iphigenia encounters the first of many mirrors in a woman who is part messenger, part prophet, and part her own creation”:
Violeta Imperial. She describes the play’s strange female figure as
a victim of torture, a member of the living “disappeared,” who through
her invisible status in society, rendered so by the state, moves freely in
the corners, alleys, and countryside selling pieces of animal bodies to
those hungry enough to buy. She has been marked verbally as a pata, a
“dyke,” (and thus, outside prescribed sexual laws), and doubly marked
physically by soldiers eager with the blade. By escaping death, she
now serves to court the present and living dead who cross her path.
(“Notes” 2-3)
Violeta Imperial’s function in the play is to reveal to Iphigenia the terrible truth about her father’s terrorist ways—one that we suspect our protagonist already knew but was unwilling to confront—and to act as “a walking warning for others” (Svich, Iphigenia
Crash 13); that is, the women whose life can still be spared. Moreover, she constitutes a “traumatic mirror” for Iphigenia (Svich, “Notes” 3), one that conjures traumatic memory from the recesses of our heroine’s mind and psyche, reminding her how
(much) she has been scarred by patriarchal, male-dominated culture and its crude tool for exercising control, rape.
Svich’s explanatory comments illustrate the parallels on which she has built in constructing character and plot, as well as the motivation for both: “[a]s Clytemnestra, now called Camila, was herself raped by Agamemnon, now called Adolfo, the violation of the female body and its subsequent brutalization lives in Iphigenia’s skin”
(Svich, “Notes” 3). Adolfo’s rape of Camila ends up depriving Iphigenia of motherly
Delikonstantinidou 422 love and affection. Without a source of love, affection, or even female solidarity on which to rely, the heroine has literally grown isolated and helpless. As Camila confesses at some point:
CAMILA: . . . I can’t touch her [Iphigenia]. She burns my fingers.
She is the fruit of Adolfo’s rape of me. Such glorious, poisonous fruit.
Dear, sweet Iphigenia . . .
He married me against my will. He took me by force.
He smashed the head of a baby boy whose name is no longer
remembered
And stuck his cock inside me. For the good of the country.
For the promise of a model wife at his side.
......
She looks at me. I know what she wants. She wants to touch me. . . .
Go on. Look, Iphigenia. I will never love you. (Iphigenia Crash 78)
In tracing the reasons for Camila’s and Iphigenia’s malfunctional relationship to male-authored violence against the female body by means of Camila’s intervention,
Svich, like Alfaro in Electricidad, caustically comments on the ways in which patriarchy pits the women of the (immediate and the larger, communal) family against each another, precluding the creation of meaningful, empowering, and life-affirming bonds of philia between them, so as to sustain and expand its hegemony.
Delikonstantinidou 423
Furthermore, Violeta Imperial’s song, the aural backcloth of most of the play, is, according to Svich, a song of mourning “for Iphigenia’s forgotten body, which she is seeking to remember, dis-member, and put together again,” playing “as an elegy for
[a] body all too living,” but whose death is taken for granted (“Notes” 3). Yet, her song can also be interpreted as a mourning chant for the violated bodies of all the female figures of the play—hers, Camila’s, Iphigenia’s, and the Fresa Girls’ who we will meet later on:
VIOLETA IMPERIAL: [sings] All the young girls
die in my arms
die like wounded birds
strangled by the palms. (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 16)
All things considered, Iphigenia’s encounter with Violeta Imperial decisively impacts on the heroine’s journey toward wholeness and freedom. The older woman is the first character in the play (the second being the Fresa Girls, and the third Achilles) who attempts to dissolve Iphigenia’s comforting illusions and willful ignorance concerning her father’s and his regime’s cruelty, and who alerts Iphigenia to her own responsibility for upholding this regime through her acquiescence. She is also the first who raises Iphigenia’s awareness of the sufferings faced by disadvantaged, minority groups under her father’s dictatorship, thus spearheading her political awakening as well as the process of her personal maturation—the two being inextricably interwoven.
Nevertheless, their encounter also revives in Iphigenia more recent and highly emotionally charged memories of her abduction by her father’s enemies in the drug
Delikonstantinidou 424 cartel the year before. This is an event partly reported by Iphigenia and the News
Anchor, and partly visually reenacted on screen, and one which, the play insinuates, may have been orchestrated by the General himself in order to win public sympathy— a prelude to the filicide he is about to commit. The shocking and painful reminiscence of the recent traumatic event acts together with her loyalty to her father, and her obstinate intent not to be defined by and through him anymore, to conduce to her dismissal, at least for the time being, of Violeta Imperial’s account of the cruel reality they share and of her warnings. As Svich has eloquently put it, “Iphigenia, who once again, is faced with the specter of death, throws a veil over the mirror called Violeta
Imperial, who recedes in the shadows, but will remember her” (“Notes” 3). The Fresa
Girls whom Iphigenia encounters next will make sure she does.
The Fresa Girls constitute perhaps the most revealing mirror for the protagonist. They appear early in the play as a chorus of phantoms, hovering about an abandoned factory and giving voice to lives of betrayed innocence, as well as of physical and psychic pain. This is how the members of the grim chorus present themselves in the play, as:
FRESA GIRL 2: The shit girls.
FRESA GIRL 3: Who find themselves dead.
FRESA GIRL 2: Killed by anonymous hands.
FRESA GIRL 1: Outside the clubs, bodies violated and slashed on the
dirt-gravel fields.
FRESA GIRL 3: And no one knows . . . anything.
Delikonstantinidou 425
[To IPHIGENIA] Because who is going to lift a hand to save a fresa
girl? (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 25)
The dramatization of their tragic predicament adds unmistakable political dimensions to the myth that Svich revises. As the playwright explains, explicitly drawing a connection between the play’s Fresa Girls and their real-life counterparts, “the fresa girls work for forty U.S. dollars a week in maquilas all over Latin and South
America” (“Notes” 3). The city of Juárez, in particular, once the “world capital of export-processing factories” (Turati, qtd. in Fragoso 24), “is filled with abused women who work for slave wages; poor, ‘strawberry’ girls, fresh from rural areas who came for better work in the city and who were murdered for no reason except they are expendable,” Chirico forcefully comments with regard to “fresa girls” within and without the play’s context. The scholar describes them as the “residual by- products” of the capitalist system and of its attendant structural (gender/sexual and ethnic/racial) inequalities (28), which render poor, brown young women hardly more than disposable flesh.
As many theorists and, particularly, feminist scholars have noted over the years, “an underlying systemic evil” is integral to feminicide, its roots firmly planted in “misogynist sexism, racist classism, and expansionist colonialism,” specifically the ethnic/racial politics and corporate interests that play into the latter (Pineda-Madrid,
Suffering and Salvation 27). In other words, this large-scale crime is “rooted in the structural inequalities that render some women and girls acutely vulnerable” (12).205
The Juárez tragedy that Svich dramatizes in this play is no exception, being but one
205. In an interview she gave to Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, the web journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics, Svich suggested that she considers this, among other such crimes, as one of the manifestations on the micro level of the entrenched “cycles of colonial and postcolonial debt (instilled by neoliberalist economic political agendas upon the global south)” (Gener 2010).
Delikonstantinidou 426 manifestation of the said large-scale crime. The very duration, the sheer numbers, and the horrifying brutality of the quasi-ritualized crimes (involving violent rape, mutilation, and murder of the victims) suggest that this is not “the work of a small group of sociopaths,” but rather the work of many. It is a structural rather than a random, haphazard, arbitrary phenomenon (24). And, while the perpetrators enjoy scandalous impunity, largely because of the tolerance, or even outright support of local authorities (including the police), the state proves itself more than incapable of protecting these poor women and girls from physical harm. According to Rosa Linda
Fregoso, Melissa Wright, and Nancy Pineda-Madrid, among others, “[t]he state must be viewed as complicit if not directly responsible” for the crimes (Pineda-Madrid,
Suffering and Salvation 27). As a matter of fact, as Chirico maintains, by failing to even properly care for the girls’ dead, violated bodies, the state betrays its terroristic sway, in as far as it sentences the lower classes to a life of subservient fear (29).
Svich’ construction of the play’s chorus of Fresa Girls as “the ghosts of the
Women in Juárez” (“Notes” 4) functions so as to conjoin the story and fate of her multiply victimized and soon-to-be-murdered protagonist with that of the hundreds of women with whose bodies the U.S.-Mexico borderland has been strewn for more than twenty years. It is worth noting that the foregoing dramatic choice on the playwright’s part is emphasized, in the course of Iphigenia Crash, by the imagery of pink crosses emanating from the factory walls with the glowing names of actual female victims written on them (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 11, 22, 25, 56, 63, 73), as well as by means of repeated references to the dead factory girls throughout the play (38, 56, 60, 73,
74). The fact that “fresa” also alludes to the Mexican slang term for upper-class socialites, young women like Svich’s Iphigenia, strengthens the link between the choral “Fresas” and the play’s protagonist. Finally, because of the allusion it contains,
Delikonstantinidou 427 the application of this term to working class victims played by men in drag
“cunningly twists our expectations of class and gender roles,” as Kerry Reid (2011) observes of Svich’s casting decision.
Svich’s casting of the Fresa Girls as men in drag merits special focus. Here, we fully endorse Littlefield’s observation on that matter when she says that:
The decision to cast the “dead girls” as men messes with the image of
the young, beautiful, dead female body. In at least one version of the
play, the fresa girls are cast in overdone doll makeup, wearing clothes
that are too small. Such imagery satirizes the over-emphasis on female
bodies in reports about sexual violence. Dressing male bodies up as
“fresa girls” dramatizes the process of presenting death as beautiful or
romantic.
On the one hand, then, Svich’s decision to proceed with this strategic casting challenges “canonical conventions of victimhood,” especially prevalent beautified and stylized media representations and visualizations of female victims of male- perpetrated aggression. It targets the misogynist, but well-entrenched, idea that beautiful women, because they embody some sort of temptation for the male, quite
“naturally” attract male sexual predators (or even that they somehow “have it coming”). But it also targets the similarly sexist notion that raping or killing, or otherwise maltreating a beautiful woman is either more or less outrageous than doing the same to a less attractive one (with “attractive” really meaning “feminine”). It is pertinent to further note, by way of Littlefield, that “[t]he casting of men in drag as
‘girls’ . . . draws attention to violence against transgender and transsexual people and makes the point that sexual violence is not just a girl’s problem.”
Delikonstantinidou 428
On the other hand, Svich further challenges the tendency to sensationalize and/or romanticize feminicide by exposing Iphigenia’s own initial naiveté regarding the Fresa Girls’ predicament, its dimensions and meaning for Iphigenia herself, no less than for the society that contains her and that will make a victim out of her just like it did for the other “girls.” At one point, while dancing her way to a rave in order to escape, at least temporality, from the knowledge of her own inevitable murder,
Iphigenia expresses her wish to be a Fresa Girl:
IPHIGENIA: I want to be just like you, girls.
FRESA GIRL 3: Like us?
IPHIGENIA: Names on a wall. Written by lovers who caress me.
FRESA GIRL 3: Caress us?
IPHIGENIA: You are beautiful girls. (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 27)
At the beginning, then, Iphigenia appears to be oblivious not only of the fact that the
Fresa Girls’ are dead, but also of the horrid circumstances of their death; that is, of the fact that they were not mourned by lovers who had caressed them, but raped, murdered, and forgotten by men who did not even bother to bury them or hide their dead bodies. Iphigenia’s striking ignorance and naiveté, both about the state in which the “girls” find themselves and about the events that led them to that state, serves a triple purpose. It throws into sharp relief the heroine’s privileged life, “indicts the naive reader or viewer,” and stresses that “[t]here is nothing beautiful about a dead body—even a young, female one—even one found outside a dance club” (Littlefield).
Yet, despite Iphigenia’s initial attempts to dress up and glamorize the Fresa
Girls’ as well as her own imminent death “with drama, drugs and dancing,” by the
Delikonstantinidou 429 end of the play, she has become painfully aware of the fact that “there is nothing romantic about” it, or about its inescapability (Littlefield). In the course of her journey, she has her naiveté shed off and turns from icon that the Fresa Girls want to possess and appropriate (hence their envious ripping off of Iphigenia’s Chanel dress) into a pharmakos or sacrificial victim for their suffering. Eventually, she “willingly takes on the pain of these women, asking to be sacrificed to redeem their deaths”
(Chirico 29). In remotivating Iphigenia’s sacrifice, that is, in having Iphigenia choose to stand in as a sort of martyr for the other women’s suffering, suffering that is as much personal as it is social, in order to redeem the social trauma of feminicide, Svich not only “shows us that such primitive rites of sacrificing women still exist today,” but also “transforms her death into a feminist gesture of solidarity” (Chirico 29), albeit one which the play works to problematize before it reaches its conclusion.
Admittedly, whether this meaningful gesture was/is in vain or not can be said to constitute a matter of contention. We will return to this point at the end of the present chapter to discuss it in more detail and in view of other elements of the play.
If the Fresa Girls and Violeta Imperial constitute Iphigenia’s mirrors, or, alternatively, extreme versions of her predicament, the character of Virgin Puta, the female protagonist of Iphigenia’s nightmare hallucination the night before her death, is explicitly said to be “Iphigenia’s other twin,” an excessively sinister one (Svich,
Iphigenia Crash 4). While the Fresa Girls “serve to portray the crude reality of feminicide victims” and, along with Violeta Imperial, awaken Iphigenia, as well as the audience, to the intensity and urgency of the social ills whose implications they embody (such as structural malfunctions/breakdowns at the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality contributing to the propagation of an increasingly violent rape culture), Virgin Puta is revealing of the most hideous aspects
Delikonstantinidou 430 of male abuse to a woman’s body and psyche that patriarchal culture condones.
During Iphigenia’s hallucination, “played as a commedia piece for an imaginary audience,” according to Svich’s stage directions (Iphigenia Crash 50), Virgin Puta emerges as the “ephemeral and super-grotesque version of Iphigenia,” (García Barca
39, 40). She is severely whipped by the Blessed General’s Ass, a phantasmagoric and reduced version of General Adolfo, and consecutively raped by both him and the
Hermaphrodite Prince, a grotesque and dehumanized version of Achilles. Her caricatured character is used by the playwright as “a tool” with which she
“hyperbolizes hypermasculine behavior and power” and “highlights the helpless situation of all female characters” in the play (42-3). But this is not all there is to her function in the play.
Her very name, we should note, evokes multiple layers of irony. On the one hand, the word “Virgin” alludes to the icon of Virgin Mary and to La Virgen de
Guadalupe as the idealized mother and national emblem of Mexico, and is, therefore, related to the concepts of innocence, decency, and purity (in more than one sense).
Yet, on the other hand, the word “Puta” (or “Whore” in English), alludes to the mythohistorical figure of La Malinche (also named La Chingada, meaning “the fucked one”), which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, has been construed over the course of her long history as a whore and a traitor of her people by Mexican nationalists. Combining the two words and, thus, conflating their opposite semiotic/symbolic load, “Svich builds a corrosive implication,” García Barca remarks.
The very fact that the word with the positive meaning is written in English whereas the one with the negative meaning is written in Spanish nods to the ethnic/racial and cultural politics and attendant hierarchies which undergird the nefarious stereotypes
(derived from both race/ethnicity and gender) and contradictions (virgin versus
Delikonstantinidou 431 whore) permeating the “two worlds (that in which English is spoken and that in which
Spanish is spoken) which touch, mix, and collide all at once” (García Barca 59).
Much like La Malinche, who has come to be seen as the combination of the whore/traitor of the indigenous people and the mother of the mestizo/uncrowned queen of Mexico, Virgin Puta constitutes a problematic contradiction which embodies, simultaneously, veneration, humiliation, and the familiar paradigm of woman as sexualized object and as abject: sensuous, impure, and degraded.206
Similarly to other Latina and Latino artists and writers, the playwright seeks to not simply redefine but subvert the virgin/puta or mother/prostitute dichotomy—what
Latina, and specifically Chicana, feminist scholars refer to as “La Virgen/La
Malinche” dichotomy. She accomplishes that by stretching, through the Virgin-Puta mestiza figure, the male-authored and misogynist polarization to its utter extremes, thus exposing its absurdity. Svich appears to be tapping into the cultural reality that
Anzaldúa described when she wrote that “the coming [together] of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (78), and that it is precisely the Latin American “experience of such collisions that provides a basis for combining opposites” (Burke 76). The play’s
Virgin Puta character incarnates exactly such a provocative, shocking, and perhaps
Latin/o/a America-specific, combination of opposites borne of the playwright’s own experience of violent yet productive cultural collisions.
Similarly to the ancient Greek mythical figure of Iphigenia, Virgin Puta is condemned to die again and again, underscoring the fact that the reality of female victimization, over which she is held like a distorting magnifying glass lens, is being
206. “You have been made meat,” General’s Ass tells Virgin Puta while he rapes her (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 51).
Delikonstantinidou 432 endlessly reproduced. It is this bleak cycle of historical repetition, as we have noted earlier in this chapter, that Svich’s twenty-first-century Iphigenia attempts to break by acting upon her desire to reclaim her body and her sensuality for another return and retelling (Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy 234). In her attempt, she is accompanied by another split-soul, Achilles.
Svich remakes Achilles “into a new shape for our times.” She describes him as
“[a] hero turned inside out for another age. A body longing for death but not able to die.” Her revised Achilles is an androgynous rock star, who has also been touched by
“a modern plague,” AIDS. She describes him, in her usual poetic, even neo-
Shakespearean, register, as living
with the plague taunting him with mortality every minute. But this
soldier who has become another kind of icon, a rock star, continues to
play. In a world where the DJ reigns, this rock star heeds Buddy
Holly’s call to “rave on.” There is no respite for this man idolized from
Homer . . . down through the present when his name is but a click of a
web-link away from the imagination . . . Achilles’ body has been
traversed by all zones, and is still standing. Some flesh must remain for
the eventual slaughter. (Svich, “Notes” 3)
Not unlike Iphigenia, Violeta Imperial, and the Fresa Girls, Achilles is objectified and victimized by patriarchy due to his feminine, androgynous attributes. As his grotesque
“twin,” the Hermaphrodite Prince serves to further illustrate in Iphigenia’s nightmare,
Achilles is as oppressed by male/masculinist conventions and structures of power as the female figures of the play. “A rough and tender beast in a silver dress and fishnet stockings, in a slip and combat boots, in perpetual transformation” (Svich, “Notes” 3),
Delikonstantinidou 433
Achilles has been figuratively and literally—the latter during the nightmare vignette—whipped into tentative submission. “Scratch her with your fingernails.
Suckle her, boy. . . . That’s right. Obey the law. . . . Do as you are told,” General’s
Ass orders him during the nightmare hallucination scene (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 53-
4), as a case in point.
Achilles’ hybridity, both physical and psychological, can be construed “as a critique to the canon of [the] flawless, masculine and statuesque hero,” García Barca proposes, and her view commands our agreement (66). However, we could suggest that his hybridity can also be interpreted as another attempt on the part of the playwright (the other two being the character of Violeta Imperial and the casting of the Fresa Girls in drag) to deal with aspects of the sexual spectrum. Hers is an attempt to, at once, represent and call for the need to maximize the visibility of people occupying non-normative positions across the spectrum of sexuality, of the fluidity that characterizes the said spectrum in general, and of people affected/afflicted by
HIV/AIDS, who still have to deal with forms of social stigmatization, discrimination, and even outright exclusion.207
It is worth noting, moreover, that Chirico’s argument concerning both
Achilles’ and Iphigenia’s entrapment and victimization by the terms of a “symbolic contract,” established without their consent, between themselves and society is hard to dispute. Both of them are fetishized and “‘owned’ in the same way the personhood of various movie stars and celebrities is owned; their lives are constructed fabrications,
207. According to Stefan Stürmer’s and Birte Siem’s informative study on civic society’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic crisis, “people living with HIV/AIDS suffer forms of stigmatization and discrimination ranging from the subtle avoidance of interpersonal contact, over overt prejudice and discrimination to hate crimes and even murder.” The global spread of HIV/AIDS has severe and long-lasting social and economic consequences, providing “a dramatic example of an ongoing global crisis,” which, however, and on the positive side of the ledger, “has led to an unprecedented rise of civic engagement to address the ensuing medical, social, economic, and political challenges” (n. pag.). See also UNAIDS (2010).
Delikonstantinidou 434 driven by the imagination and desires of the consuming public” (30). They are two celebrities caught in “different lenses of experience,” as Svich writes (“Notes” 4).
And, whereas Achilles (nearly) escapes myth’s hold through his music and drugs, the former really “a symbol of himself, a mixture of delirium and rapture” (García Barca
65),208 Iphigenia strives to temporarily escape, or, more essentially, claim (her) myth, and thus be free of its hold forever through love and, more unconventionally, through dance.
At some point, while in their erotic trance, Achilles sings: “war is over, the gods are over, everything is over,” as a soothing lullaby to Iphigenia, and she completes the song by singing: “. . . and I’m going to let my body reign . . . to let my body be. And stop, stop being the general’s daughter” (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 10).
Their duet hints at their unity. “We’re one, girl. I wouldn’t split,” Achilles affirms later in the play (64). Their act of making love is both an act of erasure and an act of recuperation of self for Iphigenia. As Achilles’ skin inscriptions, his tattoo, moves from his body to her body, Iphigenia finds herself through Achilles’ sign.
Nevertheless, this, rather partial and temporary, recuperation of self on the part of
Iphigenia and her newfound yet fragile sense of agency cannot suspend her, or
Achilles’, fate. The mystical, transcendental union they have shared does not prevent either of their decreed deaths for the “common good” of their non-specified country.
Achilles’ postcoital asking Iphigenia for forgiveness refers to and anticipates the fact that he will not be able to save her from her “certain fate.” He even admits to being a
“coward,” before the two of them part forever—or, at least, until the next stage of their afterlives (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 8, 60). Ultimately, Svich’s twenty-first
208. Although the play’s deliberate vagueness and open-endedness does not permit us to conclusively determine whether Achilles finally succeeds in his attempt to break through to a way of being born again.
Delikonstantinidou 435 century Achilles, like the ancient one, will have to carry the burden of his inability to act as a “true” hero and thwart Iphigenia’s sacrifice.
Throughout the play, but especially in its first, pre-awakening, part,
Iphigenia’s identity has been shown to be an object, or even partially a construct of the public gaze, prey to media manipulation, while her body has been claimed as property of the state: “Give us back your body, girl. It’s never been yours to keep,”
Soldier X revealingly orders her near the play’s end (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 75).
When, in the beginning of Iphigenia Crash, she embarks on a journey of self- and world-discovery, she can hardly be considered as a subject in/for herself. However,
Iphigenia does not approach her death as a submissive victim, as the object of someone else’s version of her tragic story. In Svich’s revision, Iphigenia’s acceptance of her sacrificial fate occurs after she has awaken to the overwhelming reality of suffering that surrounds her and to the fact that she is deeply enmeshed in it, after she has re-claimed her body and sensuality, and even, albeit provisionally, her identity from the media, and after she had partially integrated her public image with (the approximation of) a true self, albeit one always already multi-mediated.
As we have already seen, this re-claiming of identity and integration, however indeterminate, transpires, in large part, as a result of her transcendent erotic/sexual encounter with Achilles, which translates into her acting upon her desires and her recovery of a body previously traumatized and a sensuality theretofore dormant. Yet, it has also much to do with Iphigenia’s ecstatic dance taking place prior to her encounter with Achilles. As Chirico observes, “[t]hrough the dramaturgical device of dance,” adopted from ancient Greek theatre with its roots in Dionysian ecstasy,
“Svich depicts her Iphigenia reintegrating and reclaiming her divided self.” The heroine’s ecstatic dance alludes to the ancient Greek Bacchic revelry, “which allowed
Delikonstantinidou 436 for an integration of the self by dissolving the boundaries between reason and the irrational, between control and excessive behavior,” the scholar observes and goes on to draw a parallelism between Iphigenia and Achilles: “[a]s Achilles side-steps categorical definitions of gender through transvestism and claims the body for himself, dancing permits Iphigenia to be freed from the weight of fame, privilege, and public opinion” (Chirico 30)—at least for a while. As the heroine spins, rolls, and contorts in ecstasy-enhanced movements, she departs from her theretofore bound, overdetermined self, accesses a primal source of palingenetic forces, and temporarily becomes a person who can be claimed neither by the media, nor by the state, nor by her severely dysfunctional family.
Pregnant with ploughing potential, the orgiastic mode of her dance involves the communal, references the pre-modern, is inflected by the archaic and the mystical.
Boundaries between “body and mind, self and others, emotion and cognition, pre- reflexive and pre-linguistic sensation and linguistic reflexivity, as well as perception and action—perhaps even the boundary between this world and another” are lifted
(Vannini and Waskul 190). It should be stressed that Iphigenia’s immersion into the dance rave is not construed as a hedonistic escape. On the contrary, it is conducive to epiphany, rendered the means by which she becomes connected to, not detached from, the world and the self, and re-learns both. In “standing out” of the self she knew up to that point (ecstasy’s literal meaning), for as long as the dance lasts, Iphigenia has new life and knowledge breathed into that self. Finally, she emerges out of a persecuted, fetishized mythical self as a renewed, partially transformed, although not thoroughly reinvented, body-self; the self-aware subject of her own story, altered in bodily, emotional, cognitive terms, and determined to take action.
Delikonstantinidou 437
It is as the subject of her story and not as its object that Iphigenia decides to return to the city and take on the role of the sacrificial victim, not for her father’s or the “State”’s sake, however, but for the sake of all the suffering women and girls who have shared and still share her fate, so that their deaths will no longer be futile and senseless but acquire meaning. As Violeta Imperial will comment while preparing
Iphigenia for her coming sacrifice, evocatively dressing her with a dress made from the remnants of the dead girls’ garments: “Your death will help us make some sense of it all. Our grief will finally have a place” (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 74). The protagonist embraces her death as a sort of preemptive paradigm that will guarantee an improved life for the generations of women to come.
In line with Foley’s reading of the Girardian theory concerning the origins and role of sacrificial ritual in society with respect to Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, we could argue that Svich’s Iphigenia, similarly to her ancient predecessor, but with much more augmented (self)awareness, becomes “a human sacrificial victim that can serve . . . to re-unite the community and restore the social system,” in a time of crisis, when social structures are collapsing. However, similarly to how Euripides’ play
“close[s] with a series of irresolvable contradictions held in fragile balance,”
Iphigenia Crash undercuts “the nature and function of the [sacrificial] ritual as a source of salvation” (“Marriage and Sacrifice 175). Similarly to Iphigenia at Aulis,
Svich’s revision does not shy away from exposing the sacrificial mechanism as another tool in the service of a cruel, sadistic status quo which stays in power by, at once, claiming divine approval and instilling terror in the subordinate population via ceremonial killings.209
209. According to recent studies on ancient societies (such as, the Anasazi and the Aztecs) engaging in human sacrifice, the practice of human sacrifice (and cannibalism) can be
Delikonstantinidou 438
The shocking irony of the play’s ending is that the supposedly generative and
redemptive sacrificial mechanism is deconstructed only after Iphigenia is already
dead. This turn of events casts painful doubt over the ultimate meaning of her, and,
through her, of all innocents’, sacrifice. It also casts doubt over the ability of an
innocent’s sacrifice to change the realities of the world; that is, the very realities
which make or present sacrifice as necessary, or even inevitable, in the first place.
Much like the Euripidean play, this one refuses to offer a resolution to the conflict
between a politics of injustice and the capacity of the individual for (offering)
redemption, or of individual gestures of love and self-sacrifice to transform the
violent scenarios of our world.
III. Healing and the Politics of Love
By the time she returns to the city to be sacrificed, Iphigenia has become fully
aware of the General’s true intentions and is able to critically reflect on her life and
fate. She even describes with details to the mercenary the way she wants to be killed:
IPHIGENIA: Make my father pay you. I want you to kill me.
I want you to lead me into a quiet house off the main road, and tell me
Achilles is waiting for me.
I want you to lead me with a knife at my back.
I want you to close the door, and cover my eyes
accounted for by a set of interrelated hypotheses involving social control, ritual, and social pathology. The practice was supposed to terrorize into submission a population that “lacked the central control necessary for effective resistance” (294). See also Turner and Turner (1999) on the “social control hypothesis” as it relates to the practice of human sacrifice.
Delikonstantinidou 439
And when I ask “Why?” I want you to pierce me with a knife.
......
This is how I want to be remembered:
With a tab of E on my tongue, the rush of love in my heart,
And the whole world spinning with my glory.
Pulse. Pulse. I go. (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 76, 79)
In authoring the script of her own death and in pre-mortem directing the way she is to be remembered, Svich’s Iphigenia seems to be acting upon her intention to not have her death and memory mystified, fetishized, and commodified by the same patriarchal masculinist order that condemned her to death.
Nevertheless, as the penultimate scene of the play reveals, the media and the news reporters still manipulated and distorted her death, as they did the events unfolding throughout the play, while both her family members and the Fresa Girls participated in the tragicomic media turmoil that followed her death. And if the latter took advantage of the death of a “rich tabloid magazine dream” to secure for themselves the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 68), her father capitalized on it, bolstering his propagandistic rhetoric by means of the news’ sheer emotional charge, to save himself from political ruin. Dressed in a military coat, he adresses to the nation thus:
ADOLFO: . . . [on video] God took her. I believe God’s will has been
done.
We must pray. We must pray that all the fighting will stop.
Delikonstantinidou 440
We must remember Iphigenia, and everything she did for us.
As your leader, I will do my best, in this time of great sorrow for our
family,
To live up to her precious memory.
My daughter Iphigenia is a saint. Let there be peace now.
[In the foreground, ADOLFO is live, watching his image on the
screen.]
[live] I will be re-elected. No one will throw a father who has just lost
his daughter out of office.
No matter what he’s done. No matter how much he loved her. No one
will dare. (82)
The politics of love that Iphigenia furnished, indeed fleshed out, via her self-sacrifice has ultimately been usurped, harnessed to serve the cause of a politics of injustice.
The playwright offers the chilling suggestion that Iphigenia will remain in the grip of a bloody myth for as long as society requires the sacrifice of the innocent “in the name of war, and therefore, peace” (Svich, “Notes” 5).
The play ends with Iphigenia alone onstage, bidding a strange farewell to a mourning Achilles and to the audience (imaginary and real) before the final blackout:
IPHIGENIA: . . . The story has been told again
......
Every part of me is breaking.
Delikonstantinidou 441
But I’m all right.
Give me your hands.
Give me your hands,
Cause you’re wonderful. (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 87)
More exploratory than explanatory, Iphigenia Crash’s ambiguous coda reinstates
Svich’s challenging of the view that the death and suffering of women qua women can somehow be meaningful in the general order of things, in laying bare the limitations and inadequacies of the idea and practice of their sacrifice, which is deemed necessary for the continued existence and prosperity of a fundamentally corrupt sociopolitical system. Unlike Morton’s La Malinche, in which the sacrifice of an innocent (Martín) allows the possibility of a new, hopeful beginning for the survivors of the catastrophe, and unlike Moraga’s The Hungry Woman, where Chac-
Mool’s sacrifice is conducive to an alternatively configured/re-membered re-unity, and more like Alfaro, Svich confronts us with a view of sacrifice as essentially unnecessary or even irrational if judged in view of the complexities of its aftermath, characterized by a sort of ethical disorientation instead of enlightenment. (Her)
Iphigenia’s story, much like Euripides’ variant, ultimately dissolves into thought- provoking open-endedness.
Yet, even as Iphigenia is shown to be caught in a lamentable cyclical birth- death-rebirth pattern, which, in the course of the play, has served to complicate familiar assessments of mythical logic and social reality in exposing both as victimizing, her voice is rescued from the obscurity of the said pattern and the thralls of oblivion. The play closes with a doubled—live and onscreen—image of Iphigenia
Delikonstantinidou 442
“in extasis” (Svich, Iphigenia Crash 86): departing from the mortal world yet holding onto Achilles’ love for another life, another return, another retelling. She may not have been able to escape her certain fate or thoroughly reinvent herself, but she did emerge as more than the mythical and media-devised self that others see in her. She did claim and acted upon her sensuality, body, and desires, and thus she is now enriched and prepared for her next return. Even as Svich allows for the myth, its organizing mytheme of the sacrifice, as well as its entire reception history, to be criticized, she grants the myth the power of truth and the forward impulse toward a future that will find us better equipped for our re-turns through the agency of
Iphigenia herself. The play ultimately celebrates the power of human logos to represent a self, even a self in defeat. Even in defeat, in disaster, even without the power to command the present, the human voice and speech achieves a dramatic or apostrophic significance, violating a silence that echoes with heinous complicity.
Therein beats the play’s tragic heart, in its affirmation of life via negativa, in keeping with the distinct workings of the tragic mode.
“It is possible to fall apart before falling together, before recognizing something familiar in each other,” a contemporary Greek film suggests, paying tribute to the ancient Greeks who understood the palingenetic power of love and made a god out of it: Eros (Worlds Apart, 2015). Svich apparently holds a similar position and so does her Iphigenia Crash. Despite the play’s cataclysmic vision of our twenty-first- century world, Iphigenia Crash concludes with a heartening message: “to hold into someone else can be wonderful” (Svich, “Notes” 6), thus reaffirming the playwright’s belief that it is only through love, trusting and consuming, and through the communion it fuels that we can aspire to a world free of restless sacrificial victims. In the meantime, and while working toward setting the concrete conditions for the
Delikonstantinidou 443 fulfillment of this aspiration, the best we can do is to allow them to signal with life- affirming meaning “through the flames,” as Artaud once urged that we do (13).
To put it differently, Svich’s mythoplay suggests—and acts upon the suggestion—that until that time when the politics of love and responsibility will substitute the politics of injustice currently in place, channels are needed to allow for the outcomes of collective trauma, suffering, grief, resentment, to be expressed, so that those born into a legacy of perpetration can be relieved and the legacy itself be redeemed. Iphigenia Crash should be considered as such a channel, allowing trauma to be voiced, lamented, and processed, so that its damaging effects on the individual and society can be transformed; so that unexpressed and unresolved suffering will not be passed from one generation to the next. In radically, in both aesthetic and political terms, addressing the impact of trauma on the personal and collective psyche, in showing it to be a historical wounding and disclosing its age-old roots, and in cautionarily, or preemptively, projecting (on) the future as an extension of the present, the play prevents the perception of the event(s) that caused the trauma as discontinuous and/or uncontrolled, and becomes conducive to its integration into the social fabric. Thus, it performs a kind of remedial or curatuve work that not only promotes the continuity of social life, but also the discovery of ways to end the cycle of retraumatization both for the individual and for the collective, beginning with the local and the communal, and extending to the global and the structural-systemic.
Similarly to all of the other mythoplays that we have examined so far,
Iphigenia Crash demonstrates the devastating effects of the post-/neo-colonial and patriarchal order and of its dominant politics and ethics on the social body, and especially on its female constituency as well as on other marginalized sections of it.
Meanwhile, however, the play also prompts the imagining of a decolonizing politics
Delikonstantinidou 444 and of a self-reflexive human ethics informed by a tragic mode all too familiar to the world and the human condition. It effectuates this prompting, or call to action, through Iphigenia’s inspiring struggles for selfhood,210 her indomitable will for love and life, and her resilient and life-affirming logos, but also through the representation and engagement of “invisible” and excluded, stigmatized threads of the social fabric, as well as through the recognition of the trauma of feminicide and its dissection down to its systemic/structural roots. The play’s summoning up the will for sociopolitical change is tied to its disarticulation of the false projections circulating in mainstream(ed) dominant cultural imaginaries regarding their “others” and to its opening up to an augmented receptivity to alterity. In that respect, it squarely faces the possibility of sociopolitical healing, pointing toward the kind of breakthrough that
Moraga has described as a gesture toward “a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation” (Loving 124)— although, as we have noted, it does this in a way distinct from Moraga’s. Hence the play’s partaking of “la cultura cura” strand of a transformative decolonizing discourse and praxis, which integrates the political and the therapeutic and which aspires to have a politically radical and socially healing effect on the twenty-first- century condition, woven through by the import and modus operandi of the tragic.
The story of Iphigenia, a story of public, state-sanctioned crimes and violence against women, is closer than ever to us in contemporary society, when we are “even more distanced from an active and ethical relationship with the original event” (Svich,
“Notes” 4). Svich revises the myth of Iphigenia not only in order to pay homage to its never ending “presentness,” but also as part of an attempt to recover Iphigenia, as a
210. “[T]he process of knowing one’s self when one is multiply oppressed is, by necessity, a decolonizing one, as it is for the multiply privileged,” writes Laura E. Pérez evocatively (141- 2); a formulation that speaks forcefully to the dramatization of Iphigenia’s self-exploratory and empowering journey by Svich.
Delikonstantinidou 445 thinking, feeling, speaking subject and in so doing to “grant her rest” (Svich “Notes”
4). Through Iphigenia’s recovery the playwright wishes to, also, grant rest to all these ghost-girls whose death have not been claimed and who, like the play’s Fresa Girls, mark present, Latin American border landscapes. As she has argued, she cannot think that her body and her position in the world, as a Latina playwright, have nothing to do with her work. Thus, in this work, she places her Latina point of view at the forefront of the theatrical experience (Svich “Home, Desire, Memory” 319-22), dramatizing by means of an ancient Greek tragic myth the predicament of other contemporary Latin
American women.
Svich’s engagement with a Greek, instead of a “purely” Latin American or indigenous, myth bears testament to the fact that the playwright “constantly feels” and capitalizes on the presence of all of her “phantom patrias,” European and Latin
American, in her life and work (Svich, “Home, Desire, Memory” 320). The mestizo/a form of Iphigenia Crash, “poised somewhere between performance and art, poetry and narrative, where there no borders” (Svich, “Home, Desire, Memory” 322), and the mestizo/a nature of its characters, effectively showcases the coexistence of multiple and diverse “phantom patrias” and their respective cultural heritages in the playwright’s creative imagination. The idea of mestizaje, then, can be said to permeate Svich’s play, as it did Morton’s, Moraga’s, and Alfaro’s. Like them, Svich imagines the path toward a new mestizaje reality as haunted by sacrificial victims, without, however, abandoning the belief that the ethos of this new mestizaje heralds or carries the promise of a humanity that will not require the sacrifice of the innocent to consolidate a fragile illusion of peace and stability; a humanity that we have good reasons to believe will still bear the unmistakable mark of tragic, yet, hopefully, will not be that sad.
Delikonstantinidou 446
Tragedy . . . speaks to the situation of modernity not because it
is timeless but because it is untimely. . . . embedded in a rich reception history . . . , a continuing tradition of anachrony, a timeless
residue of untimeliness. . . . [T]he tragic is . . . itself time-bound and
etched into an ongoing history of tragedy and the tragic.
(Leonard Location 3265-81)
Delikonstantinidou 447
Epilegomena
This study has attempted an exploration of the (border)lands of Latin/o/a
American reception of classical Greek texts, that is, ancient myths and their illustrious literary treatments by the Greek tragedians, and the/ir tragic mode. The exploration has been predicated, first and foremost, on the presence of a distinct space within the
American cultural world carved out by cultural agents of the Latin American diaspora, focusing especialy on theatre practitioners. Hopefully, the present study will further enrich existing accounts of the peculiarities of this “niche landscape” and of the challenges and opportunities it poses for the “Americanist field-imaginary” (Pease
1990), to whose decentering it has arguably contributed; for “the emerging field imaginary of trans-American studies” (Saldívar x), whose opening up it serves; as well as for a transcultural Americanist project, whose gestation it heralds (Lenz
2011)—and even beyond that. Admittedly, the wealth of material comprising the
Latin/o/a American cultural corpus is such that allows for daring visions of possibilities.
The present study has turned to one of the wellsprings of this wealth, the distinct place and role of myth in Latin/o/a American culture and, more specifically, theatre. In addition to paying proper attention to this particular aspect and property of the Latin/o/a American cultural corpus, we have tried to chart the new directions that contemporary Latino/a theatre in the U.S. has established in mythopoesis and mythography by entering into an alliance with the Greek mythical and tragic resources.
Delikonstantinidou 448
As we saw in the introductory chapter of this study, myth and myth-making make up a cornerstone of U.S. Latino/a culture and of one of its most vital and distinguished strands, its theatre tradition, since the sixteenth century. Latino/a theatre, in its various components, or performative traditions and techniques, has, in fact, been built on an complex of ritual and myth, seeped through with communal concerns and inflections. This is a solid yet pliant complex, deriving from the many different cultures that converged in the Americas and in the U.S., more particularly, and syncretizing the mystical and the spiritual with the mundane and the sociopolitical. The ties of Latino/a theatre to a ritualistic and mythical substratum remained largely unscathed, notwithstanding their reshaping, even when the former was explicitly enlisted to serve specific nationalist(ic) agendas during the Latino/a
Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano Renaissance.
The recovery and re-creation of precolonial pasts, especially by means of the theatre, emerged in that period as an ideologically and politically charged project, part and parcel of the larger project of decolonization from Euro America; a process contributive to the reclamation of rights and reinvention of viable identities of the part of U.S. Latinos/as. The dramatization of (mainly) Native American myth was, at that time, subsumed as a treasured asset into the armature of Latino/a militants by which they would resist and respond to omnipresent Eurocentrism. Advocating against the disenfranchisement and subalternization of Latino/a peoples, rescuing from obscurity their long-subordinated constitutive mythohistories as mestizos/as, the mythoplays or mitos that were developed by Latino/a and Chicano/a playwrights contributed to
Latino/a empowerment and self-formation.
One of the less fortunate dimensions of this project, that is, the use of mitos to bolster and reinforce cultural nationalist discourses and practices underpinned by
Delikonstantinidou 449 oppositional cultural and identity politics, was that the “self” that it helped form was predominantly a male one. Futhermore, the mitos, similarly to the oppositional rhetoric which they largely served, carried visible traces of patriarchy, heterosexism, homophobia, ethnoracial binaries, as well as polarizations of “us” versus “them.”
Many portions and facets of the plural Latino/a reality and experience were excluded or marginalized in the cultural production of that period, and it is to these that more contemporary Latinos and Latinas, scholars, activists, as well as theatre practitioners, including the ones whose work this study examines, sought to attend. Simultaneously, the aforementioned cultural agents began to acknowledge Latinos/as’ increasingly transmigratory presence and its implications for the U.S., particularly in view of the fact that this presence expedites processes of transnationalization that the latter undergoes (222), to draw from Ana Patricia Rodriguez’s analysis of post-eighties
Latino/a literature.
The mythical resources of Latino/a theatre have continued to be mined for their interpretative and mediatory potential, only, in post-eighties theatre works they have been put into different uses. In most cases, they are used to “negotiate and reconstruct increasingly complex Latinidades that are situated in divergent histories, socioeconomic hierarchies, race and ethnic stratifications, gender and sexual violence, and geocultural displacements, among other things” (Rodriguez 221). And, in some of these cases, they are employed in works, such as the ones this study includes, that, on the one hand, address and navigate through “transnational displacements and diasporas,” as well as “local social inequities and global forces producing diasporic experiences” (221), while, on the other, gesture toward new forms of affiliation, shifting political coalitions, and an emergent, politically-charged—still decolonization-oriented but twenty-first-century-specific—mestizaje consciousness.
Delikonstantinidou 450
Early on in this study, but also in the course of the plays’ analysis, we have discussed how the theatre works under consideration here respond by investing in the discourse, vision, and ethos of a new mestizaje to the imperative to recognize, make sense of, and act upon the nuances of an increasingly plural “Latino diasporic condition spanning the globe” (Rodriguez 222). This is especially true in recent times, as more and more Latinos/as reach “outside of the U.S. geographical territory” and
“engage with and represent Latino/a cultural imaginaries and identities outside of historically traditional ethnic configurations and U.S. geographical locations” (222).
Specifically, we have explained how the works are inextricably woven through by the sociopolitical and cultural vision of a new mestizaje, critical, inclusive, and global in intent and scope. Also, we have reflected on why this latest mestizaje ethos, which endorses and advances hybridity and transculturation, as well as new modes of inter/transcultural translation, syncrisis, and negotiation, can be said to constitute their driving force and structuring principle. The act of reaching out beyond Latino/a- specific mythohistorical resources to Greek ones that these works perform has been cast in the course of the study in terms of this new mestizaje, which develops precisely in response to “the transnational diffusion of Latino American diasporas and the globalization of Latinidades across the world” (222).
In choosing to draw from the Greek resources, and combine material therefrom with “native” material to treat current Latino/a realities, the mythoplays we have examined perform a shift in the politics of representation as well as, more broadly, in the cultural and identity politics of Latinos/as in the U.S. culturescape. In the eighties and nineties, as Rodriguez observes, “U.S. Latino/a literary and cultural production participates in the production of more diverse and divergent images, discourses, voices, and texts across the hemisphere,” thus serving “as a site of contact
Delikonstantinidou 451 and intersections” (221). Our fin-de-siècle and post-millennium mythoplays take a step further and expand this site by rehearsing and staging contacts and intersections across the hemispheres. In creatively engaging with the Greeks, they, in effect, imagine Latinidades, not only across the hemisphere, but also across hemispheres. In a very important sense, they, therefore, further diversify already diverse Latinidades, articulate and resonate with them, “as well as [with] the various historical and contemporary political, economic, and cultural issues of U.S. Latinos/as” (221), as we have seen in the preceding chapters.
The theatrical iteration of and dealing with these issues, or concrete swathes of contemporary Latino/a experience (most of which have been shown here to relate to the persisting manifestations of the traumatic legacies of the Conquest and colonization), through transhemispheric cultural alliances and streams of mythico- cultural capital perhaps signals the dawn of a new phase in Latin/o/a (and) American cultural production. This would be (or already is) a phase marked by a more pronounced transcultural and transmigratory impulse which works in tandem with a strong commitment to remedial sociopolitical change (without, however, imposing a single vision of this change), albeit in the midst of adverse circumstances; in other words, one that foregrounds different, exciting, and more heartening possibilities in a globalization-driven world.
A new economy, in many senses of the word, thus emerges that provides a different framework for approaching and understanding U.S. Latino/a identity and cultural politics and ethics, as well as the aesthetics and poetics of Latino/a cultural, and specifically theatrical, outflows, in the twenty first century. It is an economy and a framework that (cor)respond critically to the particular conditions that the new century has set up for us: a seemingly omnipotent neoliberalism, the omnipresent
Delikonstantinidou 452 media, the omniscient cyber presence, and, ultimately, the political and identity crises attending all three. They certainly do not soar above twenty-first-century market considerations—after all, tagging “ancient Greek” on a cultural item has proven to be an almost unfailingly successful marketing strategy in the past decades, at least in the theatre realm. Yet, in enlarging their scope, perspective, and field of resources, they do provide a useful, sobering yet hope-oriented, alternative angle to realities of crisis.
Moreover, they inject not only a great degree of urgency, but also a novel, “rethought and retooled” post-movimiento energy of resistance to attempts at responding to these crises (Priewe 277), by means of the very politics of the possible and of affinity that underpin it; politics unmistakably informed by the new mestizaje ethos discussed above.
To this we must add and underscore the fact that the Greek material that gets transferred though transhemispheric routes and filtered through (trans)hemispheric roots in the body of works examined here is not just any material but one attuned to a tragic mode of being, becoming, and perceiving the world and the human condition in it. The tragic mode imparts a distinct kind of transformative potency and potential to the emergent economy and modulates the framework so that the politics and ethics, aesthetics and poetics of Latino/a culture and theatre can be viewed and treated with a bracing, forward-looking self-reflexivity and self-consciousness; “forward-looking” not despite of but because of their groundedness into the tragic’s ever-contested, peculiar relevance, or its “timeless residue of untimeliness,” to point to Leonard’s formulation preceding the Epilegomena (Location 3265-81).
One of the major contributions of this project, then, is, in fact, its breaking ground in the study of Latin/o/a American cultures as it opens up the way for more nuanced transhemispheric accounts of the flows, migrations, and transfers that
Delikonstantinidou 453 currently lend it its distinctive shape. The transhemispheric import and potential of the
Latino/a yet Greek-inspired and -based body of texts examined in this study is such that enables not only the development of existing cross-cultural bonds between the
Greek and the Latino/a cultures, but also for forging new bonds between the said cultures. As a matter of fact, the creation of new links and bridges between those seemingly very different contexts becomes all the more possible in the light of existing, although long-neglected, connections. A topical transhemispheric bringing together of the Greek and the Latino/a context in an, as of yet, underexamined site of contact would not materialize in a historical vacuum; rather, it would be build on solid historical ground and on strong precedents.
In the “Prolegomena,” we touched on several cross-cultural bonds pertaining between the ancient Greek context and the Latin/o/a American one. These bonds concern, predominantly, pronounced hybrid origins, constitutive diasporic and migratory histories, processes, and experiences, as well as parallels and similarities existing not only between the Greek and the Latin/o/a American mythopoetic and mythographic tradition, but also between the patterns of cultural progression of the two contexts. Yet, drawing from a relevant study by William Garcia, we also briefly commented on the fact that “the Latin American playwrights have not been oblivious to the rewriting of tragic myths originally elaborated by the Greeks.” On the contrary,
“among the numerous and diverse themes, trends, and subjects within the vast, quite unknown, Latin American dramaturgy, the classical Greek myth is one of the most employed”; “an unknown fact to many authors of world drama histories” (145). There is good reason to speculate that the aforementioned cross-cultural bonds smoothed the way into this practice. Nowadays, more and more scholars set out to explore the varied afterlife of the Greek resources in Latin America. This rising interest in the
Delikonstantinidou 454 reception of the Greeks in the region testifies to the cultural resonance, as well as to the currency and purchase of the said afterlife. Still, as we have seen throughout this study, the U.S. Latino/a context exhibits a distinct constellation of peculiarities and particularities, challenges and problematics, which differentiate it from and within the broader (Latin) American uber-context, and thus demands distinct treatment of the
Greeks’ afterlife within its ecosystem. It was the productive difference of the U.S.
Latino/a unter-context that, in fact, warranted the undertaking of the present project.
In the course of research, the way in which more contemporary U.S.
Latinos/as engage with Greek myth, and, specifically, with that portion of the Greek mythical cosmos in which the tragic mode is operative, was found to make for an innovative (in the ways it syncretizes ancient Greek with Latino/a-specific material) and sociopolitically productive (in the ways it seeks to bring about transformative sociopolitical change) revisionary approach. Their revisions of Greek tragic myths employ Greek mythical material which has also been taken on by the tragic genre as inspiration and source, while also building on and dramaturgically forestaging the cross-cultural bonds obtaining between the Greek and the Latin/o/a American cultures. Taken together, these revisionary theatre works make up an extremely fertile territory of cultural/artistic production that has remained virtually unexplored. Indeed, although some of the plays examined here have received scant scholarly treatment
(despite the fact that most of them have been greeted with awards and all with positive reviews), no critical insight has been directed to the plays as a body of texts sharing a number of parameters in terms of aesthetics, poetics, ethics, and politics.
One primary set of questions that this study has attempted to convincingly answer, then, relates to the reasons why engagement with Greek tragic myth to attend to U.S. Latino/a realities, given also the extent to which it occurs in the past twenty-
Delikonstantinidou 455 five years, has drawn little critical interest. This neglect would, perhaps, be attributed to the well-attested phenomenon of marginalization, and even exclusion, of important segments of Latino/a cultural production, if it had not been for Jorge Huerta’s review of Morton’s La Malinche. In that review, the eminent scholar interrogates Morton’s bringing together (in the same paradigm as we have earlier discussed) of the Greek
Medea with the Central/South American Malinche, instead of focusing exclusively on the latter. And, then, there were Messinger Cypess’ arguments against the inclusion of the figures of Malinche, Llorona, and Medea in the same paradigm, on the grounds that the presence of Greek Medea compromises the cultural value of the other two figures. This evident distrust of the combination of Greek and Central/South
American figures and other mythical material was shown through the following research to have its roots to an ambivalent stance toward the Greek resources.
In the course of the twentieth century, especially during the Latino/a Civil
Rights Movement, Greek culture was constructed and construed by many cultural nationalists as the hegemonic “Other” of the Latino paradigm, and as such, it was ruled out of the arsenal of most Latino/a artists. Suspicions of this kind seem justifiable in view of the fact that the Greek resources have been “successfully . . . annexed by European culture,” as Goff and Simpson have argued (Crossroads 7), for so long that they came to be considered integral constituents of the Euro American imperial tradition and the colonial archive. The view that Latino/a militants held of the Greeks was to change drastically by the end of the century among Latino/a artists and theatre practitioners, more specifically, although, as the pieces of criticism above serve to evince, wariness in the presence of the Greek material has not been uprooted yet from Latino/a circles. This development owes much to insights gained in and mined from the fields of the Classics and, especially, Classical Reception Studies.
Delikonstantinidou 456
Indeed, credit is due to Classical Reception Studies of the past few decades for disentangling the Greek resources from the snares of Eurocentrism and from vested
“white” and “western” proprietary claims on them; or, for showing them to be much more and other than cogs of the colonial/imperial apparatus. Recent studies of the afterlife of the ancient Greek material around the world show, and the theatre practice examined here testifies, that its characteristic propulsion and “chronotopic elasticity” are neither conterminous with, nor due to an abstract quality of transcendental universality. Rather, its afterlife has been compellingly explained by means of the
“model of pushing and pulling” put forth by Goff and Simpson, according to which the Greek texts “are pulled through history by so many reappropriations, in so many contexts, that they develop an autonomous capacity to push, from the sheer momentum bestowed by this pulling power.” There is “no push without pull,” they emphasize (53). To put it differently, if the ancient Greek texts are received, by western and non-western “receivers,” including the ones this study discusses, as a corpus of knowledge and affect which is unfinished and carrying into the future, it is because so many others before have served to nourish and enrich this corpus by investing in it, thus also rendering it amenable to revisionary treatment. Lorna
Hardwick’s “migratory model” of classical receptions works in tandem with Goff’s and Simpson’s “model of pushing and pulling” to shed light on the mechanisms undergirding the Greeks’ journey through the different ages of the world. According to her model, the Greek texts are “themselves diasporic, uprooted from their original contexts, travelers both physically and metaphorically across time, place, and language” (Contests and Continuities 46-7). They are migrants, for all intents and purposes, subject to and involved in processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization implicating European cultures and their erstwhile colonial subjects.
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Whether or not the Latino/a playwrights addressed here were cognizant of these and other related developments in the field of Classical Reception Studies, their mestizo/a revisionary theatre works are admittedly aligned with them, further attesting to the validity of the aforementioned models. Therefore, they depart radically from the nationalist(ic) postulates, and exclusivity, of earlier twentieth-century Latino/a theatre practices for which the Greek material was regarded as not only foreign, but even contrary, to the oppositional political expediencies prevalent at the time.
Simultaneously, and in a manner similar to that of other non-western, contemporary, revisionary treatments of the ancient Greek material, the revisions addressed here work to de-centre it, to draw from Hardwick, “from what used to be thought of as their dominant western, cultural, social and political associations,” as well as distance it “from at least some of the effects of its association with (for example) imperial hegemonies.” Thereby, the Greek material can be said to be undergoing “a quasi postcolonial experience . . . freed to assume new identities which are not limited by the dictates, values and material culture of colonialist appropriators” (“Refiguring
Classical Texts” 109). An illustrative instance of the foregoing point is the Medea–
Malinche–Llorona paradigm discussed in the first analytical part of the study, and, especially, the way it operates in Morton’s and Moraga’s mythoplays, which serves to, at once, give a more inclusive twist to the Greeks’ reception and to the concept of mestizaje.
This is not to say, of course, that the long-standing attachments between the
Greek texts and the European receiving cultures are unproblematically dismissed. The fact that in Alfaro’s and in Svich’s work the reception history of the Greek material on which they draw is metaliterally, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, commented upon speaks forcefully to the multi-directional flows of influence at play
Delikonstantinidou 458 in the practice of mestizo/a mythopoesis they perform. It testifies to the fact that, in the revisionary process, all four “interlocutors,” that is the ancient Greek, the
European, the Euro American, and the Latino/a (itself a blend of age-old and current aspects) contexts, are constantly implicated with one another. Still, what is of outmost importance to this study is that the Greek texts are seized in the works considered here both as a vital and enduring part of the plural Latino/a cultural heritage, and as fecund sites of political agency and existential investment. They are conceived and employed as allied to Latino/a culture on the grounds of actual cross-cultural bonds, not least of which is the migratory strand weaving through both, but also as allied to the realities and experiences of crisis from which the revisions spring, which they dramatize, and on which they seek to function remedially.
With respect to this last point, that is, the plays’ remedial function, a synoptic reiteration of their dimension as social interventions in terms of social theatre praxis is in order. The works under consideration constitute a mestizo/a revisionary theatrical corpus that bears affinities to the principles and practices of what is commonly known as “social theatre” (to use a portmanteau term that covers a wide range of theatrical relatives). This is so, insofar as all of them blend aesthetics and radical politics, as well as use theatrical tools to work on real-life sociopolitical issues. Throughout the preceding chapters, we have seen how all works exhibit, some more and some less overtly, features of the quite accommodating domain of social theatre, to the extent that they seek, in a quite immediate way, to intervene politically and culturally into, as well as to have a sociotherapeutic effect on, Latino/a communities of/in crisis.
Yet, we have also seen that the plays’ political radicality is anything but uniform. Instead, it displays many shades and hues, as each work sets different focal points, and thus yields different approaches to and treatments of realities of crisis.
Delikonstantinidou 459
Even works by the same playwright, in the case of Alfaro’s revisions, provide different, politically inflected and socially engaged, angles to social diseases or nosoi plaguing the Latino/a barrio world and its constituencies, particularly its cholo/a components. The specific ways in which each work pursues its political “quest” differ too. Alfaro’s works qualify more conspicuously as social theatre projects, investing heavily in channeling their constitutive political radicality on the level of production, throughout the workshopping process, as well as through the production itself and through post-production events and initiatives. In Morton’s and Moraga’s works, political radicality operates evidently on the intra-diegetic level. Finally, in the case of
Svich’s Iphigenia Crash, political radicality suffuses the play intra-diegetically, but also marks emphatically the play on the production level, especially through casting and other staging choices.
Granted their respective differences in performing their radical politics though social theatre mechanisms, all works discussed in this study partake of “la cultura cura” conceptual and experiential framework and strand of a decolonizing discourse and praxis that, as we have noted in the course of the analysis, aspires to have a healing effect on the post-Conquest, post-or neo-colonial condition by integrating the radically political and the therapeutic. Most importantly for the perspective and purposes of this study, all of them, in formulating and attempting to carry out their radical politics and their therapeutic function, find in the tragic mode a profound source of inspiration and resonant material, as well as a potent ally.
Before recapitulating some key points of this distinct “alliance” that the
Latino/a revisions have contracted with the tragic mode, some sypoptic remarks with regard to their aesthetics are also due. As was to be expected, any dramaturgical choices on the part of the playwrights and the plays’ productions have been informed
Delikonstantinidou 460 by and served the politics and ethics of the revisions. Yet, whereas the tragic mode operates evidently on the textual level, other, more literally performative/on-stage elements of the plays constitute techniques by which the revisions (and, by extension, the receiving cultures they represent) engage in critical and creative negotiation both with the Greek primary material (and, by extension, with the ancient Greek culture and its legacies of reception), and with the American “home cultures.” Through the employed dramaturgical approaches, reception of the Greeks gets both diversified and defamiliarized. These entail experimentations with:
narrative organization, plot and plot sequence (for instance, disruptions in
the unity of time and space as well as time and space conflations in
Moraga and Svich);
rhythm and tempo (often serving to intensify the affective import of parts
of the plays, most emphatically in Moraga and Svich);
casting and the corporeality of the performers and the performances alike
(conspicuously implementing deconstructive approaches to intertextuality,
a technique employed in all of the plays but most emphatically in Svich,
where interactions between live and mediatized performance also take
place);
mise-en-scène (syncretizing mythical and real planes of reference and
meaning, again in all plays, and including pop-culture-inflected ones in
Alfaro’s and Svich’s case,);
language (blending English with Spanish and barrio-specific “tongues,”
especially in Alfaro, and to a lesser extent in Moraga and Morton);
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the dramatic form itself, by means of attracting elements of Central and
South American performance traditions (Carpa, Tanda and the Coro in the
case of Alfaro) and ritual routines (in the case of Morton and Moraga).
Evidently, then, the works manifest considerable diversity in terms of aesthetic styles and properties, with the theatrical grammar and syntax of Morton’s play approximating the conventions of mainstream narrative theatre, with those of Alfaro’s playing partly into the latter yet creating subversive effects through the pronounced syncretic content, and with those of Moraga’s and Svich’s tampering defiantly with traditional theatrical conventions and audience expectations.
To round out the penultimate portion of the concluding chapter, what is most important regarding the poetics and aesthetics of the revisions is that the dramaturgical practices that are employed for the dramatization of the plays’ syncretic mythical and non-mythical material contribute, on the one hand, and through the very mestizo/a revisionary theatrical idiom the plays articulate, to denaturalize and reinvigorate the Greek resources. On the other hand, they foreground the cross- cultural bonds existing between the Greek and the Latin/o/a American cultures, as well as showcase the creative potential that these bonds and their employment in the spirit of a new mestizaje bear for the Latin/o/a American world and beyond.
We will conclude the “Epilegomena,” and thus this study as a whole, in a tragic key for two reasons. First, because taking up the tragic mode last, despite its foremost role in what preceded our concluding discussion, agrees with the actual trajectory the present research project followed. Second, because, on a personal note, I would like the vast and productive question mark of the tragic to be the last thing the imagined participant in the discussion pursued here will take with her/him before
Delikonstantinidou 462 closing the back cover to this book. With specific regard to the first reason, realization of the workings of the tragic mode in the examined mythoplays, its constitutive role in their politics and ethics, and its implications for their vision and function in political and (socio)therapeutic terms, came rather late in the course of research and then it kept branching out and refining, as did, in fact, conception of the tragic as mode, its import and legacy. Once it did, though, it was impossible not to attend to it and, therefore, readjust the angle and tools of the project. To touch on the second reason, it is precisely because studying the tragic altered my modus operandi and opened my eyes to hitherto unimagined possibilities that I would like to see others profit from it.
When it comes to understanding the tragic, an existential and political coordinate of the human condition, and its applications and implications as such, there is one particular difficulty with which one should cope early and head on. The difficulty lies in that the tragic has been assumed and presented to be as coextensive with so many and disparate realms of life, activity, and affect that discerning the distinctiveness of the particular “shape of suffering” it entails (Felski 10), and its potential therein, can be a treacherous affair. We always run the risk of making something either too abstract or too specific out of the tragic.
Tragic theory, plural, dynamic, and interdisciplinary in its own right, comes to our aid and clears the way to an understanding of the tragic in its historical boundedness, contingency, and contemporaneity. It also provides a view of the tragic as timely in its very untimeliness and, most importantly, as more than pertinent to our own time. Meanwhile, it helps us navigate rather safely through the immense landscape of meanings, uses, and connotations that have amassed on and around the tragic, whether pertaining to the literary, the philosophical, or the vernacular “guises and forms” it has assumed over the years (10).
Delikonstantinidou 463
Qualifying the tragic as a “mode,” a rubric flexible yet selective, after Szondi and Felski, has proved notably helpful in that respect. Absent “a substantive definition of the tragic that can satisfactorily account for all known examples of tragic art,” we tapped into “significant agreements and commonalities of view” concerning the tragic mode’s defining parameters in order to foreground its usefulness as an analytical tool
(3, 14). As a matter of fact, the second chapter of this study offered a meticulous exploration of the tragic mode through reflections on selected aspects of the voluminous tragic opus, and through drawing from several bodies of scholarship on the production, operational modes, functionalities, and increasing, albeit increasingly rethought, cultural capital of the tragic.
In that same chapter, we addressed different theoretical approaches on the question of the tragic’s relation to politics and discussed, more specifically and significantly for the purposes of the present study, the tragic mode in relation to radical politics, as well as probed the possibility for such a radical politics as inherent to the tragic. The contributions of, mainly, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt,
Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Miriam Leonard emerged as key points in our discussion of the sociopolitical import of the tragic, its intimate relation
(historical, philosophical, and formal or structural) to revolutionary politics, at least since the time of the French Revolution, and of a so-called “tragic politics.” Williams’ reading of tragedy as “the necessary condition” for a self-reflexive and self-critical political praxis, Leonard’s account of the tragic as a useful tool of social critique and in the diagnosis of social crisis (Location 859, 818-33), and the light they jointly shed on the possibilities and costs of thinking about “politics in a tragic key” (Toscano
2013; Leonard Location 3208), within the context of modernity and beyond, shored up the line of argumentation developed in the course of the second chapter.
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Extremely useful for our purposes also proved to be the points that Felski has raised with regard to the workings of the tragic mode in relation to narratives of subaltern suffering, and on the ways in which the latter have impacted on our contemporary understanding of the former. The same can be said of Dienstag’s elaboration on the political productivity of the tragic by way of a critique or modulation of Nietzsche’s tragic-born and -bred “politics of transfiguration.”
Likewise, of outmost significance has been Scott’s sobering postcolonial formulation of the tragic, in accordance to a radical political idiom, as a mode of emplotment of human evolution that gives the lie to misleading, and now largely bankrupt, Romance narratives of the postemancipation condition. Together, all the above reckonings with the tragic compellingly present it not as a guarantor a successful radical politics, but as a harbinger of the possibility for it, conducive to the inscription of a more self- conscious, self-reflexive, and self-critical ethics and praxis into the politics currently in place; or “as a skeptical faith necessary for the renewal of ethical politics”
(Lampropoulos 147) in a post-postcolonial (?), transmodern present world.
Drawing and building on the above theorizations in the course of the analytical part(s) of this study, we examined how the Latino/a revisions body forth tragic aspects of their own present(s), and, more specifically, of their their subaltern constituents. To put it differently, we addressed the overlappings and intersections obtaining between the tragic mode of the revisions’ Greek mythical con-texts and their own mestizo/a ones, especially when it comes to “issues of obscure origin, interfamilial strife and impossible conflicts of allegiance” (Felski 13). Our discussion revolved around the ways in which the plays thematize and reenact them as iterations of tragic consciousness in our contemporary world.
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Furthermore, we examined how the political radicality that can be mined from the tragic mode works its way through(out) each revision and gets channeled toward the communities of/in crisis that the plays address and engage. The tools made available by the practices that have developed in the context of social theatre have functioned in conjunction with the tragic mode on which the plays have seized, as we have repeatedly seen, to effectuate this channeling, thus also diversifying, enhancing, and foregrounding the works’ political radicality. Overall, this study lent special focus on the different ways in which the plays call forth and act upon a will for sociopolitical transformation that bears the unmistakable insignia of the tragic mode, built as it is on ambiguous, irresolvable conflicts as well as “options that are both ineluctable and paradoxical, at once impossible to disavow and eternally bitter to embrace,” amidst conditions of crisis (Scott 201). Besides that, however, it also attended to the relation between the tragic and the therapeutic, and the latter’s inextricability from the radical political, in both its theoretical and its analytical part.
Beginning with a brief overview of the famous Aristotelian account of catharsis, and all the way through the post-Aristotelian critical tradition, which served to signify and resignify (on) Aristotle’s theory, the second chapter traced the relation between the tragic and the therapeutic, and forestaged the connection that obtains between the therapeutic and the (radical) political in the tragic mode. With an eye to substantiate the aforementioned points, we commented on the great extent to which kinds of social theatre, or theatre committed to sociopolitical change, such as Boal’s, are influenced by the idea, conceptual framework, and discursive wealth of/on catharsis as conducive to social/collective healing, but also on how less pronouncedly engaged varieties of contemporary theatre and performance are inflected by various and challenging modes of reimagining and reframing catharsis.
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Valuable to our discussion, in that respect, has also been Kathleen M. Sands’ interdisciplinary theory of the tragic, on which we reflected extensively and on which we later capitalized in the works’ analysis. In her account, Sands affirms the tragic’s healing potential by, first, relating it to the mechanisms of trauma and psychic dysfunction, and, then, by linking it to the therapeutic effect that ritual has on trauma.
The scholar sees in the tragic the potential to function as a vehicle for the healing of the contemporary world’s dysfunctional “inner workings,” which she likens to melancholia, insofar as the tragic can assist us in uncovering loss, recognizing it precisely as such, as well as in reclaiming the desire for a human community that is fully functional, even integrally good. Sands’ theory explains in unmistakably political terms how the tragic’s impetus for and sphere of action, or its dran (from the
Greek verb for “to act”), can remedy what she describes as the melancholy paralysis of modernity. Thus, she attributes the recent re-emergence and re-assertion of the tragic as politically significant, and even radically transformative, to the dire contemporary need to uncover our loss(es) by means of the tragic, or, as she puts it,
“to confront the crushing limitations of humanity and to reignite the desire for lives and selves that are better” (100), not despite the catastrophes, but because of and through them.
As we saw in the course of the plays’ analysis, they, in fact and effect, respond to the said need to keep trying to uncover and recover from our losses, and to heal.
Political radicality is braided together with the desire and effort to heal the wounds of unfolding history in the works we have examined. To that end, the tragic mode is seized on in them as a powerful ally for the therapeutic potential and for the potential for a radical politics that the playwrights seem to have discerned in it, with the two being viewed and employed, as is the case in Sands’ tragic theory, as interpenetrating
Delikonstantinidou 467 and cross-fertilizing. The sociopolitical change the works seek to mobilize is, as we have repeatedly stressed, a healing change. All of our dramatic mythic revisions attempt, in distinct yet convergent ways, to support communities of/in crisis to work through historical traumas and their post-traumatic reverberations up to the turbulent present(s) of U.S. Latinos/as.
The other major contribution of this study, then, is that, besides bringing to light the emergent, transhemispheric dimensions and directions that the new mestizaje vision/discourse currenty takes on, it causes a twist to it by tuning it to the tragic mode, thus further enriching its import, purchase, and applicability. In relation to that, we also propose that the new “medicine” to which Moraga once referred to describe her conception of and action toward desired political change, centered on practices of world-making inflected by a vision of feminist queer decolonization and embracing suffering as world-creating, can and will benefit immensely by a productive coupling with the tragic mode.
As has been earlier noted, while commenting on Moraga’s urgent call to action that will make “medicine” anew, the transition to a tragic-derived self-reflexive and self-critical ethics and to a politics that will build on the latter demands that we salvage from the ruins of colonialism, and of the once much-hoped-for postemancipation futures of anticolonial narratives, the will to social transformation.
Contrary to the premises and promises of progressivist anticolonial discourses that have prevailed for so long, we will have to proceed with these salvaging acts despite the knowledge that suffering cannot be bracketed off from the ever-expanding tragic narrative of modernity. We will have to do it despite the chanciness, contingency, and the risk of sparagmos; all lurking in every corner of history, all “risk factors” involved in the effort to imagine and act upon new ways of making “medicine,” of
Delikonstantinidou 468 healing our condition. My own encounter with the tragic and with the tragic mode of the works I set out to explore five years ago showed me that for new “medicine” to actualize, we need to, first, stand in front of and, then, within our and our world’s brokenness, affirm and appreciate it. Only then can we begin to imagine ways of working through it. And the tragic can help a lot in that respect, precisely because it affords us the possibility to grow into our and our world’s scars.
Last, yet anything but least, and to gesture toward the field of Classical
Reception Studies to which this study is thoroughly indebted, another contribution of the present project, which is now reaching its conclusion, is its calling attention to the brisk energy that the tragic mode’s reception by U.S. Latino/a theatre infuses into the afterlife of tragedy and the tragic, as it breaks new, syncretic, ground in the latters’ reception history and contemporary rethinking. The closure of this project finds me in a state of eager anticipation of the “ripples” that its mestizo/a contents might bring about to the wide discursive sea of contacts that reception entails. It remains to be seen how far the ripples can let us travel.
Delikonstantinidou 469
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Bibliographical Note
I completed my BA degree in English Language and Literature and my first
Master’s degree in American Studies in the School of English, Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, Greece. I am currently pursuing a second Master’s degree in Education, in the Hellenic Open University, and working on my proposal for post-doctoral research. I am working as teaching assistant in the School of English and as managing editor for the international journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics,
Critical Stages. I have published articles in numerous volumes and journals, while my research work has been presented at national and international conferences. I have also been the recipient of a number of awards, grants, and scholarships. My research areas include Theatre and Performing Arts, Ancient Myth, Greek Tragedy, Reception and Ethnic Studies.