Oct

11

2024

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Novelist (and Jewish Currents contributor) Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, is a searching meditation on narrative turning points—not only in literature but in relation to Palestine. The bulk of this slim volume, whose richness defies its brevity, is the text of a lecture that Hammad delivered last September at Columbia University, as part of a long-standing series in memory of the renowned Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. The speech focuses on the particular literary technique of the “recognition scene.” She traces the form back to Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis, “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character,” famously and tragically exemplified in Oedipus’s realization that he has killed his father and married his mother. Hammad sees anagnorisis as a phenomenon intricately bound up with the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians, she writes, are well acquainted with scenes of outsiders suddenly discovering the justice of the Palestinian cause: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realization.” Such understanding is both abrupt and gradual, accumulating slowly and then erupting all at once with a startling clarity that pierces layers of obfuscation and dehumanization. “To recognize something,” she writes, “is . . . to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.”

For Hammad, this feature of personal narratives around Palestine politicization is both inspiring and endlessly frustrating. She finds hope in “the possibility of a swift movement from ignorance to knowledge,” even as she laments the “despairing déjà vu” of witnessing others come to a belated recognition, over and over again, of the reality that Palestinians have been unambiguously describing, decade after decade. Reflecting on a conversation with an Israeli man she met on a kibbutz in the Galilee—a deserter who, after encountering a Palestinian man approaching the Gaza border fence entirely naked, fled rather than follow his orders to shoot—she quotes BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti: “How many Palestinians . . . need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” And what, Hammad asks, does it mean that in such paradigmatic recognition scenes about Palestine, the Palestinian is always only the occasion for another’s insight and never the center of their own narrative, their humanity made an object even as it’s finally seen? Repeatedly and elegantly, the lecture recasts the question of the potential and limits of recognition—aesthetically, interpersonally, and politically—as Hammad thinks with Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Anne Carson, and many others, letting complications multiply without resolution.

In a different world, the book might have ended just as Hammad’s lecture did. But of course, nine days after her September 28th talk, everything changed. In a potent, sobering afterword, which takes up a quarter of the page count, Hammad reckons with the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th and Israel’s ongoing genocide—and with the ways that both she and the world have been irrevocably changed. Watching Israel unleash immense violence, with the support of Western governments and media outlets supposedly committed to humanistic universalism, she newly comprehends the continued “proximity of humanism—its institutions, its material effects—to coloniality” and the possible irredeemability of humanism as an ideological edifice. “Others understood this better and faster than I did,” she confesses, “so this may be my own personal moment of recognition.” And while in the lecture she had asserted that turning points can only be identified as such after the fact, she admits that the present moment seems like one, though its directionality is darkly inscrutable: “Are we seeing the beginnings of a decolonial future,” she wonders, “or of a more complete obliteration than the Nakba of 1948?” This coda elevates an already remarkable book, as Hammad leans into her own uncertainty while also summoning a new stridency and clarity of purpose. “Do not give in,” she insists, the text approaching the tenor of a sermon. “Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face.”

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): David Henry Hwang’s mordant comedy Yellow Face begins by recounting the real-life 1990 controversy over the casting of the white actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of a French Vietnamese character in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Hwang’s protagonist—who shares the playwright’s name and a good number of other biographical details—has been riding on the success of his 1988 Tony Award for M. Butterfly and is happy to marshal his fame to protest a move that echoes “the yellow face days of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu.” The predictable retort? There just isn’t someone qualified among America’s pool of Asian actors.

That excuse drew appropriate groans from audiences in 2007, when Yellow Face had its New York premiere at the Public Theater. Now, as the show is enjoying an overdue run on Broadway, those groans have turned to guffaws—not least because only minutes before we hear Miss Saigon’s producers defend their casting, the audience has erupted into entrance applause for the actor currently playing “David Henry Hwang” (or DHH, as the program calls him): Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-0, Lost), one of the hunkiest leading men out there.

Yellow Face takes the form of a mockumentary of sorts, mixing fact and fantasy as it considers the wonders—and limits—of the promise offered by both theater and America: that everyone can make themselves into whomever they wish. Alongside Kim, six actors play myriad roles of varying races and genders, frequently not their own. With amusing references to an actual Hwang flop about the Miss Saigon flap that closed in previews in 1993, our current play’s hero finds himself scrambling to find the best actor to lead the cast of his new play. DHH contorts himself trying to learn the one thing he is not allowed to ask during auditions: Is Marcus (Ryan Eggold), the actor he likes, really Asian? Marcus doesn’t look it, but maybe he’s half-Asian? As Marcus succeeds in the role and is embraced by the Asian American community, DHH quickly concocts a heritage for him, declaring Marcus the descendant of Siberian Jews (“Siberia is in Asia!”). Marcus enthusiastically takes on the mantle and soon lands the lead role in a revival of The King and I. He usurps DHH as a leading activist against anti-Asian discrimination—even taking up happily with DHH’s ex-girlfriend.

In the play’s second part, Hwang raises the stakes, moving beyond theatrical skirmishes to the political stage—and the media that covers it. DHH’s immigrant father (a poignant Francis Jue) is targeted by a probe into the bank he directs (as was Hwang’s real father). In a stunning scene, a New York Times reporter, cunningly introduced as “Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel,” interviews DHH, and flagrantly manipulates his source. While that scene is fictional, the journalist and his damaging articles were real—Jeff Gerth’s front-page story in 1999 reported on a federal investigation into the transfer of tens of millions of dollars from China to Hwang’s father’s California bank. No charges were ever brought in the case. Gerth was also behind the reckless hounding of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of passing military secrets to China. A short scene drawn from Lee’s FBI interrogation transcript is shocking, with agents taunting Lee with the execution of the Rosenbergs.

If the satirical shenanigans of the play’s first part playfully posit race as a social construct, its second part shows the material consequences of racial difference that cannot so easily be laughed away. And, in Hwang’s deft hands, both present the theater as a most revelatory arena for letting those complex, competing notions clash.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Quentin Dupieux, the director of Daaaaaalí! (that’s six A’s and one exclamation point), has made strange films before, with strange central characters. These have included a murderous automobile tire, a jacket that drives its owner to ruin, and a strange beast that women find extremely attractive. With his latest American release, he presents us with a protagonist who actually existed, but is no less bizarre: the heretical surrealist Salvador Dalí. Though the man co-wrote two of the greatest classics of avant-garde cinema—Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930)—film was not his primary métier. He is, along with Warhol and Picasso, among the most famous and successful painters of the 20th century. Now, most famous and successful doesn’t mean greatest. But for decades he was a constant presence in the media. To properly understand Daaaaaalí!, those unfamiliar with the man himself should watch this clip of the artist on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. Once you get past the oddness of seeing the eccentric painter alongside the silent film star Lillian Gish and Negro League baseball great Satchel Paige, you’ll get a good sense of the man: his over-the-top Catalan accent, odd speech patterns, and mix of languages in every sentence. His exaggerated real-life delivery is perfectly captured by the actors who play him in Dupieux’s film.

I say “actors” because Dupieux, true to form, has made a surreal movie about a surrealist painter. The role is played by five separate performers; while one is an aged version of the painter who mainly appears when Dalí is supposed to be an old man, the other four show up interchangeably with no rhyme or reason. In a single conversation, we get a different Dalí in every shot. (Is Dupieux commenting on the lack of fixity in identity? On Dalí’s changing moods and sentiments? It seems not, since each and every Dalí is solipsistic and megalomaniacal.) The film revolves around a young neophyte journalist who wants to make a film about Dalí. He agrees to the interview, but only if she has the most gigantic camera available. It takes many tries to get a machine that meets the surrealist’s stringent requirements. Along the way—as if in a film by Dalí’s collaborator, Luis Buñuel—dinners are interrupted by the recounting of dreams, which become dreams within dreams, until the viewer no longer knows what’s real or imagined. The film is set in a seaside town in which the residents and objects come straight from Dalí’s paintings—the very first shot shows a piano with water pouring from it, as featured in Fontaine nécrophilique coulant d’un piano à queue—presenting an alternate universe in which Dalí was not a surrealist at all, but a realist.

Daaaaaalí! is an utterly mad film, made in the image of both its main character and its director.

On the Day of Atonement, we break from the regular parshah cycle to return to selections from Parshat Acharei Mot (reading one part in the morning and another in the afternoon). But each year, I find myself compelled less by these passages than by another biblical text traditionally read in its entirety on Yom Kippur. The book of Jonah—the afternoon haftarah, or selection from the Prophets portion of the Bible—is one of the most elusive stories in classical Hebrew literature. The overarching narrative is familiar, but the text itself is considerably darker than the family-friendly fable of Jonah and the whale. God orders the prophet to travel to the city of Nineveh to persuade its inhabitants to repent of their wickedness. Instead, Jonah boards a ship heading in the opposite direction. When a storm threatens to wreck the boat, everyone on board pleads with their gods and throws their possessions overboard—except for Jonah, who bafflingly falls asleep. Later, after he begrudgingly accepts his mission and succeeds in leading the Ninevites to repentance and divine absolution, Jonah is so angry at God’s compassion that he begs for death: “Please, Eternal One, take my life, for I would rather die than live.”

According to some classical commentaries, this desire to flee from life itself is exhibited not only in Jonah’s suicidal plea but throughout the story. One midrash teaches that “Jonah went on that voyage only to cast himself into the sea.” Jonah’s denial of life also extends to those around him—illustrated, for instance, by his choice to run away from God and thus abandon the Ninevites to their destruction, and then to endanger his fellow passengers by napping rather than taking responsibility for his actions, which brought forth God’s wrath upon the seas. But why is Jonah so callous toward his own life and the lives of those around him? One midrashic tradition, which offers an unexpected origin story for Jonah, suggests a possible explanation. In the book of Kings, the prophet Elijah miraculously resurrects a recently deceased, unnamed boy. Several commentators, following a rabbinic tendency to link unidentified minor characters in the Bible with other more central characters, interpret this boy as a young Jonah. Viewed through the lens of this midrash, Jonah’s seeming indifference to life can be understood as a response to his death and resurrection—an absolute, unassimilable rupture in experience that would surely cause severe and abiding trauma.

Read on Yom Kippur, a time of reflection on our mistakes, the book of Jonah invites us to recognize ourselves in the prophet, and to see the ways that our own trauma numbs us—both to our lives and to the suffering that surrounds us. Just as Jonah falls asleep while the ship threatens to capsize, so do we ignore the catastrophes that threaten to engulf us and our communities; just as Jonah bitterly wishes that God would destroy the vast city of Nineveh, so do we cruelly wish for the total destruction of those we consider our enemies.

It might also prompt us to hear God’s rebuke of Jonah as rebuke directed toward us. “Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?” God asks Jonah, insisting that all life is sacred, that the fact of life makes moral claims on us. Jonah does not respond; this question, left unanswered, concludes the book. This Yom Kippur, as we consider how we have acted over the past year, we stand like Jonah before the divine insistence that we not evade responsibility for our own lives and for the lives of all who share this planet. Our pain and trauma, the text reminds us, do not justify us falling into apathy or cruelty. Jonah is silent—but how will we respond?

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.