by Giorgia Winter
“So we’re both exiles.”
David Greig, a
contemporary Scottish playwright, dramatized the atmosphere of the end of the
twentieth century when many events showed that borders did not achieve their
original purpose any more. Borders had signalled the place of a nation but they
were changed as a result of certain political and economic processes. One of
the major borders was the Berlin Wall, which
served to prevent emigration from East to West Germany and from the communist
Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period, was demolished in 1989. The
Iron Curtain provided as a border between Hungary and Austria signalling
another wall to isolate people who lived in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. At
the end of the twentieth century one of the superpowers, the Soviet Union, disintegrated.
As a consequence, member states of the Soviet Union became independent, Czechoslovakia
and Yugoslavia were broken into pieces, the countries of the Eastern Bloc
became members of the European Union gradually. The title of Greig’s drama, Europe, shows the general nature of the
place where the drama is set.
The characters of Europe
live somewhere in Europe, but Greig depicts the railway station’s architecture
as the print of “the past century’s methods of government. Hapsburg, Nazi and
Stalinist forms have created a hybrid which was neither the romantic dusting of
history, nor the gloss of modernity” (7). Consequently, the drama can be
thought of as a setting in one of the countries of the Eastern Bloc, namely in
a border town. Some characters have telling names to signal the theme and help
the audience to focus on the real background where globalisation is not a fiction
but reality. Sava’s name alludes to a river which is the right side tributary
of the Danube connecting Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina with Serbia. The
name of Berlin signals one of the possible places of the drama while Morocco’s
name refers to a country situated in North-Africa, signalling the possibility to choose the place to live and a border
between two continents and two different cultures, where trading is a main job
even if it is smuggling. Morocco is a cosmopolitan businessman and the symbol
of wealth and mobility.
Some characters of the drama want to become cosmopolitan, accepting the
change in their lives if they have to live in another place while the others insist
on staying at their present home preserving tradition and stability, which
causes tension in the drama. Greig’s characters can be divided into two groups
according to their attitude to going away or staying but each of them has
different motivation. Adele says to Katia “[y]ou’ve lost your home and I’ve
never had one. So we’re both exiles” (67). Katia is supposed to have been
attacked during the war, she lost her home. At the moment, she is travelling
with her father. They symbolize political refugees in Europe while Adele, who
has a home, symbolizes people who do not have a satisfying marriage and
financial background and think that “[. . .] travel broadens the mind” (53).
The tension between the characters who have a home and who are refugees is salient.
Katia replies Adele’s thought about travel as a refugee who is forced to
travel. “It doesn’t broaden the mind, it stretches it like skin across a
tanning rack… a pegged skin out to dry” (53). Katia’s answer shows that refugees do not have
protection, they depend on the inhabitants and the weather of the countries
where they are. Even if they can find a house to live in, they remain
outsiders. Morocco as a cosmopolitan believes that “nothing’s more of a prison
than a home. Nothing is bigger threat to a man’s liberty than three meals a day
and familiar faces at the dinner table” (71). He says to Katia that she is
lucky because she lost her home. “It was a blessed release” (71). Morocco
emphasizes the importance of freedom at a time when the concept of freedom
recalls doubtfulness and exile. Exile is forced or voluntary. Billy goes into
voluntary exile to seek his fortune: “I’m going to look for work” (59). Having
a job his dreams might come true, he can be a rich man owning a Volvo or a Mercedes
with black windows, as his friends predict.
The decision between going away or staying at home and
the characters’ alleged or actual motivation can cause tension and
disconnections in Europe.
The railway station is the play’s most direct
representation of this kind of detachment, but it points symbolically to
others, too: the impossibility of communication between Adele and her husband
Berlin, the silences about the past between Sava and his daughter, the apparent
disappearance (from maps and signs) of Katia’s home town, and the false
connections that lead some to find solutions in far-right politics (Wilkie 157).
Both going
away and staying at home can be considered as an exile because both can mean
detachment. “The play therefore pursues the implications of disconnection – in
transport links, in personal relationships, in versions of nationhood, and
between competing social ideologies – for understanding a contemporary European
sense of identity” (Wilkie 157). Some characters want to travel to another
place, some of them would like to see every place in the world to broaden the
mind, and as a result some characters have to travel but some want to utilize
the new possibilities.
The play reflects the nature of the characteres in a wider sense and presents
some types of the travellers. In the Scottish context the term “travellers” refer to certain groups of ethnic nomads,
for example Scottish Travellers, who are people termed loosely Gypsies and
Tinkers in Scotland. One of the contemporary Scottish travellers is Jess Smith,
who had been living with her parents and a dog in a bus, travelling in Scotland
and England, stopping somewhere sometimes. When they stopped, the family told
stories and sang songs by the campfire. Jess Smith’s stories cannot be
considered as idyllic tales like the contemporary refugees’ stories today. In
her younger age she was outside the margins of respectable society and often
met violence. She says that “[i]t’s common knowledge that Travellers suffered
in the past and to the same extent today ‒ from prejudice and racism. People
are afraid of what they don’t understand. No one hears of nice, clean, decent,
honest Travellers” (Smith). Greig’s Scottish origin promotes explaining the
empathy for outsiders since he may have felt being despised. In the context of
colonization, Scotland has been subordinated to Great Britain, and Britishness does
not mean a nation but the integration of peoples. The destruction of the clans
as Samuel Johnson writes in Journey to
the Western Islands shows the
violent force to the submission of Scotland.
There was perhaps never
any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that
which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent
laws. We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar
appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little now of
their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military
ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their
contempt of government subdued, and the reverence for their chiefs abated. Of
what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their
language and their poverty (Heyk 114).
The basis of David Greig’s motivation to write this
drama may be his Scottish origin and being a former citizen in Nigeria, as an
outsider. In Nigeria his roots did not mean anything for the aborigins. Morocco,
who embodies being without roots in Europe,,
is the character whom Adele asks to arrange false identity documents for Katia.
He wants to know what sort of traveller Katia is because her type mirrors her
identity. “[T]he play itself compiles quite a litany of possible types of
traveller: business travellers; economic migrants; vagrants; ‘bloody
inter-railers’; refugees, tourists; gypsies; journalists ‘on the trail of a hot
story’; spies, gun runners; those on the grand tour; traders; exiles;
first-class ticket holders” (Wilkie 160). Yet in a sense they are all exiles
and, what is more, those who stay at home can be exiles too, for example Berlin
and Horse, since they became unemployed. Being sacked is also a type of discrimination.
Strangely, they have to experience something similar to what they feel against
outsiders. Horse says to Billy that “they” give all the jobs to people from developing countries but Billy does
not understand who Horse speaks about. Horse and Berlin convince Billy that the
left, the anarchists, the Jews, the “gyppos”, the blacks and the browns are “[p]olluters of the nation,” and “there didn’t used to be foreigners here” (60). They do not
accept the different nations’ otherness.
Racial discrimination is completed
with sexual discrimination in part five where Berlin dreams about Jackie
Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe as far and unavailable targets of his desire. Berlin
says that if he was president, he would “[. . .] fuck Jackie Kennedy. . . and
Marylin Monroe, [he]’d buy expensive
women for [him]self and [his] friends, smart suit, smart car, smart life . . .
smart” (23). Traditional values as purposeful actions do not attract them but
later in the drama it is Berlin who refers these values. “I’m staying here.
Staying put. Do what I can keep sane. It’s home, isn’t it? Roots. I’ve got a
wife” (26). Billy says that Berlin is stuck. Berlin’s identity is a camouflage,
he wants to believe that his family and home are important to himself but he
does not respect his wife and only pretends loving her. Fret dies because he has a responsible job and
is attached to this place. Some other characters’ identities change. Sava does not go on travelling. “I’ve found myself
here. In a station. A station is a place to finish a journey as well a place to
start one” (82). Fret and Sava represent the older generation and they are
tired to change their lives, therefore they do not want to go away. But their
daughters need to seek their fortune. Adele’s identity changes the most, she leaves
to have experiences changing her life entirely, and she changes her sexual identity
as well.
Today the connection between identity and nationhood is becoming wider
and one of its causes is globalization. Literature has always chosen identity
as a theme. One of the works in which “identity” is depicted is Joyce’s Ulysses. In the “Cyclops” episode of the
novel the concept of a nation and that of being Irish appear directly. There
was a debate in the nationalist revival about the assumption that only Gaels were
truly Irish, which was argued by the racial purists as opposed to the point
that all Irish-born people should be considered as Irish. The Jewish protagonist,
Bloom says that “[a] nation is the same people living in the same place. [. .
.] Or also living in different places” (Joyce 272). However, when he is asked
about what his nation is, he replies that “Ireland [. . .] I was born here.
Ireland” (272). Later he expresses his suffering from racial discrimination - “[a]nd
I belong to a race, too [. . .] that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This
very moment. This very instant” (273). Bloom is an exile because he has
Hungarian origin, Irish home and belongs to Jewish culture. Since 1990’s borders
have been only symbols and most of the countries in Europe have joined
the European Union, describing
a nation is more difficult now than at the beginning of the twentieth century
when Ulysses was written.
Europe works on numerous levels connected to identity,
nation and discrimination both globally and individually. The characters of the
drama argue for or against globalisation and modernisation versus tradition and
stability but “[they]’re also Europe” as the last sentence of the drama runs, anticipated
by the chorus (90).
Works Cited
Greig, David. Europe. Plays I. London: Methuen, 2002. Print.
Heyck, Thomas William. The Peoples from the British Isles.
Chicago: Lyceum, 2002. Print.
Interview with Jess Smith.
Books from Scotland. booksfromscotland.com.
Web. 27 April 2012.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.
Wilkie, Fiona. ““What’s there to be scared of in a
train”: Transport & Travel in Europe.”
Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in
David Greig’s Theatre. Ed. Anja Müller and Clare Wallace. Prague:
Litteraria Pragensia, 2011. 151-65. Print.
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