Atacama: testimony by Erzsi Elizabeth Kukorelly, English Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Geneva

Les Marécottes, 3 November 2024

Dear Michele, dear Meret,

Thank you for Atacama, yet another genre-defying triumph from the House of Millner. And this one is so very much from the house of Millner, with all the patriarchal and genealogical implications of the word. The father, the mother, the fathers and the mothers before them, the daughter and the …?

I’m not sure, Meret, where you stand in this genealogy. The words that we have are all so gendered, which of course is basically the point, because patriarchy and genealogy are part of the masculinist conspiracy of transmission (of name, of money, of status, of power). But the magic of the-ah-ter makes it possible for you to leap-frog back to your grandfather’s embodiment and clothes, and produce his voice in a way that moves your mother his daughter. Those pronouns, possessive pronouns, are also part of the stranglehold of language (the English, the French, at least) as it promulgates the structures of power, insidiously proclaiming that people must necessarily exist in networks of possession and power. (Is Viva “my daughter”? Does she want to be?)

The family, be it kinship or nuclear, has long been a staging post for patriarchal power in Europe. In the early modern period, the structure was pretty clear, especially in the upper reaches of the hierarchy: God, King, Noblemen—Noblewomen, Yeomen, Artisans, Merchants, Labourers, then all the wives; somewhere along the line between noblewomen and yeomen the children of the nobility—but mostly children below, always below, belongings, chattels, their injury and starvation for punishment not particularly criminal. When colonialism and capitalism made their merry way through the world, the family (the European family, mind you) was deemed their perfect vehicle: production (by men, paid for by salaries), reproduction (by women, unpaid), and consumption (decided by women, mainly). And, of course, the agents of actual colonization and genocide—going there, living there, killing there.

But then what of love? Is love not there, in families, birth or chosen? Can we accept that love and exploitation may co-exist in the same bonds, in the same constellations of persons? What of the love that parents feel for their children, a bittersweet tugging somewhere in the region of the stomach, an unimaginable turmoil of the heart, the endless desire to just look at them (when babies), and a sort of weird and guilty pride in them (when adults)? And what of the love that children feel for their parents? I sometimes think of my own aged parents, consider that they might die soon, and feel at first relieved at the idea, but then let the reality of it trickle down into my bones, and then I cry, I swear I cry. So this love, this beautiful, desirable, enviable love, travels along the courses and channels of family bonds, the same courses and channels that carry the exploitations of patriarchy (and its handmaidens, capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity and extractivism). Is this a paradox? An ambiguity? A painful realisation? Does loving parents and children make us somehow complicit in the whole shebang?

I think that it does, but then I also think that it is inevitable, in the same way that so many of us are complicit in the horrors of the world and its history. As I sit and write from a Swiss mountain village on a sunny autumn afternoon about one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, inspired by the emotions that your show aroused in me, and as I try to corral those emotions into thoughts and words, I am respectfully reminded of what James Baldwin wrote about his stay in a different Swiss mountain village, a mere 77.7 km away.

But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment, with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. […] These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory-but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.[1]

Of course, wherever we are in the world, we are those people, the villagers of Leukerbad, the natural descendants of Shakespeare and co.. And where does that leave us? This is not a pleasant thought. It leaves me, for one, with a feeling of acute discomfort, one where I can only feel the feeling of guilt that creeps over the surface of my skin and deep in my bowels in private, in secret. Because we have been taught to know that the guilt itself is guilty—the white woman’s tears, white fragility, white guilt—and I agree. Perhaps compassion and empathy are better than guilt; well of course they are—but how can we know what is what? And, is there a place for anger? Can white anger be legitimate or is it just too little too late and not useful anyway? Can I express my emotions regarding my feeling of historical complicity in the exploitation and disempowerment of peoples and territories in a way that will not itself be complicit, exploitative and disempowering? With what delicacy and trepidation can I direct my words in in such a way as to retain an ethical stance?

In your show, you directed your words, bodies and voices in such a way as to retain an ethical stance. I think that the way that you did this was in the particular melding of the private and the public, the familial and the political. There was never a feeling that they could somehow exist separately. The flickering black and white film of a nuclear family that seemingly grew in love in the Chilean Acatama Desert was never entirely separated from the extraction of resources, from the ethnocide and linguicide that subtended that family’s prospering; yet the love was acute, palpable, we could partake and find solace there. Can destruction and solace exist in parallel? Yes, surely. Does solace excuse destruction? No, not ever. It is a weird dance that they step out, solace and destruction, partners in a delicate and trepidatious choreography of historical emergence. Meret, I believe that the physical and envoiced agitation that you gave us towards the end of the show was produced at the confluence of an uneasy reconciliation between solace and destruction. The violence with which your body and your voice occupied the space of the stage belied (I feel) much control and precision. This was not a letting go, rather, it was (again, I feel) a representation of letting go, its performance. There is a tension between what is shown and how it is shown.

So, here too, a tension—like the tension that is produced by the impossible position of having to choose: is my family love or is it exploitation? Am I complicit or am I innocent? Am I a man or a woman? For some of us, some of these choices are easy, for others less so. If we don’t think about these choices, so be it. But if we do, we come closer to understanding something about the world, something that must exist on a plane that includes compassion and empathy.

Together, dearest Michele and Meret, you have produced a play, a performance, a generically bizarre agglomeration of public-facing, emotion-creating action and being, of voice and body, a staged something that moved me so much that I needed to write to you about it. Not least I was moved by my friend Cora’s emotion. To be able to sit next to each other whilst experiencing together created something between us too, a supplementary layer of friendship, a branching out, a mildness and melding together that we would not have had otherwise. So thank you for that.

Remain in solace for the most part, but accept that destruction will be there too.

With all my love and admiration,

Erzsi xxx

[1] James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” Notes of a Native Son, Beacon Press, 1955.