ESSAY: ‘To Think in My Own Identity Where Actually I Am Not’

THE WAYS BODIES ARE ALLOWED TO MOVE

Scrolling, social media and news flashes ensure your own now intersects visibly and fleetingly with other lives, all criss-crossing each other. Standing in line for the supermarket checkout, I wander around on Instagram. I scroll through dead babies, adverts for a summer festival, selfies by vague acquaintances, figures on cobalt mining, Frontex, income taxes, how long X has been in a relationship with Y. I rearrange my stack of groceries, pay the bill. My news app shows regional news and accusations of genocide at the same level, along with what one of our political narcissists has let slip again. We’ve never been confronted with so many stimuli, and all of them are levelled out: the bleeding soldier is followed by the curry that your guests are guaranteed to adore.

I get off the tram, walk over to where I’m supposed to be. The street is full, everyone is talking at once. Oh for Chrissakes. A cyclist curses as she weaves her way between the members of the audience who have come to see Stefan Hertmans’ Het lied der smekende moeders, based on The Suppliants by Euripides. Around Ghent City Hall, the narrow Hoogpoort is blocked with people. I recognise what the cyclist is feeling, her desire for the street to be a highway, in the shaft of linear clock time. Sorry I’m late, be there in 5.

A greasy streak of sunlight wobbles back and forth above City Hall. Stefan Hertmans appears in a protruding section of the building and starts to speak. Everyone falls silent, including casual passers-by.

[…] 

The mothers

Like mothers in all centuries through the aridity

Of history

[…]

The audience follow Hertmans’ list of grieving cities on the printed text handed out in the street. In a time of absolute scaling up, we even die and murder in greater masses. The Missing Migrant Project has recorded that at least 721 people died on their way to Europe – in January, February, March and April 2024 alone. There were 3263 deaths in the whole of 2023. Between 2021 and 2023, 51,433 disappearances of unaccompanied refugee minors were reported in Europe. The Necropolis project by the choreographer Arkadi Zaides (and many partners) houses these thousands of people who died during their journey. Every performance of Necropolis is preceded by research: an interdisciplinary team documents (known) deaths among refugees near the place where it is performed. The performance consists partly of dance, partly of a report on this macabre research.

Refugees are killed underway because local European politicians passionately defend incorrect causalities and wrongly try to convince us that one person’s death is another’s gain. The professor of theatre studies Christel Stalpaert writes on Zaides that “[…] he consequently thinks through the entanglement of politics and the ways bodies (are allowed to) move.” In Necropolis, Zaides entangles the notions of survival and remembrance, dancing and being interrupted in movement.

Even in their most superficial manifestation, this is what the performing arts always do: question or interrupt conventional movement (sometimes very literally, as the cyclist found out), send clock time into the background, guide suppliant mothers into the centre. We all die, and grief is everywhere, but the difference, the horror, is in the fact that not every lamentation is heard, that some mourn in silence, and sometimes for themselves. In The Suppliants by Euripides, the grieving mothers of Argos bring their sorrow together in a polyphonic lacrimosa – something the demigod Thesus, the son of Aethra who supports the suppliant mothers, calls ‘noise’. Those mothers “[...] have found the strength to drag their stiff limbs here,” Euripides wrote more than 2400 years ago. The strength. I know many grieving people who cannot bear to be described as strong – or even more nobly, as brave! “Bearing the unbearable. But it wasn’t only bravery, it was also submission […],” Miranda July writes of the word “brave” in All Fours. What is the opposite of a bravely grieving mother? A mother who gives up grieving? A mother who screams, shrieks, a mother who sprays graffiti, a mother who breaks down doors? How much ‘noise’ are the mothers allowed to make before they are dismissed as a nuisance?

In his text, Hertmans knots millions of grieving voices into a text that one person declaims, but which resonates with many. He emphasises the collective, politicising nature of grief, branching out of the archetype of the lonely, individual, beseeching mother-with-a-dead-child into a togetherness that acknowledges each other’s grief and aims to care based on that suffering. But it’s still controlled, it’s still theatre.

Applause thunders; it sounds quieter than it does in an auditorium because the other sounds of the city do not fall silent. Chairs are folded; those who were audience members a moment ago become pedallers on racing bicycles.

HOLD INFINITY IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

At a certain point in your life, you start to see time in terms of lack, loss and scarcity. The ancient Greeks already knew that. “Chronos is the practical time that we use to organise the world, schedule meetings and keep calendars,” Joke Hermsen writes on the mythological personification of quantifiable time. Chronos takes up space in your diary, it runs out; urgency and a lack of time get knotted together so that everything needs to be now and now nothing is possible.

“Where Chronos stands for continuity”, Hermsen sketches, “Kairos means precisely a temporary interruption of it.” The kairotic moment constitutes an interval in clock time – a crack in the ticktockticktock from which a revolution can be imagined. Hertman’s speech formed a ‘kairotic knot in time’, within which the past, present and future are compressed into a moment that is experienced not as clock time but as a connective intermezzo. Suppliant mothering people of every age and every nation gain a voice in a now that is experienced by the audience as a nunc stans – an eternal instant – but by passers-by merely as a tick of the metronome, a needle.

Theatre is one of the quintessential places where we can linger in kairotic time. In my case, partly because the theatre is just about the only place where I put my smartphone into aeroplane mode, sparing me from clock time for a couple of hours. In general, the ‘place’ of a show/performance/theatrical intervention is a bubble with its own rhythms, codes and priorities in a world that just keeps on speeding onwards. That is not unique to the theatre: houses of prayer have these characteristics to an equal extent, and there are swimming pools for those who like swimming.

Because the interventions in the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL are held in the open air, however, Chronos time forces its way in. It’s not that it suddenly dictates the time of the performance, but that of the passers-by, the people going somewhere while we’re sitting here. That contrast is sharpest in ZITTEN/Elektra by Peter De Graef, where the audience allow themselves to be led through De Graef’s interpretation of Electra’s story with a view of the open jaws of Gent-Sint-Pieters railway station swallowing and spewing hurried people into their working day. Most of them are people with office jobs, cultural workers, documented people who work with documents, because those who do heavy physical labour, those who need to stay under the radar, have been awake for much longer.

“The economy of exhaustion, fatigue, the wear and tear of racialised and gendered bodies is a constant feature of the testimonials of women who work in cleaning,” writes Françoise Vergès in her introduction to Un Féminisme Décolonial. She recalls the testimonial of Florence Bagou, one of the cleaners at the Gare du Nord in Paris who went on strike in January 2018: “[…] she gets up at four o’clock in the morning, takes her bus at 5:30 to get a train, then another train, to be at her workplace for seven o’clock in the morning.” My gaze drifts away from De Graef towards a group of railway maintenance workers having a smoke at the entrance to the station, directly opposite us.

With every sentence De Graef speaks, I think of words like ‘accomplished’, ‘seasoned’ and ‘spirited’. This is someone who has the patience to knead thoughts and, once they have risen, to share them with us. Someone whose narrative style and narrative remind me of the following lines of poetry by William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand

And Eternity in an Hour

[…]

As De Graef guides the audience out of the rat race with an invitation to mediate, I move away to one side. I can’t manage not to be aware of the glances of those walking past. I walk around, asking questions of people I’ve seen looking at the group. “Hi, I’m a journalist and I’m writing about this event.” I ask what they think is going on here. A train conductor taking a break guesses correctly; a man says: “I thought it was a political demonstration, but everyone is wearing different colours so, no, I’ve no idea. A sect, maybe?” Teenagers in dark green uniforms are clutching summaries and staring at the straggly group of meditators. Someone thinks it’s a Christian gathering, someone else that it’s yoga.

When I reread my notes, I realise how revealing it is that I was more curious about what people thought it was than how I experienced it. I stubbornly refused to participate, because I’m afraid of people looking at me when my eyes are closed, because the archetype of ‘the father as homecoming’ in De Graef’s story really doesn’t speak to me, because I get disproportionately irritated by instructions given by a man (sorry, Peter – blame it on the father). I watched what was going on from the outside: doing the exact opposite of what De Graef intended. The morning rush hour gripped me; I let kairos go.

***

“Yes, I wait for him with unwearied longing,

as I move on my sad path from day to day,

unwed and childless, bathed in tears,

bearing that endless doom of woe,”

says Sophocles’ Electra.

***

“Without parents, I slowly fade away.

No one supports me, no friend, no husband...”

Nowhere in the script do I read what it is that Electra misses about her father,

about who he was, not what. It was something else she feared, I think.

Loneliness, she says.

***

Finding peace makes you a better person. Allowing your mind to wander teaches you to think. Practice staring and extract images from it later. De Graef’s intervention combines a healthy introspection with engagement with the world and an existence in moderation. You can only harvest if you are rooted, something like that. The paradox of the revolutionary potential of seclusion and silence is that it is in fact linked to action. It is returning from seclusion re-engaged, or more intensely engaged. Relaxing to become tense again, running to yoga to forget about running, recharging for a moment to grow new bags under your eyes in no time at all. In short (and because I don’t want Bart De Wever to have a monopoly on quotes in Latin): “...numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus […]” – he never felt as active as when he was doing nothing (Cicero).

A week after the elections, I’m sitting in a pub near Brussels South Station with a friend. A woman comes in and asks for Francis; Francis isn’t there. My friend tells me that he is coming to believe more and more in collective seclusion rather than collective action. “If the majority of Flemish people think fundamentally differently to the way I think, maybe I’m just not in the right place.” He doesn’t see seclusion as the necessary condition to recharge and start contributing again, but as an end in itself, a definitive stop. I stir my soup and think, yes but, and say nothing, because I don’t know anymore either.

In Hyperpolitiek, Anton Jäger claims that the political, public realm, like the financial markets, is characterised by “uncontrollable convulsions and contractions, without any permanent infrastructure emerging from it.” The ephemerality that characterises hyperpolitics will last as long as there is no “re-institutionalisation of political engagement”, Jäger writes. I haven’t made any institutional political engagement emerge from my convulsions either. Just as I moved off to one side in ZITTEN/Elektra, my favourite place to be is on the sidelines – my political commentary is secondary, my engagement a reaction. I am not planting anything, but I feel engaged. The friend who wants to go into seclusion is talking about a vegetable garden.

The unravelling of institutionalised leisure organisations has left big holes in the patchwork quilt of public space. Holes that people fall through, holes that can be (temporarily) closed by initiatives like the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL. The woman beside me tells me she has been to every performance this week. She doesn’t know about the ancient Greeks; what interests her right now is the history of the city of Ghent, since she recently moved here. “I can’t learn everything at once.” I nod. She tells me she has already got to know a lot of people during the festival.

“[…] THINKING IN MY OWN IDENTITY WHERE ACTUALLY I AM NOT […]”

“Political thought is representative,” Hannah Arendt writes in Truth and Politics. “I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.” A critical mind will soon see the potential pitfalls in that line of thought: projection, clichés, paternalism. But Arendt brings nuance to the rest of her argument. “This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not […].” Arendt was a proponent of plurality – not the ‘plurality’ cited to ensure that rabid hate gets a seat at the table, but the plurality from which a shared but many-voiced engagement with the world can arise. After all, no bridge can be built between sowing hate and an engagement to build up.

The theatre maker Peter Aers is a planter: someone who sows, but mainly allows growth to happen on its own; someone who is unusually skilled in eliciting wonderfully beautiful conversations without taking them over. People are surprisingly lively, given the time of day: it is just after 6 o’clock in the morning. An amber haze is away driving the night. Aers sketches the background to the affair that the goddess Athene says goes “too deep for a human” in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Orestes is at the receiving end of a chain of blood vengeance, and he asks Athene for help. She convenes a jury to decide who is most guilty, and Aers systematically leads us into the question. The group has to decide who will join the jury – whose voice absolutely needs to be heard in order to understand properly and thus to arrive at a virtuous judgement. Those called to join the jury include ‘forgiveness’, ‘the heart of a mother’, Agamemnon, Cassandra, ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘children’, ‘the spirit of the times’ and ‘revenge’.

Aers had made fragile sculptures with neighbourhood residents, such as a pole wrapped in cloud-like insulation material. During the conversation, each of these works stands for a perspective that we would like to consider. ‘Thinking outside the box’, for example, is a rattling metal object. Anyone who wants to give voice to a perspective can stand behind a work. You can also switch works after a while, and more than one participant can go and stand behind the same object / perspective. Forgiveness is initially represented by three voices. And later by one. As for myself, I stand behind ‘the heart of a mother’ for a while. The suppliant mother. Ghent’s court building dominates the Tondelier site where the conversation is held. We talk about revenge and forgiveness, the spirit of the times and regret. We do not reach a verdict, and actually we’re not even trying – every sentence resounds with a desire to understand, to learn to think “in my own identity where actually I am not”.

Whereas other interpretations of tragedies tend to lean hard on archetypes – ‘the’ father, ‘the’ God, ‘the’ hero – the focus of this conversation performance is on archè (the ‘beginning’) rather than tupos (‘mould’, ‘form’). What new beginning is possible? How can we live together differently and more gently? How can we start again, together and for each other? A linden tree has been planted on the hill where we are sitting. It stands for subtlety, Aers tells us. He invites us to care for the tree.

“To think and to be fully alive are the same, and this implies that thinking must always begin afresh,” Arendt writes in The Life of the Mind. I have seldom felt that more strongly than I did then.

THE QUAKE

The queue at the polling station inches slowly towards the polling booths. I’m afraid I won’t get to Ghent on time for that day’s performance. There are posters with hairdresser’s models hanging on the walls of the place where I’m going to vote. Short. Curly. Mid-length. Crimped. Shaved. Styling. To the right, above the door to the polling booths, is a big, old map of the world on which Kongo is still spelled with a K and the Soviet Union still exists. I wonder if they couldn’t find a ladder long enough to bring the map down. Two people think the sunshine will influence the result of the elections. I leave Brussels in an empty train.

In Ghent, I pass a Flemish lion flag, the symbol of Flemish nationalism. Folding chairs have been set out in the shadow of the Castle of the Counts. Sitting here in the street, we have a view of the flag flying above the castle. Someone is confused about what my first language is. An older man speaks to me, comes too close, and I take a step back. Iphigenia – played by Axelle Verkempinck, surrounded by children from Ghent – cries out for help. She is on the other side of Kinderrechtenplein, ‘Children’s Rights Square’, and moves towards the audience. The cries for help fade away and the performance ends with confetti and fragile decisiveness.

On the way back to my home city, Brussels, I sit opposite someone on the train who takes up the entire space with his spread legs; I’m angry with myself for drawing my legs in. A drunk man unleashes a racist tirade against another man on the train. I stand up and tell the man to calm down, then go and sit opposite the man against whom the hate speech was directed. He looks at me in confusion and asks if I’m ok. The drunk man shouts that he’s going to shoot us dead. I think of Iphigenia and the teacher who told me to stop allowing myself to be guided by rage and sorrow.

There was a need

to be weak and I met

it. I appeared in the confusion

between strength and

surrender, as if out of nowhere,

that’s the illusion […], writes Robyn Schiff in the poem A Doe Replaces Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar.

A couple of hours later, it became clear that the parties who want to remove the freedom of movement and dismantle the obligation of care did well at the polls throughout Europe.

EPILOGUE

I can’t gather up the folds of this essay; I drag it with me for several days. I go for coffee with a friend whose ex told him he looked like a Greek statue and whose mother has died. While we are waiting for the tram, I glance at his smartphone, Chronos grips me, and I say nervously that I “really need to make a start on that text”. He asks me for the third time what my essay is about – I’d already evaded the question twice. “Oh, it’s about death”– he thinks the reason for my reticence is the reticence that people generally feel towards a young man who has lost his mother. “No, it’s about the theatre, tragedies and politics.” He raises his eyebrows; I say, “so, yes, about death a bit.”

As a profoundly sad teenager, Ancient Greek offered me comfort. I found the reflection of the existential doubts I had – the questions prominently featuring ‘why’ and ‘me’ – in age-old texts, and although those texts did not offer me any answers, they did tell me I wasn’t the only one, that we have been struggling for thousands of years to answer the questions that keep us awake & woke & raging & depressed & in despair. It might make us passive, the thought that everything has always been this way. The world is changing, humanity not entirely changing, but the only constant I believe in is the ability to give shape to resistance – against a compelling father, gods, blood vengeance, clock time, loneliness, violence, discrimination. The ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, and the way in which living makers approach tragedies, reminds me that repetition is never an identical reproduction, but a movement that encompasses both acknowledgement of the work that has been done before and the embodiment of what is still to be done. That is not because something is ‘new’, because it hasn’t been fought for yet.

It’s not because something isn’t new that it cannot change. Let’s turn convulsions into waves, I thought, children into policymakers, linden trees into stages for change, let’s cherish the ‘capacity to start again’ and sprinkle gentle confetti a little more often – I sometimes wish theatre was not the sideline to a centre that speeds onwards and crushes, but the centre of a society that is ambiguous yet where we can never lose sight of each other, where there are enough seats, where coffee is waiting for conversations, where the intrinsic inter homines esse of human beings becomes visible, where we act according to that principle of being a human among humans.

[I know I often write and speak like a preacher,

but please understand that I want above all to listen,

to think in my own identity where actually I am not,

that I am so grateful for theatre in its messy, fleshy, vulnerable, porous, imaginative, sparkling, ever-changing being for the ability to think,

not about myself but about us,

so please join the conversation.

gentle regards,

Sixtine]

***

With many thanks to Matthias Velle for the conversations and the invitation. Thanks to Evelyne Coussens for the feedback. Thanks to all the technicians, production and communication staff of the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL and NTGent. Thanks to Stefan Hertmans, Peter De Graef, Peter Aers and all the neighbourhood residents, Axelle Verkempinck/KOPERGIETERY. Thanks to Seppe, Alexander, Ella, Lena, Jente, Rojda, Nele – without our conversations, this text would never have been finished. Thanks to everyone who cares.