on being a stranger: part one
Theatre du Soleil's Le Dernier Caravanseráil
One of the truly great things I have seen was the Lincoln Center production of the Théatre du Soleil‘s Le Dernier Caravansérail– a two part, six hour performance that showed fragmented, interesecting stories of refugees fleeing, traveling, and sometimes arriving in destinations all over the world.
Because I studied theater for many years, Ariane Mnouchkine, the theater’s founder and director, had been a kind of hero for me since I was introduced to her work by an amazing professor named Shawn-Marie Garrett in an introductory theater class my first semester at Columbia. (Seriously, this Wikipedia page does nothing to give you an idea of how inventive and prolific Mnouchkine is.)
And so the impact this performance had on me was undoubtably due to many elements. But what I remember now is that the actors were all speaking many different languages. Each family or group of people portrayed spoke their own language– Arabic or Serbo-Croatian or French– and then their words were translated on supertitles like they do at the opera. This was an undertaking that was both new and welcome for me. I had studied theater at the Moscow Art Theater two years previous and so had seen many productions that were purely in Russian whose impact were not lost. I already felt that well-done art could transcend logic/language.
But Mnouckine’s production seemed somehow emblematic of a kind of international mentality that I hadn’t yet experienced. It showed a fluidity between cultures, a certain kind of inclusiveness that at times I think we fool ourselves into thinking we have when we live in big metropolitan places like New York and have lived in Greenpoint where they sometimes greet you in Polish when you go in to buy some bread for breakfast.
I think we are fooled because these cultures have parceled themselves out cleanly in places like New York. They are more or less worlds unto themselves. They fade into the American landscape and become a secondary asset to the English-only-ness of everyone’s hurry.
I’m not insulting American cities, as I love many of the ones in which I have lived. But I think we are isolated by our English-only-ness, and limited by it.
And because I have been spending so much time in Europe lately, I have been thinking about Le Dernier Caravanseráil, and languages, and refugees. How we become different and more spacious people when we have/hear more than one word for everything. And that crossing cultures becomes habitual and casual in places like Berlin– not some exotic or intimidating daytrip.
American literature has been called “insular and ignorant.”
Do you feel you’re restricted in this way? Do you feel some loss if you only speak or use English?
I do. And I’m kind of bilingual.
I’ve been taking German classes here in Berlin at a place called KUB: Contact and Consultation Center for Refugees and Migrants. At KUB we all crowd haphazardly into one small room. Most of the people attending have lived in Berlin longer than I have and know more German. They are from Bulgaria and Algeria and Lebanon and Cameroon and everywhere else. People come in late and speak German with many different accents and several times during every class a cellphone goes off with a different verson of the same Middle Eastern pop song. When I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing I somehow ask one of the other students. Many, if not most, people speak English. It is the most common way to communicate in the most basic way.
(I had a slightly angry woman in Poland tell me that English doesn’t even really count as a second language. People just grow up knowing it.)
It is somewhat singular for an American to be shoulder to shoulder with people from so many different cultures at once, absorbed by them. Almost every class we go around and say our names in German and where we are from. I secretly look forward to this each time, even though by now I know where many others are from. It’s the everyday Le Dernier Caravanseráil– the equalizing and intersecting of cultures without the artistic elevation.
The other day I spoke to a friend from Sweden who has lived in Berlin for years. I was telling her the complications for me being non-European. Of needing a work visa, etc.
“I forget about that sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I forget and think I am equal to everyone.”
Part Two to follow.
Tags: Ariane Mnouchkine, Berlin, KUB, Lincoln Center, Theatre du Soleil
art, books, culture, language, theater, Uncategorized, writers, writing
Very cool post, Melina. I do agree that we Americans are insular and ignorant. I see it in my students who get angry when someone suggests that they should try learning a second language. Sometimes they’re so arrogant, but that’s not surprising. Arrogance is a symptom of ignorance. And ignorance seems to be a side effect of being American. We’re isolated from the rest of the world geographically and culturally, and we’ve been trained to believe this somehow makes us better. Not so.
P.S. I’m totally jealous that you’re studying in Berlin right now!
Thanks, Jaime. You should visit.
Being a stranger seems like such a good idea for a fiction writer. Something about outsider status–emotional or political or social or whatever — seems to be an important factor in being able to see and observe people and how they behave and how they’re different and how they’re the same. Maybe a kind of loneliness or isolation is important too, since we’re so often interested in how people interact, how we connect and fail to connect.
Thank you for your relfections, Melina. i’m waiting for part two of being a stranger…i have been a stranger in many cities: London, Liverpool, Paris, Nice, Zurich, Athens to mention a few…and even in those where English is the first language i remember the sense of isolation simply not knowing anyone and simultaneously a sense of expansion in hearing different languages being spoken. Each language I have studied has expanded my brain/mind in ways too discreet, yet dramatic to describe. Each one, each time gives me the sense of penetrating a mystery.
Once again your writings coincide quite wonderfully with my own current experiences. I am writing a script in which the dialogue is equal parts Spanish and English, and in the process reflecting on my time in Mexico researching the movie and thinking about how isolated I was there and how much of an outsider I was. But in some way, as I write this movie that takes place in that place where I was an outsider, drawing on characters and words and terrain and images all completely Mexican, I am beginning to feel less an outsider (even if this feeling has to do with imaginary connections). What I enjoyed most about your post was this sentence, “How we become different and more spacious people when we have/hear more than one word for everything” because it reflected the exact excitement I am feeling at the moment, writing these dialogues in Spanish and English between an American abroad and his Mexican influencers, trying to figure out the best way to say something, and rifling through the english words and then the spanish words and then back to english again.
Your keen anticipation of the moment in class when everyone says their names and illustration of it as “the everyday Dernier” shines a bright light. Just as the distance between humans, bulgarian and lebanese, polish and algerian, can be rendered insignificant by some instance of transcendent or essential communication, so are the barriers between the exclusive confines of a great stage and our everyday realities crumbled by something truly great.
[...] In Part 1 of this post, I left off with: “Sometimes I forget and think I am equal to everyone.” [...]