Words can kill, the saying goes, but language is in constant flux, through ordinary usage and more institutionalized “spin”. If it is no longer possible to use the word “terror”, for example, without evoking George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, it is equally true that language once used to objectify groups is sometimes recuperated by these and used to their advantage. Like “nigga”, now ubiquitous in hip-hop music with both negative and positive connotations, “Abulkasem” is just such a word for Jonas Hassen Khemiri. In “Invasion!” (whose title is loaded with imagery going back to the Crusades), this young playwright of Tunisian and Swedish descent considers how language can color identity, particularly in the case of visible “immigrants” in European societies living in the shadow of 9/11.
From the mists of history to the tough realities of the streets, “Invasion!” imagines how the name of an 18th century corsair could lastingly enter the vocabulary of a group of middle-schoolers, grow with them to become a code word for coolness and from there leap into the media’s projectors when a love-struck, would-be gigolo who has adopted the name, repeatedly leaves it on the voice mail of a political refugee/harvest-picker (whose number he was given by a girl trying to avoid his advances in a bar). Seen and felt on stage in the form of a red ball that swells from the size of a child’s toy to a crushing globe, the snowballing associations of the name develop visibly from a boy’s imaginings to planetary dimensions, but always in the absence of any rhyme or reason. “Abulkasem” becomes Public Enemy #1, hunted by Interpol and the press, without ever managing to settle convincingly on an identifiable individual, except for the harvest-picker: when his “story” is finally unraveled by a translator, he becomes the unwitting victim of ethnocentric fears and anti-terror hysteria.
Director Michel Didym translates effectively to the stage Khemiri’s multi-layered, meta-theatrical text, exploiting video and live music to develop the writing’s different registers, from comedy to satire to psychological horror, and building on an able cast in a variety of quick-changing, cross-dressing roles. Khemiri asks questions from his own experiences, as the “Turk” in the eyes of Swedish society whom he imagines in the bar scene. But he pertinently expands on these to comment on wider perceptions of otherness in our particular historical moment. The much-decried government-defined debate on national identity in France has yet to provoke reactions in French theater but Khemiri’s text, seen at Nanterre, fills for the time being at least a lingering silence.
To April 17, Wed-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttlebus, 12€-25€, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.
Photo Credit: Eric Didym
