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Robin D. G. Kelley's introduction: Twenty One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East, by Broadway Plays Publishers.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
- Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”I've only been here a few days and already I can't breathe.
- Fawaz to Colonel Danny Tirza, “Twenty-One Positions”—-
The genesis of this play was itself a bold cartographic dream, a remapping of the theater world by building bridges between the U.S. and Palestine. In 2002, Naomi Wallace led a delegation of American playwrights comprised of Robert O’Hara, Betty Shamieh, Tony Kushner, Kia Corthron, and Lisa Schlesinger to meet their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank. They connected with the theater community there to exchange ideas and learn about the conditions under which Palestinians worked, lived, and created. They met Abdelfattah Abusrour, poet, playwright, educator, and founding director of the Alrowwad Cultural and Theater Society located in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp. Having grown up in the camp, Abusrour gave up a promising career in science to create a “beautiful theater of resistance” aimed at releasing the creative capacity of young people.
Wallace conceived of the trip not as a fact-finding mission or a liberal quest for “dialogue” but as an obligation to resist injustice and a radical act of reciprocity. Collaboration was an objective. So when she received a commission from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2003 to create new work, she promptly recruited Abusrour and Lisa Schlesinger to co-author a play about the situation in Palestine.
It took a little over a year and two more trips to Palestine for the trio to complete “Twenty-One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East.” They wrote it during the height of the Second Intifada and as Israel began constructing its infamous 422-mile-long, twenty to twenty-six foot high “security barrier.” Referred to as the “apartheid wall” by Palestinians, this gargantuan concrete structure snakes through the West Bank, razing villages and appropriating land for Israel, limiting Palestinian mobility and access to schools, farms, loved ones, and much needed medical care. Armed with electrified barbed wire, heavily policed gates and checkpoints, vehicle barrier trenches and a sixty-meter-wide “exclusion zone” on the Palestinian side, the wall was designed by Colonel Danny Tirza to be impenetrable. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall was illegal and ordered construction stopped. Israel has yet to abide by the ruling.
Israeli officials claim the wall was a response to the Second Intifada—the Palestinian uprising against the illegal occupation, escalating state violence, and Israel’s continued violation of international law and human rights. (The First Intifada erupted in 1987 and ended in the early 1990s). The catalyst for renewed resistance was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), the location of the Al Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem’s Old City on September 28, 2000. Surrounded by over 1,000 riot police, Sharon announced, “The Temple Mount is in our hands," which Muslims understood as a threat to take Al Aqsa, the world’s third holiest Islamic site. Violence erupted. Palestinian resistance was met with brutal force, as the Israeli Occupation Forces launched a series of military operations and administrative policies designed to collectively punish all Palestinians.
And yet, despite what critics and pundits say about “Twenty-One Positions,” it is not about the wall. Rather, the wall is both character and prop in a larger drama about six decades of colonialism. It is spectacle and obstacle, background and foreground, metaphor and smokescreen. To treat it as the play’s subject is to confuse flower bulbs and olive trees for the land itself.
Abusrour, Schlesinger, and Wallace have written a brilliant, unsettling, searing, tragicomedy about the meaning and consequences of violent dispossession and military occupation on generations of human beings—consequences that extend well beyond the Green Line, from the Jordan River to the Ohio River, from the Potomac to the Tigris and Euphrates to the bloodstained beaches of Gaza. They remind us that Operations Defensive Shield, Determined Path, Autumn Clouds, Summer Rains, Cast Lead, Returning Echo, Protective Edge, Brothers’ Keeper, or whatever the euphemism du jour, are not exceptional episodes but the rule. The consequences for the ruled ought not be measured merely by the destructive force of American-made F-15s, cluster bombs and white phosphorous, but also by the everyday routine of occupation—unemployment, poverty, segregated roads, insecurity, illegal settlements, state-sanctioned theft of water and land, destruction of olive trees and local agriculture, a racially defined security regime, the effects of permanent refugee existence.
Despite the walls, settlements, checkpoints, barriers, borders, envoys, articles, resolutions, and maps, there has been but one state since 1948: the state of emergency, the state of war. The play is set mainly in Bethlehem in the West Bank, but the state of emergency extends to every part of Palestine. The play’s invocation of shredded maps and contested archaeological sites are powerful symbols for how the occupation and the wall break up contiguous territories and lands, disrupting lives, bludgeoning memories, rupturing history. But in Israel’s efforts to create normalcy out of rupture, the rupture returns like Banquo’s ghost. Palestinians are that rupture, the living, the dead, the disappeared, the imprisoned, the refugee whose presence disrupts the Zionist dream. Like eleven-year-old Rund, they walk around with broken pieces of maps and memory of how the parts fit, how to move through occupation in “seconds or minutes” in a militarized land that can take hours to move a few kilometers. Cartographic dream meets demographic nightmare.
But wait. What we have here is a love story involving two brothers, both of whom were born and raised in Cincinnati, and their exiled parents, a beautiful and brilliant bride-to-be and her equally brilliant auntie, a sagacious and hungry little girl, a dispossessed old Mizrahi Jew, an architect of war, a people and a land. To grasp this love story, one must be prepared to hold two or more contradictory ideas and dreams at once. Israeli soldiers know how to kill from twenty-one positions. Palestinian women demonstrate twenty-one positions of lovemaking. An “Operation” is generally an act of war, but an “operation” can be an act of love. Intifada and love are deeply intertwined. So is colonialism and dehumanization. Colonial war turns Israeli kids into cogs in the Occupation machine. Every interrogation, every seizure, every shooting, every strip search, every home demolition and bulldozed olive tree, dehumanizes both occupied and occupier.
For the parents of Fawaz and Rashid, exile was a strategy to preserve one’s humanity in the face of colonial onslaught. But it didn’t work. Exile could not suppress the longing for home, the memories, the feeling of fugitivity and rootlessness. Fawaz, especially, believed America was the better place, the paragon of democracy and the rule of law. Adamant not to do anything “illegal” in occupied Palestine, he believed his American citizenship protected him. It never occurred to Fawaz that his name, skin color, and heritage trumped his passport. (How a native of Cincinnati, where police killed young black men with impunity, where poor black residents complained of living under occupation, where skin color trumps American citizenship, could be so naïve is but one of many sly jokes slipped in by the playwrights.) The irony, of course, is that the occupation itself is illegal. And so are the settlements, Israel’s use of American military supplies to maintain the occupation, home demolitions and forced evictions, prohibiting the right of return, not to mention the wall. Israel violates international law, Geneva Conventions, and U.N. resolutions with impunity with the full backing of Washington D. C.—the one place on Rund’s shredded map that proves indigestible. Fawaz’s disappointments are particularly striking now, for as I write these words the Palestinian Authority has successfully applied to join the International Criminal Court in an effort to bring charges against Israel for war crimes. Not only has the U.S. opposed their bid, but President Benjamin Netanyahu promised to retaliate by withholding at least $127 million in tax revenue owed to the Palestinian Authority.
“Twenty-One Positions” is a dangerous play. And Abusrour, Schlesinger, and Wallace know it. The Guthrie Theater decided not to produce the play, and in a letter to the playwrights, instead of critiquing the dramaturgy of the play, the Gurthrie’s senior dramaturg dismissed the play as an "anti-Zionist . . . propaganda tract" and accused the authors of "justifying...terrorist acts". As of this writing, Fordham University mounted the only U.S. production of “Twenty-One Positions."
What makes the play dangerous is not its explicit critique of occupation or its refusal to “balance” Palestinian pain and suffering with Israeli pain and suffering. Occasionally, the theater gathers enough courage to stage these kinds of stories. “Twenty-One Positions” is dangerous because its main characters resist dehumanization; they refuse to accept the terms and conditions of colonial rule; they reject victimization. They are dangerous because they are real. They represent the activists, the intellectuals, the youth, who speak confidently about a liberated country, who see the old guard leadership and the Palestinian Authority as impediments, who envision and debate at least twenty-one different paths to a democratic and decolonized future, who keep the shredded maps and the keys and the memories. You see, I met the likes of Rashid, Hala, and Fawaz at Birzeit University, at various Palestinian think-tanks in Ramallah and Haifa, and at my own university. I drank coffee with Maryam and watched Rund take off on her battered bike along the narrow pathways of a Bethlehem refugee camp. They are the ones trying desperately to breathe, to think, to live, to fulfil their own cartographic dreams of replacing the state of emergency with one land—surveyed from a glider cutting through a clear, quiet, smokeless sky.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
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Robin D. G. Kelley's introduction to The Liquid Plain, published by Broadway Plays.
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Naomi Wallace found the title The Liquid Plain in Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 poem “A Farewell to America,” a stanza from which serves as the play’s epigraph. Do not skip over it, for Wheatley’s verse does much more than serve up a neat, picturesque metaphor for the Atlantic as a vast highway between Old and New Worlds. The play and the poem share much in common. Both are based on actual events: “A Farewell to America” tells of Wheatley’s real life journey from Boston to London in 1773 whereas The Liquid Plain takes off from the trials of James De Wolfe, a slave ship captain and prominent New England citizen indicted in 1791 for throwing an enslaved woman overboard because she contracted smallpox. John Cranston, a crew member who refused orders to assist in the killing, testified against De Wolfe causing something of a sensation. Once feted by abolitionists and reviled by slave traders, Cranston faded from historical memory until Marcus Rediker’s magnificent book, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), resurrected him.
And yet, in both cases “actual events” mask deeper, more fundamental truths.
The African-born Wheatley, early America’s most famous poet, took off for “Britannia’s distant shore” partly to improve her health, partly to seek out a publisher. Paradoxically, she traveled in the company of her slave master’s son, Nathaniel Wheatley. In other words, she was property. The poem’s apparent nostalgia for New England veils her recognition that the England of old had just become liberated territory for the enslaved. A year prior to her journey, a fugitive from slavery named James Somerset successfully sued for his right to freedom in the British high court. Chief Justice Lord Mansfield ruled that because England never passed a law legalizing slavery, masters could not force fugitives back into slavery as long as they were on English soil. So when Wheatley writes in the same poem, “But thou! Temptation hence away / With all thy fatal train / Nor once seduce my soul away,” it is not clear whether she is speaking of England or America—the former, the temptation to seize her freedom; the latter, the temptation to return home without it. Either way, we know it was on her mind when she penned “A Farewell to America,” however camouflaged behind flowery verse. We also know that she returned to New England a slave, choosing to negotiate her freedom over a fugitive life in the sanctuary of Britannia. She was finally freed upon the death of her master, John Wheatley, in 1778, and she herself died six years later at the age of thirty-one, broken and penniless.
In The Liquid Plain, reversing sail across the Atlantic also serves as a possible path to freedom. The rough, cold waters first experienced as the nightmare of the Middle Passage—young men, women and children packed tightly into dark cargo holds, chained together, suffering from dysentery, fever, malnutrition and brutality—appeared as the dream of returning home. Except that Wallace’s characters chose fugitivity, self-liberation, and Africa over the kindness of white men, the fairness of white law, and the paternalism of England. Indeed, she succeeds in transforming a tale of white bourgeois villainy and white working-class courage into a story that centers on the struggles of black women for freedom and justice.
Set in Bristol, Rhode Island, the first act takes place in 1791, the year of De Wolfe’s trial and the first year of the Haitian Revolution—the massive slave insurrection that not only destroyed slavery on the island but established the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Act One opens with two lovers, Adjua and Dembi, fugitives from slavery, hustling along Bristol’s docks with dreams of returning to West Africa and raising a free child on soil they can call home. As they await passage on a ship captained by a former slave named Liverpool Joe, they pull what they think is a corpse from the water in search of valuables. The man turns out to be John Cranston—still alive but temporarily devoid of memory. Thus begins a journey that defies summary, whose tragic and prophetic twists and turns can only be experienced on the stage or in the pages that follow.
Suffice it to say, Adjua does bear a child, a girl named Bristol, who appears in Act Two and Act Three as a forty-six-year-old woman. The year is 1837, three decades after the abolition of the slave trade and three years after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. She makes the transatlantic voyage to the Rhode Island port city for which she was named, but from England, not Africa. And the point of her journey was not to seek freedom—at least not at first—but to exact justice. In the brilliant and determined Bristol Waters, the former slaver-turned-senator James De Wolfe will face his reckoning. And in Bristol’s own reckoning with history, death, Africa, ancestors, and the ghost of poet William Blake, she will discover her calling. Bristol’s dialogue with De Wolfe is a veritable masterpiece, a brilliant exposé of the conceits of Enlightenment-era civilization that transmuted people into cargo and capital, that made murder an economic calculation, that cloaked the bloody business of human trafficking in the refined garments of humanitarianism, and that built a paradise from the bones, sinew and sweat of African people. Bristol strips De Wolfe and the entire system naked, exposing his/its true identity: Butcher. Executioner. Criminal.
Wallace’s brilliance is her ability to reveal the system of modern slavery, its consequences and contradictions, without ever representing slaves, the Middle Passage, or the brutal operations of the plantation. While the play stays anchored in the lives and struggles of black women seeking freedom and justice, Wallace is sensitive to the ways in which slavery pulled everyone into its bloody fold: Europeans and Africans, children and adults, women and men, the rich and the dispossessed. Inevitably, a system of industrial-scale kidnapping bound together the Atlantic world—a world comprised of Africans escaping bondage, sailors resisting impressment, laboring women fighting concubinage, masters and owners and managers wrestling with their own dehumanization.
And yet, Wallace avoids the lure of “equivalency,” of treating impressed sailors or the suppressed European laborers as equally oppressed by the Atlantic slave system. John Cranston is neither a hero nor the star of the story—yes, he is victimized, but he is also a victimizer. Likewise, Dembi, Adjua, Liverpool Joe and Bristol are never victims—indeed, they are never slaves. Wallace grasped what most historians have yet to understand: that slaves only existed in the white imagination, and that the African refused to become a “slave”—which is to say a saleable, docile commodity ready and willing to create surplus for her owner. On the contrary, they were the system’s executioners, soldiers of liberty whose hatred of bondage and love of humanity drove them to act, often constructively but sometimes destructively.
So get ready. Batten down the hatches. Throw all assumptions overboard. And prepare for a voyage that will leave you astonished, edified, and at times utterly breathless.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
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Please follow below link to read Marina Johnson’s review of GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH: