9.+Thompson

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 2 discussions ONLY.//
Sharon Friedman (New York University)

=Judith Thompson's //Palace of the End//=



Gender and Sexuality as Weapons of War in Judith Thompson’s //Palace of the End//

The two Iraq wars and the ubiquitous war on terror have generated numerous theatrical productions that envision the subjectivities of both victims and perpetrators of violence. In Judith Thompson’s //Palace of the End//, for which she received the 2008 International Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, we are presented with a triptych of monologues comprising vastly different experiences related to the U.S. and British presence in Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s rise to power. One thread that weaves together these haunting narratives is the gendering of militarization, surveillance, political coercion, and torture. As is clear from the vast literature on the subject of women and war, “flesh and blood women”—soldiers and rape victims—as well as concepts of masculinity and femininity intersecting with race and ethnicity function to maintain the war effort and the “narrative of racial and national superiority that justifies interventionism and imperialism.”1 In oppressive national regimes or conflicts between indigenous groups, women are often targeted and rape employed to shame, intimidate, unsettle communities and discourage resistance.

Thompson’s invented soliloquies imagine the personal reflections of public figures—our proxies-- whose lives function as a lens onto fateful moral choices during escalating violence, and their narratives make visible the gender dynamics operating in the exercise of power. As in many of Thompson’s plays, the characters’ choices are integrally bound up in shifting identities and subjectivities, socially constructed, yet provisional, and psychologically complex.2 Two of the figures are already dead, and their presence adds a surrealistic quality to the alternate universe of horrific events that we think of as happening “elsewhere.” Claudia Barnett notes that Thompson uses ghostly figures to “transform the dialectic between life and death into a dialectic between life and theatre.” Thompson’s ghosts, she says, “try to improve the lives of the living characters” and the “live audiences who observe them,” creating the potential for theatre and its audiences “to transcend the past and affect the future.”3

The first monologue, “My Pyramids,” was inspired by the media frenzy surrounding Private Lynndie England, the young American soldier photographed in the act of sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, and subsequently imprisoned for actions that had been ordered or sanctioned by her superiors, including the father of her child, Specialist Charles Grainer who staged the photos. Her personal narrative alludes to discourses and ideologies involving the interrogation of suspected terrorists, viewed as racially and culturally alien, and most pointedly to the deployment of sexuality as an intelligence tool. However, in her address to the audience she indignantly holds them responsible for scapegoating her as a woman who humiliates men (in her terms “ugly” or a “feminist”), and for not recognizing the alternate universe she inhabits as she recalls “those secret nights when my breathing went funny and there was dry ice in my heart and I laughed like I have never laughed before.”4

The second monologue, “Harrowdown Hill,” is drawn from the publicized account of the alleged suicide or murder of Dr. David Kelly, member of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense and a former UN weapons inspector identified as the source of a BBC report claiming that the British government had exaggerated its assessment of Iraq’s weapons program in its lead-up to the war. In Thompson’s play, Kelly’s admission follows first hand-reports of American soldiers’ fatal harassment of a young Iraqi girl, daughter of his close personal friend in Baghdad. After a public hearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee investigating his role in the media scandal, Kelly was derogated by the press often in emasculating terms (“that sad little Walter Middy of a man just couldn’t take the pressure” of public scrutiny).5 Two days later he was found dead in a wooded area near his Oxfordshire home. The monologue references these events, as Kelly asks the audience to witness his confession, his guilt over his earlier silence, and the horror of his abjection.6 As he observes his body slowly disintegrating in the woods, his plea for redemption morphs into childhood rhymes shared with his daughter. From a psychoanalytic perspective, perhaps the child within (associated with the metaphorical child he did not protect) clamors to return to a lost self prior to entry into the symbolic order that, in his position of institutional authority, he so dutifully obeyed.

The third and emotionally wrenching final monologue, “Instruments of Yearning” (the designation given to Saddam Hussein’s secret police), interprets the written narrative of Nehrjas Al Saffarh, a well-known member of the Communist Party of Iraq in the 1970s. In what at first appears to be a rape victim’s narrative of war and violence, she is Saddam’s target and, later, part of the “collateral damage” of the Gulf war when her home was bombed by Americans. In Saddam’s terms, she is the traitorous woman who must be sexually abused, and the mother who must witness her son’s torture when she fails to provide information about her husband, a communist party leader. With poignant irony, however, she is also David Kelly’s metaphorical parent who does not protect her child by providing a different kind of military intelligence. And she too asks her child’s forgiveness in allowing this to happen. Al Saffaarh inhabits multiple identities, fragmented and unstable, bleeding into each other: a member of the resistance, a mother of four, a rape victim, and a tormented spirit, a ghost who presides over the past, present, and future of a landscape—her home—violent and beautiful. In her dream of mother and son flying together, watching over Baghdad until there is finally peace, she too yearns for a return to an imaginary realm prior to a rupture with the mother and entry into the law of the father.

These monologues render “the cracks and fissures” as well as “the eruptions” that “seep or explode through psychic and social surfaces” that Robert Nunn sees in Thompson’s earlier depictions of characters in traumatic circumstances.7 The personal is inseparable from the social. The “monstrous” in the traumatized psyche is seen to reside not only in the oppressor but in the most ostensibly righteous victim especially within a geographical and psychic landscape of conquest and violence. (See Penny Farfan’s “Monstrous History: Judith Thompson’s Sled” for an analysis of the presence of past trauma in Thompson’s postcolonial drama.8) The recurrent image in the alternate worlds of Palace of the End, both in the language of the monologues and in the mirrors of the set design, is Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” in which Alice ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror. Thompson’s alternate universe—this violence elsewhere and within—is only legible through a mirror onto the characters’ (and our) moral choices, actions, and inactions, and through a reflection that allows for the appearance of the unconscious, the surfacing of repressed past traumas that complicate reason and subvert denial. We also see the desire for what one Thompson critic calls “the pre-ethical self”9 or, in Lacanian terms, the imaginary prior to entry into a phallocentric order. Naturalized conceptions of gender and violence are made strange in this mirror as well, and color every reflection.

1 Lindsey Feitz and Joane Nagel, “The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War,” //Women in the Military and Armed Conflict//, eds. Helena Carreiras and Gerhard Kummel (Verlag 2008) 212. 2 See Julie Adam, “The Implicated Audience: Judith Thompson’s Anti-Naturalism in //The Crackwalker//, //White Biting Dog//, //I am Yours//, and //Lion in the Streets//,” in //Judith Thompson//, ed. Ric Knowles (Playwrights Canada Press: 2005) 41-46. Jen Harvie, “Constructing Fictions of an Essential Reality, or ‘This Picksur is Niiice': Judith Thompson’s //Lion in the Streets"//, in Knowles, 47-58. 3 Claudia Barnett, “Judith Thompson’s Ghosts: The Revenants that Haunt the Plays” in Knowles, 92, 96. 4 Judith Thompson, //Palace of the End// (Playwrights Canada Press, 1999) 18. 5 Thompson, 23. 6 Julia Kristeva’s //Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection// (Columbia University Press, 1982) would be useful for looking at Kelly’s monologue.. 7 Ric Knowles, “Introduction,” in Knowles, viii; Robert Nunn, “Spatial Metaphor in the Plays of Judith Thompson,” in Knowles, 22-23, 35-36. 8 Penny Farfan, “Monstrous History: Judith Thompson’s Sled ” in Knowles, 99-105. 9 George Toles, “‘Cause You’re the Only One I want’: The Anatomy of Love in the Plays of Judith Thompson” in Knowles, 6. Toles refers to the “inner child’s unfulfilled needs,” the “‘overpowering ghost’ of a child that the self can never leave behind.”