Just as revelations of massive abuse at residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damages done to First Nations by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Ought a Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill’s Sisters were the first plays to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no overt reference to the residential school experience. Sisters looks at a Catholic residential school but focusses on the white nuns rather than the Native children. In the context of residential school histories and literature, this essay examines the plays’ theatrical forms and silences with specific reference to trauma theory and a series of debates in 1988-1989 around the issues of Native peoples going public about their experiences of the schools and non-Native writers appropriating Native stories.
A radically satirical response to the American invasion of Iraq post-9/11, The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil combines traditional agitprop with the transnational impulses of postcolonial performance to imagine some kind of new world emerging from exile, diaspora, and the ashes of the old. Dramatizing the plight of stateless refugees from a fictional Middle Eastern country, its three Canadian playwrights deploy Canadian theatre's historically ambivalent position along the margins of American cultural and military power to attack American foreign policy as well as to critique Canadian complicity and hypocrisy. This essay examines the ideological origins of the play and the metatheatrical comic strategies that allow it to transcend what Noam Chomsky calls “the bounds of the expressible” and to speak the politically unspeakable.
Near the beginning of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967), George Ryga's classic Canadian play about the destruction of a young Native woman who has come to the city looking for a better life, Ryga introduces Mr. Homer, "a white citizen who has the hurried but fulfilled appearance of the socially responsible man." Mr. Homer is a pillar of what is known in social welfare terms as the voluntary sector. He runs an agency called (appropriately, in this postcolonial text) the Centre. "[W]e do a lot of things for our Indians here in the city at the Centre", he explains to the audience in his superficially good-natured and benignly paternalistic way. His Centre is an important adjunct to the formal justice system represented by the Magistrate, who assures Rita Joe, during one of her frequent, nightmarish trials, "There are institutions to help you". As the scene unfolds, Mr. Homer puts his hand "possessively" on Rita's shoulder, inviting her to confirm how he helped her when her mother got sick and died, and how he helps other "poor dears" who need a place to eat and sleep when they get drunk and leave home. He chuckles over how Indian women "get more of a kick diggin' through [old clothes] that's piled up" in a heap rather than hung on racks. Then he turns again to the audience and angrily complains that "It's the do-gooders bum my ass", those newspaper or TV reporters for whom a drunken Indian becomes a story about "Red Power" or the failure of government policy. "Let them live an' work among the Indians for a few months ... then they'd know what it's really like"
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple chronicles the life of an African American woman from rural Georgia during the first forty years of the twentieth century, a blues life of indignity and severe emotional poverty that is salvaged and ultimately redeemed, in part through the agency of the blues itself. On the opening page, warned by her stepfather never to tell anyone but God that he has raped her, Walker’s protagonist, Celie, erases herself. “I am,” she writes, striking out the word “am” and correcting herself, “I have always been a good girl” (3). She presents herself as “an absence, an erased presence” (Gates 243). Later her husband further (un)defines her: “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Color Purple 176). From this condition of absence, of ostensible nothingness, Celie learns to make herself present and real. She achieves subjectivity and agency under the tutelage of Shug Avery, blues singer.
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