Theatricality and Performativity in Hanay Geiogamah's Foghorn and Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots

Theatricality and Performativity in Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn

and Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots

Laila Galal RizkAin Shams University

In recent years, the concepts of theatricality and

performativity have been revisited with renewed enthusiasm.

Performativity, a term borrowed from speech act theory, has

recently come to prominence as Jacque Derrida, Judith Butler,

and other literary theorists have reworked J.L. Austin’s

theories of the performative. Theatricality, described as a

special kind of theatrical stylization through which its

aesthetic and self-referential function is foregrounded, has

constantly been redefined due to the change in the notion of

theatre itself. Indeed, both theatricality and

performativity as concepts and as discourses have been in

flux, and their relationship to each other, and their

meanings and uses, have equally been in question. This paper

explores the notions of theatricality and performativity in

two plays by Native American playwrights, Hanay Geiogamah and

Monique Mojica in an attempt to show how the two concepts of

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theatricality and performativity interact in a self-conscious

critical practice. The paper begins with a brief overview of

the concepts of theatricality and performativity, with a

special focus on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.

The second section of the paper examines Geiogamah’s Foghorn

(1973) and Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots

(1990) to explore the playwrights’ use of theatricality and

performativity to respond to issues of racial and gender

identity.

The most widely cited approach to theatricality was

adopted in the 1970s by Elizabeth Burns in her pioneering

book, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and

in Social Life. Burns proceeds from the assumption that the

concept of theatre is historically and culturally determined

and argues that theatricality cannot be defined as a

particular mode of behaviour or expression. Instead, she

suggests that theatricality “attaches to any kind of

behaviour perceived and interpreted by others and described

(mentally or explicitly) in theatrical terms. ….

theatricality itself is determined by a particular viewpoint,

a mode of perception” (13). Burns identifies two sets of

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conventions related to the audience's reading of a

performance, the rhetorical and the authenticating. She

defines the rhetorical conventions as the implicit agreement

between actors and spectators by which the audience “is

persuaded to accept characters and situations whose validity

is ephemeral and bound to the theatre” (31). The second

convention, the authenticating, are the signs that are

crucial in enabling the audience to "decode" the significance

of a theatre event to their lives, which Burns describes as

"‘model’ social conventions in use at a specific time and in

a specific place and milieu. … These conventions suggest a

total and external code of values and norms of conducts from

which the speech and action of the play is drawn. Their

function is, therefore, to authenticate the play” (32).

Joachim Fiebach, who has written extensively on

theatricality in the 1980s, argues that theatricality is a

process of production, whose product is consumed by the

spectator and once it has been consumed, it vanishes.

According to him, any concept of theatricality should be

based upon “the structural essentials of the specific

cultural production of theater, in its most comprehensive

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sense. Theater is a type of social communication whose

specificity is, first, the ostentatious display of

audiovisual movements” (17). Erika Fischer-Lichte, however,

reads theatricality through a semiological perspective,

defining it in terms of signs that can or cannot be decoded.

She points out:

… Theatricality may be defined as a particular mode

of using signs or as a

particular kind of semiotic process in which particular signs

(human beings and objects of

their environment) are employed as signs of

signs—by their producers, or their recipients. Thus a

shift of the

dominance within the semiotic functions determines when

theatricality appears.

When the semiotic function of using signs as signs of signs

in a behavioural, situational or

communication process is perceived and

received as dominant, the behavioural, situational, or

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communication

process may be regarded as theatrical” (88).

Roland Barthes describes theatricality by connecting it

to the creative process. In his definition, Barthes stresses

the visual and auditory aspects of theatre, “It is theater-

minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up

on stage starting from the written argument; it is that

ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice—gesture, tone,

distance, substance, light—which submerges the text beneath

the profusion of its external language” (26). Similarly,

Juan Villegas stresses the above elements in Negotiating

Performance, a study of Latin American and U.S. Latino

theatre, in which he calls for the redefinition of “theatre”

as theatricality to include carnivals, religious festivals,

popular rituals, and political demonstrations. He defines

theatricality as “a means of communicating a message by

integrating verbal, visual, auditive, body, gestural signs to

be performed in front of an audience” (316).

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Willmar Sauter in his study, The Theatrical Event (2000),

defines theatricality as the communicative intersection

between the performer’s actions and the spectator’s

reactions, which he describes as characterized by “three

interactive levels, called the sensory, artistic, and

symbolic levels of theatrical communication. These levels

can only be activated during the process of a theatrical

event. It is the very “eventness” of all theatre, the

interaction between performer and spectator, which

facilitates theatricality” (63). In defining theatricality,

Josette Feral agrees with Sauter in underlining the bodily

presence of the performer and spectator and their

relationship to each other. She argues that theatricality is

to be found in the relation between two spaces: the real

space and a fictional space. The real space is the actual

physical one, while the fictional space is a virtual or

imagined space created either by the actor, or by the

spectator alone (“Performance and Theatricality” 171-72).

For theatricality to happen, the spectator must see the

"real" space through a fictional framing, which makes this

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space occur differently. In the Foreword to the special

issue of SubStance on theatricality, Feral argues:

Theatricality is not a property, a quality … that

belongs to the object, the body,

the space or the subject. ... It is only graspable as a

process. … It has to

be actualized through a subject as both the starting point of

the process and also as its end. It is

the result of a definite will to transform

things. It imposes a view on objects, events, and

actions that is made up of

several cleavages: everyday space/representational space;

reality/fiction;

symbolic/instinctive. These impose upon the spectator’s

gaze a play of disjunction/unification, a friction

between one level and another.

In this permanent movement between meaning and its

displacement, between the same and

the different, alterity arises from

the heart of sameness, and theatricality is born. ( 12)

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Performativity, a much more elusive term, derives from

speech act theory, particularly the work of J.L. Austin who

distinguished in his 1955 book, How to Do Things with Words,

the reflective or constative function of language from its

performative function. According to Austin, constatives are

descriptive utterances that report a state of affairs; on the

other hand, performatives are utterances that do not inform

or describe but they accomplish an act through the very

process of their enunciation. Ironically, Austin excluded

theatrical utterances from his definition of performativity

and described theatrical language as “hollow or void”. He

excluded such hollow utterances from consideration precisely

because he finds them “parasitic upon [language’s] normal use

—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of

language” (22).

Judith Butler and other literary theorists have reworked

Austin’s theory of the performative. Butler's theory of

performativity, developed in her books, Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That

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Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) and Excitable

Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), helps explain

how we come to know who we are and how we are produced as

subjects within prevailing power structures. Butler builds

on constructivist notions of identity to elucidate her theory

of performativity, which holds that bodies—whether those of

race, gender, or nationality--have no ontological status

apart from the ongoing repetitive semiotic acts that

constitute their reality. Identity, Butler argues, is

"performatively constituted, be it the identity of gender,

race, class, profession, or social function (Gender Trouble

25).

In Bodies That Matter, Butler argues that gender and

other identities are constituted through repetition.

According to her, performativity is not “a singular ‘act,’

for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and

to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the

present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which

it is a repetition“(12). Butler therefore distinguishes

between performativity which is a multiple act, a

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“reiteration of norms,” and performance, which assumes “will”

or “choice.” She further distinguishes between performance

as bounded "act" and performativity, insofar as the latter

consists in “a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain,

and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as

the fabrication of the performer's "will" or "choice; … the

reduction of performativity to performance would be a

mistake” (Bodies that Matter 24). Bultler therefore suggests

that performativity cannot be understood outside of a process

of “iterability,” which she defines as “a regularized and

constrained repetition of norms” (Bodies that Matter 95).

Butler believes that this repetition of norms, rather

than institutionalizing gender and other identities, suggests

the possibility that these norms can be subverted. According

to her, the possibility of agency is located in the process

of reiteration and resignification, which is a process of

change that can be either stabilizing or destabilizing, that

is, reinforcing or undermining signifying conventions. Butler

draws attention to the possibility of the resignification of

identities, and therefore, possibilities for resistance and

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change. Debby Thompson, discussing African American

playwright, Anna Deavere Smith’s performances on racial

performativity agrees, “Resistant or subversive performative

repetitions, always done, of course, under surveillance and

the threat of potentially severe punishment, are nevertheless

possible” (137).

Theatricality in Butler is a citation of a norm that

"mimes and renders [it] hyperbolic" (Bodies that Matter 232).

She considers theatricality and what she calls, "theatrical

activism,” as a way of contesting prevailing power

structures. To Butler, theatre is a “necessary type of

hyperbolic gesture, a spectacle that might expose habituated

citational scripts” (Jackson 190). In Bodies that Matter, she

discusses the political implications of resignifying the

category “queer” and presents theatricality as a form of

public resistance to the stigma of AIDS and queerness.

Butler suggests that a parodic reiteration of the term

‘queer’ can unseat the term’s derogatory meaning and

potentially invest it with new meanings. She points out,

“Mobilized by the injuries of homophobia, theatrical rage

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reiterates those injuries precisely through an ‘acting out,’

one that does not merely repeat or recite those injuries, but

that also deploys a hyperbolic display of death and injury”

(233).

In her introduction to Seventh Generation, an anthology

of Native American plays, D’Aponte argues, “The performative

origins of Native American theatre lie in traditional ritual,

public ceremony and storytelling … in the work and guidance

of spiritual leaders … in the oral tradition of storytelling

by tribal elders; storytelling rich in spiritual legacy, in

mythology, in transcendent values” (xi). Contemporary

Native American theatre has indeed adapted and fused such

elements from the oral tradition with Western theatrical

approaches. Both Geiogamah and Mojica belong to what Jaye T.

Darby calls “fourth wave Native theatre,” a contemporary art

form that aims at “re-imagining the stage through a holistic

fusion of tradition and transformation. Grounded in the oral

tradition and the generative power of Creation stories, such

theater integrates ancient conceptions of story, community,

performance, ritual, and ceremony with contemporary issues

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and more recent performance styles” (“Re-Imagining the Stage”

76).

As playwrights, Geiogamah and Mojica share many concerns,

including issues of identity, assimilation, race relations,

cultural heritage and artistic expression. Geiogamah’s work

attempts to reclaim the image and identity of the Native

American in order to “preserve living Indian traditions and …

demonstrate the facts of Indian life in America today,

unvarnished by either Indian or non-Indian romanticizers”

(Huntsman xi). Geiogamah believes in the challenging task

of the new Native American theatre to help Native Americans

understand who they are and the impact of the changes

occurring at the beginning of the 21st century on their lives.

He sees that the role of Native American artists is to

“establish a strong identity base in their work to help

confront and clarify the endless confusions resulting from

non-Indians’ beliefs and misperceptions of Indian life. … to

help untangle the mass of confusions that stereotyping,

assimilation, and acculturation have created in the minds of

Indians themselves” (“The New American Indian Theater” 163).

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Similarly, Mojica believes that Native American artists are

creating exciting new theatre, resulting in the possibility

of offering “an alternative world-view (one in which many

worlds co-exist); the possibility of another interpretation

of ‘historical facts’; the validation of our experiences and

our images reflected on stage” (“Theatrical Diversity on

Turtle Island” 1).

Native Americans, like many minorities, have often been

victims of bias and stereotyping. As Darby points out,

“Pervasive stereotypes found in popular Western literature

and media include multiple variations of the bloodthirsty

savage, noble savage, simpleminded Indian, drunken Indian,

Indian princess (Pocahontas), vanishing Indian,

environmentalist, and New Age spiritualist” (“Introduction”

v). Native women have also been portrayed as either one of

two stock types, the romanticized “Indian princess,”

Pocahontas, or the baser “easy squaw”. Geiogamah and Mojica

believe that such images are ultimately dangerous because

they deny Native people their humanity and justify political

and cultural oppression. In their plays, both playwrights

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employ humor and parody to cut through the many myths and

legends in an attempt to subvert negative stereotypes about

Native Americans.

Geiogamah’s Foghorn (1973) and Mojica’s Princess

Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1990) explore Native American

culture and history drawing on a rich range of traditional

experiences. Foghorn, a multi-media extravaganza of short

scenes, complimented by music, lights and graphics, draws on

figures from history, myth, and television in order to

deconstruct the Indian of popular culture. It is a play

about Indian stereotypes ranging from the time of Columbus to

the 1973 incident at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, in which a

large group of armed Native Americans reclaimed Wounded Knee

in the name of the Lakota Nation. In his note to the play,

Geiogamah writes, “Almost all the characters in this play are

stereotypes pushed to the point of absurdity” (49).

Similarly, Pocahontas weaves together past and present, North

and South America, history, fairy tale, documentary and myth

in an attempt to examine the histories, myths and stereotypes

of Native and First Nations women across the Americas.

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Performed by two actresses who recall the ways that Native

women have been inscribed in Western culture, the play

satirizes colonization and deconstructs stereotypes of Native

women, celebrating them as heroines and healers.

Foghorn and Pocahontas draw attention to their

theatricality: both employ stylized settings, mannered

performances, and exaggerated visual styles. The plays are

made of brief loose scenes, use symbolic props of exaggerated

dimensions, and are characterized by acting that depends on

improvisation and direct addressing of the audience, the

blurring of the space between the actor and the audience, and

the use of audiovisual devices to amplify the dimensions of

time and space.

The two plays are structured round the idea of a journey.

The stage directions of the opening scene in Foghorn require

that the scene be performed against “a background of

progressive electronic sound, one that evokes a journey

through time and space … The costumes and movement should

suggest a forced journey … spanning the centuries from 1492 to

the present and stretching geographically from the West Indies

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to Alcatraz Island” (51). Geiogamah points out that, rather

than a linear plot, rhythm and repetition serve to undergird

the circular structure of Foghorn, “In creating … a

performance context, of course, I went to the structure of the

rhythm, of the beat. … this beat ramifies out into one, two,

three, four; one, two, three, four. It’s very, very basic

stuff. And repeat and recapitulate, turn around, reverse,

turn around, reverse, recapitulate, reverse, recapitulate,

reverse, etc., etc.” (qtd. in Darby “Come to the Ceremonial

Circle” 200).

Pocahontas is also a journey into the past in

which Contemporary Woman #1, accompanied by Contemporary Woman

#2, search through myths and legends of Aboriginal women, both

fictional and actual to “recover the history of … grandmothers

as a tool toward [their] healing” (136). The two actresses

who play the two women continually shift characters on stage

as the scenes change. Similar to Foghorn, Pocahontas does not

have a linear structure, but is based on the theme of

transformation: 13 transformations or scenes, one for each

moon in the lunar year. In her description of the set, Mojica

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writes in the introductory note to the play, “The theme of the

set, costumes and props is also transformation; objects and

set pieces appear to be one thing but become something else,

they can be turned inside-out to reveal another reality”

(138).

The opening scenes of the plays examine the legacy of

colonialism in a number of racial images and stereotypes.

Foghorn opens with a large, painted Indian face,

apparitionlike, moving slowly as it is projected about the

stage, gazing towards the audience. In his note to the play,

Geiogamah points out the function of the visuals, which is to

“counterpoint the action and to give a feeling that the

audience is actually present yet not directly participating in

the action of the play” (49). The performing group play the

opening scene against a background of recorded soundtracks in

a hint at the destruction of native culture at the hands of

the colonizers. The Native Americans’ forced journey from the

West Indies to Alcatraz Island is accompanied with progressive

electronic music and stylized choreography patterned to follow

the electronic score. The scene opens with the landing of

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Columbus and the discovery of Indians by a Spanish sailor who

exclaims, “Los indios! Estos hombres, cho-co-la-tes!” (52).

The Indian face fades to show white settlers castigating

Indians and shouting different kinds of racial slurs, ranging

from a list of stereotypes to condescending dialogue that

exemplifies racial and colonial oppression, “Don’t talk back!

Vermin! Varmits! Vermin! Varmits! Filthy savages. Murderers!

Scalpers! … I say let’s force them off the land” (52). The

scene ends with a US senator announcing, “The Indian problem

is a matter for the courts and the Congress to deal with.

We’ve been victorious over them on the battlefield, now they

must settle on the reservations we have generously set aside

for them” (52-53).

In a similar manner, Pocahontas starts in a journey

imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual displacement,

the result of years of colonization and oppression. The

scene opens with Contemporary Woman #1, on her hands and

knees, searching:

No map, no trail, no footprint, no way home

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only darkness, a cold wind whistling by my ears.

Nowhere to set my feet.

No place to stand.

No map, no trail, no footprint, no way

home. (140).

She announces her search for her roots and identity through

the myths and legends of the past, “It’s time for the women

to pick up their medicine in order for the people to

continue. … The women are the medicine, so we must heal the

women” (140). Similar to the opening scene of Foghorn, this

scene ends with Contemporary Woman #2 firing a series of

popular racial and gender stereotypes of Native women:

Princess, Princess, calendar girl,

Redskin temptress, Indian pearl.

Waiting by the water

for a white man to save.

She’s a savage now remember –

Can’t behave! (141)

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In both scenes, Geiogamah and Mojica re-cite and re-

perform a chain of racial and gender citations in order to

expose them--what Jackson describes as “racial performativity

via racialized theatricality” (197). In those scenes, racial

and gender identities are exaggerated, reworked and

resignified. Because these identities are constantly made

and remade, there is potential for change. This practice of

incorporating racist discourse rather than eradicating it

exemplifies Butler’s call for the resignification of hate

speech. As she argues:

An aesthetic enactment of an injurious word may both

use the word and mention it,

that is, make use of it to produce certain effects but also

at the same time make

reference to that very use, calling attention to it as

a citation, situating that use within a citational

legacy, making that use into

an explicit discursive item to be reflected on rather than a

taken for granted

operation of ordinary language. Or, it may be that an

aesthetic

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reenactment uses that word, but also displays it, points to

it, outlines it as the

arbitrary material instance of language that is exploited to

produce

certain kinds of effects. … Such use renders the term as a

textual object to be thought about

and read, even as it also implicates us

in a relation of knowingness about its conventional force

and meaning. (Excitable

Speech 99-100)

In reproducing these racist and gender slurs and stereotypes

in the text, Geiogamah and Mojica display them as

resignifiable terms.

Butler’s concept of performativity insists that identity

is socially scripted, prescribed, and learned. However, she

maintains that scripts can be resisted and changed, that the

individual has agency and can act beyond, or in excess of,

the script ("Performative Acts" 281-82). In Foghorn and

Pocahontas, Geiogamah and Mojica are interested in their

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characters’ struggle within and against scripts. Script,

scripting and role-playing are evoked in both plays. In

Pocahontas, Mojica explores the trauma of Native women

through the story narrated by the three versions of

Pocahontas: the legendary Storybook Pocahontas, Lady Rebecca,

her name after she converted to Christianity and married John

Roffe, and Matoaka, her name as a child. Through the

interactions of these three Pocahontases, we witness the

considerable disruption and loss that Native peoples suffered

as a result of European exploration. The story-line becomes

multiple, disrupted, fragmented, and on-going, resisting

closure right up to the final words, which signal the

beginning of a new story, with the child Matoaka saying,

“Dark skies, the moon is mine / stars travel / woman’s time”

(152).

Geiogamah’s Pocahontas in Foghorn attempts to resist the

colonial script by rewriting it. In the play, he attempts to

deconstruct the popular Pocahontas stereotype of the gentle

innocent princess or heroine by showing us a sly Pocahontas

telling her handmaidens about her sexual encounter with John

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Smith and describing his sudden impotence. Pocahontas tells

her eager handmaidens, “And the big captain was standing

above me, looking down at me, breathing like a boy after a

footrace, and I saw that his … He said to me, I love you,

dear Pocahontas. I promise you it won’t happen the next

time, I promise, I promise, I promise” (64-65). Through the

story of the Captain’s impotence, Geiogamah deflates the

theme of white superiority underscored by the popular images

of Pocahontas.

Princess Buttered-on-Both Sides, one of the many faces of

the Trickster and a well-known icon of Native women, is

another example of a woman resisting scripts. In Princess

Pocahontas, Mojica shows her as a contestant in the Miss

North American Indian Beauty pageant. Stuck in the talent

segment, she is seen rehearsing her role / song trying it out

with “a drawling country and western feel” (146). Her

song/script is a satirical critique of the white captain and

colonization:

Captain Whiteman, I would pledge my life to you

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Captain Whiteman, I would defy my father too.

I pledge to aid and to save,

I’ll protect you to your grave.

… Captain Whiteman for you, I will convert,

Captain Whiteman, all my pagan gods are dirt.

If I’m savage don’t despise me,

‘cause I’ll let you civilize me.

Oh Captain Whiteman, I’m your buckskin-clad dessert.

(146)

In the light of Butler’s definition of identity as

reiterative, as a stylized repetition of social norms through

time, Mojica is trying to unmask these norms and their

coercive effects.

The cultural collision of stereotypes from both the White

and the Native worlds is also echoed in Foghorn. In one

scene, a clownish and hysterical white schoolteacher attempts

to civilize Indian children through teaching them the English

language, which, according to her, is the first step to the

‘civilized’ American way of life. She addresses the class

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with this ready made script, “Good morning, savages! … You

are going to learn the English language. … The most

beautiful language in all the world. The language that has

brought hope and civilization to people everywhere. … OUR

language! …Hello. Hell-o. It’s the first word of the

American way. The American way begins with hello. Say it,

children, say it. Hell-O. Hell-O.” (61). As she tries to

coax the class one by one to say hello, they close in on her

and attack her. This scene contrasts ironically with another

scene, in which Native Americans land on and occupy Alcatraz

Island in reference to the incident when the American Indian

Movement militants occupied Alcatraz in 1969. A narrator

reading the Native American declaration promises the majority

inhabitants of the country:

… a portion of the land … to be held in trust by the

American Indian people— for as long as the sun

shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea! WE will

further guide the majority inhabitants in the proper way

of living. We will offer them

our religion, our education, our way of life—in order to help

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them achieve our level of

civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers

from their savage and unhappy state. (55-56)

Performativity is a metaphor that dominates Foghorn and

Pocahontas. Identity as a species of performance is a major

issue in the plays which focus on performed constructions of

marginalized identities The characters perform their

Indianness around myths, tales, slogans, and songs because

they are removed from the center of the action. Jackson

points out that in feminist and anti-racist theatre,

performance “was repeatedly invoked as the vehicle by which

fragmented identities were made whole, the silent given voice,

the invisible made visible, and the injurer targeted by the

injured” (190). In both plays, Geiogamah and Mojica battle

with a number of racial and sexual stereotypes, juxtaposing

cultural archetypes from both the White and Native Worlds.

Foghorn includes a scene of Tonto, the “friendly Indian

companion” of the Lone Ranger, an Indian caricature based on a

popular television show. As Kaufmann describes Tonto,

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“Whatever the Lone Ranger was, Tonto was less—less fast, less

a sharpshooter, less domineering. Even his horse, Scout, was

less white” (122). In this scene, we see Tonto with his

clipped baby talk, listening to the Lone Ranger and shining

his boots. A dull and inefficient Lone Ranger feels insecure

because the Indian usually comes to his rescue in a crisis,

and therefore suggests an episode in which this time Tonto is

shot by a bad Indian and the Lone Ranger tries to save him.

As he tells Tonto, “It looks maybe like I’m not too smart

having to rely on an illiterate Injun like you to do all the

clever thinking, and even outsmarting the white man. … Tonto,

can you think of any way that I can come to your rescue and

save you from the hands of death?” (65-66). The scene ends in

ironic reversal where Tonto, tired of shinning the Lone

Ranger’s boots, cuts the man’s throat.

Geiogamah also provides an ironic commentary on colonial

appropriation through the reconstruction of the Wild West

Show. In the 1880s, the Wild West Show, a combination of

circus, parade and carnival that displayed Indian activities

and artifacts, was very popular. In these shows, real

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Indians were shown as “exotic and savage beings … rarely were

the Indians given the limelight but were on the fringes as

marauders attacking the Prairie wagon train, the Deadwood

Mail-Coach, or settlers’ cabin …. When given a special place

in the entertainment, it was to demonstrate Indian ways, most

frequently games, war dances, and fighting techniques…”

(Wilmeth 139). In the 1890s this practice was criticized for

exploiting Indians and perpetuating stereotypes of the Indian

people. However, the Wild West Show became “the source of

images, staging techniques and personnel for the major medium

that replaced it—the Western movie” (qtd. in Wilmeth 140).

Geiogamah’s farcical scene of a ridiculous Wild West Show

starts with an announcer’s voice promising the audience

“fascinating true-to-life scenes of this vanishing specimen

of primitive mankind” (78). The choreography and music for

the scene provide the actors, according to the stage

directions, with “wide latitude for clowning” (77). Using

props of slapstick proportions, the Indians wear fake war

bonnets, ride stick horses, yelp their war whoops, and do a

scalp dance. In an interview with Kenneth Lincoln, Geiogamah

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recalls the enthusiasm of the performers and the energy

released by them as they played this scene, “We’d turn the

sound up just as loud as we could without breaking the

limits. We had the visuals as big as we could magnified in

zoom reverse. Everything was just wild, absolutely wild, and

it got wilder and wilder” (79).

The Wild West Show scene merges into a somber scene where

the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 is enacted. In contrast to

the recorded soundtracks of earlier scenes, traditional

drumming and the AIM unity song about Wounded Knee are

performed live, but are interrupted by rifle shots during the

siege of Wounded Knee in 1973. A drummer is shot and carried

by the performers in a funeral procession while the Marshal’s

voice announces that they are all under arrest. The play

ends with each performer thrusting his hands towards the

audience giving the name of his tribe as the Narrator asserts

“We move on” (81). The last lines are the words of the

Spanish sailor, “Los indios” that opened the play, followed

by the Narrator’s “I am … NOT GUILTY!” (82) speaking for the

defendants in the Wounded Knee courtroom and for all Native

30

Americans. The closing scene echoes the opening of the play:

the colonial oppression and the pursuing killing and

confinement of the first scene are seen again in the drastic

measures taken by the US government following the incident at

Wounded Knee in 1973.

In a similar manner, Mojica examines a number of cultural

icons of Aboriginal history, looking at the symbols of the

indigenous as a form of resistance and cultural

reaffirmation. The play appropriates the Malinche myth, a

symbol of the enslaved, violated and abandoned woman in

Mexican culture. Malinche, a Nahuatl woman, was the

interpreter and mistress of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan

Cortes, during the conquest of Mexico. Named Doña Marina by

the Spaniards and La Malinche by the Aztecs, her role as

interpreter, mistress, and mother to Cortes’ son, the first

"Mexican,” still stirs up controversy. Many Mexicans

continue to condemn the woman, labeling her a traitor and

whore for her role as the alter-ego of Cortes as he conquered

Mexico. In the play’s list of characters, Mojica notes,

“Throughout Mexico and much of Latin America, she is referred

31

to as “La Chingada”—the fuked one, and her name is synonymous

with traitor” (136).

Mojica shows Contemporary Woman #1 as Malinche, cursed and

spit at as a traitor and whore. Malinche challenges those

accusations by denying the colonial identities imposed on her

and claiming her Native one, “My name is Malinali. Not Dona

Marina, not Malinche, La Chingada! The fucked one! … I wear the

face of Malinali Tenepat. I see this face reflected in the

mirror” (143). In narrating her story, she counters the

charge of being a traitor, acknowledging her role as

interpreter that saved thousands of Native lives by enabling

Cortes to negotiate rather than slaughter, “I am the only one

can speak to the Maya, to the Mexica. It is my words that are

of value. … They call me ‘Princess.’ I am a gift, claimed as

value by this man in metal. I can change the words. I have

power” (143).

Malinche also challenges the stigma of being called a

whore by exposing the violation she was subjected to, given to

Cortes as a gift from local Indian leaders, “What is that they

32

say about me? That I opened my legs to the whole conquering

Spanish army? They were already here. I was a gift. Passed

on. Handed on. … Stolen! Bound! Caught! Trapped!” (144). The

Malinche archetype takes on political and social significance,

and the violation of the body is associated with colonial

subjectivity. As Octavio Paz writes:

If the Chingada is a representation of the violated

Mother, it is appropriate to

associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation,

not only in the

historical sense, but also in the very flesh of Indian women.

The symbol of this violation is

dona Malinche, the mistress of Cortes. … Dona

Marina becomes a figure representing the Indian women who

were fascinated,

violated, or seduced by the Spaniards. (77)

Malinche’s narrative ends in a tone of resistance that conveys

pride in her Native roots and provides ethnic verification,

“Born from the earth, fed with my blood, anything alive here

33

is alive because I stayed alive” (144). Through such a

narrative, Mojica’s text appropriates the Malinche myth that

has helped perpetuate the passive role of women in colonial

sites as well as the tendency to feel ashamed of their

indigenous origins.

In another scene, Mojica explores the suffering of the

indigenous Metis (mixed-blood) women in the Canadian west

through the three narratives of Marie, Margaret and Madelaine.

The three Native women tell of their suffering and humiliation

at the hands of the European colonizers:

We die from

smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, childbirth.

We claw at the gate of the fort or we starve and

freeze to death outside.

We birth the Metis.

When there is no more to trade, our men trade us.

(160)

34

The women’s narratives tell of the lost heritage and the

subsequent destruction of personal and cultural identity.

The women are portrayed as divided selves and the binary

opposition between the indigenous and the foreign is clearly

marked. Margaret laments her usurped identity and the

destruction of native traditions:

I am the third and youngest wife of a captain of the

home guard.

I have no children of my own. I help care for the

children of the other wives.

… The women, not from my people, but from the other

side of the river,

They unbraid my hair and wash it with harsh, lye soap.

They wash me.

… They take away my deerskin clothes except for my

moccasins.

They put on me clothing made of cloth with little

flowers …

My name is Wapithee’oo! They call me Margaret. (159)

35

Madelaine tells her story of being “turned off” and replaced

by a white woman after 15 years of marriage to James Johnston,

“Disposed of, discarded, replaced, after the white women came”

(161). Contemporary Woman #1 concludes the scene, “In the

middle of my dream I came face to face to face and the copper

hand reached to touch my back. I awakened sad, cold,

confused, for the journey had been long and far … avec Marie,

Margaret et Madelaine… ” (162).

Pocahontas ends with Contemporary Woman #1 singing while

emptying a bucket of sand centre stage, making footprints, to

emphasize the importance of maintaining one’s culture with an

eye to the future. The feeling of displacement and

dislocation that Pocahontas opened with turns in the play’s

final scene into an awakening and a call for solidarity,

“Wake up! There’s work to be done! We’re here” (166). A long

line of Native women, “The weight of our history on our

backs, the tiredness of the struggle we shared” are

celebrated as the centre of the “hoop of the nation” (164).

The concluding lines of the play are uttered by Contemporary

Woman # 1, joined by Contemporary Woman # 2, “A nation is not

36

conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

… Then, it is done, no matter how brave its warriors, nor how

strong its weapons” (169).

In the closing of Foghorn, with the narrator’s cry “I am

… NOT GUILTY“ absolving himself of some unspecific crime, and

Pocahontas’ Contemporary Woman #1 stepping out of her many

roles/identities and warning us, “Now, I’d like you to take a

good look … I don’t want to be mistaken for a crowd of Native

women. I am one” (168), the audience are reminded, not only

that identity is scripted and performed, but also that the

script can be changed. What we have been watching is not

fixed, stable, accessible, or true. It is a story, a script;

we can buy into, accept, and enjoy it, or we can resist and

struggle to re-write it.

In conclusion, as Feral has suggested, theatricality and

performativity are closely related; performativity is indeed

inscribed within theatricality, and is an important component

of it. (“Foreword” 2). Geiogamah and Mojica, by showing

identity as performative and using the power of

37

theatricality to describe and to change the way identities

are performed and received, have succeeded in exploring the

concepts of performativity and theatricality to express

important ethnic and cultural concerns.

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