homophobia after death

I have just returned from Finland and while reading some blogs, I ended up with Renee's macabre short post at Womanist Musing about a gay man from Senegal who was exhumed twice from the graveyard for being gay. Not knowing much about Senegal, I won't make some statements about how homophobia works localy, the effects of French colonialism, the religious connotations or how heterosexuals discriminate gay people in Senegal. To put it simple, this case from Thies is really fucked up: "a man who was presumed to be gay died of natural causes in a hospital. Just hours after he was buried in a Muslim cemetery four men had his body exhumed his body, leaving it near his grave. The police were forced to intervene and the body was reburied. Not wishing to be stymied in their efforts the man was once again exhumed and this time his body was dumped in front of his family home."

Death is not a safe place anymore, even after becoming a corpse, the queer body is atill denied, rejected, thrown out of the grave. The zombiefication of the gay man in this case makes me wonder of some stories of life after death. Because obviously homophobia goes that far.

staging death

In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead there is an interesting line: "You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it's not gasps and blood and falling about. It's just a man failing to reappear." Alfred Hickling uses it as a contradiction to an event at the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival last week, the so called Stage-death contest, organized by Lodestar Theatre Company. I have thought about it quite a lot, probably because I used death in most of my performances. What was the driving force for such an unconscious decision? I have to admit that death is everywhere and nowhere, one of the most used conventions in alternative theatre and one of the most life-affirming technique but the question is: what is behind it? Used as a convention, death becomes a Brechtian comment. If it is just a form of affirming life on stage, as in Judith Butler’s amateur theatre act of playing dead-of-AIDS gays, then the act in itself is full of hysterical creative energy, the dead is not actually dead, is just an identification for the living. The focus in many cases is on the impossibility of representing death, just like in Tom Stoppard comment: it is not death that we see on stage but just a form of avoiding its representation. Because we know actors are not dead: we can feel their breath and their aliveness. They are showing us something and their staged death is not in vain, it comes with a reason.
But back to the stage death contest: the basic requirement was to turn up and expire for as long as possible. The proposed scenarios included Death By Chocolate, Death By Liposuction and Death By Misadventure. Marks were awarded for overacting, self-indulgence and shoddiness of costume. I have no idea who won. And to close this post I found a photo on flickr with a theatrical sketch from Brazil where thousands of mothers loose their children to armed violence. Few of these mothers staged a performance for the Hummingbird Project in connection with the Social Communication Programme, Urban Outcries. This is from their show, staging the death of their children:

Jehanne Complex

Exquisite

Research & Performing Group

Presents

Jehanne Complex

Jeanne Hamilton-Bick (US) will perform.

Deniz Gőzler (TUR), Trever Hagen (US) and Serhan Kazaz (TUR) will play live music.

Arany Gitta (HU), Lányi Katalin (HU), Rencsisovszki Beatrix (HU) and Seregély Beáta (HU) will dance.

A performance by Mihai Lucaciu (RO).

Tuesday, 20th of May, 8.00 PM – open rehearsal

Wednesday, 21st of May, 8.00 PM - premiere

In front of CEU Auditorium

Nador utca 9, Budapest

Everyone is welcomed but seating is limited

Delia's gone

another lovely and tough Johnny Cash song. it explains a lot just by its own lyrics. the video shows actually more. a type of reading that can be performed: at the first level we have this antiwoman song of a guy that kills his exlover. simple and ugly. at the second level, actually, the narrator is dead and Delia has buried him. Inside the grave her memory hunts him. is it because she runs from him? is the narrator in the grave of his world because she took the whole world with her? who is killing who? is it a sort of revearsed killing? is it a disssapeareance of a sort of being -in-the-world? quite possible.


Delia's gone


Delia, oh, Delia Delia all my life
If I hadn't have shot poor
Delia I'd have had her for my wife
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

I went up to Memphis And I met Delia there
Found her in her parlor
And I tied to her chair
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

She was low down and trifling
And she was cold and mean
Kind of evil make me want to Grab my sub machine
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

First time I shot her I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

But jailer, oh, jailer Jailer,
I can't sleep 'Cause all around my bedside
I hear the patter of Delia's feet
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

So if you woman's devilish
You can let her run
Or you can bring her down and do her
Like Delia got done
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

video is here

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