The Complex Interrelations of Home, Body, Identity and Otherness in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. THE COMPLEX INTERRELATIONS OF HOME, BODY, IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS IN TONY KUSHNER‟S HOMEBODY/KABUL CLAUS PETER NEUMANN Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected] Received 10 September 2015 Accepted 20 March 2016 KEYWORDS Home; body; identity; Afghanistan; subjective, systemic, and symbolic violence; otherness. PALABRAS CLAVE Hogar; cuerpo; identidad; Afganistán; violencia subjetiva, sistémica y simbólica; alteridad. ABSTRACT Juxtaposing two terms, at once separated by and connected through a slash, the title of Tony Kushner‟s play Homebody/Kabul (2001) raises questions about the constitution of identity and its relation to place. The play suggests the home and the body, evoked by the title‟s first term, to act as safeguards for a stable and unified identity in privileged regions while the homes and bodies of other places are continually exposed to the threat of violence. Systemic and symbolic violence (Žižek) are revealed to enforce totalizing boundaries (Bhaba) projecting a homogeneous Other that serves as an object to be conquered. At the same time this homogeneous Other is a precondition for the projection of a stable and unified hegemonic self. In the final analysis, however, the play shows how any project of a stable and unified self is radically undermined by the heterogeneity and the unappropriable alterity of the Other. RESUMEN Yuxtaponiendo dos términos, a la vez separados y conectados por una barra, el título de la obra Homebody/Kabul (2001), de Tony Kushner, plantea preguntas sobre la constitución de la identidad y su relación con el lugar. La obra sugiere que el hogar y el cuerpo, evocados por el primer término del título, actúan como salvaguardia de una identidad estable y coherente en regiones privilegiadas mientras que los hogares y cuerpos de otros lugares están continuamente expuestos a la amenaza de la violencia. La obra demuestra como la violencia sistémica y la simbólica (Žižek) imponen fronteras totalizantes (Bhaba), proyectando un Otro homogéneo que sirve como objeto a conquistar. Al mismo tiempo ese Otro homogéneo es una precondición para la proyección de un yo hegemónico estable y coherente. Sin embargo, la obra 116 Claus Peter Neumann Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. demuestra como cualquier proyecto de un yo estable y coherente se ve socavado por la heterogeneidad y la alteridad inapropriable del Otro. 1. INTRODUCTION: HOMEBODY/KABUL When Tony Kushner first presented his play Homebody/Kabul to the public in a partial reading at the University of Pennsylvania‟s Kelly Writers House in February 2001, the playwright, albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek, emphasized the title and predicted that academics were going to “be very excited by the slash mark” (“Reading”) separating the two words, „Homebody‟ and „Kabul‟. Irony (directed at himself and at academic practice) apart, this remark suggests that Kushner had deeper implications in mind when deciding on the play‟s title. The title and the slash were indeed commented on by quite a few reviewers and academics, most of whom (e.g. Gussow, Bouchard 301) interpreted them as simply denoting the play‟s plot structure, dividing the play into two distinctive parts: the Homebody‟s monologue, taking place in a London home, and the remaining scenes, happening in the city of Kabul under Taliban rule. At a basic level, this makes sense, of course. However, rather than indicating a sequential order, a slash usually implies some kind of relation between two terms: as alternatives or opposites (MLA 76), or suggesting a connection or, conversely, a conflict (Penn). More in tune with these relational implications, Sara Soncini reads the slash as signaling “division, disjunction, dichotomy” (373), thereby foregrounding the contrasting elements that characterize each part of the play as well as the rupture between the monologue and the unexpected turn of events that follows it. Peter Marks, in contrast, interprets the slash as symbolizing the link between the two parts, personalized in the characters of the Homebody and Mahala, the Afghan woman who takes the Homebody‟s place in the final scene. Jessica Ng takes the title and its separation of the two terms to symbolize the alienation and impossibility of connection experienced by the Homebody in spite of her trip to Kabul (4). This interpretation, however, neglects the fact that the play insinuates the possibility that the Homebody may actually have found that connection, by converting to Islam and marrying an Afghan doctor. Erith Jaffe-Berg accordingly considers that, while initially creating an opposition between “home and foreign” (80), the title, by fusing “the two words [. . .] in a one-word title,” suggests that the Homebody eventually becomes part of Kabul. In quite a challenging way, Joshua Abrams construes the slash in the title as “acknowledging a disappearance” (62), i.e. that of the Homebody, hovering over the Kabul part of the play as an “absent presence.” All these interpretations of the title and its slash are reasonable. But none of them tries to delve deeper into the title‟s multiple implications for the interpretation of the play. This article intends to read the play through the lens of the title and its juxtaposition of the two terms—„Homebody‟ and „Kabul‟—both separated and The Complex Interrelations of Home, Body, Identity and Otherness 117 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. connected through the slash in order to come up with an interpretation of how the play relates both terms to each other. 2. HOME AND BODY AT HOME AND IN KABUL When the curtain rises on the first scene of Homebody/Kabul, all the audience sees is a woman sitting on a chair, reading a guidebook to Kabul. The few props mentioned in the stage directions include a second chair, a table with a lamp and tablecloth, a coat, a pocketbook, and a shopping bag (Kushner, Homebody 6). These props evoke a room in the house of a middle-class family, a setting with which the audience is sure to be familiar from their own lives. The whole first scene is static: it never leaves the room, and the only person on stage for about one hour is the anonymous woman to whom the first term of the play‟s title refers: the „Homebody,‟ an adequate label—at least initially—for the character, referring as it does to someone who prefers staying home to going out in the world. Apart from its conventional meaning, in Kushner‟s play the word „Homebody‟ can be taken literally because the woman‟s identity is initially defined through the presence of her body and the home—which Gaston Bachelard describes as a metaphor for the self that provides it with a sense of stability. 1 The beginning of the play, thus, implies notions of identity as grounded in the human body and safeguarded by the home. Unlike the word “Homebody”, referring to an anonymous person, the title‟s second term, “Kabul”, is a proper name, identifying a specific place in its geographical and socio-historical particularities, the very place where the Homebody, in the interstice between scene 1 and scene 2, has traveled and disappeared and where Priscilla, her daughter, is now looking for her body. Here the spectator is confronted with quite different homes and other bodies. As to the Afghan home, the verbal scenery emphasizes the city‟s ruinous state. Historical landmarks have been severely damaged or disappeared as one Afghan character points out: “That was the dome of Ziarat-I-Jan Baz, now destroyed, and that is Ziarat Panjeshah, what‟s left of it” (Kushner, Homebody 55). According to the stage directions, there are “mountains of rubble [that indicate] terrible fighting” (Kushner, Homebody 111). The bodies of the Afghan people match the state of their living quarters. As a British character remarks, an important section of the Afghan population are dismembered: “nearly every other man you meet here is missing pieces” (Kushner, Homebody 101). The atmosphere thereby evoked is harrowing. 1 “La maison est un corps d‟images qui donnent à l‟homme des raisons ou des illusions de stabilité” (Bachelard 34). 118 Claus Peter Neumann Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. Seen in this light, the play‟s juxtaposition of „Homebody‟ and „Kabul‟ also reflects what Una Chaudhuri has called “the mutually constructive relations between people and place” (xii). And these relations are quite different for people living in a place like Kabul from those one could expect in London. The play‟s title, thus, simultaneously evokes and subverts notions of identity as a unity grounded in the body and given stability by the home. The stability and unity that home and body seem to confer on the self are shown to be reserved to the hegemonic regions of the world. 3. HOME, BODY AND VIOLENCE In the Kabul scenes, the home no longer acting as a safeguard for the body, both become exposed to various kinds of violence. On the one hand, violence in Homebody/Kabul is hardly ever physically acted out on stage. On one occasion Priscilla takes off her burqa on the streets of Kabul and Khwaja, her future guide, is beaten when he protects her against an angry member of the religious police. Another violent moment occurs in the penultimate scene, when a border guard almost shoots Mahala, the woman whom Priscilla and her father, Milton, are taking out of Afghanistan. But even though violent acts are rarely represented on stage, violence is in fact omnipresent in the play. From the Homebody‟s retelling of the history of Afghanistan (full of war and bloodshed), to the description of the Homebody‟s dismemberment by an Afghan crowd, to the verbal references to destruction and harm mentioned above, an atmosphere of violence and its consequences pervades the play, sure to leave an unsettling impact on the spectators. Such an embedding of the few violent acts portrayed on stage in a general, verbally projected atmosphere of violence evokes what Slavoj Žižek has explained as an indissoluble entanglement of three different kinds of violence: subjective, systemic and symbolic. “Subjective violence” is the most visible of the three since it is “performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (Žižek 1), i.e. what a commonsensical view would misconceive as violence per se (the adjective „subjective‟ not implying subjectivity as opposed to objectivity but rather being used because this kind of violence is carried out by an identifiable subject). “Systemic violence” refers to socio-economical and political constraints acting on individuals and groups both locally and on a global scale. Finally, “symbolic violence” denotes the violence exerted by the symbolic order, such as language‟s “imposition of a certain universe of meaning.” This homogeneous universe of meaning frequently petrifies and naturalizes systemic violence. According to Žižek, systemic and symbolic violence provide a “zero level” (2) that is generally perceived as the norm against which subjective violence is considered a breach, i.e. “a perturbation of the „normal‟, peaceful state of things.” At the same time, however, systemic and symbolic violence frequently create and perpetuate the very conditions that favor the outburst The Complex Interrelations of Home, Body, Identity and Otherness 119 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. of subjective violence—and often the failure to stay within the confines prescribed by systemic and symbolic violence does not so much represent a violent breach in itself, but is rather the cause that triggers the guardians of the system to exert subjective violence on the transgressor. Kushner‟s play provides a case in point: in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan attire has strong repercussions on the female body. Thus, the audience watches Priscilla forced, like all women in the Afghanistan under the Taliban, to wear a burqa in public, struggling with it in her wanderings through the streets of Kabul and thereby demonstrating the severe physical limitations it sets on the body. The obligation for women to wear the burqa is exposed as a discriminatory practice that severely limits women‟s movement and semiotically marks them off as un-identified Other, thus functioning as a constraint that is both real and symbolic. In this way, the burqa combines traits of systemic and symbolic violence because it simultaneously enacts and represents the Taliban‟s permanent subjugation of women‟s bodies. This subjugation also works in cultural terms, limiting the women‟s scope of perception via the burqa‟s grille, which lets the wearer only see a small fraction of the outside reality (a limitation of perception that is otherwise reflected in the Taliban‟s aversion against girls‟ attending school). Thus, as long as Priscilla keeps wearing the burqa, complying with the denigrating rules imposed on Afghan women and, thereby, staying within the restrictive cultural parameters these rules encode, she cannot help but remain blind to the world that surrounds her. This is emphasized when she takes the burqa off and can now, for the first time, fully contemplate the sight. She exclaims in surprise: “Oh, beautiful” (Kushner, Homebody 55). Quite in coherence with the interrelation between symbolic, systemic and subjective violence as explained above, Priscilla‟s attempt to take the burqa off (disrupting the norm imposed by symbolic and systemic violence), almost has serious repercussions on her body since a member of the religious police is on the point of beating her with a rubber hose, an instance of subjective violence which is eventually directed at Khwaja, who intervenes on Priscilla‟s behalf. A few hostile critics have read the play‟s preoccupation with the history and present of Afghanistan as the author taking sides with the Taliban regime, one of them actually affirming that most of Kushner‟s European characters “might as well have been created by a Taliban playwright” (Phillips). Similarly, Mark Steyn accuses Kushner of idealizing the Afghans as “cultured, educated, artistic, urbane, articulate, poets, and librarians, masters of all the virtues the metropolitan power once claimed for itself” (qtd. Juntunen 184). However, such opinions contrast with the fact that the play points out many cases of all three kinds of violence perpetrated by the Taliban. In fact, the two instances of on-stage subjective violence mentioned above show members of the Taliban as aggressors and women as their potential victims. And further verbal references leave no doubt about the Taliban‟s harshness. However, this trait is not projected as intrinsic to Afghanistan and its people (nor, 120 Claus Peter Neumann Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. for that matter, to Islam) but is directly related to a complex web of history and international political and socio-economic relations. Both the Homebody‟s monologue and the Kabul scenes make it clear that the country‟s history of violence and bloodshed, rather than corresponding to any sanguinary streak of the Afghan people, is the outcome of the area‟s geopolitical position at the crossroads of competing empires, from the Macedonian and Persian ones right down to the USA and the USSR (e.g. Kushner, Homebody 12, 14, 16, 18, 22 etc.). Throughout history, the inhabitants of the Kabul valley have become involved in a colonial fight for power, continually exposing them to the threat of victimization. In contrast to the aptly named Homebody, the Afghan body, due to this systemic violence on a worldwide scale, is left without any protection against subjective violence. The mutilated state of the bodies of many Afghan citizens mentioned above is, thus, directly related to Michel Foucault‟s claim that “The body is the inscribed surface of events. [It is] totally imprinted by history [. . .]” (148). Afghan history sadly proves Foucault right: the dismembered Kabuli citizens offer particularly cruel examples of how history, in a combination of systemic and subjective violence, has been imprinted onto the Afghan body. Neither does the Afghan home serve as shelter. In her monologue, the Homebody describes a fantasy trip through an imaginary Kabul, at the end of which she says: “I long to be back in the safety of my kitchen” (Kushner, Homebody 26). The British (or more generally Western industrialized middle- and upper-class) home acts as a safeguard for the wholeness of the body (a safeguard which is, in turn, guaranteed by these countries‟ position with respect to global systemic violence). The Afghan body lacks such a guarantee—as the repeated references to casualties due to Western bombs mistakenly dropped on civilian Afghan houses (Kushner, Homebody 33, 77, 86, 100, and 133) make clear. In certain areas of the world events demonstrate that the home per se does not at all provide a protection of the body against subjective violence and, thus, utterly fails as a guarantor of identity. 4. THE HOMEBODY, KABUL AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE As mentioned above, systemic violence is usually bolstered by symbolic violence. In a representative/narrative doubling, in which the audience is shown an actress playing a British housewife reading to them from a guidebook to Kabul, written by an American author (Nancy Hatch Dupree), the play self-consciously foregrounds the symbolic violence inherent in historical narrative. By expressing location always in relation to the nations claiming sovereignty over it, the guidebook projects empire-building as the one element that provides a unifying meaning to historical processes. Thus, the momentary disappearance of imperial forces leads to periods “of disorder, migration and tribal unrest” (Kushner, Homebody 15), leaving the region in “a state of anarchy” (Kushner, Homebody 19). Dupree‟s Anglo- The Complex Interrelations of Home, Body, Identity and Otherness 121 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. American historical narrative always reads Afghanistan in its function as the one to be colonized, thus naturalizing the above-mentioned systemic violence historically exerted on the region and its people. As Framji Minwalla points out, this historical narrative “is recorded in a mode that can only be called Orientalist” (31). In fact, Orientalist discourse in the monologue goes far beyond the guidebook and has inevitably entered the Homebody‟s imaginary, reinforcing the symbolic violence of the historical narrative through what Peter Dickinson identifies as an “exotization of the other” (435). The Homebody intersperses her retelling of the guidebook‟s history with personal accounts, which include an imaginary visit with a (presumably Afghan) shopkeeper to Kabul, during which they pass by picturesque places. She imagines admiring the painting of “handsome Shah Shujah [. . .] of olive complexion and thick black beard, [who] wears a green tunic over which are worked flowers of gold and a breastplate of diamond and the throne is covered with a cloth adorned with pearls” (Kushner, Homebody 25-26). The Homebody is so moved by her reveries of exotic splendor that “She cries softly” (Kushner, Homebody 26). The Orientalist discourse recycled through the Homebody‟s imaginary trip keeps in circulation what Edward Said has denounced as the “European invention” of the Orient as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1). The play thereby exposes how the combined symbolic violence of Western historical narrative and Orientalist discourse appropriate the concept of Afghanistan, projecting on it the picturesque and the exotic as safeguards of a cultural identity that turns country and inhabitants into what Una Chaudhuri has termed the “spectacular Other” (2), against which the imperial self can be defined and upheld. The Western self only receives its defining contours through its difference from the „Other‟, which to a considerable extent is constructed through an othering discourse combined with the narratives of history of the colonized world. The play‟s title and its juxtaposition of “Homebody” and “Kabul” thus, also implies how the Western self, presumably anchored in the home and the body, is actually dependent on alterity for its definition. A further element of symbolic violence foregrounded by the play is that of mapping. By outlining borders, the map defines a country as entity to begin with. Accordingly, right from the beginning of the narrative construction of the Afghanistan represented in the play, two natural borders are mentioned: “the River Oxus” (Kushner, Homebody 10)—which is now called the Amu Darya and forms the border between Afghanistan and its northern neighbors Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and, in part, Turkmenistan (Wahab and Youngerman 5)—and the Hindu Kush mountains, which separate Afghanistan from Pakistan. A comparison of the physical, political and ethnical maps, however, reveals that the ethnicities that make up the Afghan population do not at all keep to these borders. Thus, Tajiks represent about a quarter of all Afghans (Wahab and 122 Claus Peter Neumann Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. Youngerman 14), but live of course on both sides of the Amu Darya, and ethnic Uzbeks and Turkmen comprise a considerable part of the northern Afghan population. In addition, Kushner‟s play explicitly calls attention to the fact that the Pashtuns, Afghanistan‟s dominating ethnicity—accounting for approximately half of its population—extend far beyond the Hindu Kush mountains, into Pakistan (Kushner, Homebody 98-99). The unquestioned identity and unity of place that the borders on a map suggest is thus contrasted with the questionable status of clear-cut geographicalethnic units. According to one of the play‟s epigraphs, in Afghanistan “each group and region has more in common with its Nancy Hatch Dupree, neighbors over the border than with each other” (Kushner, Homebody 7). Rather than representing a homogeneous entity with a unifying political center, Afghanistan is a heterogeneous conglomerate where centripetal forces draw the regions that compose the state towards widely differing cultural identities, transgressing all borders, even and most conspicuously so the natural ones. The dividing act of the border (yet another implication of the slash in the play‟s title) is thereby exposed to be arbitrary— dividing into sometimes almost irreconcilable difference what in many respects (culturally, linguistically, and ethnically) is similar or sometimes even the same while simultaneously acting as what Homi Bhaba has termed “totalizing boundaries” (149), which project a false homogeneity on a country that is in no way warranted by its underlying heterogeneity. This ostensible homogeneity engendered by boundaries reinforces the self-defining projection of otherness mentioned above. At the same time, the combined symbolic violence of historiography, Orientalist discourse and mapping becomes a tool in the construction of what Michael Keith and Steve Pile have termed the “geometries of domination” (1), in which borders function as lines of exclusion, one of the foremost instances of systemic violence. They protect the privileged selves of hegemonic countries, their bodies and homes, by keeping hardship within the bounds of what Western discourse has been variously calling third-world or underdeveloped countries, preventing this hardship from spilling over and affecting surrounding peoples, thereby generating a safe haven for the wealthy by shutting the regions of better-to- do people off against the under-privileged, one of whose very few chances of crossing the borders that maintain them in poverty is as immigrants (frequently illegal ones who are under a permanent threat of being expelled from the hegemonic self). The Other does have some chance of crossing the border, but even if they manage to stay, the borders they cross are only external, geographical ones. The border in its sense of exclusionary boundary remains intact. But its effects are different: in one passage of her monologue, the Homebody laments the plight of immigrant shopkeepers who spend long hours in shops stuffed with artefacts of various, ethnically different places, forced by the global market to be artificially The Complex Interrelations of Home, Body, Identity and Otherness 123 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 19 (2015), Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 115-131. embellished so as to fit into “the safe container of aesthetic, which is to say, consumer appeal” (Kushner, Homebody 17, emphases in the original), thereby becoming degraded to indistinguishable “Third World junk” (Kushner, Homebody 17). The difference between products of widely differing cultures is abolished by converting these products into commodities for the consumer, who buys them to lend his or her life an air of chic exoticism, not caring what exact place and culture a particular product comes from nor what significance it has for the people who created it. Members of the former colonizing countries acquire a presumable piece of otherness without, however, caring to meet the Other in its alterity, appropriating it while ignoring its particularity. While these shopkeepers escape the hardship they suffered in their home country, the home they acquire in a hegemonic country, rather than guaranteeing an identity, actually deprives them of it. In the Homebody‟s words, they bring to their junk shop a “great, heavy, no longer portable self” (Kushner, Homebody 20). The Other, thus, may under certain circumstances enter the territory of the Western self, but frequently in doing so they are obliged to shed their particular otherness, which is appropriated by Western discourse under the general headings of „refugee‟ or „immigrant‟. Thus, while the external borders are at once exclusionary and constitutive of the simulacrum of national identity, the internal borders are only exclusionary. If the external border is passed, a wide variety of different othernesses is merged into what the Homebody calls a mass of “desperate indiscriminateness” (Kushner, Homebody 20). In this sense, the slash separating „Homebody‟ from „Kabul‟ becomes the demarcation line that, in a combination of symbolic and systemic violence, excludes the specific Other in his or her particularity from the hegemonic self and which through this same act makes the effect of a unified and stable identity possible for the privileged in the first place. 5. THE HOMEBODY IN KABUL The first thing we learn in the Kabul part of the play, as soon as it leaves the Homebody‟s home, is the account of the dismemberment of the Homebody‟s body. The circumstances of her death are described in atrocious detail by Doctor Qari Shah in a page-long description (Kushner, Homebody 31-32) that brings, this time verbally, the body to the centre of attention. 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