Abstract
This article examines the potential of a transdisciplinary ethnographic approach that bridges ethnography, performance, storytelling, and imagination to contribute to an activist research practice within anthropology and other disciplines. It focuses on my current research project that studies, by means of dramatic storytelling, the impact of migration on Polish Romani women’s experiences of aging. In the dramatic storytelling sessions, the ethnographer and the interlocutor stepped into character and co-performed fictional stories loosely based on their own lives. Situating the project within the context of an “imaginative ethnography” that is concerned with people’s imaginative lifeworlds, and methodological experimentations at the ground level of fieldwork, this article discusses the ways the project challenged traditional conceptions of engagement and advocacy. It considers the silence—“quiet theatre”—that engulfed the interlocutor–ethnographer interactions in the storytelling sessions as a form of radical empathic politics that works through affect, projective approximation, and empathy. In doing so, the article proposes a conceptualization of interventionist research practice as a contextually specific particularity that takes to task the meanings of politics in academic activism.
Keywords
Silence
Randia, my Romani interlocutor, and I are sitting at the kitchen table. We are recording a dramatic storytelling session in which we are taking on the roles of different characters to narrate, in a fictional form, Randia’s experiences of aging in Poland after the nation’s accession to the European Union. Over the past decade, I have been studying how elderly Romani women in Poland are coping in the aftermath of mass migration of young and middle-aged Roma to Western Europe. This research project also seeks to explore how transdisciplinary approaches that draw on ethnography and the creative arts, such as dramatic storytelling, might contribute to an engaged and interventionist anthropology concerned with social justice and transformation.
For more than 7 years, I have been recording storytelling sessions with Randia in which she assumes different voices and physicalities, casts me as different characters, or treats me as an audience member. She acts in a style that could be referred to as psychological realism 1 wherein the actor “steps into” and emotionally identifies with the character portrayed. At times, she also adopts what resembles Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater 2 in which the actor employs a variety of illusion-breaking strategies to portray rather than “feel” his or her character. Finally, her acting also exhibits elements of magic realism 3 (Ahmadzadeh, 2011), which incorporates both realistic and fantastical content. She usually develops her scenes through spontaneous improvisations with little or no preparation or prior discussion (Kazubowski-Houston, 2017b). Originally, I did not intend to conduct research through dramatic storytelling. However, when I began my fieldwork with Romani women in “Elbląg”, Poland, in 2010, it turned out that in this small community, issues of confidentiality were paramount. My interlocutors were reluctant to discuss many aspects of their lives in interviews, and were concerned that pseudonyms alone would not guarantee their anonymity. Consequently, Randia suggested that we adopt dramatic storytelling, in which the women would narrate their life experiences in a dramatic and fictional form. Randia was not an artist, but a decade earlier, she had worked with me on a performance ethnography project, which involved the development and presentation of a theatrical production based on Romani women’s experiences of violence (Kazubowski-Houston, 2010). Randia did not perform on stage, as she was concerned about the potential violent repercussion from non-Romani audiences, but she collaborated with Polish actors in rehearsals and was actively involved in all stages of the performance development process. She enjoyed working with imaginative and performative approaches, and thought that dramatic storytelling would be ideal in the current project to ensure participant confidentiality and anonymity.
Today, Randia is playing an elderly Romani woman whom she named Córka, and I am playing Córka’s relations, friends, and acquaintances. Randia (as Córka) is making pierogies, while I, as Córka’s sister-in-law Bogusia, watch her intently. I (Magda) too occasionally make pierogies, and am curious to see how she makes hers. Making pierogies is a personal kind of art and everyone I know does it differently. Randia (Córka) carefully combines flour, eggs (lots of eggs!), and water, then slowly mixes all the ingredients together to form a dough, which she then kneads until it is soft and elastic. Tearing off pieces of dough, she rolls them into small rounds, places a round in her hand, and drops a heaping tablespoon of filling (cottage cheese and potatoes) in the middle. Then she folds the dough over the filling, seals it by pinching the edges together, and places each pierogi on the opposite end of the table. I watch her with awe as she performs each activity slowly and with great care. All in silence. The silence is so pervasive that I feel it percolating in the space between Randia and me. It does not feel comfortable, but I am used to it. From time to time, I hear the sounds of our breaths weaving in and out at different tempos and rhythms. I also hear the sounds of Randia’s (Córka’s) hands skillfully moving the dough. Through the open window, the sounds of the wind in the trees, screaming children, and barking dogs occasionally waft into the kitchen.
I hear, as well, the ticking of the clock. It sounds like the clock my grandmother had when I was a child. An old Soviet clock. “Well, at least the time does pass,” I think to myself. But other than that, we sit in absolute silence until Randia interjects, “I don’t roll out the whole dough anymore and cut out the rounds with a glass like I used to. It’s too hard. I don’t have that kind of energy anymore. [Silence] . . . See, Bogusia, I also add a lot of eggs; the dough is better then.” I ask, “Really, I didn’t know that, why?” “Because eggs soften it,” replies Córka. “I really take time to make them now . . . nothing to rush for . . . not like before.” We sit in absolute silence for another 5 min. Randia (Córka) keeps making pierogies and I (Bogusia) keep watching her until Córka breaks the silence again. “Cooking makes the time pass,” she states, and continues, What else am I supposed to do? . . . Sometimes, I’ll prepare food and wait . . . perhaps someone will stop by? . . . Then I can offer them a bite to eat. [ . . . ] You know, a good meal is so important . . . My daughter died hungry, so she comes for food. Nearly every night I wake up and hear her in the kitchen rummaging through the cupboards, looking for food. So, I make food . . . and wait . . . If no one comes, my daughter will come. The one who died last year. She always does.
Córka continues making pierogies, and I, Bogusia, keep watching her in silence until she speaks again: This is what my days look like. I always sit like this in silence. Before, there were kids running around . . . and always somebody hustling about . . . and I would go out too . . . to shop for groceries, or fortune tell . . . But now, I can’t walk . . . How am I supposed to carry all the groceries up the stairs? When I can’t even see! So, I sit like this. This silence is no good . . . I’m afraid of it. [Pauses.] I’m afraid that I’ll get used to it and that’ll be the end of me. Once you get used to it, the end is near. [Pauses.] But, you know, Bogusia, see, when we’re sitting like this together, you and I, like this, in silence, it somehow feels good . . . Well, maybe not good, because silence is never good . . . but it’s like, like you’re being listened to . . . you know? Do you know what I mean?
That day, in July 2015, I did not yet fully know what Randia (Córka) meant. However, I sensed that she had made an astute observation about the transformative power of ethnography, performance, and imagination. This article is an attempt to unpack Randia’s assertion, and to think with it about how transdisciplinary, imaginative, ethnographic approaches might help not only anthropologists but also other scholars to reimagine academic engagement and intervention. In particular, I consider how our dramatic storytelling sessions worked with silence—constituting what Randia aptly termed “quiet theatre”—to facilitate a form of radical politics through affect, projective improvisation, and empathy. I propose thinking of such interventionist research practices as a contextually specific method to take to task the meanings of politics in ethnographic research.
In Poland and other European states, many elderly people are fending for themselves since Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004, which opened access to Western labor markets, and the Schengen Treaty of 2007, which eliminated tourist visa requirements for Polish citizens (White, 2011). High rates of unemployment, economic recession, and the disintegration of the social safety net have eroded the quality of life for many elderly Poles, and have contributed to their stigmatization as a “burden on society” (Kazubowski-Houston, 2012, 2017a, 2017b; Wilinska, 2010; Zalewska, 2009). Residential homes for the elderly are rare and stigmatized in Poland, as in much of Eastern Europe, and there are several locales across the country inhabited exclusively by aging adults who are deprived of daily care (White, 2011).
For Romani elders, the situation is even more precarious. Ongoing socioeconomic transformations have seen the quality of life deteriorate for Romani minorities. Negative stereotypes of the Roma, combined with economic crises and resurgent Polish nationalist sentiments, have increased prejudice and violence against this minority group, leading to their further marginalization (Jasińska-Kania, 2009). With younger Roma gone to Western Europe, many Romani elders live alone in deep poverty and under the threat of violence, without the important familial support they once had. Not only do they struggle to make ends meet but they also find themselves grappling with what it means to be Roma living largely among the non-Roma (Kazubowski-Houston, 2017b).
An Anthropology of Possibility
Committed to the larger anthropological project of reimagining anthropology as an engaged, collaborative, reflexive, and interventionist practice (Clarke, 2010; Hemment, 2007; Johnston, 2010; Kline & Newcomb, 2013; Lassiter, 2005; Low & Merry, 2010; Osterweil, 2013; Skidmore, 2006), I intended my research to somehow contribute to improving the lives of Romani women. While the role of anthropology outside academia has long been an important debate in the discipline, the debate has become more intense since the 1980s’ “crisis of representation.” With the rise of hermeneutics and the critique of scientific positivism and power imbalances that have traditionally defined ethnographer–interlocutor relations, “giving back” to our interlocutors, in some form, has come to be seen as a staple of anthropological research.
For many, engaged anthropology, rather than being optional, defines ethical anthropological research (Bourgois, 1990; Speed, 2006). This idea, in fact, is not new in anthropology. Already in the 1970s, Dell Hymes (1972) asserted that “the general problem [of anthropological inquiry] is also a moral problem, a problem of one’s commitments in, and to, the world” (p. 14). He famously proposed that anthropology should reinvent itself by “mov[ing] from a liberal humanism, defending the powerless, to a socialist humanism, confronting the powerful and seeking to transform the structure of power” (Hymes, 1972, p. 52). This was a call for “studying up,” or investigating the relations of power at work in society, rather than the “cultures” of others (Nader, 1972).
Currently, many debates about applied and interventionist anthropology center on what has come to be known as “cultural critique” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986) versus so-called activist scholarship (Goldstein, 2014). While some consider cultural critique important in undermining society’s relations of power, others argue that it is, to a large extent, an academic privilege diametrically opposed to transformative social action (Hale, 2006). There are also those who problematize the distinction between a disengaged cultural critique and an engaged activist scholarship by arguing that the two are not mutually exclusive, as critical engagement offers new perspectives on the world, on what might constitute practical transformative action, and how to carry it out (Hemment, 2007; Osterweil, 2013). In this line of thinking, cultural critique is seen as a stepping-stone toward anthropological activism (Hemment, 2007).
For some, engaged and interventionist anthropology has been defined as necessarily collaborative (Kazubowski-Houston, 2010; Lassiter, 2005; Robertson & Clan, 2013). Collaborative anthropologists strive to minimize power differentials by working collaboratively with interlocutors and involving them directly in decision-making processes, writing, and disseminating research findings (Lassiter, 1998, 2005). Collaborative approaches that favor community engagement, dialogue, and reciprocity have been important in feminist, queer, and postcolonial research practice (see, for example, Banerjea, 2015; Huggins & Glebbeek, 2009; Kazubowski-Houston, 2010; Robertson & Culhane, 2005; Susser, 2010). Such approaches have largely informed my own conception of engaged anthropology as a collaborative, critical, and participatory praxis that critiques and seeks to undermine society’s unequal relations of power.
My project sought to study what an engaged anthropology might learn from, and contribute to, other approaches and methodologies that have been developed and applied in advocacy research in other disciplines. I was interested in how transdisciplinary work that bridges ethnography, performance, and imagination might constitute “radical performances”—“acts that question, or re-envision ingrained social arrangements of power” (Cohen-Cruz, 1998, p. 1)—or “performance[s] of possibilities” (Madison, 2005, p. 172) that lead toward change. In particular, I wanted to learn what effects such radical performances might have on fieldwork, specifically on how we attend to the stories people tell us; how we participate in, experience, feel, and sense the field; and, ultimately, how we write up, perform, and share our ethnographies.
Most studies, thus far, have primarily examined transdisciplinary research approaches as representational strategies; experiments with the ethnographic process itself have been infrequent (Kazubowski-Houston, 2017a). The dramatic storytelling approach we employed in my project could be situated in the context of imaginative ethnography, which considers imagining as an emergent and shifting exterior and interior mode of being and expression, concerned with both “imaginative practices” and “creative methodologies” (Culhane, 2017, pp. 13-18). Imaginative practices can be seen as both constituting and constitutive of intersubjective experience, social relations, and the interrelationships between the past, present, and future. Imaginative ethnographers take seriously what our interlocutors understand as imagination and pay close attention to how they negotiate and live imaginative practices on a daily basis (Elliott & Culhane, 2017). Imaginative ethnography also embraces “creative methodologies”: transdisciplinary, collaborative, embodied, and critical research methods that draw from ethnography, anthropology, cultural studies, performance studies, and the creative arts (Culhane, 2017; Denzin, 2003; Elliott & Culhane, 2017; Fabian, 1990; Kazubowski-Houston, 2010, 2011, 2017a, 2017b; Madison, 2010; Magnat, 2012).
By employing dramatic storytelling as an ethnographic research methodology, I hoped the project would facilitate a space where my interlocutor could employ imagination (as she understood it) to “project [her] ‘fables’ in a direction that [did] not have to reckon with the ‘evident universe’” (Crapanzano, 2004, p. 19). In my view, by breaking with the evident and expected, our dramatic storytelling could conjure up new ways of being, dreams, and desires, and shift focus toward what surfaces, sprouts, and promises (Crapanzano, 2004; Kazubowski-Houston, 2017a and b; Mittermaier, 2011). Such “utopian performatives” (Dolan, 2005, p. 5) or “method[s] of hope” (Miyazaki, 2004), I thought, would help facilitate a construction of ethnographic knowledge about my interlocutor’s “imaginative lifeworlds” (Irving, 2011, p. 22), the inner thoughts, dialogues, feelings, emotions, hopes, desires, sensations, and moods that are too taboo, buried, or incomprehensible to be gleaned through more conventional research methods that rely on observation and verbal expression. Furthermore, dramatic storytelling held a strong promise for applied and interventionist anthropology, because of its potential to build deep relationships with interlocutors and thereby avoid traditionally hierarchical interactions between ethnographer and informant. Finally, its interplay of performance, fiction, and ethnography could aid in disseminating knowledge in more engaging and accessible ways (Denzin, 2003; Kazubowski-Houston, 2010; Mienczakowski, 2001; Saldaña, 2003).
My ultimate goal was, by employing dramatic storytelling as a research methodology, to generate knowledge and later use it as an “oppositional narrative” (Bickham Mendez, 2008, pp. 143-144) for negotiating with local authorities to improve Romani women’s living conditions. In addition to publishing newspaper articles in both local and national press, I also planned to circulate women’s performative stories on social media to call attention to their plight. In that sense, I was committed to practicing public anthropology, which addresses pressing societal issues by disseminating knowledge to policymakers and among and beyond the communities involved (Low & Merry, 2010).
What Is an Old Romani Woman to Do, Alone in This World?
The Silence That Was “No Good”
While I did not know what Randia meant when she stated that the silence in which Bogusia and she sat together “somehow felt good [ . . . ] like you’re being listened to,” I did know, at least in part, why she may have thought that the silence in which “she sat like this” alone was “no good.” My mother, like Randia, was also elderly, ill, and lived in Elbląg, Poland. I was a migrant child who, like Randia’s children, left her mother behind and emigrated abroad. Randia and my mother were of the generation who came of age in the communist Poland of the 1950s and 1960s. Upon commencing employment, they were allocated apartments—if they were lucky, given the extensive housing shortages under socialism—in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or cooperatives (Markham, 2003). Such so-called bloki, constructed from concrete panels, usually had four or five levels but no elevators. As the state housing allocations favored educated and white ethnic Poles, many Roma did not “qualify” to live in bloki, which, while dysfunctional in design, at least had central heating and hot water. Instead, the Roma were housed in prewar coal-heated buildings designated as social housing, also lacking elevators. Given this inaccessibility of socialist infrastructure, many members of Randia and my mother’s generation, now in their 70s or older, find themselves prisoners in their own homes. With no elevators, they cannot easily leave their apartments, especially if they live on higher floors. They are stuck alone in their flats in that silence that Randia feared.
This was both my mother’s and Randia’s fate. As I had no siblings, and no relatives close by, my mother’s only company (outside of a few elderly friends) was three hired caregivers. Randia did not have caregivers, but she did have some friends and distant relatives checking in on her from time to time. I knew that for Randia, the silence that was her daily companion was a silence of perpetual waiting, for someone to visit, for a relative to call, for me to stop by to record her stories, for her deceased daughter to visit, and, finally, for her children to return to Poland. Waiting for something to happen defined most of Randia’s days. She once remarked, “Every day is the same: no one comes, nothing to wait for . . . how terrible this life is now” (interview, August 5, 2013). For my mother, that silence was also about waiting, waiting for me, her son-in-law, and her grandson to visit over the summer months; for a priest to come celebrate the Eucharist with her on Fridays; and for dinners to be delivered at 1 p.m. every day. That silence was “no good” for both Randia and my mother because it was a silence of loneliness, of abandonment, and of a loss of prospects for a different life. It was a silence in which death lurked like a shy bird. One day, while recording a storytelling session, we heard a loud thump against the window. Randia jumped up and, frightened, ran to investigate what had happened. She looked out the window and declared, “Just a bird lurking . . . wants to come in, but is afraid . . . Scared the wits out of me . . . It frightened me like that before one morning . . . I was alone . . . thought it was death already knocking on my door. You know death comes early in the mornings?” (dramatic storytelling session, July 30, 2016)
I also knew, to some extent, what Randia may have meant when she noted that the silence in which she and I “sat like this together” was, in part, no good. It was the silence of pierogi making. Of leaves rustling. Of the clock ticking. It was the silence around me while I looked after my mother during the summer months, when I felt suspended in time, in my mother’s small apartment, waiting for something to happen . . . for her condition to improve or worsen, for time to stop or speed forward, so I could spend less or more time in Poland, for the caregivers to return from holidays to relieve me, or for me to finally return to Canada. This silence of sitting together, Randia and I, and my mother and I, weighed heavily upon us, threatening to swallow everything up, as in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. In the play, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by the side of the road for someone or something they refer to as “Godot.” Beckett’s play is an existentialist meditation on the post–World War II reality devoid of any meaning and values, and the absurdity of human life and death. Godot never arrives and the two tramps spend their days waiting, hopeful and hopeless, trapped in the overwhelming nothingness of time and their own toxic co-dependence.
To me, educated in the Western tradition of theater and performance, at times, the silence that engulfed Randia and me felt like the silence straight out of Beckett’s play. It seemed that any word we uttered or any gesture we made came out of, and moved right back into, silence. Words and gestures appeared to be just desperate attempts to jolt time that had unequivocally stopped. To do something. To change things. To intervene. But it seemed, as Randia aptly observed that, for the most part, nothing happened. Like Randia, Beckett’s Estragon remarks, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful” (1982, p. 43). As in Beckett’s play, Randia’s visitors also vanish as quickly as they come; her long-awaited daughter returned from England only to die from cancer a few weeks later. Randia’s anxiety about potentially getting used to the silence was reminiscent of the anxiety that Vladimir and Estragon felt over being swallowed up by the vortex of nothingness. It is unlikely that Randia would have interpreted the silence of our dramatic storytelling sessions from this modernist existentialist perspective. I never explained my Beckettian interpretations to her because, at the time, I thought it would be inconsiderate to impose on her my academic, and rather pessimistic, insights. Randia likely would have never heard of Beckett, the Theatre of the Absurd and its existential angst, as difficult life circumstances prevented her from attending school. Her mother was ill and, as the only girl in the family, Randia had to help with the daily chores and look after her siblings. And even if Randia did have access to a literary education, Beckett’s play still may have not had any resonance for her in our storytelling context. Yet, in retrospect, it seems that Randia also sensed despair and futility in that silence, perhaps overwhelmingly, over her lack of options in a world that valorizes masculinity, whiteness, and wealth. She once remarked, “Wind always blows in a poor woman’s eyes . . . What is an old Romani woman to do, alone in this world?” (dramatic storytelling session, June 29, 2011)
For me, the silence of my research field was also “no good” because it seemed to have transfixed Randia and me in inaction, which, in turn, had begun chafing away at my confidence that my project could ever effect change. Randia—as well as my other Romani interlocutors—did not want me to do anything to publicly critique the discrimination faced by the Roma in Poland, or to do any advocacy work to improve her situation. She was concerned that the stories she shared with me remain fictionalized, that her name be a pseudonym, and that no identifying information about her be available locally and nationally. 4 She did not want me to write newspaper articles, circulate her performances on social media, or speak on her behalf with local authorities. She did not want anyone to know who she was, where she lived, or that she needed help. “I want to be left alone . . . in peace. If they know that I’m here . . . living alone, they’ll come and burn my house down, or worse” (interview, December 20, 2013). Randia was afraid.
She likely felt vulnerable as an elderly Romani woman living in a country where refugees are unwelcome and minorities are seen as the culprit of Poland’s woes, a view that has exponentially gained support since the ultranationalist and conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) party came into power in 2015. It made perfect sense for Randia to want to remain “invisible.” While it is not uncommon for interlocutors, in certain contexts, to be ambivalent about broader social justice goals, usually people are, at least to some extent, in favor of researchers advocating for their individual needs (Checker, Davis, & Schuller, 2014). However, Randia showed no interest. The only action on my part that she cared about was my immediate material help in terms of finances, food, shopping, and running errands. She also enjoyed my company and always looked forward to my visits. But that was all. It seemed as if the silence in which “we [were] sitting like this together” had crept into our bodies and petrified them. Thus, that day, when Randia stated that that silence also “[felt] good [ . . . ] like you’re being listened to [ . . . ],” I did not know what she meant.
The Good Silence
In retrospect, however, I recognized that one dramatic storytelling session shed light on Randia’s remark. In that session, Randia takes on the role of Córka, her play’s protagonist, and tells her friend, Ela, about her children, how they abandoned her, how they didn’t send her money, how they didn’t care if she were dead or alive, how she missed them like she had never missed anything before, and how she was afraid of dying alone. At one point, Randia as Córka falls silent, raises her wrinkled, swollen hand, and carefully places it on mine. She looks into my eyes. I think Randia will step out of character and ask me to comment on her performance, but she doesn’t. She is still Córka. I see tears welling up in her eyes, rolling down her face and onto my arm. Then, in a quiet but stern voice, Córka asks me, “Ela, how could they have left me like that? How could children do anything like this to their mother? Tell me!” I remain silent, not knowing what to do. But Córka insists, “Tell me!” I realize that Randia wants me to take on the role of Ela. Unsettled, I mutter as Ela, “They can’t come back. It’s not that simple. They’d like to come back, but they can’t . . . they’ve set up their lives over there and it’s not easy to return.” Córka remains silent, but keeps looking at me, and now my eyes well up with tears. Finally, she breaks the silence, “Maybe you’re right.” Then silence befalls us again and we sit in it together for several minutes.
A bit later, Randia takes on the role of Córka’s daughter, Hania, and casts me as Córka. Hania has just come to Poland from England to visit her mother. She sits down at the table and says, “Mama, I will return to Poland . . . I won’t go back to England . . . You’re older now . . . you’re not coping . . . I’ll look after you. I will cook for you.” At that point, Randia instructs me to respond to Hania that I (Córka) do not want her to return to Poland, because there are no prospects for her here and she has children to provide for. I (as Córka) repeat Randia’s words. Randia, in magic realist fashion, then becomes Hania and Córka simultaneously. In fact, it is not easy to distinguish when she is speaking as Hania and when as Córka, although it is clear that she is now playing both characters. And at times it seems that, in a Brechtian way, Randia breaks the fourth wall and speaks as herself. Randia as Córka addresses her daughter, Hania: “I don’t want you to leave England, at least you have a job there . . . Work there for a few years first, make more money . . . Then you can return.” Then, Randia speaks as Córka’s daughter, Hania: “But I can’t stay there, when you are here alone . . . Do you even have food to eat?” Randia, either as herself speaking about her own daughter or as Córka speaking about her daughter, muses: Maybe she’d like to come back . . . but whether she thinks about me ever? That I can’t tell for sure. Sometimes, she calls and asks how I’m doing, if I want anything, but then I don’t hear from her for weeks. Dear daughter, I’m still managing, when I really can no longer look after myself, I will tell you. Maybe your sister will come back. She is better off than you. Maybe she will . . . But go to sleep now, child. Go to sleep. It’s late.
Randia, seemingly addressing me as Magda, although this is not completely clear: “Maybe it’s not easy to return for you, so I know it’s not easy . . . especially when you have a family there . . . You’re dependent on them for what they want to do” (field notes, July 19, 2011).
Immediately after this session, I recorded in my field notes that I felt uneasy, although I did not specify why. Yet, now it appears clear that in this session, Randia was not only guiding me to co-perform her thoughts and feelings about the migration of her children but, in stubbornly requesting that I (as Ela) explain her children’s actions, Randia also was asking me to explain my decision to immigrate and leave my ailing mother in Poland. Thus, my attempt to justify Córka’s children’s decision to stay abroad was my own attempt to justify my own actions. And Córka’s admission that maybe Ela was right also constituted Randia’s acceptance of my decision to emigrate. Thus, what really happened in those moments was that Randia asked me about my decision to leave my mother behind in Poland, which I think she always wanted to ask but was reluctant to, fearing that it might compromise our relationship. As I have written elsewhere, the topic of my emigration and my mother’s care had long been an “elephant in the room” (Kazubowski-Houston, forthcoming).
This particular storytelling session diametrically subverted the relations of power between Randia and me, both within and outside the storytelling sessions. In many subsequent sessions, Randia, as Córka, continued to question me (always as another character) about my decision to emigrate from Poland, to leave my mother behind, and to not return to Poland to care for my mother, and also about my plans for the future. In many scenes, Córka’s questions were rather hostile, as she frequently expressed anger at her children (played by me) for leaving her behind and failing to provide her with care in her old age. She also cast me in roles of other relatives, friends, and acquaintances whom she used as her sounding board for expressing frustration with her children. With time, Córka’s aggression abated, and on several occasions, she confided in her friends and relations that she felt sorry for her children because “their lives were hard and options limited.”
Outside the storytelling context, Randia became more willing to discuss with me, in our daily conversations, my decision to immigrate to Canada and my mother’s care. Initially, these exchanges were rather moralizing on Randia’s part, as she adamantly asserted that she would have never emigrated abroad and left her mother behind. She was very critical of my intention to eventually move my mother into a long-term care facility. However, another storytelling session in which Córka acknowledged that her children might not be able to return to Poland to look after her, and that Córka’s friend, Ela (a one-time migrant), had no other options but to move her mother into a home, transformed her position on this issue. As soon as we finished recording that storytelling session, Randia asked me what I was planning to do about my mother’s care. Unsure how to respond, I replied that I had no good ideas. Randia then advised that I needed to find my mother “a good home” because I “don’t have other options.” It appeared that Randia’s change of heart was, at least to a certain extent, a result of our dramatic storytelling sessions.
quiet theater
Why did these sessions contribute to such a transformation in the relations between Randia and me? Perhaps this was the case because the sessions afforded a particular kind of attunement between Randia and me, one not necessarily possible in other research contexts. During the emotional session in which Randia (Córka) demanded that I (Ela) explain her children’s decision to emigrate, her 6-year-old granddaughter walked into the room and asked if she could listen. Randia looked at her sternly, and annoyed, whispered, “Shhhhhh . . . We are doing quiet theatre here” (field notes, July 19, 2012). How apt. It was quiet theater indeed, in its intense focus on the performer’s speech, facial expressions, gestures, movements, breath, and her relationship to the ethnographer. No sound effects, no lights, a dim lamp softly flickering in the corner. Everything perfectly orchestrated by silence, the most serene of directors. In another storytelling session, Córka confided in her friend Ela, “All these thoughts sit like stone in me . . . I’ve no one to talk to . . . but who would I tell all these things to anyways? . . . Stupid old baba, they would say. That’s all. So it’s good you come. My daughter also comes . . . the one who died last year . . . she listens . . . and now when I’ve buried my son, he’ll come too” (dramatic storytelling session, August 5, 2015).
Ethnography and Attunement
The dramatic storytelling sessions were also a “quiet theatre” because they cracked open a space for listening in ways that Ela and Córka’s daughter do, and that Córka’s son one day will. Such ways of listening do not “fix the other in place” but “allow [ . . . ] the other to be herself and not herself simultaneously” (Stevenson, 2014, p. 173). Perhaps this is what Randia (Córka) meant when she stated that the silence “somehow feels good . . . Well, maybe not good, because silence is never good . . . but it’s like . . . like you’re being listened to.” It may have been that such ways of listening “feel good” because they facilitate a process through which Randia and I could seek a mutual empathic understanding. I suggest this cautiously because I am aware of the intricate position that empathy has occupied in anthropology (Hollan & Throop, 2008). Largely understudied and undertheorized, empathy has been generally conceptualized as a first-person experiential, embodied, and emotional understanding of another’s perspective (Halpern, 2001; Hollan & Throop, 2008; Wikan, 1992). 5 Thus, it has been seen as neither exclusively rational nor visceral, but working simultaneously on both levels. Anthropologists have long recognized that studying empathy is rather challenging. Clifford Geertz (1976/1984), for example, argues that, in an ethnographic context, empathy is nothing more than a projection of the anthropologist’s thoughts and feelings onto their interlocutors. Others have also stressed that the anthropologist’s comprehension of others’ experience is always limited by her own (Crapanzano, 1980; Rabinow, 1977; Rosaldo, 1984/1989). Renato Rosaldo (1984/1989) insists that to even partially understand the emotional lives of our interlocutors, we need to tap into our experiences that are parallel to those of our interlocutors. Achieving empathy may also be difficult because there is a whole realm of experience that cannot be easily expressed in discursive statements, some aspects of interiority are too idiosyncratic and defy social norms and understandings, and the ethnographer and interlocutors may be inhabiting different and not always compatible worlds (Kirmayer, 2008). Moreover, one must, to be able to imagine someone else’s circumstances, be willing to be affected by them, and be self-reflexive enough to differentiate between one’s own emotions and those of one’s interlocutors (Kirmayer, 2008).
A Space of Sincerity
Despite their challenges, our dramatic storytelling sessions did seem to facilitate a certain level of empathic attunement between Randia and me, what I call a “space of sincerity.” This space had sprung up somewhere between the interworkings of silence, spontaneous improvisation, fiction, and empathy. Popular and scientific notions of silence—products of a Western logocentric apotheosis of voice—have historically equated silence, in negative terms, with absence. Psychological discourses, in particular, have pathologized silence as a form of repressed trauma to be therapeutically managed. Yet silence, at times, may constitute an alternate means of expression and communication, especially of what cannot be easily conveyed in words (Kidron, 2009, pp. 6-7). Spoken language is not the only route to empathy. Silence can be seen as another form of language that involves an affective and performative form of remembering (Balkenhol, 2016, p. 284). “Traces” of the past (Derrida, 1976) may dwell in silence—quiet forms of knowing—mischievously fusing the experiences of the self with those of others. It is in these convergences that empathy may arise (Kidron, 2009, p. 17).
One day, Randia and I were sitting in the living room, waiting for her sister-in-law to stop by with a cake. To pass the time, we were recording a storytelling session in which Córka was also waiting for her sister-in-law to deliver cake. Córka was to share the cake with her family the following Saturday, the anniversary of her son’s death. She was growing impatient and worried that perhaps her sister-in-law had forgotten about the cake, which would ruin the anniversary. The cake Randia was waiting for was not for an anniversary, but rather, for her and her sister-in-law to enjoy together over coffee. Yet both Randia and Córka were equally impatient. To demonstrate her impatience, Randia/Córka was sighing and intermittently looking up at the clock in her living room. Many parts of the scene took place in absolute silence, with only the ticking of the old clock in the background. At one point, I suddenly found myself transported to my mother’s apartment in the 1980s. I was a teenager doing homework, and my grandmother (who lived with us) was napping on the sofa. My grandmother’s old clock struck 3 p.m. I remember looking at my grandmother and, for the first time ever, coming to the painful realization that her time with us was limited: she was 85 years old.
Randia’s deep sigh jolted me back to the present. I glanced at Randia’s clock. It was nearly 3 p.m. The coincidence was remarkable. But even more astonishing was Randia’s/Córka’s heartbreaking reflection, “Yes, the clock is ticking for all of us . . . but for some, the clock is ticking faster than for others . . . For me it’s ticking fast. We might not be sitting like this together next year.” It was not important whether it was Córka addressing her friend Ela or Randia speaking to me because, if Randia and I would not be “sitting like this together next year,” neither would be Córka and Ela. Taken aback, I looked at Randia, thinking to myself, “What if this really were the last time we would see each other?” At that point, the feelings I felt for my grandmother on that day in the 1980s came flooding back with such a formidable force that I was left completely astonished. In that instance, Randia had transformed into my grandmother, and my grandmother into Randia. Traces of the past stubbornly stuck to the old clock’s ticking, pulling us together with its ghostly arms. Randia’s hearty laughter eased the moment, “Don’t worry, Magda, I’m not ready to go yet . . . not so fast! My candle hasn’t burnt out, yet!”
Performance studies scholar Soyini Madison (2005) argues that once experience is converted into a theatrical expression, it moves from the private to the public sphere and becomes “a shared reality” (p. 151). As performance theorist Dwight Conquergood (1991) notes, in the context of performance ethnography, shared emotional knowledge is summoned between performer and audience. Randia and I were both performers and spectators, and such shared emotional knowledge may have also materialized between us, and our unique co-construction of knowledge may have further aided in this process by mobilizing a particular kind of quiet “affective work” (Kwon, 2015, p. 480). This form of affective work draws on unarticulated, subliminal bodily sensations, and moods more than on consciously experienced thoughts, feelings, emotions, and desires (Irving, 2011; Massumi, 2002). Perhaps this is seen in these “sticky” moments of silence, as well as in the spontaneous nature of our improvisations, during which Randia and I had to allow our stories, movements, expressions, and emotions to arise with little time for rationalization. As Brazilian theater director and theoretician Augusto Boal argues, working intuitively with the body allows actors to connect to their unconscious feelings and desires (A. Jackson, 1992, p. xxiii).
Fiction and Projective Approximation
Fiction—which also opens a window onto the unconscious—also played a role here. Improvisation allowed Randia (and me) to spontaneously step into different characters that inadvertently represented me, my mother, her children, herself, and others, with little time to rationalize any one choice. This improvisational spontaneity may have facilitated Randia’s switching back and forth between various acting styles, which allowed her to identify with the characters played and also shift roles. The elements of magic realism she adopted made it possible for her to also merge multiple roles into one, expand one role into many, or blend those roles with her own person, my person, or vice versa. She was able to create characters that, in a kaleidoscopic manner, were in a continuous process of becoming, assembling, reassembling, appearing, and disappearing, a type of a “surrealist adventure”(Thompson, 2007, pp. 181-187) that defies traditional notions of personhood, constricted by a definable body, time, and space. Randia could step into my shoes and those of her children, and “experience” what my life and her children’s may have “felt” like through “projective approximation.” In this process, an actor—in this case Randia—creates their characterizations by mimicking their own experiences and what they imagine to be the experiences of their characters (Loizos, 1993; Sjöberg, forthcoming). They are approximations because they are never direct expressions of either one’s own or the characters’ experiences; one does not possess a means for the unmediated expression of one’s own, or others’, experiences. Mimicry, thus, is a space of continuous (re)interpretation and creativity (Sjöberg, forthcoming; Taussig, 1993). As Walter Benjamin (1978) argued, mimesis has a radical potential because it is inextricably linked to action.
In a context of spontaneous improvisation, such creative action is an unfinished and messy happenstance, which may have led Randia into those corners of my and her characters’ interior lives that she would have not visited consciously. Moreover, the continuous process of becoming different characters, blurring the lines between them, and breaking the fourth wall, may have also muddled for her (and me) the distinctions between the moments when she performed as if she were another character and when she performed as if she were herself. In this kaleidoscope of personhoods, Randia may have inadvertently adopted my own emotional perspective as her own, as well as the perspectives of her children.
In circumventing self-censorship and tapping into unarticulated and unconscious interiorities, spontaneous improvisation enabled us to attune to those aspects of each other’s experiences less amenable to spoken means of expression. Fiction may have also been useful here because “empathic knowing” can be experienced as an infringement on privacy (Groark, 2008, p. 430), or even yet another insidious form of colonization. Perhaps fiction facilitated a level of empathic attunement because, while it tapped into our private thoughts and feelings, it also safely concealed them. By the end of the storytelling day, when Randia, as Córka, compelled me, as Ela, to explain the decision to emigrate, I jotted down in my field notes, “[Randia] was Córka, and I was Ela. Fiction stood safely between us . . . like an invisible screen, concealing a heartbroken mother abandoned by her children, and a guilt-ridden daughter who had abandoned her mother.” As Randia once aptly put it, fiction allowed her to “say what [she] really want[ed] to say.”
However, the empathic attunement that materialized in our dramatic storytelling project was not stable or persistent. While Randia grew progressively empathic toward my situation as a migrant child during our storytelling sessions, this had changed when I returned to Poland after a year’s absence. Randia was again reproachful about my decision to immigrate to Canada, and about my plans to eventually move my mother into a long-term care facility. In fact, the screen of fiction was no longer needed: in the earlier stages of the project, she expressed disapproval only while in character, but when I returned to Poland, she was critical of me even outside of storytelling. Toward the end of my stay, she grew more empathic toward me once again.
It is difficult to know why Randia’s empathy was intermittent, but it may have been that our dramatic storytelling sessions facilitated a “momentary affective attunement,” rather than a more sustained long-term “empathic understanding” (Kirmayer, 2008, p. 461). A more sustained empathic understanding might be more difficult to attain: While we might have empathy for another person, this “feeling occurs in the midst of our own struggles, strivings, and commitments, and so immediately acquires new meaning and consequence” (Kirmayer, 2008, pp. 460-461). Perhaps it was easier for Randia to empathize with me during the summer months, when both her children and I were visiting, and when she may have felt less despondent than in winter when struggling alone to make ends meet. Following my long absence, it may have been difficult for her to even remember that she had earlier empathized with me because, as Hollan (2008) notes, what one experiences as empathy in a particular moment may not be remembered as such afterward. Furthermore, a momentary affective attunement, such as the one that materialized between us in the dramatic storytelling sessions, may have not been adequate to maintain Randia’s empathy toward me in the long term because, as mentioned earlier, ethnographers and interlocutors may be occupying diametrically different worlds (Kirmayer, 2008). Randia may have been able to empathize with me in the midst of our improvisations, but, later on, it appeared difficult for her to cognitively appreciate my rationale that I was not able to return to Poland to look after my mother because I could not give up my tenured professorship in Canada. For Randia, the idea of a tenured professorship had no meaning, while looking after one’s mother was one’s utmost responsibility, regardless of the circumstances.
Radical Silence
So, what insights does my dramatic storytelling project provide for an engaged and interventionist anthropology, or for ethnographic practice more broadly? What can transdisciplinary ethnographic approaches that take imagination, performance, and fiction seriously offer the larger academic effort committed to advocacy and activism? Though I sought to effect a tangible transformative action, this project has shown that “quiet theatre”—which, to me, initially meant paralyzing silence—could, in fact, be the very well of radical action. Prominent British theater director, Peter Brook, famously argued that in Beckett’s theater “[ . . . ] despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn” and, in that sense, he saw Beckett’s “dark plays” as, ultimately, “plays of light” (Brook, 1968, p. 58). It seems that the contour our “quiet theatre” followed was the opposite of the “no good” silence that engulfed Randia and me; in that sense, then, it was a play of light, or, I should say, a play of vitalizing silence.
As researchers, we always come to our projects with certain ideas about what politics, justice, change, or involvement might entail. Yet, these ideas are never neutral; behind them might lurk Western ideals of humanitarianism (Hemment, 2007; Johnston, 2010), “do-gooderism” (Schuller, 2014, p. 409), and the “white savior industrial complex” (Cole, 2012). Although anthropological intervention as a concrete action aimed at social transformation has been seen as a desired anthropological goal (Mullings, 2013), at the same time, the on-the-ground realities of ethnographic work are frequently unpredictable, contradictory, unfinished, and ever-changing, constantly throwing into doubt what it means to be an activist (Checker et al, 2014). Ignoring this simple fact can romanticize and exaggerate the extent to which we can effect change (Checker, 2014), when, in fact, more frequently than not, we cannot easily transform the social, political, and economic forces responsible for inequality and injustice. Overestimating our power will not help our interlocutors, and might only serve the neoliberal forces in academia that have usurped the language of social justice, community activism, and transformation to promote their entrepreneurial agendas (Checker et al, 2014). Thinking about activism, we should keep in mind Sarah Green’s (2014) words that “there are always particularities that make a difference, and which have specific implications for intervention” (p. 5).
Perhaps this is why transdisciplinary ethnographic approaches are good to act with. They seem to have that Midas touch that—through imagination, performance, storytelling, and fiction, or other creative strategies—turns particularities into gold. Our quiet theater was one such piece of gold that paved the way to transforming our relationship. Of course, not all projects can adopt approaches that bridge ethnography and the creative arts. Doing so may not always be possible or beneficial. The dramatic storytelling that Randia and I adopted, for example, required strong and long-term rapport between the two of us, and Randia’s willingness to work with performance and fiction. In my case, I had known Randia since 2001, and we have remained in close contact since. She already had an experience in, and fondness for, working theatrically. This project may have not been possible had I worked with a different woman. I do urge, however, as we seek out “methods of hope” (Miyazaki, 2004), “utopian performatives” (Dolan, 2005, p. 5), and “performance[s] of possibilities” (Madison, 2005, p. 172), that we keep in mind that radical change can also sit in the strangest of places, such as silence or inaction. And it can leap toward us when we least expect it, demanding that we sit quiet and listen. Quiet theater, then, may be less about the research approaches we ultimately adopt to effect change, and more about being attentive to the unpredictable, hidden, obscure, and humble ways in which activism might play out in the field. In our project, quiet theater allowed Randia to reimagine her relationship with her own children and, by proxy, her own life. As a result of the dramatic storytelling sessions in which she felt empathy toward me, she began considering the possibility that her children had left because they had few options, that despite their absence they still cared for her, that they may not be able to return to Poland to look after her, and, thus, that she may have to seek alternatives. She even considered joining her children in England or moving into a long-term care facility, options she had long strenuously opposed.
Yet “sitting quiet and listening” also might mean taking into consideration perspectives that might not easily align with our own Western scholarly training. For me, it might involve being open to the possibility that our “quiet theatre” may have not only been, or even not at all, about an empathic attunement between Randia and me, but rather, about something else entirely. While Randia, at times, admitted that she “felt for me” as a migrant child, our “space of sincerity” may have had more to do with her deceased children than with me and her. Perhaps this is where my scholarly interpretations of silence may be incompatible with those of Randia. She, like many Catholic Roma in Poland with whom I have worked, believes in an afterlife, and that spirits inhabit our realities and guide our lives. Hence, she maintained that her deceased children’s spirits watched over and cared for her. In fact, for her, it was only her children’s spirits who ever truly cared, “ . . . nobody cares anymore . . . when my family was here, I still was looked after, but now they don’t care anymore. They have their own problems, and they are far. If I dropped dead, no one would notice . . . well, I shouldn’t say no one . . . because . . . my son and daughter who died would . . . they care, they always pay attention” (field notes, August 10, 2010). Following the deaths of her eldest daughter and, subsequently, her son and youngest daughter, Randia began experiencing nightly visitations. She claimed these were her children who had come to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Yet, when I asked her whether she had ever spoken to her daughter’s spirit, she asserted that although she had wanted to, she did not, as a priest had once advised her that “one shall never speak to ghosts.” Our dramatic storytelling sessions, though, may have provided Randia with a space for a different kind of attunement, where Randia could connect with her children’s spirits. In one dramatic storytelling session, while narrating a scene in which a spirit of the deceased Hania visits her mother, Córka, Randia had Córka ask her daughter an array of questions: “Child, why did you die? Why did you not look after yourself? Why didn’t you see doctors . . . when there was still time? Why? You left me all alone . . . with all this debt. How could you have done this to your old mother?” (storytelling session, August 14, 2016). When I asked Randia why Córka was asking her daughter questions when one should never speak with spirits, she stated, “No, one never should! But now, Córka can . . . because it’s a play. I’d never ask myself, but she can” (field notes, August 14, 2016). Consequently, it may have been that the space of sincerity, where a different form of understanding between her and me had materialized, was not necessarily due to our mutual empathic attunement, fiction, or projective improvisation, but, first and foremost, because, in that space, spirits “paid attention.” Following one storytelling session, Randia remarked, “I know my mother hears me, she always does . . . she watches over me . . . you know, when we were acting today, Córka and Ela, and her photo was right there? . . . I thought, ‘she is watching over us . . . she’s guiding us.’ Because, she understands. Her spirit enthused us today . . . ” (field notes, July 2, 2015). Perhaps, what for me was magic realism, for Randia, was not so magic, but rather, a part of how things really were in the world. She once counseled me, “[ . . . ] spirits are everywhere . . . in every corner . . . we’re surrounded by them . . . that’s how things really [emphasis mine] are” (field notes, July 10, 2015). Quiet theater, then, may also require paying attention and taking seriously what our interlocutors are telling us. By taking seriously, I mean accepting our interlocutors’ worlds, not merely as alternative points of view, systems of beliefs, but rather, as having ontological significance, namely as lived realities co-existing alongside our own (Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell, 2007; Kohn, 2013; Povinelli, 1995; Viveros de Castro, 2015). quiet theater listens. And if we carefully listen with it, we may even hear not only the rustling of the leaves outside the kitchen window but also the sprouting of new leaves from the barren tree in the final act of Waiting for Godot.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Shawn Kazubowski-Houston, Erin Martineau, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on this article, as well as the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE) for its tremendous support and inspiration.
Author’s Note
Sections of this article have been previously published to support different arguments and conclusions in Canadian Theatre Review (“A Stroll in Heavy Boots,” 2012) and Anthropologies and Futures (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has been funded by York University’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Small Research Grant and the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD) Research-Creation Grant.