Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2006

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[p. 124]

Diana Manole

"What Language Shall We Pray In?"
Post-Colonial Approaches to Sacred Texts and Rituals in Canadian Contemporary Drama

While the performance of sacred texts and rituals can be conventionally seen as the observance of tradition, their post-colonial(1) and diasporic revaluations alter the customary religious practice, if not the texts themselves. Performed in a different space than the home country, and sometimes in a different language than the mother tongues of the believers, sacred rituals equally homogenize and differentiate imagined colonial, post-colonial and exilic communities. The ambivalence of cultural difference and the hybridity of religious practices reveal what Homi Bhabha identifies as "the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identification, and all acts of cultural translation."(2)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradoxically conflicting functions of Christian sacred texts and rituals, specifically the Scripture and the Lord's Prayer, in two English-Canadian post-colonial plays. I attempt to establish the ways in which they acquire and express a specific range of meanings. In the first part of my investigation, I will compare similar aspects of British Evangelization in India as analyzed by Homi Bhabha in his essay "Signs Taken For Wonders," on the one hand, and of French Evangelization in Canada as re-enacted by Michael Hollingsworth in the play "New France," the first part of his epic satire The History of the Village of the Small Huts(3), on the other hand. In the second part, I will explore the ways in which [p. 125] a Christian ritual becomes a strategic device in the process of cultural and ethnical redefinition of an immigrant community in Marie-Beath Badian's radio-drama Novena. In analysis, I will use the word "Indian" to refer to the native inhabitants of the today's Republic of India, which was a British colony till 1947, and the term "Aboriginal" to refer to the Aboriginal inhabitants of Canada. The two tribes mentioned in the play "New France" are the Hurons and the Iroquois. My theoretical framework will be mostly based on Bhabha's studies on post-colonialism, in which he proposes a rethinking of nationalism, representation, and resistance that above all stresses the "ambivalence" or "hybridity" that characterizes the site of colonialist cultural discourse, which he characterizes as being "less than one and double."

Religious conversions had a major role during the colonization processes of all kinds, from antiquity to more recent eras. Among several studies, Post-Colonial Drama. Theory, Practice, Politics by Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins argues that the "proselytising activities of Christian missionaries have had catastrophic effects on indigenous cultures"(4), particularly in the settler-invaders colonies(5) such as Canada. In most cases, colonized and colonizers' communities, despite the inherent processes of cultural and spiritual contamination, have never willingly shared the same spiritual beliefs. Furthermore, the reworking and deconstruction of Christian narratives and value systems from an indigenous perspective, on the one hand, and the affirmation of local non-Western spiritual values, on the other hand, constitute major strategies of post-colonial discourse. In this process, post-colonial theatre, more often than other artistic means, is used as an agent of social reform and as a medium of political action, mainly because of its capacity "to intervene publicly in social organization."(6)

Consequently, the use of sacred symbols, texts, and rituals as signifiers in secular theatre productions at the same time reflect and influence religions' functions in society. Gilbert and Tompkins conclude that traditional non-Christian ritual performances "are not only mnemonic devices that assist in the preservation of history but are also effective strategies for maintaining [p. 126] cultural differences through specific systems of communication- aural, visual, and kinetic- and through specific values related to local (often pre-contact) customs."(7) They also address the ways in which the re-enactments of non-Christian rituals, in post-colonial drama and theatre, are often "key sites of resistance to imposed values and practices" that have a major role in the nationalist discourse of the colonized people. Gilbert and Tompkins, however, do not take into account Christianity's persistent post-colonial influence on the same people. In contrast, Bhabha and Hollingsworth explore this aspect from a similar point of view.

On a theoretical level, in "Signs Taken For Wonders," Bhabha analyzes the functions and significations of the English Evangelisation, in general, and of the "English book" (the Bible, namely), in particular, during the British colonization of India. On a fictional level, in "New France," Hollingsworth re-creates the early stages of the French Colonization of what was to become "Canada," in which the Aboriginals' conversion to Christianity played an important part. According to Alan Filewod, The History is "the nearest we have to an 'official' historical epic, [which] enacts a vision of the nation as it proceeds through stages of colonialism towards an endlessly deferred postcolonial autonomy.”(8) The History, nonetheless,re-enacts Canadian national history at the same degree it parodies it, being both an agent of the construction and of the de-construction of the historical metanarrative. The Canadian playwright does not pursue a revisionary interrogation of Christian doctrine and a reworking of Biblical myths as in most of the post-colonial theatre productions with nationalist agendas, but rather illustrates how the "tyranny of the Bible," as Gilbert and Tompkins call the Evangelization, has affected the indigenous cultures, and how Aboriginal populations have reacted against it.

Coincidentally, or not, Bhabha's study was published for the first time in 1985, the same year in which "New France" was first produced. Although belonging to distinct cultural fields, i.e. drama and cultural studies, the two works employ similar theoretical perspectives in analyzing and correspondingly re-enacting the so-called "civilizing missions" implied in the early English and French Evangelisation. Just as the theoretical study explores the mechanisms of repetition, mimicry, and mockery in relation to "the English book," the creative writing [p. 127] embodies the Aboriginals' resistance against the French Imperial culture and religion that were forced upon them. In other words, where the theorist analyzes the "canny questions that the natives put, so insistently, to the English book" as mentioned in missionaries' letters of that time, the playwright develops fictional situations in a satiric style, in which historical and imagined characters paradoxically confront each other. Both of them recall, however, colonized subjects' similar tactics "to resist baptism and to put the project of conversion in an impossible position.”(9) Consequently, Canadian dramatic characters created by Hollingsworth with parodic means, on one hand, and actual Indians evoked by Bhabha based on primary sources, on the other hand, challenge the colonial manipulation of the Christian dogma in comparable manners. In doing so, they set up post-colonial negotiations of political, cultural, and spiritual imperial authority.

Bhabha starts his analysis by proposing an idealistic image of the "English book" as a "sign taken for wonders" by the Indians, the emblem of colonial rule, desire, and discipline, pointing toward the fixity of Colonial power, defined by its discursive capacity to "narrate" and subsequently disseminate a European cultural heritage. The idyllic description of an 1817 encounter between Anund Messeh, one of the earliest Indian catechists, and a crowd of about five hundred people, men, women and children, employed in the passionate reading of the "the Gospel of our Lord, translated into the Hindoostanee Tongue," seems to support this point of view. However, in the process of cultural translation and subsequent hybridization, the manifestations of disavowal and distrust contaminate the reception of the sacred text. Not only the Indians do not accept the spiritual identity of the Book that teaches the religion of the "the European Sahibs," for an unexpected reason, "'Ah! no,' replied the stranger, 'that cannot be, for they eat flesh,'"(10) but they even deny its material identity as an object. From their perspective, mainly because they have never seen a printed book before, the Bible is a miracle sent to them by God, and not a European book distributed by the Missionaries.

The specific colonial appropriation of the Bible maintains its paradigmatic presence as the Word of God, but articulates its syntagmatic occurrence, from Bhabha's perspective, "with a range of differential knowledges and positionalities that both estrange its 'identity' and produce [p. 128] new forms of knowledge, new modes of differentiation, new sites of power." (11) The colonial doubling, defined as "a strategic displacement of value through a process of the metonymy of presence,"(12) generates hybrid signifiers, which Bhabha retrieves from the 19th century British documents, and Hollingsworth recreates with the means of structural irony.(13) With a perfectly mimed ignorance and childish questions, the Huron Atironta leads the French missionary to believe that he will accept the baptism, but in the end categorically refuses it for reasons that implicitly speak about a profound sense of ethnic and spiritual belonging:

BRÉBEUF: Do you want to burn in Hell?
ATIRONTA: If I can take my pipe, yes.
BRÉBEUF: Your children died without being baptized.
AGONA: Is it true that my children are burning in Hell?
BRÉBEUF: I can see them now. […] Now I can baptize you.
AGONA: No. When I die I want to be with my children. {21}

The playwright, however, quickly replaces his characters' Socratic innocence with a more apparent and firm political attitude:

ATIRONTA: We think heaven is full of Frenchmen. I want to be with my relatives in hell. I am not afraid of Jesuit torture. {21}

Bhabha argues that the colonized subject's relation to "the English book" invariably involves a changing of its nuances that translates eventually into political insurgence. It is from [p. 129] the same perspective that Hollingsworth imagines the complete distortion of the Bible's meaning, which ironically serves as a final argument for the priest's killing:

AGONA: And the book says 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'
(Agona approaches BRÉBEUF with the knife. The lights fade.) {29}

Paradoxically, the political manipulation and alteration of the Christian Scripture according to the colonizers' needs reaches its climax in the "French version" as re-enacted by the Canadian playwright:

FRONTENAC (15): Jesus was a Frenchman. His mother was a virgin, a nice French lady. The English killed Jesus. If you want the love of Jesus do not trade with the English.{40}

Conversion to Christianity is mockingly minimized by the colonized people, and regarded more like business negotiations by the colonizers:

ATIRONTA: Aataensic is our God.
CHAMPLAIN: Your God is a fool. My God is more powerful.
ATIRONTA: I cannot promise you that we will believe in your God, but I promise you we will trade our furs for your gew-gaws.
CHAMPLAIN: Done. Little by little I will change you. {11, my emphasis}

In Hollingsworth's view, however, French settlers consciously attempt to change the Aboriginals' identity, and transform them into instruments in the destruction of their own culture and spirituality. According to the documents analyzed by Bhabha, a similar strategy was consciously employed in India where, for example, a British missionary's tactics was to make Indians "the instruments of pulling down their own religion." To prove his point, Bhabha [p. 130] extensively quotes a letter written in May 1918 by a correspondent of the Church Missionary Society, describing the English education at Father John's mission in Tranquebar, conceived as a very effective Evangelization method: "In this way the Heathens themselves might be made the instruments of pulling down their own religion, and of erecting in its ruins the standards of the Cross. (MR, May 1817. 187)."(16) The process of disavowal that enabled this kind of paradoxical reversal was authoritative mainly because it was structured, in Bhabha's words, "around the ambivalence of splitting, denial, repetition--strategies of defence that mobilize culture as an open textured, warlike strategy whose aim 'is rather a continued agony than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture.'"(17)

Direct allusions to the Bible are rare in Hollingsworth's play. Nevertheless, the Canadian playwright ironically highlights Scripture's unfortunate influence on Aboriginals' lives, which once again illustrates the colonial subjects' misreading of the Christian doctrine. They replace the codes and cultural associations of the canonical text with those of their own culture, and, therefore, establish what Bhabha calls "partial knowledge." The direct results of this process are paradoxical. When, for example, Iroquois attack them, the recently baptized Christian Hurons discover themselves changed and helpless:

AGONA: You are a Christian Huron. It is forbidden to fight. The book says so.
ATIRONTA: You have destroyed the spirit of my people. {29, my emphasis}

By 1815, the Bible was translated into at least eight Indian languages and dialects, with a first edition of between one thousand and ten thousand copies in each translation, and handed out for free. The printed book was "doing its own work," in missionaries' words quoted by Bhabha, being frequently perceived by the Indian peasants as a miracle, "a novelty and a household deity."(18) The technology of the printed word had a powerful impact in the early nineteenth-century rural India. In the 17th century French colony in Canada, the situation was [p. 131] quite opposite. Without the benefit of printing technology and due to "improper" translations, the Lord's Word makes the Hurons be afraid, kill the Jesuit priests, or, more frequently, laugh:

BRÉBEUF: When I say Jesus will save them from sin, that's not what he tells them.
BRÛLÉ: First of all, there's no word for sin. I've told you that a hundred times.
BRÉBEUF: Whenever he translates what I say, they laugh at me. {14}

Hollingsworth's Aboriginal characters identify God with "Nanabozho", Christ with "a crazy God", a "heartless monster God", and a Jesuit missionary with a "great sorcerer" who talks to demons all day. The Shaman is amazed by the French missionaries who never stop talking "about their Oki. What he wants. What he forbids. Oki is like devil. We die like flies 'cause of Oki" {27}. In the post-colonial playwright's vision, however, the Aboriginals eventually accept baptism and even learn to "survive" it.

In the reading of the ambivalence of colonial cultural text, Bhabha identifies "a form of splitting -less than one and double," but I argue that in special, yet frequent post-colonial circumstances, the splitting becomes less than one and multiple and results in further conversions of the cultural sign system. Accordingly, the dissimilarities between the imperial original, its colonial expression, and the subsequent post-colonial reflection of the latter express the ongoing hybridization process, which often contradicts the official attempt to regain the initial pre-contact value and belief systems. However, in the particular case of (former) colonized subjects, who immigrate to a (former) colony, other than their own home country and of a different kind, i.e. they are born in an (former) occupation colony and move to a (former) settler-invader one, the splitting of their sign system is further intensified. Do these diasporic ethnic minorities actually assume the position of contemporary colonizers in relation to their new country's aboriginal population? I will not risk a hasty answer, but I will point out an example of a specific post-colonial immigrant revaluation of what was once most likely a colonization tool, a Christian ritual, as it appears in Marie-Beath Badian's English-Canadian [p. 132] Novena.(20) The play is set in a Filipino-Canadian immigrant community, which gets together to perform a Christian ritual,(21) i.e. to pray for one of its sick members estranged "on the other side of the world" in their home country of the Philippines. It does it, however, on its own terms, not only from different social and religious perspectives, but also from a gastronomic one as the playwright ironically highlights: "You can't pray without rice, fried fish, and little pork spring rolls"{12}.

The representation of difference, though, cannot be read as the reflection of pre-given social or cultural traditions. As Bhabha argues in the "Introduction" to The Location of Culture, from the minority's perspective, the social articulation of difference "is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation."(22) The simple fact that the play begins with the Lord's Prayer translated into Tagalog, which, in this context, I read as a sign of colonial appropriation similar to the Bible's translation into Hindi from Bhabha's point of view, inscribes the text into a double perspective, while the further splitting of the discourse, although implicit, remains unveiled for the moment. Moreover, Badian leads us on a false route, creating the impression that the play's main character is in fact a young woman eager to respect her Filipino ancestors' traditions. Anna seems to comply obediently when her mother asks her to pray because "Daughters pray. So I do," and even does it together with her relatives:

Ama naming,
sumasalangit and ngalan mo,
Mapasaamin ang kaharian mo;
Sundin ang loob mo ditto sa lupa para ng sa langit. {11}

[p. 133] The readers are, however, soon to discover that, on the contrary, she has not seen her father for three years, ever since she left the family home, that she has now joined her family against her will, and actually feels estranged: "I don't know many of these people. But the truth is, too, that a lot of them don't know me" {21}. Anna tries to remain detached and ironic, calls her relatives "an emergency response unit of Filipinos," and fakes praying: "…just mouth the words, I pray. And no one has to know if I mean it" {13}. Nevertheless, as the time goes by, she gradually gets more and more involved in the Christian ritual she is part of, and in her childhood memories, which trigger a process of self-discovery in terms of her ethnic, spiritual and familial identity. At the end of the play, Anna discovers herself changed. She willingly repeats the Lord's Prayer in Tagalog and recalls the word "love," "mahal," in the same language, the only one she actually knows in her parents' mother tongue. The collective performance of the Christian ritual has helped Anna recover both her faith and her daughterly feelings toward her father. I then conclude that, from Badian's perspective in Novena, the Christian ritual, once estranged from its European medium, be it English, or French, or Spanish, in the case of the Evangelization of the Philippines, was appropriated by the former colonial subjects to the degree that it became a signifier of their home country's culture and an important tool in preserving their ethnic identity as an immigrant community. Consequently, the post-colonial hybridization of the Christian ritual, on one hand, and the further splitting of religion's significance for particular communities, on the other hand, conserve the results of the preceding colonial phase, while paradoxically evolving in opposite directions. As a result, the Christian belief system, once contaminated with indigenous elements,(23) is now impregnated with elements of contemporary Western culture and civilization. I find interesting the fact that this hybridization is most evident in the play's visual descriptions, which usually do not have a special function other than compensating the lack of visual representation of radio-drama. In [p. 134] the recollections of the past, Anna's Christian altar in her childhood bedroom, eventually overwhelmed by everyday objects, becomes a metaphor of post-colonial multiple splitting:

I made an altar in my bedroom with that statue; all by myself, my parents didn't make me do it. On my armoire, I surrounded her with crucifixes made from last year's palm leaves from Palm Sunday, prayer books that I got for my first communion, silk flowers that I swiped from the family room. Then later on I added the souvenir key-chain from the Phantom of the Opera. [...] I kept adding things to the altar: my Little Mermaid card collection, precious Barbie dolls, trophies, awards, medals, ribbons - special things, things that I was proud of. {17}

In the present time scenes, Christian ritual objects such as rosaries, prayer books, and candles are mixed with typical Asian dishes such as "rice, fried fish, and little pork spring rolls," topped off with an "extra rice cooker" to help feed the believers, and some video games to entertain their kids. As opposed to the hybridization of Christian symbols as a mode of resistance against imperial domination in countries such as India, their immigrant appropriation operates as a paradoxical form of integration into post-colonial countries such as Canada. The colonial double lens of reception has naturally evolved into a post-colonial triple lens, corresponding to the three distinct categories of receivers: the (former) colonized subjects, the (former) colonizers, and the post-colonial culturally and sometimes spiritually hybrid immigrant communities.

WORKS CITED

Badian, Marie-Beath. "Novena." Pietropaolo, Damiano, Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration. Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama, J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2005. 7-28.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

"BRÉBEUF, JEAN DE." Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Library and Archives Canada, 1 Feb. 2006. <http://www.biographi.ca/>.

"BRÛLÉ, ÉTIENNE." Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Library and Archives Canada, 1 Feb. 2006. <http://www.biographi.ca/>.

[p. 135] "BUADE DE FRONTENAC ET DE PALLUAU, LOUIS DE." Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Library and Archives Canada. 1 Feb. 2006.<http://www.biographi.ca/>.

Filewod, Alan. "'One Big Ontario:' Nation-Building in the Village of the Small Huts." Per Brask, ed. Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1995. 208-220.

Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London/ New York: Routledge, 1996.

Hollingsworth, Michael. The History of the Village of the Small Huts. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1994.

Hutcheon, Linda, ed. Double-Talking. Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature. Toronto: ECW PRESS, 1992.

Miller, Jack. "Religion in the Philippines." Asian Studies, Vol. II, No. 1, Fall 1982. 26-27. Copyright AskAsia, 1996, retrieved from Ask Asia Readings. 22 Oct. 2005. <http://www.askasia.org/teachers/Instructional_Resources/Materials/Readings/Philippines/R_philippines_1.htm>.

"Novena." The Catholic Encyclopedia. 1 Feb. 2006. <http://www.newadvent.org/>.

Video Cabaret. Home Page, 27 Oct. 2005. <http://www.videocab.com/html>.

Endnotes

In this paper, I use Helen Gilbert and Joanne Thompkins's definition of post-colonialism as a politically motivated cultural movement that is not "necessarily determined by temporal constraints […] meaning the time after colonisation has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state" (2).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) 242.
From 1985 to 1999, Michael Hollingsworth and the VideoCabaret Ensemble created twelve plays dramatizing Canada's colonial history, from Donnacona and Cartier to Brian Mulroney and George Bush, collectively titled The History of the Village of the Small Huts. The parts, individually written and produced, are: "New France" (1985); "The British" (1986); "The Mackenzie-Papineau Rebellion" (1987); "Confederation & Riel" (1988); "Laurier" (1991); "The Great War" (1992); "The Life and Times of Mackenzie King" (1993); "WWII" (1994); "The Cold War" (1995); "Trudeau and the FLQ" (1996); "Trudeau and the PQ" (1998); "The Life and Times of Brian Mulroney" (1999). (Video Cabaret)
Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London/ New York: Routledge, 1996) 43.
Among other theorists and historians, Gilbert and Tompkins distinguish two different types of British colonies: the settler-invader colonies, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the 'occupation' colonies, which include India, parts of South-East Asia, west and central Africa, and some of the Caribbean Islands. (6)
Gilbert and Tompkins 3.
Gilbert and Tompkins 54.
Alan Filewod, "'One Big Ontario:' Nation-Building in the Village of the Small Huts," Per Brask, ed. Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama (Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1995) 209.
Bhabha 169.
Bhabha 147.
Bhabha 171.
Bhabha 171.
As defined by Hutcheon, structural irony is usually related to Socratic irony,exemplified by Socrates' pose of ignorance and willingness to learn in order to confront or provoke or confute others. This is a matter of "enticing them into a display of supposed knowledge and making their error conspicuous by adroit questioning" (33).
"BRÉBEUF, JEAN DE (called Échon by the Hurons), priest, Jesuit, founder of the Huron mission; b. 25 March 1593 at Condé-sur-Vire in Lower Normandy; martyred 16 March 1649 at the village of Saint-Ignace in the Huron country (in the region of Midland, Ontario), canonized 29 June 1930 by Pius XI and proclaimed by Pius XII on 16 Oct. 1940 patron saint of Canada along with his seven martyred companions" (Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online).
"BUADE DE FRONTENAC ET DE PALLUAU, LOUIS DE, soldier, Comte, governor-general of New France; one of the more turbulent and influential figures in the history of Canada, chiefly noted as the architect of French expansion in North America and defender of New France against attacks by the Iroquois confederacy and the English colonies; b. posthumously 22 May 1622, at Saint-Germain; d. 28 Nov. 1698 at Quebec, buried in the church of the Recollets at Quebec" (Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online).
Bhabha 151.
Bhabha 163.
Bhabha 166.
"BRÛLÉ, ÉTIENNE, interpreter of the Huron language, probably the first white man to make his way into the Huron country and Pennsylvania, and to see lakes Huron, Ontario, Superior, and Erie; b. c. 1592 probably at Champigny-sur-Marne (near Paris); murdered by the Hurons c. June 1633 " (Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online).
According to the The Catholic Encyclopedia, Novena is "a nine days' private or public devotion in the Catholic Church to obtain special graces. The octave has more of the festal character; to the novena belongs that of hopeful mourning, of yearning, of prayer" (The Catholic Encyclopedia Online).
Jack Miller describes the religious configuration of the Philippines determined by the Spanish Evangelization in the 16th century, deepened by the United States in the first half of the 20th century: "The Philippines proudly boasts to be the only Christian nation in Asia. More than 86 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, 6 percent belong to various nationalized Christian cults, and another 2 percent belong to well over 100 Protestant denominations. In addition to the Christian majority, there is a vigorous 4 percent Muslim minority, concentrated on the southern islands of Mindanao, Sulu, and Palawan. Scattered in isolated mountainous regions, the remaining 2 percent follow non-Western, indigenous beliefs and practices" (Miller, "Religion in the Philippines").
Bhabha 3.
According to Miller, the Chinese minority, for example, although statistically insignificant, has been culturally influential in colouring Filipino Catholicism with many of the beliefs and practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. (Miller, "Religion in the Philippines").

Diana Manole is currently a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto, where she has developed a strong research interest in post-colonial and post-communist drama and theatre. She has presented several papers at academic conferences such as MATC 2006, ASTR 2005, and ATHE 2004.