Beyond Ryanga: The Image of Africa in Contemporary Irish Theatre

Jason King

Throughout Europe it is ‘the Irish [who] are the closest people to Africa’, declares Old Man, one of the protagonists of George Seremba’s Napoleon of the Nile (23).⁹⁰⁸ This ideal of cultural proximity and sense of historical affinity between the peoples of Ireland and Africa has been dramatized in a number of recent Irish theatrical productions, most prominently in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). As is often argued, it is the disgraced former missionary Father Jack’s reminiscences about his experiences in the leper colony of Ryanga, Uganda, that serves to provide an objective correlative in the play for pre-modern Ireland’s vitality and more integral sense of community at the point of its demise, as the celebration of the Lughnasa festival and recourse to ‘ritual … dancing … [and] ceremony’ (Friel, 40) become compensatory gestures for the disintegration of a traditional, rural way of life ‘after the industrial revolution had finally caught up with Ballybeg’ (59). Dancing at Lughnasa uses its master-image of dancing to link the suppressed harvest festival practices of a pre-Christian Ireland with the equivalent African rites of celebration, notes Nicholas Grene (265). According to Declan Kiberd, it is Father Jack who comes to embody this ideal of intercultural connection and decolonization after ‘going native’ (Friel, 39) and becoming exposed ‘to the counterclaims of the local culture … in ways which suggest how deep the analogies between Celtic Ireland and contemporary Africa might be’ (Kiberd, 1999: 143). Indeed, for Kiberd it is precisely the conflation of ‘colonized traditional societies’ in Father Jack’s imagination and his inability ‘to distinguish between Irish harvest festivals and African tribal practices’ (611) that infuses the play with a politically progressive dimension: as a dramatic exemplification of the ‘idea that [Ireland] contained both First World and Third World realities’ (143). Thus, while some commentators have cautioned against presupposing a direct form of ‘equivalence between the Africa and Donegal of the play’ (Jordan, xliv; also see O’Toole, 95-6), it is still remarkable the degree of critical acquiescence about Friel’s portrayal of the Irish-African intercultural encounter, in which his underlying ‘analogy between Celtic Ireland and contemporary Africa’ is assumed to be relatively unproblematic.

Since Dancing at Lughnasa was first performed in 1990, however, the primary setting for Irish and African cultural interaction has shifted from the scenario of Irish missionaries in Uganda to the increasing arrival of African immigrants, often asylum seekers and refugees, into Ireland itself. The predominant impetus for intercultural contact is less to be found in vestigial forms of ritual than in the cultural exchanges between African migrants and members of the Irish host society. It might prove salutary to consider, then, that shortly before Brian Friel began plotting the return of his Irish missionary from Uganda in the late 1980s, the Ugandan born playwright and Irish theatre practitioner George Seremba was being persecuted, shot at, and tortured in his native land, as reflected both in his autobiographical play Come Good Rain (1993) and in his performance as a Ugandan refugee in Ireland, the protagonist Joseph Omara, in Donal O’Kelly’s play Asylum! Asylum! (1996).⁹⁰⁹ In his work as both a playwright and an actor, George Seremba brings a very different angle of vision to the interrelation between Ireland and Uganda from that of Father Jack in Dancing at Lughnasa: one which substitutes Friel’s celebration of intercultural ritual, dancing, and ceremony for the eruption of political violence as the predominant symptom of colonial modernity that links both Africa and Europe in their respective plays. Similarly, if the return of Fr. Jack, carrying into the household Ryangan customs represents ‘the pagan affirmation of his native Lughnasa’ (Pine, 271) in Friel’s work, then the same Irish missionary tradition is also invoked as a point of contact between Ireland and Africa in Charlie O’Neill’s play Hurl (2003). For O’Neill, however, Friel’s affirmation of pagan customs becomes reconceived as a pretext for reverse migration. Thus, the protagonist of Hurl, a de-frocked and ‘dishevelled priest’ named Lofty, or ‘Father Bernard Joseph McMahon’ (O’Neill, 1), has returned from his missionary work in Sierra Leone in disgrace, like Father Jack in Dancing at Lughnasa before him, to an unsettling retirement, only to find that his many African charges have followed him in tow, to apply for asylum in Ireland as the literal and spiritual descendants of the ‘hundreds of Irish emigrants who went there’ (O’Neill, 5) in the first place.⁹¹⁰ Most crudely put, the Africans are here because the Irish were there, even if under the pretext of providing spiritual salvation rather than founding colonial settlements.

Whatever the dramatic force of Friel’s ‘analogy between Celtic Ireland and contemporary Africa’, their interconnection is reconceived from a spiritual to a geopolitical nexus in the eyes of Donal O’Kelly, Charlie O’Neill, and George Seremba, as coeval cultural entities which are bound together in contemporaneous spatial and temporal relation with one another. More specifically, it is my contention that these playwrights significantly reconfigure the colonial relationship between the Irish missionary and the African migrant into a metaphor for Irish-African intercultural relations that are focalized in geopolitical rather than spiritual terms. About his education by Irish missionaries, the Sudanese refugee character Old Man in Seremba’s play Napoleon of the Nile recalls that: ‘We used to have a St. Patrick’s Day parade at school’ replete with ‘shamrocks and pipes. In the middle of Africa. I love the Irish, but talk about neo-colonial overtones.’ (Seremba, 24) Despite its neo-colonial overtones, however, the figure of the Irish and European missionary would also appear to be rehabilitated in these plays: from a paternalist educator intent on the deracination of African culture, to a colonial intermediary who offers a means of escape from the threat of persecution and ultimately a pathway to the west.

This reconfiguration of the colonial relationship between the Irish missionary and the African migrant from the promise of spiritual to the provision of geopolitical salvation marks the narrative trajectory of Come Good Rain, and appears implicit in the plotlines of Asylum! Asylum! and Hurl. Each of these plays thus transfigures the spiritual imperative of Ireland’s missionary legacy from the spread of Christianity, the education of the African natives, and the inculcation within them of a Roman Catholic world view into a geo-political imperative to open migratory corridors and provide a place of refuge for those Africans who have been either imperilled or impoverished by the collapse of the imperial social order in which Ireland through its missionaries was implicated. By contrast, Dancing at Lughnasa simply substitutes one spiritual imperative for another. The process of Irish and African intercultural exchange that it dramatizes never moves beyond what Declan Kiberd terms ‘the level of the spirit’ (49). Indeed, although the historical present of Dancing at Lughnasa is set in the 1960s or 1970s, the narrator Michael does not recognize any sense of geo-political obligation towards the descendants of those Africans whom Father Jack has left behind, in a Ryanga now engulfed by the cataclysmic violence of the Idi Amin and Milton Obote regimes. By hypostatizing the spiritual, Friel pre-empts any geo-political interrelation between Ireland and Africa from becoming recognizable in the play.

Thus, beyond Ryanga, it is the dramatic works of George Seremba and Donal O’Kelly, in particular, that serve to remind an Irish audience that Uganda and the rest of Africa continue to exist in a contemporaneous spatial, social, and political relationship with Ireland long after its missionaries have left the continent, to which the Irish still have some obligation in the moment of the historical present. Implicitly their dramatic works destabilize Brian Friel’s analogous sensibility between ‘Celtic Ireland and contemporary Africa’ with a more current set of images of the geo-political asymmetry that divides Ireland, Uganda, and other African nations into postcolonial states that exist at very different removes from the polarizing effects of globalization. By conjunctively reading the works of O’Kelly and Seremba alongside each other, one can begin to reconstruct imaginatively a refugee’s journey from Uganda to Ireland in its entirety, and to bridge over these incommensurate cultural entities that bind his or her world together. Through their sympathetic portrayal of Ugandan migrant protagonists, these plays encourage Irish audiences to look beyond Friel’s Ryanga to a more contemporaneous image of the African in Irish theatre: one that takes shape against the backdrop of global socio-economic disparities in which the Irish themselves are implicated.

The question, however, of whether Irish theatre is receptive to external cultural influence or even capable of representing the polarizing effects of globalization has engendered increasing critical debate. Recent Irish theatre criticism has grappled with the impact of globalization, for example, on the development and reception of Irish theatrical forms, and questioned the adequacy of postcolonial theory to provide an interpretive framework that situates Irish theatre production in relation to contemporary social reality. Shaun Richards has thus suggested that while much postcolonial Irish theatre criticism remains fixated on the construction of binary forms of identity in Irish drama that reflect the British imperial legacy in Ireland, a more pertinent question for theatre scholars in the era of globalization might be the extent to which Irish drama has engaged with the integration of the Irish state into the world capitalist system (2004).⁹¹¹ Similarly, Patrick Lonergan argues that the influence of globalization in Irish theatre is most readily apparent in the enhancement of ‘mobility’ across the Irish theatre industry as a whole. According to Lonergan, ‘mobility has become the dominant value throughout the globalizing world, in sometimes shockingly different ways’. Irish ‘theatres and writers have achieved success by seeking freedom from impediments to their mobility’, he adds, whereas for ‘the refugee who has spent thousands of dollars to be stowed away in a truck bound for Ireland … inhibition of mobility signifies disadvantage’ (22-3). Implicit in Lonergan’s argument, however, is the identification of Irish theatre with the beneficiaries of globalization rather than its victims, the idea that ‘globalization has created opportunities for Irish theatre companies and writers to tour and produce new work abroad’ (20) in place of any sense of responsibility to represent the adverse effects of globalizing social processes on those who have felt them most directly, such as asylum seekers and refugees. And yet, their arrival in Ireland represents a more obvious face of globalization than the peregrinations of the Irish theatre diaspora, and should occupy a more prominent place in the emergent critique of globalization and Irish theatre that is too often preoccupied with the reception of Irish plays abroad.

Postcolonial critics and globalization theorists of Irish theatre also appear curiously insulated from the wider debate about the development of intercultural theatre in both an Irish and international context. Surprisingly few Irish theatre scholars have engaged, for example, with the theoretical perspectives on the production of intercultural theatre developed by critics like Patrice Pavis and Rustom Bharucha, let alone considered what the contours of an Irish form of interculturalism would look like in specific theatre practice. One exception is Brian Singleton, who has traced the origins of intercultural theatre in Ireland to the modernist aesthetic of W.B. Yeats, especially as exemplified in Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902). ‘Yeats’s plan for a new indigenous Irish theatre looked to Ireland’s pre-colonial myths and legends for his subject’, Singleton writes, ‘but also to the classical nō plays of Japan for his dramaturgical construction’ (628).

Elsewhere I have examined the emergence of more contemporary Irish intercultural theatrical forms and practices in relation to the portrayal of immigrants on the Irish stage (King, 2005). The impetus for contemporary Irish intercultural drama has developed, I have suggested, in the space of imaginative overlap that has opened up between Irish historical memories of migration and the experiences of immigrants in Ireland now, which has become a recurrent narrative conceit in a number of recent Irish plays. From the dramatization of Irish historical memories of migration, the contours and core values of a specifically Irish form of interculturalism thus becomes imaginable both in theoretical perspective and in contemporary theatre practice. Here I want to extend and refine that argument further. More specifically, I want to suggest that the imaginative recuperation of the missionary experience in Irish theatre illuminates one particular aspect of Irish historical memory, which brings into sympathetic alignment the arrival of the African migrant with what Ronit Lentin has described as ‘the return of the national repressed’ (233). Thus, whether it be through their symbolic adoption of ‘black babies’, or the provision of education and inculcation of Irish norms and values abroad, Irish missionary activities in Africa became a metaphor in recent Irish theatrical productions for the neo-colonial relationship in which the image of the African in Ireland takes shape under the shadow of Irish historical memory.

The geo-political interconnection between Irish missionary history and the arrival of African migrants in Ireland only becomes evident, however, in a conjunctive reading of the plays of George Seremba and Donal O’Kelly alongside one another, rather than in either of their individual texts. In Come Good Rain, George Seremba recalls the cause of his displacement from Uganda to Canada and then Ireland as a result of his personal experience of abduction, interrogation, torture, botched execution and escape with the help of Catholic missionaries. In his performance in Donal O’Kelly’s play Asylum! Asylum!, Seremba also recounts the experiences of Joseph Omara, a refugee in Ireland, who was forced by the Ugandan military to watch while his father and four other prisoners were ‘placed in a pit’ that was ‘covered with logs’ (O’Kelly, 114) and then set alight before he could flee from the country.⁹¹² About his performance in Asylum! Asylum!, Seremba has said, ‘it was fantastic for me because there were some cross-currents between it and Come Good Rain. As in Come Good Rain, I was watching it from within, the whole trauma unfolding,’ he adds, as Joseph ‘is made to pile up the logs for the ghastly crime, the ghastly murder, really, of his father. So, for myself, the joy was in part that someone from a very different country had the ability to empathize with that sort of situation, and to actually think that it would make theatrical material.’⁹¹³

Thus, in his various roles as a playwright, an actor in Asylum! Asylum!, and a cultural commentator, George Seremba has developed these cross-currents and created a composite narrative of a refugee’s movements from Africa to Ireland in each of its consecutive stages: from the experience of persecution in Uganda, through the process of displacement, to the moment of arrival in Ireland and the refugee’s subsequent reception by members of the Irish host society. About his own life story that is recorded in Come Good Rain, Seremba recalls that it ‘is a very autobiographical play’.

It is about growing up and coming of age in Uganda in the era of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, who were two dictators in succession almost. The play itself and its pivotal moment revolves around this one day, in fact, one evening: December 10^th, 1980. Uganda had gone through eight years of Idi Amin, who was deposed in 1979. After he was finally overthrown, there was a brief period of peace – it was as if the nation had resurrected. Pretty soon after that, one started to see the clouds gather that would lead ominously to the return of Obote.

When I returned to Uganda in December 1980, on the eve of the election on December 10, I was at the campus of Makerere University, and I could see that it was a very polarized campus. The men who picked me up that night, that evening, from the university campus, were, it turned out, members of what was known as the G Branch, which was military intelligence. They summarily tortured me and interrogated me, and then took me for more interrogation and more torture at the office of the chief of staff of the army, who was Obote’s right hand man. It was there that the die was cast, as one would say, because we got into his office at half past nine that evening, and by eleven o’clock I had been sentenced and I was in the Namanve Forest on the outskirts of the city: where the shooting, what turned out to be a botched execution, happened. I believe it was meant as a lesson to those who harbored similar ideas of the kind of Uganda they would be operating in. So, in the end, I think that in the play, to me, there is obviously the historical background which I have been dwelling on, but it is also very much a story of a celebration of that ability to triumph against all those odds. There is an element of poetic justice in it. It is definitely a celebration of the spirit of humanity, and how sometimes those who are prepared to lose their life actually cling to it.⁹¹⁴

There in embryo is the substance of George Seremba’s claim for asylum as well as the plotline of Come Good Rain, in the performance of which he would play the roles of thirty one separate characters to tell both his own and his ‘country’s story’ (111). In order to tell his story, George Seremba claims,

painful memories were dredged out of my subconscious. Each bullet, each pause, each gun had to be expressed differently. Each bullet had to sting and hurt, enter the body, leave or stay the same way it did, together with all the shrapnel, on the night of the 10^th of December 1980. It had to be a one man show, with a musician to accompany me, through the tears and raptures, as I relived the horror on my therapeutic voyage (11).

Seremba’s re-enactment of these ‘painful memories dredged out of his subconscious’ has both aesthetic and political applications: for like every asylum seeker before a refugee tribunal, he has to become both the author and object of his own narrative of persecution and traumatic displacement, in which his ability to relive the horror and to communicate its effects in an expressive fashion will determine the credibility of his claim, and whether or not he is allowed to stay.⁹¹⁵ This is precisely what Fintan O’Toole credits Seremba with in his ‘extraordinary re-enactment of his own torture and attempted murder by the Ugandan secret police [in] Come Good Rain’: namely, his ability ‘to take the piece far beyond the realms of artistic imagery’ and make it appear ‘inescapably real’ (O’Toole, 328). The sheer difficulty of making such ‘painful memories’ seem ‘inescapably real’ to a sceptical audience of Irish immigration officials also provides the basic plotline of Donal O’Kelly’s play Asylum! Asylum!, in which George Seremba was cast in the part of the Ugandan refugee Joseph Omara.

One aesthetic strategy that Seremba employs in Come Good Rain to make his ‘painful memories’ seem ‘inescapably real’ to the audience is to acquaint it with the effects of violence and progressive feelings of disembodiment that result from the experience of torture. Throughout his performance, he increasingly emphasizes the spectacle of the body in pain. Thus, as Seremba re-enacts his experience of being shot and left for dead in the Namanve Forest, an increasing disjunction becomes apparent between his disembodied perceptions of the self and the overwhelming sensations of pain being inflicted upon the body as it is blasted with six bullets and then a rocket propelled grenade in rapid succession. Ric Knowles notes, for example, that Seremba’s ‘narrative is marked by the language of self-alienation’ (23): for ‘as he undergoes his torture and intended murder, Seremba moves between first-person references to the self and a third-person account of what is happening to ‘the body,’ as bullets hit ‘the leg,’ ‘the left arm,’ ‘the right thigh,’ and ‘the head’.… As one soldier aims a rocket-propelled grenade at him, [Seremba recalls that] ‘I stared at him in disbelief. Oh God, there goes the rest of the body.’ (Knowles, 23) By substituting pronouns for the definite article, in other words, Seremba communicates his own sense of disembodiment and thereby makes his audience feel intimately acquainted with the experience of torture by sharing its detached perspective, as not just the object of but also a spectator and witness to the spectacle of the suffering ‘husk that was my body’ (Seremba, 47). Even his stage directions are intended to draw the audience in to this experience of progressive disembodiment through torture when, after ‘the fifth shot is fired,’ the script reads that ‘the familiar and by now comparatively tame sound of another bullet is heard.’ (Seremba, 45) Like George Seremba in the Namanve Forest, the audience too is drawn into the inescapable reality of the experience of torture, by having to normalize its perception of the effects of violence upon the body in pain, as ‘familiar and by now comparatively tame’.

In this way, the audience is not only forced to bear witness to George Seremba’s experience of persecution and traumatic displacement, but it also becomes the potential vehicle of his salvation. Modupe Olagun argues that although Come Good Rain ‘foregrounds the continuities’ between the murderous regimes of Milton Obote and Idi Amin ‘within a broad historical matrix, … the hero of the play is neither of these two strongmen’ but rather the ‘men and women who rescue George’ (441) after he is shot at considerable risk to themselves. Indeed, Seremba acknowledges that the reason that he wrote the play was because ‘it was already commissioned by [my rescuers,] the people of Bweyogerere village – [and that] fulfilling it was going to be [my] thank-you note to them and to [my] family as well as to all [of my] valuable friends.’ (10) Thus, ‘Seremba’s hero in the play is the human(itarian) community’ as a whole, Olagun suggests (445), whereas Seremba himself pays tribute to ‘the so-called African extended human family’ (153) for whom the audience by its ‘collective nature’ (11) stands in as a potential humanitarian community in the making.

The point here, however, is that Seremba’s conception of the ‘so-called African extended human family’ is sufficiently broad to also include those Catholic missionaries who play a vital role in facilitating his escape from Uganda. Thus, at the very end of the narrative, it is a group of Catholic missionaries, and Brother Andrew, in particular, who not only ‘promise help’ but make possible Seremba’s escape ‘across the border’ (53). As Seremba recounts: ‘Photographs are taken. A new identity card is issued and stamped … I’m also listed as a postulant, a Brother in the making so to speak. The card also calls for a brand new story.’ (54) In other words, as in the case of so many refugees, these Catholic missionaries help fabricate a new identity for George Seremba in order to traffic him out of Uganda. Seremba thus reconfigures the image of the ‘triumphalist Catholic missionary’ (Kiberd, 47) from that of a spiritual intercessor, as the transmitter and receptacle of spiritual value, into a human trafficker of sorts. Not only that, but to facilitate his flight, Seremba is disguised as a missionary, thereby completely inverting the experience of Father Jack, who, in ‘going native’, seeks to emulate African cultural norms. By contrast, George Seremba adopts the mannerisms of a Catholic postulant in order to reverse the trajectory of inter-cultural contact that the Catholic Church established in Uganda, and to gain access to the west. Ultimately, the missionaries in Come Good Rain offer a means of escape from the threat of persecution and political violence, because they tend to the needs of the African body as much as the immortal soul.

Thus, George Seremba inverts the whole paradigm of ‘conversion’ at the heart of missionary history from a spiritual to a geo-political setting, whereby those former missionary harvesters of African souls now actively engage in breaking down borders in order to deliver their charges to safety in Europe and North America. As A.B.K Kasozi writes in The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda: by the 1970s and 1980s Uganda’s Catholic missions like Father Jack’s in Ryanga had become perceived as ‘places of refuge and hope to the surrounding communities … to which many exiles fled before proceeding elsewhere’ (160). That those missionaries who traffic humans in the name of God are the heroes of our time is one of the more provocative ideas communicated in Come Good Rain. Indeed, it is precisely this idea that Irish Minister for Justice, Equality, and Law Reform, Michael McDowell, has sought to exorcise when he publicly ‘questioned … the information given by Nigerians who applied for asylum [in Ireland claiming] that they had been given money by unknown Irish priests to help flee Nigeria’ (Liam Reid, The Irish Times 28 March 2005).

In Donal O’Kelly’s play Asylum! Asylum!, it is not an Irish missionary but a ‘just retired sacristan, in his late sixties’ (114), Bill Gaughran, who offers shelter and a place of refuge to the Ugandan refugee Joseph Omara after the Irish state has failed to deport him. The play thus represents the obverse of Ireland’s missionary tradition in which the sacristan comes to embody the enactment of Christian teaching in a local Irish rather than exotic African setting. Although not a defrocked priest like Lofty in Hurl, or disgraced like Friel’s Father Jack, Bill Gaughran is also forced into retirement and protests that he ‘didn’t jump… [but] was pushed’ (115). ‘The oul biddies in the church won’t know what to be doing’, his friend Boylan cajoles, because ‘they all fancied you in that slinky black soutane. ‘Big Black Bill’ … that’s what they called you.’ In retirement, Bill Gaughran discovers himself to be the paterfamilias of a deeply dysfunctional household in which his daughter Mary, an immigration solicitor, and his son Leo, an immigration officer, both come into conflict over his decision to invite Joseph Omara into their home; their professional interests become reinforced by a sense of sibling rivalry. On the surface, the subsequent love interest and interracial romance that develops between Joseph and Mary would seem to symbolize the reconstitution of the traditional Irish family through the provision of hospitality to the outsider, and the reinvention of a cultural ideal of welcoming the stranger that is deeply embedded in Ireland’s Christian heritage. Asylum! Asylum! thus encapsulates both the figure of the refugee as well as Irish ideals of hospitality and exclusion within the same Gaughran family household which becomes a microcosm for Ireland’s response to its so-called refugee crisis.

More specifically, the play offsets a hospitable Irish self-image in pitting Joseph Omara against Leo Gaughran and Pillar Boylan, both of them ambitious Irish immigration officers who seek to deport Joseph as part of a larger project of sweeping expulsions and boundary consolidation ironically code-named ‘Operation Sweep’ (153). Both their project and Asylum! Asylum! culminates, then, in a sequence of spasms of anti-immigrant violence that links Leo’s eye-witness account of the conflagration of an immigrant hostel in Berlin in magical realist fashion with Joseph’s forcible deportation from Ireland: as symbolic manifestations of the same underlying ‘pressure from Europe. Pressure for expulsions. Pressure for asylum rejections. Pressure to stop immigration’ (138).

Whether or not this represents a bald-faced allegory of Ireland’s reception of asylum seekers and refugees or a more nuanced and sophisticated treatment of the subject to some extent depends upon one’s interpretation of the genre of the play. In response to the original production of Asylum! Asylum! at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 1994, Victor Merriman criticized its staging within ‘a proscenium format, where the pull of the conventions of theatrical realism diluted its impact’ (290), while Fintan O’Toole questioned the ‘perception that a play which has a direct and urgent political content must adopt the most immediate and direct of [naturalist] forms’ (Critical Moments 127). In performance, Asylum! Asylum! ‘is most effective … when it is most strange’, according to O’Toole, because in these moments it enables the audience to comprehend the sense ‘of estrangement that Joseph is made to feel. The aesthetics and the politics reinforce each other.’ (128) Like Merriman, however, O’Toole argued that the original production of Asylum! Asylum! faltered to the extent that it was ‘hedged around by naturalist conventions that simply’ could not convey Joseph’s experience of disorientation and ‘the way the world looks from the outside’. Victor Merriman attempted a more expressionist treatment, on the other hand, in his own production of the play in 1997, which featured George Seremba, ‘in order to open up the theatrical playfulness of the script’s Irish/African encounters, and to enable the magic realist ending to emerge more fully’ (290). Like in Come Good Rain, the artistic challenge in Asylum! Asylum! is to engender sympathy for the African immigrant by transforming the cultural incongruity of the play’s ‘Irish/African encounter’ into a matter of aesthetic and political concern.

Where Asylum! Asylum! differs from Come Good Rain, however, is in its emphasis on the remembrance of trauma rather than its portrayal outright. More specifically, O’Kelly’s play foregrounds the difficulties that refugees have in conveying their experiences of persecution, and the politics of storytelling that delimits and underpins Ireland’s refugee hearings and asylum debate. The Irish asylum debate is an unequal contest, he suggests, between the occasional strategic duplicity of the would-be migrant, on the one hand, and the institutional disingenuousness of the Irish host society that would seek to reject his or her claims without, at the same time, disavowing its traditionally congenial and hospitable self-image as an open and welcoming place. The play’s underlying sense of conflict is predicated, in other words, upon this contestation of narratives as a vehicle of a wider social and political struggle that pits the individual figure of the asylum seeker against the preconceptions and hostile attitudes of the Irish host society.

The play’s underlying sense of dramatic irony thus hinges on a discrepancy between the immigration officers’ perceptions of Joseph as a ‘chancer’ (124), a story-teller, and a master of ‘the immigrant’s twist and turns’ (145), – ‘Heart-wrenching stories like his [are] being trotted out at every point of entry… the same scam all over Europe’ (144), Leo declares – and the inference the audience draws that he is a genuine refugee. For although Joseph Omara admits to having been a ‘small-time smuggler’ (151) and petty criminal in Uganda, he bears obvious physical and mental injuries (123); suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (128-29); and he recalls his experience of persecution with a sense of immediacy and candour punctuated by sporadic recollections of horror that Fintan O’Toole describes as a compelling ‘evocation of the nightmare of torture’ (127). When confronted by Leo and Pillar with the threat of imminent deportation, Joseph visualizes the scene of horror that is transfixed in his memory and frozen in time. ‘Come to Uganda with me!’ he implores. ‘Come to the schoolyard. I’ll show you a pit! There is smell of smoke!’ he avows, to which Pillar replies: ‘Nothing but the same old yarn! We don’t believe you! You’re a chancer!’ (163) The politics of storytelling and recitation and reception of refugee narratives thus becomes one of the primary sites of conflict in the play.

Underlying these conflicting narratives of immigrant duplicity and the memory of terror, however, are the geo-political imperatives of globalization to stem population movements and secure borders. ‘It only takes one leaky section in the walls of Fortress Europe and the flood of immigrants will pour in and swamp the continent’, declares Pillar. Ireland’s points of entry, in particular, he adds, need to be ‘plugged’ (153). Joseph’s adversaries thus articulate their mission in terms of disaster prevention and national self-preservation; they envision themselves metaphorically to be a bulwark against a rising tide of migrants. Behind their calamitous metaphors of fluidity, however, lies the starker, socio-economic parlance of limited resources, unemployment, imminent overpopulation, and the prevailing assumption that ‘there’s no room for anybody else … [Europe’s] full up’ (120). Indeed, according to Pillar, the ultimate ‘criterion for enforcement of [Ireland’s] immigration barrier’ (165) is, quite simply: ‘survival … survival of the fittest … [For] everybody knows it’s a jungle out there.’ (167) Ireland’s immigration policy and a discourse of Social Darwinism thus coalesce into explicitly linked manifestations of a prevailing ideology of natural selection.

More to the point, this ideology of natural selection and global discourse of Social Darwinism frame a more localized form of conflict between the figure of the African immigrant and contradictory ideals of Irish humanitarianism and inhospitality. The tension between these humanitarian and hostile responses of Irish society towards African migrants tends to be resolved to their detriment, as those characters who extend hospitality, like the retired sacristan Bill Gaughran, or Lofty in Hurl, become associated with a sense of obsolescence in each of their respective plays. Asylum! Asylum! and Hurl thus make visible the interconnection between global inequality and more localized forms of struggle, like that of Joseph Omara, within a singular frame of reference. Joseph’s struggle becomes emblematic of the masses of African migrants, in other words, who have been dislocated by the social, economic, and political processes of globalization in which Ireland and Europe are implicated. In the end, he is forcibly deported from Ireland, but his friends and companions become politicized in the process and so the conclusion of the play is somewhat open-ended, charged with the possibility that further deportations might be disrupted if Irish people engage in acts of civil disobedience to prevent them.

In conclusion, O’Kelly’s depiction of deportation would seem to anticipate the fate of some of the cast members of another recent Irish theatrical production that has also explored the interconnections between Irish missionaries and African migrants, by conflating the two of them together in the character of a black St. Patrick: the protagonist in Calypso’s ‘multicultural musical’ (Crawley, 20 March, 2003) entitled ‘Mixing It On The Mountain’ that was performed over the course of the St. Patrick’s Festival in 2003. ‘It’s never referred to, the fact that our Patrick is Nigerian’, declared the play’s director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, but in casting a Nigerian to play the role of Ireland’s patron saint and first missionary she was clearly ‘playing fast and loose’ with the nation’s foundational myth, in order ‘to reflect the changing face of contemporary Ireland’ (Crawley, 17 March, 2003). The play thus featured a mixed cast of professional Irish actors and unaccompanied minors, with the former performing in the role of Celtic raiders and slave traders whose captives were played by child asylum seekers in the care of the state, with whom Calypso has been working for several years in its ‘Tower of Babel’ project.⁹¹⁶ Such members of the ‘Tower of Babel’ are also enrolled in Irish schools, where their presence in some ways represents an inversion of the Irish missionary tradition, as the African recipients of an Irish education on Irish rather than African soil. Since their appearance in ‘Mixing It On The Mountain’ in 2003, many of them have performed in a variety of intercultural theatrical spectacles, including on The Late Late Show, during the ‘Bloomsday’ centenary in 2004, and for Ireland’s former President Mary Robinson, and yet, several have received deportation notices in the past year.

The experience of these African immigrants thus points up a profound ideological contradiction between the Irish self-image of a hospitable and welcoming nation of ‘saints and scholars’, and the geo-political reality of its renunciation of its missionary legacy and refusal to recognize any corresponding obligation to maintain access and provide a place of refuge for its former African charges. Whether it be through the sport of Hurling or Ireland’s missionary legacy as a whole, both become re-imagined as metaphors in contemporary Irish drama for the transculturation of Irish norms and values in the people of Africa, for whom the Irish are ‘still responsible’ (O’Neill, 11) after the decline of their spiritual empire. The image of the African thus becomes transformed in the works of George Seremba, Donal O’Kelly, and Charlie O’Neill from a passive recipient of Irish cultural and spiritual values into a more active migrant who must cross the global and geopolitical threshold of Ireland’s ‘immigration barrier’ in order to participate in Irish society.

Ultimately, in both Come Good Rain and Asylum! Asylum!, George Seremba and Donal O’Kelly celebrate the spontaneous formation of humanitarian communities in response to specific incidents of suffering as the impetus for heroism in their respective plays. The Irish arts community and wider public could take their lead from these dramatic works to transform themselves into one such humanitarian community in the making, dedicated to the expansion of the moral imagination of Irish society. ‘You sometimes wonder’, claims George Seremba, ‘whether some of those people on the planes that take people back to Nigeria … went through exactly what I did, or something similar to it, and perhaps … were not endowed with the ability to say what happened, or to be believed?’ ‘It speaks a lot to the kind of responsibility that one has if you are lucky enough to have the gift of storytelling, particularly through drama,’ he adds.⁹¹⁷ That responsibility extends from the dramatist to the audience and wider Irish public to ensure that deportation is not the only end imaginable for vulnerable African immigrants, such as the members of the ‘Tower of Babel’, in Irish society. More than most Irish dramatists, Seremba and O’Kelly have pointed the way forward beyond Brian Friel’s Ryanga towards a geopolitical rather than spiritual ideal of inter-culturalism in Ireland. And yet, the conversion of the image of the African from the object of spiritual salvation to the agent of social change that their plays insist upon is only fitfully realized in the world offstage.

Extract From: ‘Echoes Down the Corridor’: Irish Theatre – Past, Present and Future, edited by Patrick Lonergan & Riana O’Dwyer (2007)

Cross Reference: Multicuturalism

See Also: Synge and His Influences – Centenary Essays from the Synge Summer School, edited by Patrick Lonergan and Because we are poor: Irish theatre in the 1990s, by Victor Merriman