Performing New German Realities by Lizzie Stewart

Author:Lizzie Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030698485
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Matthes suggests that Zaimoglu’s “path from radical to serious writer and his public avowal of his faith have given him the credibility of the postmigrant intellectual with ‘Islamic expertise’” (2010, 200). For Zaimoglu, if not for those receiving his work, however, there is clearly a significant difference between his representation of the Neo-Muslimas’ views in the form of a play in an aesthetic sphere and in the form of statements in a political forum.

In this chapter, I will suggest that notions of legitimacy and authenticity have not only accumulated around, but also shifted during the performance history of the play. Such notions have had a frequent role to play in engagements with Zaimoglu’s non-dramatic writing. Scholars such as Julia Abel and Chantelle Warner, for example, have read para-textual elements, such as the preface in Zaimoglu’s infamous debut book Kanak Sprak, as containing and playing with literary signs which create or deny certain expectations of authenticity and documentary associated with the ethnicized, previously subaltern voice which these texts are often supposed to contain (Abel 2006, 309–14; Warner 2011, 258–61). As Warner puts it, “[f]ramed as social autobiography, the value of these works comes to be measured by their ‘documentariness,’ which in turn is evaluated in terms of preconceived notions” (2011, 263–64).

What these preconceived notions might be for Black Virgins in terms of the Muslim woman as source has been explored by Sieg, who discusses the play in the context of a growth in female testimonial literature which repeatedly follows a narrative of oppression by Islam and self-realisation through escape to the West and rejection of the religion. Indeed, 2006 also saw the touring of Dutch playwright Adelheid Roosen’s 2003 play, De Gesluierde Monologen (The Veiled Monologues), to Berlin Kreuzberg, an interview-based play for which “Muslim women [were] asked about their views on and experiences with a variety of issues related to sexuality” (El-Tayeb 2011, 98).12 Black Virgins thus positions itself in opposition to a discourse already prevalent in the media and the political sphere in 2006 which presents Islam as inherently antithetical to supposedly “European” values such as women’s and gay rights (Sieg 2010, 173–85; 2011, 166; see also Stewart 2017). In this regard, “the notion of ethnic authenticity is already scripted in advance” (Sieg 2010, 166). The way in which the play’s rescripting of these sociopolitical discourses in performance interacts with broader aesthetic tendencies in contemporary German theatre, on the other hand, is the subject of this chapter.

The chapter also explores the play’s representation of an “authentic” relationship to Islam and to sexuality as emancipatory. The interaction between these notions of authenticity, and those connected to the label of “semi-documentary theatre” I suggest, led to difficulties in the play’s reception. As an alternative approach to reading the play, I focus on the use of references to science fiction, and particularly to Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the premiere production, which thematise, rather than attempting to gloss over issues of fictionalisation and representation in the play.

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