On The Practice of the Dialogue of Civilizations

By Jared Wright

Mr. Jared Wright has been a collaborator at Boston Experimental Theatre since 2011, as an actor, co-producer, art director, writer and director.

I. M(O)ther will be the 5th performance/experiment BETC has undertaken under the “auspiciously” named project “The Dialogue of Civilizations”—a name that invokes and indicts the grand thoughts of huge swaths of humanity.  In my imagination the phrase conjures the pillars of our temples and minarets of our mosques bellowing at each other, “You are wrong!”  The image holds within it the underlying assumption of all civilizations—that they are bigger than us,  greater than us.  It feels as though the titans themselves must wrestle with each other to keep such a dialogue in play—Gilgamesh and Prometheus grappling on the fault lines of tectonic plates.

So then what is my place as a lowly player, poet, musician, writer? As any artist in such grand civilizational speech… and you, what is your place, dear reader, or audience, or fellow player, in that dialogue?

Despite my desire to divorce myself from my civilization (I feel the ground rumble at the mere mention)… I cannot.  My mind, my heart, my passion, even how I see and feel—all are so shaped by the history from which I was cooked up, pressed and pushed out, that I will forever be its product.  I am just another slow, salty drip on the stalagmite of the White Western World.  Stone metaphors seem fitting, because stone is almost the hardest thing I know, and to move stone is the most laborious thing I know.

II. You too, are the sweat of some stone, some eons-long struggle to survive, to master nature, to bear forth new generations with the prophetic hope that they will be better.  

The generations have cried, ‘They must be better than us!’  Because if they aren’t better than us, better than our wars over gods, our willingness to let others starve, or our starvation, our maniacal hoarding of resources, or our push upwards, feet pressed firmly on the faces of others, then was it worth bearing them into the world at all? 

Yet, in this time, those of the humanistic bent know the ‘state of emergency’ has not lifted.  We are not better.  Progress—of generations, of humanization, of thought and art and beauty—is not only not guaranteed, it is fitful and intermittent. And sometimes it moves in reverse as progress gives way to fear.  Our states of emergency are cyclical and constant, moving from nation to nation, embedded in each civilization, enough to assure me, at least, that no generation should be heralded as greater than the last.  Our stalactites and pillars are ours to move, and they won’t budge without wrenching from them those changes we seek with the most fervent and critical effort.

Each of us is dripping down the layers of ourselves, whether we want to or not. Only with the most fervent effort can those drips coalesce into something we could call ‘progress’.  We must work as we drip, so we may be made greater by each other.  We must push to fashion these pillars in such a way so that they are the sum of our many parts, acknowledging our hopes and shadows.  And that push must happen in the moment of connection and interaction.  

That is where our ‘dialogue’ can begin. Because civilizations seem incapable of speaking except in yells and accusations, but I…

I can fall in love with you…  And, just maybe, you can fall in love with me.

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History

III.   In the general Dialogue of Civilizations our conversations seem as immovable as our temples, but it is in the particular where we can actually learn, exchange, and grow.  In a moment, you, who dripped from the stalactite of the Muslim World, and I who dripped from the Christian World can dance to new rhythms, meld our voices in chants, synchronize our movements with fluidity, or share the pains of lost loved ones who succumbed to these constant states of emergency.

In those moments of connection we are seized by a kind of elation that is usually reserved for our places of worship.  It is the personal revolutionary fervor that rises in our chests, our stomachs, our throats.  The playing of your oud can possess my body, and my movements or my poetry can electrify your daf.  We can hold each other with our gazes, listen, and unite our voices, our burdens, our hopes. 

We, an Iranian American and a Jewish American, an Iraqi and a South African, a Korean and a Turk, can discover by creating together, playing together, struggling to understand each other, fighting each other, mocking each other, supporting each other, that you are not who I thought you were, and we are not who we think we are. As Walt Whitman declared, “We are large. We contain multitudes.”  But to access that multitudinous self, of both shadow and light, we must create the space in which complexity can be held and shared.

Our hope is for our theatre to develop a stronger, deeper, and more resilient container for and a site more conducive to those interactions.

Yes, we are born of civilizations and grand categories, Muslim, Christian, Asian, Black, White and we carry those categorical histories with us, but we are also musicians, acrobats, dancers, story-tellers, children of mothers, mothers, or future mothers, lovers of the resonance of ‘that bell’, childish when given a ball, carriers of our family’s pride or shamed by our family’s secrets.  Despite being born of them and shaped by them, we are also much more than our civilizations.  The real Dialogue of Civilizations is in discovering that the alienations I feel from my categories are justified, because my civilization has betrayed me, represented and misrepresented me, even when I am present.

The new path is in discovering through dialogue a real connection to the person you encounter.  Once that connection is established, we may be able to improvise and discover new ways out.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

IV.  The encounter, the dialogue in the particular, won’t always be pleasant.  We are practitioners of the Theatre of Cruelty.  It’s founder, Antonin Artaud, explained, the “Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all… not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies… but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us.”  Our theatre must be a reminder that, “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” 

In fact, if our dialogues in the particular are all pleasant, someone is probably lying.  It can’t be all dancing and communing.  Too much blood has been spilled.  The ‘Dialogue between Civilizations’ was originally created in response to the term, “The Clash of Civilizations”, because so much war, oppression and dehumanization had divided our peoples that there seemed no way forward. It was Dariush Shayegan’s way of empowering Persian thought and engaging European, Western, and Asian ideas in it—creating a new path where one previously seemed impossible.  

In our devised production “The Last Dream”, we filled the stage with the beauty and strength of children from Salvadoran refugee families. Throughout the show they danced and supported each other despite U.S., anti-immigrant policies that threatened—and still threaten—to destroy their families. The stage was filled with the complex colors and celebrations of those brought up in two different worlds, but eventually a giant grey-faced creature consumed the stage and the children on it until only one was left.  A nine-year-old girl in her pink birthday dress held out her hands to the audience, looked them in the eyes and asked, “Will you help me?” Then, the lights went out.  

Our encounter should not and cannot only consist of dancing and song.  Our civilizations at large do have real ‘scores to settle’, and many of those scores are carried by us in the particular.  My fathers or my grandfathers killed yours, and maybe yours killed mine.  The effects of those deaths are felt, bodily, emotionally, and tangibly today.  In the theatre we can explore that kind of pain, those kinds of shadows, but in a container of metaphor and fantasies that will restrain the violence, honor the pain, and perhaps help us move.  You can see my shame, my rage, my desire for power, and I can see your vengeance, your envy, your lust.  You can press against me until I give and learn—and find new limits, a new call to action.

So this then is our place; players, poets, musicians, artists… push, with me and against me.  Test my every contour, and I will try to test yours.  We will prove ourselves pliable, adaptable, and adept.  And readers or audience, demand of us honesty.  Accept nothing less of us or of yourselves, and where possible, you should engage and play and confront as well.  That is our dialogue, where civilizations manifest among us.  

And if we can hold all that and still dance, still sing, and still fall in love, then perhaps we, newly pressed and transformed by each other, refined as diamonds, can move these civilizational stones.

Jared Wright