State of Denial

By Rahul Varma

Odette is a young Rwandan-born Canadian filmmaker who has travelled to Turkey to investigate stories of genocide and hidden identity for an upcoming film. When she interviews Sahana, an elderly Muslim woman who has spent her life assisting survivors of the Armenian genocide, she learns a devastating secret about Sahana, one that she resolves to share with the world at any cost, even if it means revealing her own shocking secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781770913417

Rahul Varma

Rahul Varma is a playwright, artistic director of Teesri Duniya Theatre, and co-founder of alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage. He writes both in Hindi and English, a language he acquired as an adult. Some of his other plays include Land Where the Trees Talk, No Man’s Land, Trading Injuries (a radio drama), and Truth and Treason. His plays have been translated into French, Italian, Hindi, and Punjabi. Rahul is the recipient of a special Juror’s Award from the Quebec Drama Federation, a Montreal English Critic’s Circle Award for promoting Interculturalism, and the South Asian Theatre Festival Award.

Book preview

STATE OF DENIAL

RAHUL VARMA

Playwrights Canada Press

TORONTO

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Production History

Characters

Prologue

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

Scene 9

Scene 10

Scene 11

Scene 12

Scene 13

Scene 14

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

To survivors of genocide and sexual violence who lived to tell.

Preface

In 1988, while directing Equal Wages, a one-act play highlighting the age-old problem of lower wages for women, Armenian actress Nadia Agopyan asked me, So when are we going to do a play about Armenian genocide? I must confess that I knew little about it, even though I considered myself well aware of world events. The genocide was not taught in schools, and it was even contested by many governments at the time. The media illustrated stories of ethnic cleansing from all over the world but largely ignored the Armenian genocide. Nadia's words stayed with me.

In 2007, I joined Professor Steven High's remarkable research project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Genocide, War, and Other Human Rights Violations (www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca). His project included interviews with over five hundred community partners who had been displaced by mass violence. These partners were drawn into several working groups, such as Cambodian, Holocaust, Rwandan, and the Oral History and Performance (OHP) Group, of which Teesri Duniya Theatre was a participating member. In 2008 the OHP organized the Untold Histories event, in which Canadian artists from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds presented their stories through the spoken word, dance, music, and film. As I heard the stories and testimonies of survivors and exiles, I committed myself to write a play on the Armenian genocide.

The OHP expected me to write a verbatim play from the testimonies and stories that were being archived, but I took a different approach. I proceeded to write a fictional play, which was the best guarantee I had to over­come the limitations of the deeply personal stories being told. My concern was chal­lenging or questioning a story without offending the storyteller. How was I to contrast the personal story of a survivor with that of her oppressor, who is not approached to speak? What do we do when the cultural sensitivity of a story would not permit any discussion of class, gender, nationality, or other determinants? Now the challenge was to find that imagined story.

It was in one of my conversations with Armenian scholar and friend Hourig Attarian that I was made aware of Fethiya Çetin's recently published memoir, in which her grandmother revealed to her an untold truth that changed everything Çetin knew about her grandmother. That revelation not only exposed to Çetin how her grandmother survived genocide, but who she actually was and eventually became in order to live. Why did this grandmother keep her silence for such a long time? What did breaking this silence mean to her? The idea of the play was born that day from listening to this grandmother's story.

While I thanked Hourig for giving me the idea, I was steadfast in my conviction that this play would not be a personal story, nor would it be a docudrama. However, I must state that my resistance to biography and docudrama is not meant to undermine the value of the genre but came from a desire to explore truth beyond the facts and reality.

While I was moved by this grandmother's story, I was thinking about the survivors whose stories would not be told. Are they not also important? And what about those amongst us who fear telling their stories in order to protect their privacy and the families left behind. Furthermore, I had to set the play in a global context. What is the relationship between various incidents of political violence occurring in the world? I had to think about the relationship between recurring genocides in the world. From the Armenian genocide of 1915 to the Holocaust of 1933–45 to Rwanda in 1994, why have we not learnt to stop the eruption of ethnic cleansing and gendered violence.

So I wrote State of Denial with a fictionalized plot with characters from different cultural backgrounds reading historical documents, testimonials, and other literature. An imaginatively created State of Denial permitted me to tell not one personal story but a composite of stories based on the life experiences of characters that differed in their nationality, ethnic­ity, religion, history, and culture. The action of the play was set at the intersection of different cultures that now reside in Canada. Featuring events from Armenia, Turkey, and Rwanda, the treatment of the material and the narrative reflect the perspectives of lives lived in Canada while examining the truth behind historical genocides in which female bodies were used as the battleground for sexual abuse and gendered violence.

It became a play about hidden identity, silence, survival, and the need to counter denial. Now it was time for me to tell my friend Nadia Agopyan that I hadn't forgotten her question.

On a personal note, writing a play about genocide, war rape, sexual humiliation, and ethnic cleansing, I must admit that I can't comprehend what possesses men to unleash such horrific crimes, and I am more bewildered when I see that the world knows about it and does little. All I can say is that in the face of such shameless denial, awareness is our only hope. As one of the survivor said, When I was in the camp, I just wished I would die. But I kept thinking of all those who didn't survive to speak afterwards. I lived to tell the story.

Rahul Varma

March 2015