Bastards, pirates, and halfbreeds: playwriting in Canada - Re-writing the creative writing tradition poetic form as experimental procedure: the view from renaissance England

Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Bastards, pirates, and halfbreeds: playwriting in Canada
Re-writing the creative writing tradition poetic form as experimental procedure: the view from renaissance England

YVETTE NOLAN

In the twenty-five years that I have been writing plays, I have been invited to participate in dozens of conferences, symposia, panels, and gatherings. Usually, I am the only playwright. For many years, organizers did not quite know what to do with me. Playwrights are the bastard children of letters; the thing we do is not quite literature, most people never read a play, many people do not know how to read a play. Most plays are never published, because the thing that playwrights do exists in the air, in the mouths of actors. Production is more important than publication, and very few plays get published until they have been produced. In 2011, only 39 plays were submitted for consideration for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Drama, as opposed to 238 books of fiction and 170 books of poetry. One doesn’t even have to be literate to receive a play: for millennia, plays have been used to teach, to educate, to edify, to illuminate the often unwashed, uneducated, illiterate masses.

In 1981 we battled our way into the Governor General Literary Awards, forty-five years after they had been established. Drama was eligible before that in the category of Poetry or Drama, which I suspect really irritated the poets, even though the playwrights never won. The closest we came to victory was in 1962, when James Reaney’s Twelve Letters to a Small Town and The Killdeer and Other Plays took the prize, but I suspect the drama snuck in under cover of the poetry of Twelve Letters. And while there is no shame in being beat out by Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, and Alden Nowlan, the category was never a particularly good fit. We all know what poetry is, and yet it is hard to define. An assemblage of words that evokes an emotion, a rhythmic composition, an art form that elevates human expression … As I once heard the brilliant poet Ken Babstock say, extempore, “Who is able to say that this column of words is approaching the state of being a poem?” Drama shares some things with poetry — an economy of words, for instance — but really, plays are about voice.

I am the daughter of two people who understood the power of words. My mother was a polyglot: her first language was Algonquin, her second French, her third English. One of the reasons she survived residential school was because her command of French made her a favourite of the nuns, a French order. My father was an immigrant from Ireland who had won a medal for being the best speaker of Irish when he was in high school. Both of them knew the power of mastering English, which was, for both of them, the oppressors’ tongue.

I became a playwright by accident. I loved the theatre, had always loved the dressing up and imagining a better or more exciting or more dangerous life. Seeing into other people’s lives, walking in someone else’s shoes for a short time. I was a theatre rat, making props, hanging lights, coordinating costumes, anything to keep me working near or around the theatre. I thought I wanted to be an actor, but an actor does not have very much control over what she gets to say. Working as an administrator at the inaugural Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 1988, I watched a lot of plays, and thought, Surely I can do better than that. I have been trying ever since.

I wrote my first play at my computer after hours at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. Blade is the story of a young woman killed by a man who was killing prostitutes and was thereby transformed into a prostitute by the media. The story was inspired by events at that time in Winnipeg, and although the murder and disappearance of young Aboriginal women is now so common as to have its own shorthand — “missing and murdered women” — in 1990, the world had yet to recognize a pattern. Canadians had yet to meet Robert Pickton or hear the term Highway of Tears. My heroine, Angela, got to speak her truth after her death, and in speaking her truth, called into question the “facts” about all the young women killed before her. Angela, a young, white university student, gave voice to the young Native women who had been silenced in life and in death.

I produced the play in the 1990 Fringe Festival, and the response was immediate and transformative. I was twenty-nine years old and I had discovered the power of giving voice.

From 2003 until 2011 I served as the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto, where I had the opportunity to read hundreds of plays by Indigenous artists, and the power to produce a few of those every year. The Native scripts that compelled me were the ones that gave voice to individuals who had been marginalized and who had disappeared. The first major work I chose to produce was Marie Clements’s epic The Unnatural and Accidental Women, which she wrote in reaction to “the Boozing Barber,” Gilbert Paul Jordan, who for decades stalked Native women on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, paying them to drink with him. After the women passed out, he continued to pour booze down their throats. The women’s impossibly high alcohol levels lead the coroner to deem their deaths “unnatural and accidental.” Jordan was linked to the deaths of at least ten women, but was only ever convicted of manslaughter, for the death of one of his few non-Native victims.

Struck by the fact that the media coverage was all about Jordan, with very little written about the women he victimized, Marie gave the women voice in her play. The audience gets to see a little of the lives of these women whose deaths did not even arouse curiosity in the public. Throughout the first act, we are introduced to the women, we see them battle demons of loneliness, poverty, and addiction. We learn their names, that they had children, and lovers, and friends. At the end of the act, the women who have been hunted and felled by the Barber are summoned by the formidable Aunt Shadie:

Aunt Shadie calls to them in song, and they respond, in song, in rounds of their original language.

The women in the Barbershop call to each fallen woman, in each solitary room. The women respond and join them in song and ritual as they gather their voice, language and selves in the barbershop.

Throughout, the song floats in and out of each scene, submerging under some, and taking over others, flowing like a river. Each call and response a current. It grows in strength and intensity to the end of Act One where all their voices join force.

Aunt Shadie

Do I hear you sister like yesterday today

Ke-peh-tat-in/jee/ne-gee-metch

Das-goots/o-tahg-gos-ehk

Ahnotes/ka-kee-se-khak (57—58)

The women, once victims, are resurrected, gathered into a community, and given voice.

The playwright Erik Ehn once said that theatre was “uncovering the dead and constructing a history for a community.” If there is a people whose history has been buried, it is the first people of this land, so it is no wonder that there are so many plays that work to unearth those hidden histories and make them visible for the population. Marie Clements, Daniel David Moses, Melanie J. Murray, and Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble have all dragged our stories onto the stage and illuminated them for our consideration. They are often uncomfortable stories, stories that challenge the viewer’s notion of who they are as Canadians. But if, as the New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr has posited, “the most profound function of theatre is to disenchant the citi­zen from the spell of received opinion,” much of the work of First Nations playwrights in the past decade has sought to shake Canadian citizens from their comfortable assumptions about their nation: that its people are polite and tolerant people, its society a just society, that all who live within its ­borders can achieve equality and prosperity.

Marie Clements gave voice to the missing and murdered women in The Unnatural and Accidental Women and The Road Forward, and in Burning Vision literally unearthed the history of uranium mining and its effects on the Indigenous communities in northern Canada from where the uranium was first dug up, to the impact it had as it was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her Tombs of the Vanishing Indian begins in the tunnels underneath Los Angeles, where a mother is killed trying to keep her daughters with her, the shot propelling each of the three young women into very different journeys, each a possible outcome for a seized Native child, none completely successful or whole, because of the lack of roots.

Daniel David Moses’s seminal play Almighty Voice and His Wife offered audiences several ways of looking at the history of Canada. The first act is a deceptively simple rendering of the courtship and marriage of the Cree warrior Almighty Voice and his wife, White Girl, so named because of her time spent in residential school where she learned to fear the white god. The marriage leads to the death by cop of Almighty Voice, who had killed a cow for his wedding feast, making him a fugitive. The act ends with Almighty Voice’s death at the hands of the Northwest Mounted Police and their big cannon.

The second act is vaudeville, enacted in whiteface, in an abandoned industrial school a hundred years later. White Girl is now the Interlocutor and the Master of Ceremonies in a macabre minstrel show, in which she demands that the Ghost re-enact his death for the entertainment of the gentle audience, who want to be titillated by stories of savages, from the safety of their seats: “These fine, kind folks want to know the truth, the amazing details and circumstance behind your savagely beautiful appearance. They also want to be entertained and enlightened, and maybe a tiny bit thrilled, just a goose of frightened” (31).

Almighty Voice’s story and White Girl’s identity have been buried by the tools of colonization — the Church and the residential school system — and the narrative imposed by the dominant culture, of savages who once roamed this land, but have disappeared, except on the stages (and screens) where they are allowed and even encouraged to perform their Indian-ness. This performance invites audience members to both recognize their own role in the making of the stereotype, and to participate in the dismantling of it. As the players wipe the whiteface off their faces in the final moments of the play, exposing the authentic Aboriginal person underneath, the audience has the opportunity to consider their own response to the representations of First Nations that they are offered on a daily basis.

There is little comfortable about “disenchant[ing] the citizen from the spell of received opinion.” People often prefer to remain under spells, to believe that they are powerless, and therefore not responsible for any number of things: missing and murdered women, the death of a Cree warrior, a people who live on the margins of society. The playwright who suggests otherwise, that the individual has power, can make a difference, who shows how we are all connected, wakes the sleeping at his or her peril.

Playwriting can be a dangerous business. Ask Christopher Marlowe, who wrote plays about revenge and ambition and massacres, who was suspected of being a spy, and was stabbed to death in an argument over the reckoning — the bar bill. Ask Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian playwright whose battle with Shell over the Ogoni homelands led to his hanging. Vaclav Havel, whose plays got him banned from the theatre, which in turn provoked him to make more plays, which transformed him into the former Czechoslovakia’s leading dissident. Here, in polite and comfortable Canada, Michael Healey’s Proud, a satirical play about a prime minister, cleverly named Prime Minister, was not banned from Tarragon Theatre, where Healey had been playwright-in-residence for eleven years, but rather it was just not going to be produced, allegedly because members of the theatre feared legal repercussions from the Conservative government.

Plays are — can be — dangerous. They are powerful because they say things into the air, and the very act of saying things into the air can make them so. Plays can make people mad. The only death threat I have ever received was over comments I made about a play, not even my own damn play, but David Mamet’s Oleanna. The play is about a university student who accuses her professor of sexual harassment, thereby ruining his chance at tenure. I had written to the artistic director of a theatre that was producing the play, expressing my opinion that the play was a backlash play, weighted unfairly against women and feminism, and every production inevitably ended with audience members yelling “Kill the bitch!” at the stage. The artistic director responded publicly in a daily newspaper, using my discomfort to illustrate the relevance and impact of theatre. He suggested his Oleanna would be a balanced and fair examination of power, and the final line in the article was his assertion, “I think this will be an Oleanna that even Yvette Nolan can approve of.” I took the bait, agreeing to do a post-show panel with three others — a journalist, a feminist academic, and someone else — but the night before the panel, I received the death threat. The theatre was forced to pepper the audience with undercover security in order to proceed. Dangerous stuff.

When I was in university I had a lover whose mother hated me because I was a “halfbreed.” I never met her, but the lover told me that his mother thought of a halfbreed as a kind of pirate, someone “with a knife in her teeth, climbing up the ropes of a ship.” This was not the first time in my life someone’s mother didn’t like me because I was a halfbreed; my friend Robert Klein in grade school was not allowed to consort with me for the same reason. This image has stuck with me for twenty-five years, and to a certain extent informed the way I engage with the world. Putting it into the air makes it so.

My status as a halfbreed, a formerly derogatory term that Maria Campbell reclaimed for us with her 1973 memoir, conferred upon me a gift of unbelonging. Not white enough for my friend Rob’s family, or my former lover’s mother, never quite Native enough to represent First Nations issues, told that I didn’t “need to do that — that Indian thing,” because I could “pass,” I found myself just outside enough to have some perspective on my communities.

The pirate is a great image for a playwright, who is so often the outsider, rarely welcomed in the hallowed halls of literature, except of course for the big kahuna, the one and only Master Will. As Annie says in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, “Shakespeare out in front by a mile and the rest of field strung out behind trying to close the gap.” (There is a delicious irony in the fact that the damn-with-faint-praise comment one hears about all kinds of writing is “It ain’t Shakespeare.”) The pirate is a plunderer, plucking the choice bits from other people’s lives for her own use. My mother could never come to a play of mine without accusing me of putting pieces of her life onstage. One of my theatrical heroes, Judith Thompson, wrote her Crackwalker characters so clearly that she was, for years, not welcome in Kingston. Perhaps that is an apocryphal story, but what do I care? Yo ho! Yo ho!

Harold Pinter, one of our theatrical elders, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature talked about the responsibility of the writer to seek truth: “The search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.” Pinter asserted that as a writer “you find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.” So affecting was Pinter’s Nobel speech, titled “Art, Truth & Politics,” that English PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists) established a prize in his name to honour a writer who “casts an ’unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ’fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.’”

With great power comes great responsibility.

In 1996, I wrote a play called Annie Mae’s Movement. It’s about Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mi’kmaq woman from Nova Scotia, who left her family to go to the United States to work with the American Indian Movement. In 1976 her body was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Initially, the authorities said she had died of exposure and she was buried as a Jane Doe. When her family had her body exhumed and another autopsy done, it was discovered that the cause of death was actually a bullet in her head.

When I sat down to write the play, twenty years after her death, no one had been arrested for her murder, and many of us, many of us women in Indian Country, believed that no one ever would be.

I wrote the play because I was afraid that Annie Mae was going to be forgotten.

The play was produced in 1999 in Whitehorse and toured to Winnipeg and Halifax. In 2001 it received another production at Native Earth in Toronto. Then one day in March 2003, I was in a hotel in Calgary and the phone rang, and it was a Globe and Mail reporter wondering if I had a comment about the fact that John Graham had been indicted in Annie Mae’s murder. I went to my hotel door and there was the Globe with the news. After twenty-seven years, someone was finally going to be charged with her murder, and it turned out to be John Graham, a Yukon resident who was living in Whitehorse when the play premiered there.

I had, like most playwrights, done my research diligently and then set it aside and written creatively. I gleaned what facts there were in the literature (and in 1996, the World Wide Web was still a new and spotty research tool), and set out to articulate some kind of truth about Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, warrior, mother, martyr. As Pinter pointed out in his Nobel speech: “Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.”

The penultimate scene in the play is the rape and murder of Annie Mae. One of my pieces of research is the autopsy report, and there is no naming of rape in the report (mind you, there is no bullet in the first autopsy report, either, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there). But I know that Anna Mae died in a war, and men rape women in war, and that is a truth I know. Much later, I spoke with Denise Maloney Aquash, Anna Mae’s eldest daughter, and I sent her a copy of the play at her request. Denise became the executive director of Indigenous Women for Justice in 2004, a public figure herself, and in interviews I have heard her refer to the rape and murder of her mother. And I wonder, did I make it so by saying it?

On Christmas Day in 2011, I received an email from a lawyer in Massachusetts who had represented Leonard Peltier from 2002 to 2007 and Arlo Looking Cloud — one of the men convicted of shooting Anna Mae — since 2008. And he wanted to read the play.

I thought, oh oh, I am in trouble. I told him it was available from Playwrights Canada Press, Amazon, or Powell’s.com. I explained that it was a work of fiction, “a piece of art, an imagining of the time between Anna Mae’s decision to go to Wounded Knee and her death a couple of years later. It can also be seen as the moment from the time the bullet leaves the gun until it kills her.”

Five days later, I got another note from him, saying he got the book on Amazon, read it, and I was “right on.” He confirmed for me some of the facts that I had invented, and affirmed my ending, my truth about who was responsible for Anna Mae’s death. The exchange had me shaking my head, realizing again what I already know about this work I do.

There is an Adrienne Rich line that bounces around in my head a lot (if I were a tattoo kind of pirate, I might have it inked on my skin): “But there come times — perhaps this is one of them — / when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die.” This is one of them. I believe it is. I feel that we live in dangerous times.

Governments are in the process of dismantling our history. I cannot help but think that cutting funding to archives, the film industry, Statistics Canada, anyone who advocates on behalf of environmental issues is a way of erasing our memory, our mythologies about ourselves as who we are as Canadians, as denizens of Turtle Island. If they can make us forget who we are, and where we came from, how we got here, why we got here, then they can move forward without regard to who we thought we were.

This is why artists are so important, why writers are so important. Playwrights, who say things out loud, are more important now than ever, and more dangerous. Playwrights who strive to “disenchant the citizen from the spell of received opinion” are especially dangerous, and because we are pirates, we have little fear, and little concern for society’s rules.

I love my pirate relations, and there are many, young and old, established and emerging: Daniel Macdonald, whose play A History of Breathing forces us to look at our role in genocide and reinvent the world in love; Colleen Murphy, who howls with outrage at who we have become as Canadians in her Governor General’s Award—winning play The December Man and her upcoming Pig Girl; Anthony MacMahon, who shows us how easy it is for a people to be divided by showing us the Irish Troubles in The Frenzy of Queen Maeve; Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, who is dismantling colonialism country by country with her 54-ology; Tommy Taylor, who was transformed into a playwright by his arrest at the G20; Judith Thompson, now in her fourth decade of playwriting, who is tackling everything from the right-to-die movement to the Dove-commissioned play Body & Soul, starring non-professional actors.

As I was writing this, I was thrilled to hear that Tom Stoppard had been awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize. I was amused to hear him identified as the man who co-wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love and the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (It ain’t Shakespeare, except it kind of is.) Stoppard has been a guilty pleasure of mine since I saw (five times) the 1985 Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Real Thing, a play about love and the power of words. Stoppard’s hero in The Real Thing is Henry, a playwright. Explaining to his new wife the power of and responsibility of the writer, he says, “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

Works Cited

Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.

Moses, Daniel David. Almighty Voice and His Wife. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. “Transcendental Etude.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974—1977. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Print.

Stoppard, Tom. The Real Thing. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Print.