Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha (2014). Tulika
Books, New Delhi; ISBN 978-93-82381-37-2; pp. xvi; 250. INR 695.00
Approaching
terror
When I started
reading Rustom Bharucha’s latest book, Terror and Performance, it
immediately became an intensely personal and gripping engagement. It was difficult to read in a single attempt
as the mind kept wandering from one unpleasant moment in our recent annals of
terror to another in some of which I had also become an unwitting part – mostly
as a spectator. From the beginning, my reading was a conversation with
Bharucha’s text through detours of my own experiences and an interrogation to a
lesser extent. In 1986, as a young man
when I went to the Colombo International Airport to pick up my father who was
returning from the Middle East, I was shaken by a tremendously loud sound for
which I had no immediate references. I had not heard such a sound before. People started running towards the sound. It
was a bomb that had blown up an Air Lanka flight which had come from Gatwick. The
Central Telegraph Office in Colombo was bombed in the same year. Again, we learnt that everyone was running
towards the sound and not away from it. Dry local political humor very soon informed
us that people were trying to get inside the bombed out telegraph office hoping
that they could get free phone calls to their relatives in the Middle East as
they had heard telephones were dangling from the walls with no operators in
sight. That was long before mobile phones and call boxes. We were still young
in terms of our experiences with terror. However, we soon had very viable references
to what all this meant as the political narrative of Lanka unfolded with
devastating consequences. But in 1986, when the kind of terror that was to
follow in all its fury was still relatively new and quite unknown – at least in
southern parts of the country, we were acutely unaware of the dynamics of the actual
act of terror and the structure of feeling it could unleash. This is why many
of us in these initial years were naively attracted towards the epicenter of
the act rather than being mindful to run away from it. But as the society grew
in experience, people soon learned their lessons. Though an academic text in
every conceivable way, I was reminded one could always find a few rare books of
this kind which might personally and emotionally touch a reader in addition to
whatever intellectual stimulation it might also usher in. Terror and Performance
is clearly one such book. From the perspective of the writer, Bharucha himself
recognizes this personal emotional engagement and investment early in the book.
For him, “this writing demands stamina
as it faces an onslaught of uncertainties and cruelties at the global level
that challenges the basic assumptions of what it means to be human” (xi). It is
the same kind of stamina that one also needs to read it as most of us in South
Asia would be reading it squarely sitting in the midst of our own worlds of unfolding
terror or memories of it. This is why all those thoughts came gushing into my
mind throughout the reading. I was not only reading Bharucha; I was also
reading my own past.
At the very
outset, Bharaucha has identified quite accurately two predicaments that writers
of terror have to face. One is the seeming non-existence of an exit from the
act of writing in the sense of not “being able to free one’s self from the
closure of violence” (xi). Particularly in the uncertain political
circumstances of countries in South Asia and other regions of the world with
similar political experiences, there is no seeming end to violence. As such,
how would one end his narrative? This is not a simple matter of cataloguing
acts of terror, but dealing with the interpretation of what happens. The second
predicament he refers to is the need to “accept a state of suspension” with no other
choices (xii). In other words, “once one enters the narrative of terror, one
has no other choice but to keep wading through the blood even as the
possibility of reaching the other side cannot be readily assumed” (xii). The
issue of ‘personal’ is crucial throughout the book not only to the writer but
also to the reader. For Bharucha, this amalgamation of concerns focused on the
‘personal’ is also an essential part of the book’s methodological approach. As
he notes, despite the many books he could rely on to find some of the answers
to his questions, “these questions demanded a more personal interrogation and
verification, some of which fuel critical junctures of thought in the book”
(xv). In this sense, writing about
terror as well as reading about it in many ways is an immersion in the violence
itself, particularly when this has to be done from our kind of politico-social
circumstances where the distance between the constant unfolding of terror and
the relentless and seemingly fruitless search for collective sanity is not so
great.
Bharucha had
begun to produce Jean Genet’s play, The Maids three weeks after
September 11th 2001 in a Manila theatrical venue known as the
Republic of Malate, which was burned down in November (1-2). If the burning of
the theater was the immediate ‘provocation’ for the book (2), its actual
creative impulse emanates from the following crucial question: “How can one
free terror from the hegemonic discourse of terrorism?” (2-3). For Bharucha,
the “only way of breathing life into the vocabulary of terror is to insist that
it should not be conflated with what has come to be hegemonized as ‘terrorism’”
(3). In many ways, this book is epitomized by this ideological position in a
general context where much is talked and written about terror without the
contextual nuances required to make sense of terror within the difficult to
access terrains of human nature. From
this point of departure, the book interrogates the twin ideas of terror and
performance via four significant motifs: September ‘11, Islamophobia, truth and
reconciliation and non-violence. Given
Bharucha’s expertise and passionate involvement in theatre and the ideas of
performance, throughout the book, he makes detailed and nuanced detours into
the literature on these disciplinary domains in an attempt to make sense out of
specific events of terror. Bharucha
makes it very clear that he is writing on the basis of his “affinities to
humanities” and more clearly from his experience with “immersion in the field
of theater and performance studies” (xii). In chapter one, juxtaposed against
his experience and thoughts of producing Maids in Manila, Bharucha
invites us to think through the global or at least seemingly global discourse
on 9’11 in an attempt to “exhume the terrifying effects of ‘September 11’ from
its overstated, yet unresolved discourse” (33).
He does not attempt to do this through the almost impossible task of a
critical retrospective of the way in which 9’11 has been seen and perceived
globally. Instead, he begins his journey via a critical interrogation of a
series of responses to the event that were published in the Theatre Journal
(47). This journey progresses through an analytical domain which looks at the
ideas of tragedy, cruelty, repetition of terror, trauma, autoimmunity, politics
of empathy and so on through an informed understanding of how theater and
performance work and how that understanding might be useful in interpreting terror.
Though the
hegemonic media coverage that has engulfed the world has insistently informed
us that 9’11 is a ‘world changing event’
or a ‘major event’ (47), I tend to agree more with Derrida’s argument, which Bharucha
refers to as an “impression of a major event” (45). Notwithstanding the
calamity and the resultant sense of sorrow the event enveloped New York and the
United States for a considerable period of time and taking into account the
global imagination and sense of shock it captured, one has to wonder whether
the event’s ‘world changing’ persona was a product of its location and the
global consequences of this location rather than the nature of terror
unleashed. This is a question that Bharucha’s analysis opens up. It is also not
a simple matter of the number of civilian casualties. The Mumbai attack of 26th
September 2008, which is now known in India as 26’11 glibly following the
nomenclature concocted to describe the New York attack, the Westgate Shopping
Mall attack in Nairobi on 21st September 2013 (all of which
intriguingly happened in September of different years) and the relentless Israeli
bombing of Gaza in 2014 changed the ‘worlds’ of the people who were intimately
and devastatingly touched by these events; their worlds were scarred and
shattered. But these incidents have
never become ‘world changing’ events partly due to their location(s), partly
due to the kind of media coverage they received which did not confer that almost
hallowed position on them and also because of the structure of repercussions.
After all, the US launched the ‘war on terror’ after 9’11 which among other
things became a death call to hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani civilians through drone attacks
while India and Nigeria could not muster adequate cash or military and
political muscle for such a global outreach. And as abundantly clear, the victims of
Israeli aggression in Gaza are merely collateral damage. As Bharucha correctly
points out, ‘September 11’ acquired its discursive position primarily through
an ‘American mediascape’ and its global influence rather than from any ‘unitary
perspective’ that makes sense globally (49).
Narrating Islamophobia
Chapter two
titled ‘Muslims in a Time of Terror’ deals with Islamophobia and is a chilling
account of the difficulty in being Muslim in today’s political contexts in most
‘non-Muslim places.’ ‘Aliens’ or
‘minorities ‘ in this context often happen to be Muslims as the situations in
varying degrees of intensity in contemporary Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India as
well as Western Europe and North America very clearly indicate. Keeping apart
North America and Europe where Muslim settlement in any significant numbers is
a relatively recent phenomenon, in non-Muslim majority countries in South Asia
such as Sri Lanka and India as well as in Burma, Thailand and the Philippines
this imagination essentially means delegitimization of Muslim history in these
places and a subsequent erasure of that history as well as the often expressed
wish for the erasure of their physical presence. But since the Palestinian
liberation struggle from the 1960s onwards when the violence of that struggle
entered the world stage and more specifically since ‘September ‘11’, “the
spectre of ‘Muslims’ has haunted and infiltrated the language of terrorism in
our times” (75). In many ways, it is this ‘language of terror’ where the main
culprit is seen as the Muslim and the way in which media world over has
recreated the Muslim as terrorist as described by Edward Said in his book, Covering
Islam.[1]
This state of affairs has ensured that being Muslim in our times and very
tellingly in our part of the world has become anxiety-ridden and constantly
surveilled state of being.
Beginning with
an anecdotal account of a personal experience where Bharucha himself came close
to ‘passing’ for a Muslim (76), he takes us through a fascinating terrain of
knowledge exploring the construction of the Muslim, particularly in
sub-continental India through a number of tropes which includes ‘passing’ and
‘covering’ (76-85). He later explores in detail how these tropes or frameworks
of reference actually work in real life as well as in performance. As he notes, “’passing’ which can be most
easily read within the narrative of mistaken identity” which he identifies as
“one of the most ancient tropes of world theatre” (85). Bharucha’s anecdotal
entry into the discussion as well as his latter nuanced exploration of
Islamophobia in our times allowed for the re-narrativation in my own mind an
incident that happened in 2012. I had gone for a haircut in a small barber’s
kiosk in Chanakyapuri. The barber asked me before he began his work if I was a
Muslim. I said no and was not intersected in further explanations. Though he
did start his inelegant chopping of my hair, he asked on three different times
the same question which made me very nervous and he was not too pleasant. But
when one of my colleagues came into the place, the barber asked him also if I
was a Muslim. Unlike me, without any hesitation, my colleague confirmed I was
not a Muslim and also established my ‘foreignness.’ The atmosphere immediately metamorphosed into
something more palatable. The barber’s glumness disappeared; he became talkative
and even gave me a free head massage. And since that day, he always
acknowledges me in the market with a large, if somewhat, crooked smile. All
this is simply because the spectre of Muslim had been exorcised from my persona
to his satisfaction. Reading Bharucha’s
exploration, I was reminded of the discomforting feeling I felt that day, which
constantly come to my mind every time I visit that market.
The latter
part of the chapter focuses on discourses of communalism in contemporary India
through which Bharaucha explores how Muslims have been targeted, ‘othered’ and
killed in specific moments of history.
With a focus on dynamics of ‘othering Indian Muslims’ and the 2002 anti-Muslim
violence in Gujarat, Bharucha proceeds to ascertain the discursivity of what he
terms genocide and the extent to which the killing of the other can be
understood as a performative act (75).
Borrowing Arjun Appadurai’s terminology, ‘dead certainty’ Bharucha notes
that the “’dead certainty’ of the Gujarat genocide cannot be separated from the
terrifyingly banal truth that the perpetrators of this genocide were fully
aware that they would get away with their crimes” (108). What is even more
terrifying is the fact that this certainty can be extended way beyond Gujarat
to other parts of our region and to communities beyond Muslims in times of
terror: anti-Tamil violence in Sri Lanka in 1983, anti-Sikh violence in India
in 1984, continuing sporadic violence against Ahmadiyas in Pakistan and
continuing violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka at the present time. In the
latter case, a large corpus of visual
evidence percolates all over the internet in general and YouTube in particular, thanks to the emergence of CCTV and mobile
camera footage as a viable audio-pictorial discourse which presents the spectre of freely roaming perpetrators as long
as they are acting at the behest of the state or its numerous agencies.
Dramas of
truth and reconciliation
The third
Chapter of the book titled ‘Countering Terror?’ focuses on the notion of seeking
justice in the aftermath of terror through truth and reconciliation processes.
This is undertaken by way of a close exploration of these processes in Rwanda
and South Africa. As we know, it is in these two countries where ‘truth and
reconciliation,’ initially experimented by post-apartheid South Africa, have
been tried out as formal socio-legal mechanisms to deal with the consequences
of terror. At the very outset, Bharucha consciously addresses the serious
issues that are embedded in the often casual use of the prefix ‘post’ as in
post-genocide Rwanda and post-apartheid South Africa. As he correctly notes,
‘post’ when juxtaposed with experiences of large-scale tragedies tends to be
“deceptive in so far as it implies a clean break with the past, which, in
actuality, continues to haunt the present through lingering legacies of
violence, humiliation and injustice” (111).
In a comparable context, there is a rather vocal discourse on ‘postwar
reconciliation’ in Sri Lanka sponsored by the state and readily embraced by
many people, in the southern parts of the country, thankful at seeing an
official end to a war that lasted for thirty years and enamored by the new
buildings, roads, expressways, parks and walking paths and other assets of ‘development’
that have emerged across the landscape both in the south and the once
war-scarred northeast. However, what this discourse hides within its rhetoric
demarcated by a very liminal sense of ‘post’ and its physical manifestations of
decontextualized contemporary artifacts of ‘development’ are the lingering pain
and traumatized memories of thousands of people and dismantled processes of
justice which remain largely invisible. It is with regard to such contexts that
Bharucha warns us that at best ‘post’
only marks ‘official’ endings of “national crises and states of
emergency as determined by the agencies of the state” while at ground level, a
very different reality exists in the hearts and minds of the people (111). With
this important qualification Bharucha proceeds to explore the performative
aspects of the processes of transitional justice in Rwanda and South Africa.
In the case of
Rwanda, Bharucha’s main effort is to explore how the Gacca process
worked mostly through the vivid ethnographic details provided by the work of
Ananda Breed (124-130). With this information, he not only provides a wider canvas
to the reading that follows but also the structure of dramaturgy with reference
to Gacca. Gacca is a pre-colonial local model for dispute
resolution that was prevalent in Rwanda which essentially meant “opposing
families sitting on the grass opening themselves to the medication of community
elders” (118). However, the transformation of this simple but affective and
highly respected system of dispute-resolution based in local wisdom to the new gacca
which was meant to offer judgments on ‘serious crimes’ was burdened with
significant internal contradictions with disastrous consequences. This has lead
some critics to describe the reinvented gacca simply as a hoax (119). But as Bharucha’s description amply
demonstrates, it is this system with its own dysfunctions and contradictions that
was available for the performance of justice in Rwanda.
Comparatively,
Bharucha’s journey into the discursive spaces of truth and reconciliation in
South Africa takes place via a number of motifs which includes how silence is
performed and challenged, how ideas of forgiveness needs to be worked through
when juxtaposed against the reality of living with evil and the spatial
dimensions of reconciliation (144-156). Besides, Bharucha ponders over the
theatricality of the hearings themselves and the nature of ‘truth’ in the practice
of storytelling sanctioned by the TRC process in South Africa (131-144). On the
other hand, following Judith Butler’s notion of performitivity as the “power to
produce what it names,’ the conceptual focus of his approach, is based on a
close reading of the legal mechanisms and institutions set up by states to
enact “new modes of ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’” (111). Indeed the ‘newness’ of these modes of
forgiveness and reconciliation is precisely their problem as well as means of ‘success’
as ‘procedures’ or to borrow Bharucha’s key word in the text, ‘performances.’
Truth and reconciliation processes – weather in Rwanda and South Africa or
elsewhere -- have ‘worked’ to the extent they have, because they have offered
much leeway to perform the ‘truth’ in a way culprits would agree to and legal
systems would tolerate despite the massive misgivings of many victims. This
leeway however, is also the focus of much criticism by victims as the
literature on the South African and Rwandan cases clearly document. For them, truth is really not narrated.
Instead, a legally binding and state-sanctioned version of truth is presented and performed in
public that allows society in general and the state in particular to move on
without having to drastically deal with its collective violent past. It is the
complexity of this situation which Bharucha affectively brings out within which
the seeming finality of transitional justice mechanisms of ‘post’-genocide
Rwanda and ‘post’-apartheid South Africa becomes unhinged. In fact, at the end
of the chapter, Bharucha himself poses the question whether “justice
materialize through the process of truth and reconciliation” and whether
“justice however flawed and incomplete in its execution, be regarded as a means
of countering terror?” (157). Interestingly, it is in this liminal state where
such processes can be seen as ‘excuses’ for justice that the present Sri Lankan
regime has requested South African help in setting up a local truth and
reconciliation mechanism in the backdrop of international demands for war a
crimes tribunal and an accountable investigation into the last phases of Sri
Lanka’s devastating civil war. As in the cases of Rwanda and South Africa, Sri
Lankan regime is also looking for a way out rather than a means to deliver
justice or finding a legitimate source of closure. In any event, as a restless academic not
interested in providing clinical bullet points of ‘solutions’ for think-tanks,
Bharucha lets his question hang after providing the ethnographic context and
the conceptual framework for us to think through what it means.
Non-violence
amidst terror?
The final
Chapter of the book is titled, ‘Performing Non-Violence in the Age of Terror.’ At
its very beginning, the sudden entry of Gandhi into a discourse on terror comes
as a shock until one is reminded that Gandhi unleashed his nonviolence in a
world of terror, violence and cruelty. Beyond
this, Bharucha’s deployment of Gandhi at this stage of his book also has to do
with his attempt of interrogating the truth and reconciliation mechanisms he
had just described in the previous chapter. He correctly describes Gandhi as “the world’s
most obstinate and visionary of radicals” (159). Bharucha deploys Gandhi to pose crucial
questions and provocations on how to deal with terror in the “immediacies of
here and now” (159). That is, for Bharucha, Gandhi is not a source of
solutions, but a catalyst and initiator of questions that “stretch the limits
of this book beyond its discursive framework into the domain of possible
action” (159). Indeed, what better way to undertake this task than with the
spectre of a man who acted as did Gandhi?
Entering into
an interesting domain of informed conjecture, Bharucha wonders how Gandhi would
have perceived the truth and reconciliation processes in countries like Rwanda
and South Africa. He suggests that the South African TRC would have “moved
Gandhi deeply” even though he would have disagreed with both Desmond Tutu and
Nelson Mandela (160). In Bharucha’s mind, “the spectral presence of Gandhi in
this epilogue offers critical dissent not only in relation to the outcome of
the TRC process in South Africa, but also its very premises” (160). Describing
Gandhi as a “one-man truth commission” based on the way he worked in the
context of riots and atrocities in the Indian sub-continent, Bharucha suggests quite
convincingly that Gandhi would have been seriously concerned about the TRC’s
symbolic and healing significations as well as the way in which the legalities
and their implications actually worked in practice (160). In the context of Gandhi’s
well-documented positions on the value of truth, social justice and the
necessity to take responsibility for one’s own actions, Bharucha suggests that
Gandhi would not have accepted a system which did not offer “evidence of
repentance on the part of the perpetrators” in exchange for amnesty and
forgiveness (160). Unfortunately, this is precisely the main problem with truth
and reconciliation systems that have been experimented with so far. Citing
examples from the Rwandan case, Bharucha suggests that Gandhi’s preference
would have been for one of the community service options that was available
which was centered “within the neighborhood or district where the crime took
place, thereby compelling perpetrators and victims to recognize each other’s
existence” (161). Such a system is far more palatable than a system of
institutionalized and disassociated apologies with no semblance of repentance
or a situation where victims would have to work and live amongst free roaming
perpetrators where they might meet and pass each other in the most mundane and
quotidian of circumstances, not unlike the situation painted in Ariel Dormman’s
play, the Death and the Maiden.[2]
Would
Gandhian solutions to truth and reconciliation make sense in a world where
Gandhi himself is absent? With this important question in mind, Bharucha explores some specific examples of
Gandhi in action to see how he responded to extremities of different kinds of
violence (163-173). I think Bharucha is correct when he claims without
confusion that “only non-violence could suggest a way out of the impasse of
warring factions through its own paradoxical logic: ready to die, but not
prepared to kill” (173). This position brings to my mind the often quoted,
but as often unpracticed, Buddhist position articulated by the Buddha in the ‘Kalayakkhini Vatthu’ in Dhamma
Pada which posits, “hatred
is, indeed, never appeased by hatred in this world; it is appeased only by
loving-kindness; this is an ancient law.”[3] However, as the work of
terror and the lack of ethics in predominantly Buddhist societies in
contemporary contexts such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar on one hand and Thailand to
a different extent would indicate, both Gandhian and Buddhist positions on
non-violence in most cases do not make much headway beyond decontextualized
rhetoric.
Semantics
of terror and performance
I would like
to conclude my engagement with Bharucha’s book with a minor note of dissonance.
This has to do with the meaning Bharucha has given to ‘performance’ within the specificity
of his book. He reminds us early in the book that it is titled ‘terror and
performance’ and not ‘terror as performance’ (29). The reason for this is very clearly spelt out
by him: “the performative understanding of terror begins only when one responds
to an act of violence, however vulnerably and in a state of acute fear, either
through spectatorship or witnessing” (29). He also notes that terror can be
performed when an individual who has experienced terror relives the moment (29).
He emphasizes however, that the performance of terror is “built through the
accretion of these responses and not through the act of terror itself” (29). And
true to this early assertion, it is through this lens that Bharucha continues
to look at and interrogate the notion of terror throughout the book. As he
makes clear, “to regard the involuntary deaths of victims as performance in
their own right raises troubling issues around the agency, if not the privilege
to name ‘performance’ in the first place (29). It is also in the same context
that Bharucha questions Ann Pellegrini’s description of ‘September 2011’ as
‘performance unto death’ (65-66). He is not convinced if the deaths and
disappearances that occurred as a result of ‘September 2011’ should or could be
seen as performances in the first place (66). As he questions, “in whose
authorial framework, and from which disciplinary set of protocols and
expertise, can death be proclaimed as performative? Who determines performance
for others, including the dead in whose name we speak?” (66). I understand
Bharucha’s intellectual and ethical discomfort in this specific framework of
seeing acts of terror and the resultant deaths in a performative idiom.
However, it seems to me that this understanding of the performative attributes
of terror does not allow for a more complete understanding of what terror might
mean. This is mostly because this
position has removed the perspective of the perpetrators from the wider understandings
of terror. Even Pelligrni, who is taken to task by Bharucha seems to be talking
of ‘performance unto death’ rather flippantly, which is the main reason for the
angst that Bharucha feels. Such a flippant reaction might come from
“interpreting death as performance through the spectacular effects of its
visuality for a particular audience” (66).
For me, the act of terror itself can and must necessarily be seen as a
performance of a certain kind when seen from the perspective of its authors,
the perpetrators whose agency is generally absent in many academic reckonings
of the meanings of their acts though they are ever present in the act itself.
One wonders why the Twin Towers were not simply exploded with bombs affixed to
its foundations or underground parking areas as was once unsuccessfully
attempted or demolished with a missile attack in a context where useable
missiles are readily available in the international black-market of weapons, facilitated
and supplied by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its satellite states and
the expanse of active global warzones. Either
of these acts seems to me would have been far more clinical while it would have
also saved the perpetrators. Why then, adopt the obviously risky task of high-jacking
airplanes and flying them into the Twin Towers when the possibility of them being
shot down or the project going wrong for numerous other reasons were ever
present. As Bharucha himself describes the event, “audacious, deadly, suicidal
perpetrators who carefully timed the bombings of the Twin Towers for maximum
media coverage, and possibly George Bush and his cronies in the FBI and CIA
---“ (45). In other words, they were enacting a performance for the world to
see for which they had written a very careful script, engaged in practice with choreographic
precision, and all of us have seen the final production. When I saw the attack
of the second airplane live on CNN, slow-motion repeat telecasts of the earlier
attack was already been shown. I kept watching it and flipping through
television channels to see the event from other angles because it was not just
an attack, but also a performance albeit with very deadly consequences.
This issue of
performitvity of the act also brought other memories back to me. In the late
1980s when the reign of terror in southern Sri Lanka was at its peak, one
morning people in the vicinity of the central town of Kandy near the local
university saw eighteen body-less heads neatly arranged on the bank of a small
body of water silently gazing upon the water. Their bodies were nowhere to be
seen. At this time, it was normal for people to encounter smoldering bodies
along the roads, people strapped to lamp posts and shot and so on. After all, it was a time of terror. Even so, the kind of scene described above was
not common. It was meant to be a special event, a performance of terror. Ten
years later, when I had undertaken research into this phase of local politics
of terror, I remember having a very surreal interview with a policeman who was
stationed in the western province at the time of terror. While sipping chilled
lime juice from a slender tall glass and eating egg sandwiches sitting in the
air-conditioned comfort zone of a local club, he casually narrated to me his
involvement with some of the worst cases of terror and violence in the area in
the late 1980s. As he noted more than once, the scale of violence and its presentation
always mattered in constructing the message the perpetrators wanted to
communicate. In other words, he was referring to the structure of a performance
with a very clear idea of the intended audience just as much as the members of
Al Qaeda knew they were performing ‘September 2011’ to the US and the world.
True, in these
kinds of performances, the agency of victims becomes a nonentity by virtue of
death. And I have never been sure if we as scholars have the right to assume
and appropriate their pain and agency and talk for them. But the authorial
framework and the set of disciplinary protocols which allows these to be
proclaimed ‘performative’ do not come
from any contemporary academic discipline. In this sense, Bharucha’s questioning of
Pallegrini as well as his discomfort is quite understandable. Formal academic disciplines
however, are not the only sources to offer an authorial framework or
legitimizing protocols for different kinds of performances. As we know quite well, the discourses on
medieval European public executions through beheading, hanging and quartering
were designed to be public events or performances with their own ritualized
practices which the executioners as well as the de-agencied victims were
obliged to follow. Similarly, the entire spectrum of ‘thirty two forms of
torture’ (detis vadha) practiced within the system of pre-colonial
judicial system in Sri Lanka were also designed to be public performances. According
to local folklore, victims were garlanded in red hibiscus flowers (known as vadha
mal or torture flowers) and paraded through the streets accompanied by the sound
of a specific drum beat known as the ‘death drum’ (mala bera). The
drumming brought people out to see the spectacle of public torture which ended
in death. People readily gathered to see these events and often cheered on the executions. In other words, they were an interactive
group of spectators in a public performance. My point is when perpetrators
undertake extreme acts of terror, they can be seen as performances not on the basis
of legitimacy drawn from the protocols of contemporary academic practice, but
by the authorial frameworks and protocols of established practice offered by
these ancient practices which still linger in the historical consciousness of
many.
What I have attempted
is to capture albeit perhaps in a minimally coherent manner the crux of Bharucha’s
masterful text, admittedly however without doing much justice to his overall
narrative. As I read his book, Bharucha’s
narrative took me to emotional places which my mind had barricaded long ago; it unlocked memories that were long
forgotten; it made me revisit experiences of terror and violence that I had ‘walked’
through which I would have preferred not to have done. In other words, I have
read this book not as an autonomous text that could be flipped through with an
emotional distance that a clinical disassociation would allow. Instead, I have read and attempted to
understand it as something that makes more nuanced contextual sense to me when
read through the trajectories of my own life and my own history. But that also
means it will be understood from the strengths of my own background as well as
through the obvious hindrances of its lapses.
(This reading was initially published in Groundviews: http://groundviews.org/2014/09/21/terror-performance-and-anxieties-of-our-times-reading-rustom-bharucha-and-reliving-terror/)
Endnotes
[1]. Edward Said, 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
[2]. Ariel Dorfman, 1991. Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin Books.
[3]. http://www.tipitaka.net/tipitaka/dhp/verseload.php?verse=005 (last accessed on 09 August 2014).
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