VIEWPOINT: IN A STRANGE STATE OF AFFAIRS

Afghanistan inspired the new play by Tony Kushner long before September 11. On the eve of its British premiere, the author of Angels in America reflects on the aftermath of 9/11
 

After the Twin Towers collapsed last September I received e-mails from a few newspapers asking for an article about the attack. I imagine everyone who'd ever written anything was asked to write about the attack. Opining felt hasty, unseemly and unwise. I thought about the wisdom of Jewish laws of shiva, the weeklong period of silence, retirement, prayer mandated as one begins mourning. I didn't write.

A month later, as the cast of my play Homebody/Kabul was beginning rehearsals at New York Theatre Workshop and letters containing anthrax spores were arriving in newsrooms all over the city, I was asked to prepare a press statement, since it was assumed that, given the subject of the play, there might be controversy.

This is what I wrote: "Homebody/Kabul is a play about Afghanistan and the West's historic and contemporary relationship to that country. It is also a play about travel, about knowledge and learning through seeking out strangeness, about trying to escape the unhappiness of one's life through an encounter with Otherness, about narcissism and self-referentiality as inescapable booby traps in any such encounter; and it's about a human catastrophe, a political problem of global dimensions. It's also about grief. I hate having to write what a play is about, but I suppose these are some of the themes of this play.

"I didn't imagine when I was working on the play that by the time we produced it the United States would be at war with Afghanistan. My play is not a polemic; it was written before September 11, before we began bombing, and I haven't changed anything in the play to make it more or less relevant to current events.

"It was my feeling when writing it that more arrogance, more aggression, more chaos and more bloodshed were the last things needed in addressing the desperate situation in which the Afghan people find themselves. I would hope my feeling is expressed in the play. It seems to me that Americans have shown, in recent weeks, a desire to know much more about Afghanistan. My greatest hope for a play is always that it might prove generative of thought, contemplation, discussion ó important components of what I think we want from our entertainments.

"We have been plunged into horror, profoundly alienated from our 'dailyness', from a certain familiarity and safety without which life becomes very difficult. It seems to me that one of the hardest challenges we face is to keep thinking critically, analytically, compassionately, deeply, even while angry, mourning, terrified. We need to think about ourselves, our society, even about our enemies. I have always believed theatre can be a useful part of our collective and individual examining."

Nine months have passed, and Homebody/Kabul, in which an Englishwoman (the Homebody of the title) goes missing in Taliban-controlled Kabul and is sought after by her half-Arab daughter, is about to begin performances in London. The fate of the people of Afghanistan is, again, in the hands of the US, and there are ominous signs that we are beginning to lose interest. And a continued American presence in the region is unlikely to prove an unmixed blessing. George W. Bush ran for President against the Clinton Administration's record of "nation building". Hard to know what to make of his present posturing as the Simon Bolivar of Central Asia; one suspects an oil pipeline runs through it.

Homebody/Kabul was written before 9/11. I'm not psychic. If you choose to write about current events there's a good chance you will find the events you've written about to be . . . well, current. If lines in Homebody/Kabul seem "eerily prescient" (a phrase repeated so often that my boyfriend Mark suggested I adopt it as a drag name: Eara Lee Prescient), we ought to consider that the information required to foresee, long before 9/11, at least the broad outline of serious trouble ahead was so abundant and easy of access that even a playwright could avail himself of it We also ought to wonder about the policy, so recently popular with the American Right, according to which countries or regions can be cordoned off and summarily tossed out of the international community's considerations, subjected to sanction and refused help by the world's powers, a policy that helped blind the US Government to geopolitical reality, to say nothing of ethical accountability and moral responsibility.

In addition to the requests to write something after 9/11, I was asked to unwrite something. An editor of a magazine to which I'd contributed a short piece, written before 9/11, e-mailed to inquire whether I would like to remove a sentence in the piece in which I called George W. Bush a feckless blood-spattered plutocrat (more executions under his belt than any other governor ó any other elected official? ó in American history) and Ariel Sharon an unindicted war criminal (the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon). I saw no good reason to make the change.

September 11 may have altered the world for ever, but nothing changes what has been. The past can't be erased and can only be effaced if we agree to forget, and what has been shouldn't be forgotten. People change. I believe deeply in the possibility of people changing. But Bush? Sharon? Nine months have passed and look at the mess the feckless blood-spattered plutocrat and the unindicted war criminal have wrought in the Middle East.

Change requires as its catalysts and fuel good faith and decent intention, as well as deep need. Need, not greed; decent intention, not oil profiteering; good faith, not ethnic cleansing and military occupation cloaked in fundamentalist misreading of Scripture. As Margo Channing reminds us, "Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

If I may be permitted an aside: I know the preceding statement will upset people who believe that the Palestinian Authority, if not the Palestinian people, share equally in the blame for the current nightmare in the Mideast, which threatens the entire planet. I am an American and a Jew, and as such I believe I have a direct responsibility for the behaviour of Americans and Jews.

I deplore suicide bombings and the enemies of the peace process in the Palestinian territories and in the Arab and Muslim world. I deplore the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israeli Defence Forces in the occupied territories. I deplore the occupation, the forced evacuations, the settlements, the refugee camps, the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people; Jews, of all people, with our history of suffering, should refuse to treat our fellow human beings like that.

I deplore the enemies of peace in Israel and in America as well, and to them, inasmuch as they are far more mighty, and already have what the Palestinians seek, statehood, I apportion a greater share of the responsibility for making peace to them. Israel must not be destroyed. The Palestinian state must be established. Peace talks must resume.

Great historical crimes reproduce themselves. One injustice breeds new generations of injustice. Suffering rolls on down through the years, becomes a bleak patrimony, the only inheritance for the disinherited, the key to history, the only certain meaning of life. Sorrow proliferates, evil endures, the only God is the God of Vengeance. Hope dies, the imagination withers and with it the human heart. What time in human history is comparable to this? It has become almost impossible to locate plausible occasions for hope.

Confronted with the massacre of innocent people, we quibble rather than act; the death of children becomes a feature of our daily entertainment. Technology offers oppressor and oppressed alike efficient and cost-effective means of mass murder, and even acts expressive of dissent, defiance and liberation are changed by the appalling progress of weapons development and the global arms market into suicide bombings, into brutal expressions of indiscriminate nihilistic mayhem.

The following speech used to be in the third act of Homebody/Kabul, which was, in its first draft, a very long play. It's still a long play but it used to be longer. This speech is about Cain, Adam's first son, who is, according to legend, buried in Kabul:

"Cain was marked, and so they drove him out, everywhere he tried to rest, they drove him away. Only Kabul did not. He was an extremely old man when he arrived, many years older than a thousand years old. Anyone could see that it was past time, that he was done for, that he could no longer hurt anyone. His heart was worn out with regretting, after so many centuries of remorse, it must have been.

"He most likely felt nothing at all by the time he arrived here, an animal looking for a soft bed of leaves, some place out of the night wind. And this has always been a hospitable city, welcoming strangers, a good host to the weary traveller. But still it was a great mistake. Letting him stop here, burying him here. They should have driven him away."

I was moved by the fact that the city of Kabul was Cain's resting place. In the play I suggest that he was, perhaps, murdered there. Over the centuries so many people have died in Kabul, in Afghanistan, the number of the slain in the past four decades perhaps exceeding all those who had fallen in all the centuries before.

Cain was marked not as a sign of the evil he had committed when he murdered his brother, but as a protection: God warned the human race to leave the murderer unharmed. He who killed Cain would be punished sevenfold. Did Cain die violently in Kabul? Is the city in some sense cursed? What is the genesis of evil, how far back does one have to go to find it? Isn't the abandonment of the futile and fatal search for lost causes one place at which a distinction can be made between justice and revenge?

It is in fact only part of the legend that Cain died and was buried in Kabul. The Homebody character points out, citing Nancy Hatch Dupree's guidebook, that Cain may have founded the city. This legend has a resonance with the passage in the Holy Scriptures in which we are told that Cain's sons, Jabal, Jubal and Tubalcain, were the human race's first musicians and metalsmiths.

There is attached to this destroyer, this solitary, desperate, cursed figure of ultimate barrenness, some potential for that renewal of life which is human creativity. Cain is the founder of a city as well as a fratricide, the father of the arts as well as the first person to usurp God's power of determining mortality, the first person to usurp the role of the angel of death.

Tragedy is the annihilation from whence new life springs, the Nothing out of which Something is born. Devastation can be a necessary prelude to a new kind of beauty. Necessary but always bloody. In the preface to his verse drama, Cain, Byron tells us: "The world was destroyed several times before the creation of man."

That makes a certain sort of sense to me. The history of revolution and modern evolutionary theory lend credence to Byron's breathtaking assertion, but how frightening! Are cataclysm and catastrophe the birth spasms of the future, is the mass grave some sort of cradle, does the future always arrive borne on a torrent of blood?

In my synagogue, on the High Holy Days, the rabbis prepare a booklet which contains beautiful and provocative passages from the vast body of Jewish spiritual inquiry and explication. And so this year, months after the towers fell down, the mushroom cloud still visible in the sky over Manhattan, I read the following sentence, which suggests another kind of prologue to creation, perhaps offers hope for some prelude other than destruction, some other way for the future to commence: from the Talmud (BT Nedarim 39B): "Repentance preceded the world."

Homebody/Kabul is in preview from May 10 and opens on May 22 at the Young Vic Theatre.
 

©2002 Tony Kushner