essays
Not By Bread Alone
by Chris Walters
June 24, 2019
Chris Walters is a playwright, director and teacher of Drama. You can follow Chris and his work here.
A group of us were having dinner in a local restaurant the other night. We are all volunteers with an NGO operating on one of the Greek islands, which runs a number of projects connected with the refugee crisis, and we were saying goodbye to one of our number who had finished her stint as an interpreter, and was returning to the “real” world, resuming her law studies in the States. Slightly ironic that it was a farewell, as the conversation turned to the arrival the night before of some sixty refugees in an inflatable boat. Another in the group had been one of the people who had helped to pull them out of the water; he normally volunteered at the communal vegetable garden on one of the projects, but he was also part of the rota of people who stayed up all night, maintaining a watch over the coast, looking out for just such events. The mood quietened, we asked about the procedure from that point. After being given blankets and hot drinks, they were given a basic health check, before being taken to be registered and provided with somewhere to stay. I felt humbled. I am a Drama teacher, and felt that my own role was so much more peripheral and inconsequential, in comparison with helping people floundering in the waves in the dark. In those desperate moments of need, James was helping to provide that most pressing and basic need for safety, for security, for food and warmth. While I was literally playing games.
Once that immediate emergency is dealt with, that next stage in the migrants’ desperate litany of traumatic events that form their journey met and overcome, they needed to return to some form of normality, to face the mundane and tedious daily reality that is the migrant’s lot – a bleak encounter, for the most part, with most plotting the next stage of their journey. I work with unaccompanied minors, those least able to determine their own future. Having survived one terrifying experience, tossed and turned by the wind and waves in the dark, they now faced the equally random vagaries of a bureaucracy creaking at the knees. These children and young people, having received food and shelter, albeit of the most basic kind, also needed an education. Even within that, I know that what I am able to offer is rightly regarded as being of a low priority. They need the basics of numeracy and literacy, the ability to communicate in the language of their new home (however temporary they hope that to be).
And yet.
If their souls are not to be irredeemably crushed, they need to move beyond that bare and basic requirement, of words and numbers. They need to play, to sing, to laugh. And it is at this stage that I can at last make my contribution. The benefits of drama as part of a well-rounded education are well-rehearsed (sorry). It goes far beyond its role (sorry again) as the study and practice of a respected art-form. Above all, and uniquely, I would argue, it is social. It demands other people.
If you were washed up alone on a desert island, you might (once you had fed and sheltered yourself) turn to any number of forms of artistic expression. You might fashion a musical instrument, learn to play it, make beautiful music; you might use the natural resources to paint or sculpt. With access to some form of pen and ink, you might write: prose, poetry, an account of your daily life. You might even, for the sheer joy of it, sing or dance. What you would not do, unless you found yourself treading the path to madness, is act. Play a part. Tell a story. For those things, you need other people. Even a one-person show demands an audience.
Think of all those qualities that educators cite when pronouncing the benefits of drama. Communication – verbal, physical, facial. Co-operation – working as a part of a team with a common purpose. Even that most elusive and difficult to measure quality of self-confidence. All of them, I would argue, are social. And they are all part of a return to normality, to living alongside and in harmony with other people. For many, the migrant experience must have been at times a desperate, every man, woman and child for themselves struggle for survival. But they need to move beyond that, and this is when the drama teacher can help, to give them the opportunity to heal and to grow.
It includes that most non-serious of things: laughter. In my previous life as a teacher of an academic, school subject, I sometimes had to remind my students (and myself) that I was not teaching a course in comedy. That would mean abandoning one half of the art, one of the two masks that signify our subject. But laughter is so life-affirming. We laugh a lot in class – at each other, though never (all right, hardly ever) harshly; with each other, as a shared release; and at ourselves. And if there is yet one more thing that I am sure the young migrants have missed, I am sure it is laughter.
Finally, drama (and its cousin, theatre) allows the opportunity for people to reflect, in a safe environment, upon their own experiences; we play others in order to understand ourselves. I am currently working with a group of young Afghanis on a greatly edited and adapted version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Briefly, it tells the story of a refugee, forced to flee her home, and taking with her an abandoned child. Given the probable experiences of the performers – we don’t ask – this does have the potential to invoke trauma. But theatre allows the story to be transformed. It is told as a fairy tale, of baddies mocked and defeated, of goodies cheered. We also take a stylised, frequently comic, theatrical style. And, crucially, our refugee triumphs, saves the day, and the child. And triumph, we hope, trust and pray, is what they will all do.
essays
A Rising Sun
by Jay Winik
April 30, 2018
Jay Winik is a writer and one of the nations leading historians. He is currently the Historian In Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In looking at the military today, we inevitably are drawn to history for context. To be sure, we live in uncertain, chaotic, and dangerous times. Abroad we have the looming specter of an increasingly belligerent Russia; of rogue regimes racing to develop a nuclear weapon, North Korea and Iran; we have the heart-wrenching sight of innocents dying a ghastly death from nerve gas in Syria. At home, we have a populist and controversial president, the two parties at each other's throats, and the fear by some that democracy itself is under assault, if not withering away or dying. We also have a government that at times appears paralyzed. And there is the axiom that a government stretched at home, will invariably have difficulty supporting the military abroad. On its face, this does not bode well.
Is America up to this challenge? Are the danger signs all around, not just for the military but the American people as a whole?
America has weathered daunting crises before. It has survived strong presidents and bad ones, tough times and good ones. It has survived the Shays rebellion, the French Revolution, and the burning of the US capitol; a great civil war that tore us asunder, taking some 620,000 lives, an incalculable number. It survived World War I and World War II, Hitler, Nazi-ism and the Third Reich; and the Great Depression. It survived the tumult of the Korean War and agony of Vietnam and racial strife; and too, 9/11 and the seeming quagmire of Iraq.
Throughout, America has flourished. It's a remarkable story. Democracy has been strong, and democracy has prevailed. In a sense, however, it has never been easy. Think of George Washington as commander-in-chief at the beginning of the Republic. Confronted with the French military juggernaut that threatened to turn its might on America, Washington could feel himself aging day-by-day, that is, when he wasn't angrily swearing up a storm in cabinet meetings. Consider Abraham Lincoln during the Battle of the Wilderness, months after the great turning point of the war at Gettysburg. His hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed, with boxer’s circles lining his eyes, he roamed the halls of the White House muttering over and over to himself, "I must have relief from this anxiety or it will kill me." It almost did. The Union lost some 52,000 soldiers in a mere six weeks during the Wilderness campaign, nearly as many as America lost during the entirety of the Vietnam War. Or consider Franklin Roosevelt who as commander-in-chief was so genial, so confident and composed, always stoical. Yet when called upon to take the phone in the second floor Oval Office when he was given an update on the beginning of the North Africa invasion, a prelude to D-Day, his hand was shaking he was so anxious. Nonetheless, General Marshall would later tell him, "the light of battle is in our troop’s eyes.”
With American military men and women fighting abroad for our safety, we feel democracy is safe.
Is it?
One is reminded here, of what Benjamin Franklin said at the close of the Constitutional Convention. He pointed to the President's chair, and wryly remarked, "I have often in the course of the session looked at the sun behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now I have the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun."