Haunting the stageThe performance of trauma by contemporary female playwrights

Résumé

The world of pilgrims- of identity-builders- must be orderly, determined, predictable, insured; but above all, it must be a kind of world in which footprints are engraved for good, so that the trace and the record of past travels are kept and preserved. A world in which travelling may be indeed a pilgrimage. A world hospitable to the pilgrims. And so the modern men and women lived in a time-space with structure; a solid, tough, durable time-space¿ The world is not hospitable to the pilgrims any more. The pilgrims lost their battle by winning it. They strove to make the world solid by making it pliable, so that identity could be built at will, but built systematically, floor by floor and brick by brick. They proceeded by turning the space in which identity was to be built in a desert. They found out that the desert, though comfortingly featureless for those who seek to make their mark, does not hold features well. The easier it is to emboss a footprint, the easier it is to efface it. A gust of wind will do. And deserts are windy places. It soon transpired that the real problem is not how to build identity, but how to preserve it; whatever you may build in the sand, is unlikely to be a castle. In a desert-like world it takes no great effort to blaze a trail- the difficulty is how to recognize it as a trail after a while. How to distinguish a forward march from going in circles, from eternal return? It turns virtually impossible to patch the trodden stretches of sand into an itinerary- let alone into a plan for a life-long journey. (Zygmunt Bauman 1996:8)