Abstract
Seamus Heaney talked of poetry's responsibility to represent the ‘bloody miracle’, the ‘terrible beauty’ of atrocity; to create ‘something adequate’. This article asks, what is adequate to the burning and eating of a nun and the murderous gang rape and evisceration of a medical student? It considers Njabulo Ndebele's answer: the retelling of the story in the service of ‘love and politics’, and that of the South African playwright, Yael Farber, who workshopped and then performed experiences of terrible, disfiguring violence against women. It asks what Humanities disciplinary writing would be ‘something adequate’: something that raises ‘critical consciousness’ in the terms Heaney claimed in his Nobel Lecture ‘Crediting Poetry’, that illuminates and appreciates rather than contributes to an anaesthetising ‘culture of suspicion’, that re-presents adequate – discipline-specific, singular, particular, poetic – truth.
Keywords
What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead. (Nelson Mandela, 2002 speech in celebration of Walter Sisulu) [Poetry has] the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it. (Seamus Heaney, 1995 Nobel Lecture)
December 2012 saw a kind of laying to rest of one atrocity in South Africa, the reburial of the bones of Sister Quinlan, torched in her car at a time of political unrest (‘a story about a strange chemistry: the chemistry of loving, and killing, and loving again’: see Njabulo Ndebele, here) and the call for a witness to a second: the violent gang rape and ghastly evisceration of a student, the ‘Delhi bus rape’ that outraged the world, which spurred the South African playwright Yael Farber to create her extraordinary play, Nirbhaya, The Fearless One.
Heaney’s Nobel Lecture, ‘Crediting Poetry’, concerned itself with poetry’s role in depicting/raising consciousness/witnessing what is human in acts of violence: a personal issue for him growing up and becoming a poet in a Northern Ireland riven by daily acts of sectarian violence. He mentioned that Yeats, a previous Irish Nobel prize winning poet, despite crafting the term ‘terrible beauty’ about the Easter 1916 uprising, made no mention in his acceptance speech of Irish nationalism and unionism, with its attendant retaliatory killings, punishment beatings, tarring and featherings, kneecappings.
In terms which resonate with Catharine Stimpson’s article in this issue, Heaney speaks of: A historic dialectic [which] exists between the beautiful and the bestial. The bestial destroys the beautiful, but in a bloody miracle, the beautiful emerges from the womb of the bestial, the ‘terrible beauty’ of which the poet W. B. Yeats wrote. (Heaney, 1995)
We want (need? demand?) from art, from poetry, said Heaney, what the women wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad – standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Alma Akhmatova if she could describe it at all, if her art was equal to it (Heaney, 1995).
Not realism, the documenting of horror which can leave us ‘immune’ – but something ‘equal to’ its terror and its beauty?
What can be equal to the burning alive of a nun like Sister Quinlan, a well-loved midwife to the community, caught up in mob violence though her mercy and care-giving car was known to the township? Whose body was then … eaten.
Njabulo Ndebele, story-teller and Chancellor of Johannesburg University in his speech on the occasion of the commemoration of the atrocity, included in this issue, answers: the telling of the story, of ‘what we did’, because it has become a matter of habit for us to keep telling the stories of what was done to us. We do not tell as much the stories of what we did. This habit results in a remarkable irony. The more we tell the stories of what was done to us, we steadfastly recall and therefore remain in the past that we had strived to release ourselves from. When we do this, we retain our status as objects. We can be objects not only in the eyes of others, but also in our own eyes. Something else happens, though, when we tell the story of what we did. We become subjects. Subjects are responsible for what they do. The more we tell the story of what we did, we create the possibility that through our own efforts we can create the future that we still desire. Then the story of our future becomes our story not the story our reaction to others. We become, through our own actions, the subject of our own learning. (Ndebele, 2012)
Sister Quinlan’s bones, Ndebele reflects on the 50th ‘anniversary’ of the horror, 12 December 2012, are the site of a re-imagining: ‘We contemplate our own humanity at its worst moments’: There is a proverb: ‘a woman grabs the knife on the side that cuts’. Not the handle. That’s too easy. It seems to be the easiest thing for most men to do. I invite you to be the woman who grabs the knife on the side that cuts and so you can feel her pain as the sharp blade cuts into her fingers. Yet she will not let go. She has to hold on, because a lot depends on it. Today the image of our humanity at its worst moments surrounds us. I would like to invite you to pick up the knife again, and like a woman, hold it firmly on its sharpest side and press, and let the blade cut once more into your fingers. (Ndebele, 2012)
Ndebele turns to story, to proverb, to depicting the perpetrators with imaginative sympathy in order to find a way back to the act of atrocity. Heaney turns to Homer, to an ‘epic image’ of a supplicating woman being prodded by the spears of the victors, as having the ‘documentary adequacy’ required of poetry in times of atrocity and inhumanity – the ‘truth telling that will be hard and retributive’ – but turns also to a Yeats poem which is as ‘tender-minded towards life itself and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer’ (Heaney, 1995). It is the satisfying of the ‘contradictory needs’ for truth telling that is adequate but does not harden the heart that is uniquely to the credit of poetry.
Theatre and, theatre as, witness: Nirbhaya
What kind of performance, of performative utterance, is adequate? What can lay to rest the victim Sister Quinlan, died December 1962, or the victim of the Delhi bus rape and evisceration in December 2012?
Three days after Ndebele retold the story – graphically – of the burning alive, stoning and cannibalism in order to invite his audience into joining him in imagining the event, a shocking story was broken by Indian news media: a female medical student and her boyfriend caught a bus home. The driver of the bus and a group of youths overpowered them, dragged the girl off and beat and raped her repeatedly, blows from an iron bar eviscerating her. The victim of the ‘Delhi bus rape’, given, in an act of belated protection, the pseudonym Nirbhaya: ‘the Fearless One’, clung for weeks to life while lackadaisical criminal procedures eventually rounded up the youths, one of whom was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Mass protests throughout India and internationally seemed powerless to change a culture of acceptance of all kinds of brutality against women, in ‘the rape capital’ Delhi and elsewhere. Nirbhaya died; in her name the South African director Yael Farber crafted a play with the victims of atrocity – mass rape, familial sexual abuse, dowry-bride attempted murder.
A few months later the play was performed in Edinburgh at the Festival, in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, audience sitting in conclave facing a stage bare except a side with a set of seats and hanging straps. From various places in the auditorium women stood up, one hand held high, demanding the right to speak. Gracefully – as was every act in this production – they formed a line and mounted the stage, reminding me forcefully of the entry of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, where a white robed figure stood waiting – Nirbhaya. Such metatheatricality, breaking the physical and emotional division of actors from spectators, implicating the audience, is not surprising to the experienced Edinburgh Festival goer. But, this was not a coup de théâtre: the women were preparing to tell their own stories, envoiced by the spirit of Nirbhaya the fearless, and Yael Farber, the theatre director who was contacted by women affected by and recognising her atrocious suffering. Like a Greek chorus the women moved together to support and re-enact both rape and evisceration, before the final laying to rest, a symbolic reintegrating of the body, folding back the viscera, washing and shrouding the body in a swirl of incense and sand which spread over the audience and chorus. But inbetween the re-enactments members in turn went back to the seats and hanging straps of the ‘bus’ and drew from their seat pocket a length of cloth that became a protective canopy, a cover for incest, veil, shroud or in one case – the dowry bride – the lovingly held clothes of the child that had been taken away from her.
This beautifully crafted, beautifully choreographed and, yes, beautiful production came to the international stage a few months after Nirbhaya died, while those convicted of her rape and torture were awaiting sentence. While the workshops from which the witnesses’ stories were crafted developed from experience to performance, there were mass demonstrations and political protest, demanding that such abuse must not be allowed … not, to not happen again: sadly, it will, almost daily, not only in rape city Delhi but also to women around the world. But that it must not be allowed to go untold and unheard.
My mind went immediately to Euripides’ Trojan Women, similarly produced during the winter after a particular atrocity: the subjugation by Athens of a free Greek state, Melos; the male audience, sitting in the same ‘tribal’ blocks as when they voted for the killing of all adult men and the enslavement of the women and children, were presented with the suffering of enslaved women, wives and daughters, similar to those they had recently been offered in the marketplace or brothels.
But Euripides and Greek tragedy use distancing effects: a masked professional actor playing an iconic ruined queen, Hecuba; the fall is that of Troy. In Nirbhaya, the acting is not professional but a profession; there are no masks, and as every commentator has mentioned, one face bore the scars of the burning kerosene that was poured on her by her in-laws, while her infant son watched.
There was infinite beauty in the crafting, choreographing and formal re-enacting of the events of 12 December and her death in January 2013: living up to Heaney’s demands that poetry, the poiesis – creative making – of atrocity, should have both ‘documentary adequacy’ but also the formal qualities that have ‘the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it’ (Heaney, 1995).
The final act after the raising of the body was one of naming and identification – comparable to Yeats’ lines in ‘Easter, 1916’: I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
But this was no heroisation but a case of self-witness. Each woman in turn named herself and her family: daughter of…, wife of… – those who had perpetrated or closed their eyes to the violence – and left the playing area as they arrived, hand held high through an audience that rose as one, shedding for them the tears that they had bold-facedly, bare-facedly, refused to shed. It was this naming that brought the act back to the world of Greek tragedy, where theatre’s role is to re-enact the story, the meaning of the name, so that it will not be forgotten. Troy is dead, say the chorus of Trojan women; not so, it is re-vivified in the performance.
Edinburgh is full of political and brutal theatre, of plays written precisely for this festival event, this receptive audience and for playing spaces and a schedule that leaves no room or time for comfy three act-ers. Some demand a frightening level of audience involvement, implication in the cruelty and dislocation. Brecht, wanting alienation, extreme estranging, so that the audience refuses assent, says: No, it mustn’t be like that! The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary. (Brecht, 1974: 71)
But this was not simply that, simply consciousness-raising or even action-provoking, though as with Trojan Women there could be no doubt of the playwright’s reason for writing. Rather, this was a joining in witness to the suffering of the ‘Fearless One’ and to the courage of those who came forward to show us what they had suffered.
The production was something equal, something adequate.
Humanities and the ‘contradictory needs’ of the truth of things
Homi Bhabha, the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, claims for Humanities a similar task to Heaney’s: that of the creative mediating of the real, ‘contradictory needs’ for a truth telling that is adequate but does not harden the heart. This is the truth of things as they are on Stevens’ blue guitar: If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar. Ah, but to play man number one, To drive the dagger in his heart, To lay his brain upon the board And pick the acrid colors out, To nail his thought across the door, Its wings spread wide to rain and snow, To strike his living hi and ho, To tick it, tock it, turn it true, To bang from it a savage blue, Jangling the metal of the strings … So that's life, then: things are they are? […] The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows. Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, […] A tune beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar.
So Bhabha, in his Director’s letter, ‘A View from the Mahindra Humanities Center’, which he wrote for the Harvard Humanities Project: The humanist's skill or craftsmanship lies in endowing both the archive and the experience of everyday life with a ‘fourth’ dimension that becomes visible in the art of narrative: the telling of a story, the process of an argument, or the making of a picture. Humanists are embedded in this world of poesis and mimesis - in ‘making’ and ‘representing’ - as forms of human communication through which a historical world comes to be, and to belong, to those who inhabit its ambit of ideas, images, and values.
Bhabha continues: Humanists reflect as much on these processes of mediation as on the outcomes of knowledge. They draw attention to the frames, maps, or tables with which we construct our access to reality at one remove. They reflect on ways in which social reality is translated into metaphor (literature), image (art), abstract reasoning (philosophy), narrative and memory (history). Literature is, in some profound sense, about the shape of language and words, but it is also about character, action, social and political consciousness, unconscious fantasy. Art is about light, color, paint, stone, and figurative technique, but it is also about religious passion, aesthetic interest, the intimation of pain, and the perception of beauty and virtue. (Bhabha, 2013)
Our disciplines preserve and render visible and communicate, each in their way, in their own intellectual tradition, with their own epistemologies and hermeneutics, with their own texts, that which is humane in the Humanities. That which gives an account of the real world that is adequate to the atrocities and fearfulnesses: the task of poietai, makers (artists, tragedians, historians, theologians, philosophers…) since Homer.
Every Humanities discipline has material, texts, images of atrocity, of humans’ ‘inhumanity’; likewise records of courage, tenderness, virtue, sensibility, ‘humanity’. What would it mean for any and each of our disciplines to contain and produce narratives with the double consciousness of reality and imag(in)ing, the double response to atrocity and sympathy, that are hard truth telling and tender-hearted, that have Heaney’s ‘power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it’?
That is, seeing poiesis and mimesis as the responsibility not solely of artists and poets, but of academics.
That is the challenge represented by Heaney and taken up, in this Special Issue of AHHE, by Attridge and Derrida; Ndebele’s story-telling; Barnett’s Humanity among the Inhuman; Evans’ Liberal Values; and the ‘critical consciousness’ which Minnich sets to resist the evil of banality: by adequate Humanities disciplinary writing.
This is an idea of Humanities writing not measured according to rubrics or ‘rigour, originality, impact’ or other research output criteria: Humanities criticism that illuminates and appreciates rather than contributes to a anaesthetising ‘culture of suspicion’, that re-presents adequate – discipline-specific, singular, particular, poetic – truth.