{"id":246,"date":"2023-06-05T20:57:32","date_gmt":"2023-06-05T20:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/27\/?p=246"},"modified":"2023-07-11T14:24:27","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T14:24:27","slug":"a-feminist-rewriting-of-kleist-oziriand-nublings-die-verlobung-in-st-domingo-ein-widerspruch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/27\/a-feminist-rewriting-of-kleist-oziriand-nublings-die-verlobung-in-st-domingo-ein-widerspruch\/","title":{"rendered":"A Feminist Rewriting of Kleist? \u00d6ziri\u2019and N\u00fcbling\u2019s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo \u2013 Ein Widerspruch<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Priscilla Layne<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In his novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo<\/font> (1811), Heinrich von Kleist depicted the Haitian revolution within a highly racialized framework of white innocence and Black vengeance. With his rewriting of this narrative in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo\u2014Ein Widerspruch<\/font> (2019), rather than condemning the Black people rebelling, Necati \u00d6ziri emphasizes the violence they are responding to. \u00d6ziri also shifts the play\u2019s focus from a tragic love affair to a mother-daughter relationship between. In this paper, I apply a feminist, postcolonial reading to \u00d6ziri\u2019s play, to explore all of the ways he is writing back against Kleist, including by embracing ambiguity.

Keywords: <\/strong>Postcolonialism, Haitian revolution, violence, feminism, postmigrant, racism<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo<\/em> (The Betrothal in St. Domingo<\/em>,1811), German Romantic author Heinrich von Kleist attempted to bring the Haitian Revolution to Europe\u2019s shores via literary representation. His protagonist, the Swiss character Gustav, is desperately trying to help himself and his family leave the island in the wake of the slave revolt. While on the run, Gustav seeks shelter at a home that is inhabited by the mixed-race woman Toni and her mother Babekan, who happens to be the romantic partner of Congo Huango, who is leading the rebellion and seeking revenge against the former slave masters. Babekan has been using Toni to lure white men to their deaths via a false sense of security. Until now, Toni has not questioned her mother\u2019s tactics. But she falls in love with Gustav and wants to save his life, so they can marry and live in Europe. Despite his strong feelings for Toni, Gustav is suspicious of her, because even with her very light complexion, he questions whether she can ever really be loyal to him <\/em>and betray her Black brethren. Ultimately, his paranoia causes Gustav to shoot Toni to death, as he mistakes her attempt to save him as an attempt to deliver him to his potential executioners. Once Gustav realizes his mistake, he shoots himself as well, and when Gustav\u2019s uncle reaches Switzerland, he creates a memorial in their honor beneath a tree in his garden.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Bildnis Heinrich von Kleist<\/em>, 1801, Zeichnung, Dresden, Sammlung Otto Krug. Public domain. Photo: Web\/Wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

On the one hand, Kleist\u2019s narrative interrogates the legacy of a French Revolution that declared liberty for some but not all. On the other hand, he posed his questions within a highly racialized framework, where those who are dark-skinned are brutally violent, whites like the Gustav can see themselves as \u201cinnocent\u201d and biracial characters like Toni are doomed to a tragic life (and death) because they cannot fully be contained within racial categories. With what has been described as an \u00dcberschreibung<\/em> (overwriting) of Kleist\u2019s narrative, in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo \u2013 Ein Widerspruch <\/em>(The Betrothal in St. Domingo\u2014A Contradiction<\/em>, 2019), Turkish German playwright Necati \u00d6ziri interrogates Kleist by asking what the Blacks\u2019 perspective might have been. \u00d6ziri uses the style and themes of postmigrant theatre to liberate Kleist\u2019s Black characters from his white supremacist racial framework.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By writing from this perspective, rather than condemning the Black people who rebel, \u00d6ziri emphasizes what they are responding <\/em>to, which includes the violent potential <\/em>of whites. As Simone De Beauvoir argues, \u201cthe oppressed has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants\u201d (89). Furthermore, \u00d6ziri shifts the play\u2019s focus from the tragic love story between Toni and Gustav to the mother-daughter relationship between Babekan and Toni. In Kleist, ambiguity and uncertainty are dangerous, best represented by Toni, which is why she must die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this paper, I will apply a feminist, postcolonial reading to \u00d6ziri\u2019s play to explore all of the ways he is writing back against Kleist, including by embracing ambiguity. By drawing on Simone De Beauvoir\u2019s understanding of the ethics of ambiguity, I will discuss why \u00d6ziri\u2019s play is useful for exploring questions around agency, violence and feminism in representations of revolutionary violence. In my analysis, I will sometimes differentiate between \u00d6ziri\u2019s text and Sebastian N\u00fcbling\u2019s staging because they occupy different positionalities and I cannot always be certain whether choices made for the performance were influenced by \u00d6ziri or whether they are due to N\u00fcbling\u2019s interpretation of \u00d6ziri\u2019s text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resisting Realism<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The performance I will analyze was filmed at the Maxim Gorki theatre in Berlin. The Gorki features a racially and ethnically diverse ensemble cast that includes both native speakers and non-native speakers of German; thus, staging the play there allowed director N\u00fcbling to practice a kind of blind casting\u2014actors aren\u2019t assigned roles because of physical similarity to characters and because the ensemble is so diverse, this allows for actors of Color to play roles that traditionally had only been played by white actors. N\u00fcbling utilizes this diverse cast to challenge Western views of the Haitian revolution, inject \u00d6ziri\u2019s narrative with African diasporic aesthetics and redefine the importance of \u201cambiguity\u201d for Kleist\u2019s narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most important strategies N\u00fcbling uses to decenter a single, dominant and white perspective of the Haitian revolution is to, instead, allow for several different characters to narrate what is happening. Furthermore, the character of Toni is played by two actresses, who, at first, are clearly identified because of the different colored clothing: one (Kenda Hmeidan) starts in an orange velour, short-sleeved romper, with the sleeves cut at an angle; the other (played by \u00c7i\u011fdem Teke) wears a buttoned-down shirt and pants in different green shades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Typical of postmigrant theatre, there are several moments in the play when the actors break the fourth wall and blur the lines between the reality of the play and real life. This helps emphasize that the themes presented in the play\u2014racism, freedom, exploitation\u2014are not just bygone political issues but are still relevant. And the audience is meant to critically reflect on what they are seeing, hopefully being motivated to make changes in their own lives, not just rethink their understanding of this history. For example, \u00d6ziri purposefully uses ambiguous language to make it difficult for us to immediately identify the time of the setting. Are we in the here and now or in eighteenth-century Haiti? After taking the stage in her orange velour costume, Toni describes a political time of revolution and political change:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Die Gesellschaften um uns herum ver\u00e4ndern sich, \u00fcberall, in Europa und auch hier. Der Hass organisiert sich. Das Vertrauen in die politischen Entscheidungstr\u00e4ger schwindet. Alle sehnen sich nach Vers\u00f6hnung, nach Alltag und Normalit\u00e4t, nach einer Vision f\u00fcr dieses noch junge Jahrhundert. Alle wollen Wissen: Was kommt nach dem Protest?<\/p>\n\u00d6ziri 3[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There is a reason why these remarks resonate with both our present and the Haitian and French Revolutions. In all three contexts, political unrest was on the horizon because the people lacking power no longer trusted in their rulers and they questioned whether they simply had to accept the world as it was or could possibly change <\/em>the world to reflect what they desired. It is this equivalence between the Haitian and the French Revolutions that Haitian leaders tried to underscore in order to stress that while the French argued for liberty for all, they conveniently forgot the enslaved in their colonies. Thus, the Haitian Revolution was merely a case of enslaved people demanding the same rights and respect that allegedly counted for all human beings. In fact, this rhetoric around who counts as human is what helps us locate \u00d6ziri\u2019s text in the past. Reflecting on who does and doesn\u2019t count as human <\/em>is a task attributed to Br\u00e9da, a character whom \u00d6ziri has modeled on revolutionary Haitian General Fran\u00e7ois Dominique Toussaint (1743\u20131803). When the actor who plays Br\u00e9da (Falilou Seck) first takes the stage, he states, \u201cich stehe hier auch und vor allem, weil es mir als der Mensch, der ich geworden bin, pers\u00f6nlich wichtig ist\u201d (3).[2]<\/sup><\/a> Thus, he is aware that he did not always count as \u201chuman,\u201d and importantly for him, becoming human is tied to a desire to liberate all<\/em> not just a select few, as was the case of the European bourgeois revolutions.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Br\u00e9da\u2019s prologue, with which \u00d6ziri begins his play, is his first drastic departure from Kleist\u2019s text. A typical realist novella, Kleist\u2019s Verlobung <\/em>begins with an omniscient narrator informing us of the setting of the conflict. What stands out about Kleist\u2019s narrator is that he is decidedly un<\/em>sympathetic to the enslaved Black people on the island. He states: \u201cZu Port au Prince, auf dem franz\u00f6sischen Anteil der Insel St. Domingo, lebte, zu Anfange dieses Jahrhunderts, als die Schwarzen die Wei\u00dfen ermordeten, auf der Pflanzung des Herrn Guillaume von Villeneuve, ein f\u00fcrchterlicher alter N****, namens Congo Hoango\u201d (Projekt Gutenberg).[4]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n