At the start of veteran Turkish theatre actor and director Genco Erkal's 2017 production Göçmenleeeer (Migraaaants), the audience is confronted with an immersive scene. Centre stage is a smuggler who is cautioning a mixed group of refugees to check their cell phone batteries, as these small instruments will serve as their only lifelines once they are out at sea. Assuring the refugees that he is attuned to every trifling detail of their voyage, the smuggler then turns his attention to the play's audience, cautioning them to remain aware of their own communication devices. This is an odd moment in which the play's ethical strategies and its meta-consciousness converge: audience members are invited to identify with the leave taking of the refugees, feeling as though they themselves, in the words of one reviewer, ‘are handing over every possession to step into that boat and place their lives squarely in the hands of this man’.Footnote 2 At the same time, the smuggler, played by Erkal himself, is clearly poking fun at his hyper-connected, middle-class Istanbul audience, inviting them to turn off their cell phones and respect the dignity of the diegetic domain, even as he himself will repeatedly break the fourth wall of this space.
Where performances by, about, or featuring refugees are concerned, these strategies will hardly appear novel. Since the late 1990s, the representation of migration, refuge and asylum has proliferated on global stages, with theatre and performance studies scholarship evolving in response. Immersive or site-specific performances have led scholars to explore the possibilities of identification, but also the limits of theatre's ability to furnish what Tom Burvill has called ‘an experience of the ethical encounter with alterity’.Footnote 3 Performances with documentary, testimonial or verbatim features, meanwhile, have occasioned commentary on the hybridity of these genres, as well as their relation to cognate forms like humanitarian reportage and securitarian surveillance.Footnote 4 And, conceptually, the figure of the refugee has summoned an array of methodological approaches, with some underlining the representational dimensions of data-driven performances, and others turning to the non-representational, affective possibilities of the migrant ‘other’.Footnote 5 Introducing a recent special issue of Research in Drama Education entitled Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis, Emma Cox and Caroline Wake note that these representational strategies have only intensified under the glare of the ‘European refugee crisis’ of 2015–16: the once-exceptional use of this term has now come to be as ubiquitous as migration itself, leading the viewer to imagine crisis as an extended present, a never-ending state of heightened emergency requiring exceptional measures, both political and theatrical.Footnote 6
Romanian–French playwright Matéi Visniec's 2017 play Migraaaants, from which Göçmenleeeer was translated into Turkish, responds to this challenge in a taxonomic vein.Footnote 7 The play employs an episodic structure featuring eight different storylines distributed across thirty-one scenes. Episodes featuring various categories of migrant smugglers are interspersed with scenes set in an anonymous Balkan space, where an unnamed couple watch silently as a barbed-wire fence is installed near their village. An anonymous French president learns to make his draconian asylum policies sound compassionate, while an elderly Greek gravedigger fills his island cemetery with bodies that have washed ashore along the Aegean Sea. And scattered throughout are darkly humorous episodes featuring the newest in anti-immigration technologies, from heat-sensitive heartbeat detectors to ecologically conscious barbed wire. Joined together, these vignettes condemn both Europe's twenty-first-century migration policies and the deadly economies that they have prompted in the continent's borderlands. Visniec's play, in other words, is exemplary of an ever-growing group of European theatre and performance practices addressing the continent's migratory situation.Footnote 8
Genco Erkal and his company Dostlar Tiyatrosu's Göçmenleeeer, however, which premiered at the Istanbul Theatre Festival in November 2017 and was staged both in Istanbul and across the country throughout 2018, stands out from this growing canon. Translated as it is from Migraaaants, it speaks to what Visniec calls ‘Europe's great moral dilemma’.Footnote 9 Yet it does so to draw attention to the recent Syrian migration to Turkey. Göçmenleeeer, in other words, deploys the political context and the aesthetic expression of one migratory situation to address the complexities of another. Intercultural transfer and adaptation are, of course, not uncommon theatrical exercises, and in fact a frequent tendency in recent depictions of exile and refuge has been the adaptation of classical texts.Footnote 10 Erkal's production, however, is a relatively literal translation of the original script, and the structural liberties that Göçmenleeeer does take are both minimal and mandated by Visniec's original. What happens when a source text representing a politically and historically distinctive migratory moment, the ‘European refugee crisis’, is translated for production in a very different political sphere?
In this article, my goal is to consider this question in two parts. First, I suggest that whereas Visniec's Migraaaants is premised on a basic moral dichotomy that positions European ‘hosts’ against non-European ‘refugees’, Erkal's Göçmenleeeer operates in a political context where the geographic distinction between Europe and non-Europe is fraught with ambivalence. Since its initial application for membership in the European Economic Community in 1959, the Turkish Republic's European Union (EU) accession process has been characterized by fits and starts; currently stalled, the most recent round of negotiations began in 2004, when the newly elected Justice and Development Party (AKP) rallied efforts to begin a series of legislative reforms mandated by the EU's Copenhagen criteria. Meltem Ahıska famously labelled the mixture of desire and anxiety that characterized this period a form of ‘occidentalism’; that is, a profound ambivalence regarding both Turkish modernity and the nebulous geography glossed as the ‘West’.Footnote 11 Two decades later, Syrian migration sits at the centre of these questions. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the arrival of over 3.6 million refugees has posed unprecedented challenges for Turkey's migratory bureaucracy.Footnote 12 Making matters more complicated, the EU–Turkey Refugee Deal of 2016 promised to accelerate Turkey's accession process, but only if all irregular migrants arriving on European soil via Turkey would be returned. Rendering Turkish territory into a flexible borderscape, such developments have only triangulated easy categories of hosts and guests. Translating Migraaaants into Göçmenleeeer, in other words, is a layered aesthetic–political task: rather than function as a given representation of Syrian migration to Turkey, Göçmenleeeer illustrates the range of affects that this phenomenon has provoked, promising powerful avenues of identification even as it risks usurping the very forms of recognition the play is designed to secure.
Second, Migraaaants's translation into Göçmenleeeer points to a paradigm of crisis that appears to transcend both national and supra-national borders. As noted, Genco Erkal's concern is with the ongoing Syrian migration to Turkey, but the theatrical representation through which he hopes to address this situation comes from the domain of the ‘European refugee crisis’. The ubiquity of this phenomenon is perhaps not surprising: Cox and Wake note that the language of crisis, whether referring to a migratory emergency in need of intervention, a crisis of national identity in the age of globalization or the broader international crisis of neo-liberal capital, often foregrounds the Euro-American world. They rightfully argue that this myopic focus can ‘occlude’ migratory movements happening elsewhere around the globe.Footnote 13 However, I take Migraaaants's transformation into Göçmenleeeer as evidence that the language of European crisis not only occludes crises occurring elsewhere but actually produces them; that is, gives shape to their representation. As a result, the questions provoked by Göçmenleeeer are less about redressing the asymmetrical representation of global sites of migration, and more about recognizing their intertwinement. I will end by asking, where does crisis stand in relation to our ability to imagine a transnational aesthetics of political resistance to anti-immigration policies? Does crisis indicate the limits of this aesthetic?
From Migraaaants to Göçmenleeeer
Romanian–French journalist and playwright Matéi Visniec locates Migraaaants's gestation in 2015–16, the brief period when migratory flows to the European Union, whether via Mediterranean waterways or overland through Turkey and successive Balkan states, rose to unprecedented levels. Images of humanitarian disasters exploded across global screens, from the now-iconic photograph of three-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker Aylan Kurdi, whose lifeless body had washed ashore near the Turkish resort town of Bodrum, to images of asylum seekers dodging tear gas along the Hungarian–Serbian border. The European response was fragmented, demonstrating the fragility of the continent's supra-national bodies as well as the role that domestic politics played in determining individual nation states’ strategies. On the one hand, the long-standing Dublin II protocols of 2003 meant that applications for asylum would be processed by the countries where asylum seekers first entered EU territory, leading to the charge that northern member states had displaced their administrative responsibilities onto the countries populating the continent's border zones, including Italy (via the island of Lampedusa), Hungary and Greece.Footnote 14 On the other hand, member states across Europe appeared to reinforce non-arrival measures, including an increased reliance on practices of internment and detention. These policies culminated in the EU–Turkey Refugee Deal of 2016, according to which Turkey would readmit (mostly Syrian) migrants who had transited illegally to Europe through Turkish soil, and the EU would fast-track the negotiations surrounding Turkey's EU membership.Footnote 15
Observing these developments at Radio France internationale, where he has worked since 1990, Visniec created the journalistic archive that eventually became the raw material of his play. First produced by director Gérard Gelas and the Théâtre du Chêne Noir in 2016 in Avignon, the play has since been staged across France, as well as in Spain, Morocco, Romania, Switzerland and Quebec. In the preface to the 2017 print edition of Migraaaants, the playwright views the ‘European refugee crisis’ as a historical process whose origins far precede the displacements of war-torn Syria:
I am convinced that what is at stake is not simply ‘a migratory phenomenon of unprecedented size’, but ‘a revolution in sharing’. A gigantic passive uprising is hiding behind this movement (which is also motivated by a survival instinct). These hundreds of millions of people are reminding the Occident that its economic, political, and cultural model is not globalizing well. It is a model that only functions within a restricted perimeter of habitable earth, while the rest of the planet observes this ‘feast of the privileged’ only via television. The revolution that we are watching is one of ‘re-sharing access to good fortunes in our world’.Footnote 16
For Visniec, in other words, ‘Europe's great moral dilemma’ concerns the regimes of capital accumulation that both inform and are informed by outbreaks of political violence across the world; the ‘revolution in sharing’ thus implies a redistributive political transformation. The playwright's reference to ‘re-sharing’ also indicates how Europe's frontiers are not merely instruments of exclusion but ‘are equally devices of inclusion’, facilitating the circulation of certain migratory claims over others, and legitimating certain kinds of labour mobility while exploiting other forms of labour power.Footnote 17
The simultaneous strengthening and elasticity of Europe's borders permeates Migraaaants. The play's ubiquitous passage mafia caution a group of refugees cowering in a fragile lifeboat off Greek shores, ‘if you are from Pakistan, you must pretend to be Afghan’, or ‘if you are Algerian or Moroccan, you must convince them that you are Syrian or Iraqi’.Footnote 18 While these hierarchies of refugee urgency evoke the ambiguities of migration governance, other scenes reference the symbolic ubiquity of borders. Throughout the play, three salespersons advertise an aesthetically savvy brand of barbed wire to enfold Europe's supra-national borders. They are quick to note, however, that if audience members ‘feel menaced, aggressed, disturbed or even discomforted’ by migrants, the scale of the desired enclosure can shrink to protect specific urban neighbourhoods, or even individual bodies.Footnote 19 And throughout the play, vignettes featuring the figure of Le Président illustrate the long overlapping discourses of humanitarian care and security-minded closure in Europe's management of migration.Footnote 20 Encouraged by his political coach, Le Président learns to replace the stigmatized word ‘immigrant’ with the unadorned ‘migrant’. The coach notes that in a world of increasingly trafficked goods and services, ‘the migrant is at home everywhere, across the planet’; he simply needs to move in a manner that can be ‘controlled’.Footnote 21
If Migraaaants's politics are context-specific, so too are its aesthetic reference points. In the French context, for example, the play's formal affinities to Théâtre du Soleil's landmark Le dérnier caravansérail: Odyssées (2003) are immediately visible.Footnote 22 The Théâtre du Soleil's production was based on interviews that company members conducted from 2001 to 2003 with immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers from around the world; they later developed improvisational material from these testimonies. Similarly, Visniec drew on his vast journalistic archive to develop his dramatic material. Le dérnier caravansérail is a two-part, seven-hour epic that uses an episodic structure to convey the multiplicity of migratory experience characterizing the turn of the twenty-first century, from Afghan migrants fleeing the Taliban to those escaping the transformations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost two decades later, Migraaaants is a modular play composed of ‘short scenes and dramatic situations’ meant to convey the global ubiquity of migration;Footnote 23 Visniec revisits some of Le dérnier caravansérail's geographies, such as the transit points between France and the United Kingdom, but joins them to the newer trajectories of the ‘European refugee crisis’. In both instances, the performance material's documentary origins are positioned to evoke other genre conventions, including references to tragedy and a tendency to frame contemporary migratory movements with reference to ancient tropes of displacement, exile or shelter. In Le dérnier caravansérail, Hélène Cixous's extensive programme notes begin with reference to the Trojan War and the play's key staging device is an ekkyklema evoking the tragic tableaus of ancient Greek theatre.Footnote 24 In Migraaaants, Visniec likens the refugee crisis to ‘a tragedy of humanity that unfolds before our eyes, worthy of ancient Greek theatre, where man confronted the implacable force of destiny’.Footnote 25 The play's final scene portrays Le Président speaking upstage of a literal conveyor belt of moving migrants, a ritualized, collective and processional movement that Emma Cox identifies as ‘central to the visual economy associated with refugee transit’ in Euro-America.Footnote 26 Migraaaants is, in other words, the product of a historically specific political critique and a similarly situated, emerging aesthetic tradition.
Göçmenleeeer, in contrast, hails from a political–aesthetic context that is as different as it is geographically proximate. The arrival of vulnerable populations into Turkey is not a novel phenomenon, but the sheer size of the population that has sought refuge in the country since the start of the Syrian civil war is unprecedented: Turkey now hosts the largest number of forcibly displaced people worldwide, as well as over half of all displaced Syrian citizens.Footnote 27 Since the early 2000s, the policies that have dealt with such flows have begun to be aligned with their European counterparts, with key legislation from 2013 expanding eligibility for residence permits, humanitarian assistance and non-refoulement, and establishing a Directorate General of Migration Management under the Ministry of the Interior. Although the AKP government maintained an ‘open-door’ policy during the early years of the war, however, Turkish immigration policy continues to feature a ‘geographic limitation clause’: despite having signed the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, Turkey does not grant refugee status to non-European asylum seekers. Thus Syrians in Turkey cannot technically acquire refugee status;Footnote 28 they can only apply for temporary asylum and are granted ‘temporary protection’, which includes access to public healthcare, educational opportunities for children, and work permits.Footnote 29
Several years into the war, this impermanent status illustrated the darker underbelly of life in the receiving country. Turkey's broader neo-liberal turn and the growing uncertainty of unprotected labour markets meant that Syrian refugees came to exemplify precarious and flexible labour.Footnote 30 As the state's management of migratory flows compounded tensions between the native and non-native wings of the labour market, one of the strongest motifs underlying anti-Syrian sentiment was labour competition in the agriculture, construction or textile sectors. The public sphere was soon flooded with false news items proclaiming the welfare state's partiality towards Syrian refugees, lending dangerous clickbait to Turkish citizens already wary of the AKP's neo-liberal policies, brazen authoritarianism and political instrumentalization of the law.Footnote 31 As a result, anti-Syrian prejudice and anti-Arab racism came to function as common denominators across a spectrum of political persuasions, with the growing visibility of Syrian communities in urban centres regarded as the sign of a country whose infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. Brokered against this landscape, the EU–Turkey Refugee Deal of 2016 mandated that as of March 2016, ‘all new irregular migrants’ who arrived on European soil via Turkey would be returned. In return, the EU would offer the Turkish government €6 billion, lift visa requirements for Turkish citizens travelling to the Schengen zone, and restart the EU accession process.Footnote 32 The deal thus wedded Turkey's long-awaited inclusion into Europe to its willingness to participate in an enlargened borderscape, a permanent–temporary holding zone.
With the exception of Genco Erkal's Göçmenleeeer, these developments have been largely absent from the theatrical stage.Footnote 33 This absence is made all the more conspicuous by the fact that the new millennium has witnessed the development of a rich field of political theatre emerging from Turkey's independent (locally referred to as ‘alternative’) theatre-makers. Indeed, the AKP's ascendancy and early rule challenged the foundations of Turkey's modernization project, engaging in a (selective) redressing of the country's historical injustices. The ‘explosion of memory’ that characterized this period resulted in new forms of cultural visibility for Turkey's religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities, however contingent and vulnerable.Footnote 34 Theatre practitioners have since produced work in long-stigmatized minority languages, and focused on key episodes of political violence, minority dispossession and collective memory making from Turkish history. These developments, however, have simply not resulted in representations of Syrian migration.
At first glance, Göçmenleeeer itself seems an unlikely candidate for redressing this pointed absence. Erkal's production, like Zeynep Irgat and Osman Senemoğlu's translation, is faithful to Migraaaants's printed text. Göçmenleeeer features twenty scenes, omitting several of Visniec's storylines but ultimately retaining the original's general chronology. A brief glance at the production's publicity material, however, shows that Visniec's content is framed directly through Turkey's own migratory moment. Erkal's comments on this topic are unequivocal:
Turkey is situated on a path [to Europe] and so we are following these developments [the refugee crisis] very closely. Both because Turkey is on the path towards the Greek islands, and because many Syrian migrants have begun to live here with us and we encounter them everyday, I keep feeling the need to do something.Footnote 35
Göçmenleeeer's connection to the Turkish situation is echoed by reviewers and journalists. In prose borrowed directly from Dostlar Tiyatrosu's press release, commentators repeatedly reference the manner in which the play depicts refugees’ struggle for survival ‘unfolding before our very eyes’ (gözümüzün önünde cereyan eden).Footnote 36 A critic writing for the extreme nationalist newspaper Aydınlık contrasts the appalling conditions depicted in Visniec's play and the seeming asylum ‘paradise’ offered to migrants by Turkish immigration policies, suggesting that the benevolence of the Turkish response undermines Visniec's dramatic intentions and ultimately weakens the production's appeal.Footnote 37 Meanwhile, left news outlet Evrensel notes that Claude Leon's set features actual life vests confiscated from lifeboats captured on the Aegean Sea, strengthening the play's moral stance by suggesting the audiences’ own imbrication in these perilous crossings.Footnote 38 However different their political orientations, in other words, these critics are joined in the conviction that Göçmenleeeer is meant to address the contemporary situation of the Turkish viewer. The complexity of that address is worthy of pause.
Incongruous memories, immersive strategies
What happens when Migraaaants is translated into Turkish? In the original title, Visniec's amplification of the second vowel is meant to signal the racial panic that transmutes a migrant collective into a menacing mass. In translation, Visniec's distortion falls on the suffix -ler pluralizing the term göçmen (literally Turkish for migrant, derived from the verb göçmek), which thus becomes Göçmenleeeer. Visniec's morphological experiment functions in a slightly different manner in the Turkish context, however, revealing the complexities that haunt the global exchange and circulation of aesthetic paradigms, even when the representation in question concerns a phenomenon as universal as forced displacement.
Whereas Visniec utilizes the term migrant as an umbrella designation for all categories of immigration, in Turkey the term göçmen has historically referred to migrants who already claim Turkish identity. This tautology is rooted in one of the foundational contradictions of the Turkish Republic's citizenship regime. On the one hand, Turkish republicanism is premised on a staunchly secular, modernizing state that does not recognize ethno-religious pluralities. On the other, it boasts a citizenship regime that identifies ethnic Turkishness and Sunni Islam as the cornerstones of national belonging. This contradiction was a direct outcome of the migrations that characterized the waning years of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic (1923).Footnote 39 The refugee movements that accompanied the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the destruction of the Armenians of Asia Minor during the First World War, and the compulsory population exchange mandated by the Lausanne Treaty following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 all created a landscape where ethnicity and territory were bound in new, demography-conscious ways. While these movements remade Asia Minor in the image of the young ‘Turkish’ nation, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed the continued arrival of ex-Ottoman Muslims from the region's surrounding territories, particularly the Balkans. These arrivals were regulated by settlement laws that privileged migrants belonging to the Turkish soy or race;Footnote 40 over the course of the twentieth century, this origin-based privilege meant simplified naturalization procedures and market advantages for göçmen populations.
The word göçmenleeeer thus signals an odd, incongruous panic, but the distortion also attests to the fact that the connotations of the göçmen have been shifting. Indeed, Turkey's jus sanguinis tradition of citizenship is being modified, partly in response to the mass migration from Syria, and partly as a result of policy changes mandated by the EU accession process.Footnote 41 Where political and media representations are concerned, the stubborn historical origins of the göçmen have meant that Syrian migrants are variously labelled mülteci (refugee), sığınmacı (asylum seeker), and misafir (guest), before being qualified simply as Suriyeliler (the Syrians), a vague gloss that lacks any indication of legal status or political experience.Footnote 42 At the same time, it is precisely because göçmen hits a recognizable, intimate note that Genco Erkal is able to identify Turkish audiences’ own histories of migration with those undertaken by contemporary Syrians, noting in an interview that ‘migration exists throughout our history’, that the memory of being göçmen should cultivate automatic affinity, if not care, from those witnessing the play.Footnote 43
These affiliations and affects are double-edged, and indeed Göçmenleeeer has the potential to both encourage and undercut what Debarati Sanyal calls ‘memorial cross-pollination’.Footnote 44 Midway through Migraaaants, for example, is a scene set in ‘a cemetery freshly created on a Greek island’, overseen by an elderly gravedigger.Footnote 45 A Syrian woman arrives and asks her interpreter to inquire after her son's family. The old man needs little encouragement to launch into a tirade about how ‘the European Union does nothing for the dead’, but he nonetheless directs the visitors to the combination of numbers and letters marking each gravestone.Footnote 46 ‘These are the DNA codes of each drowned person’, he tells the interpreter, adding, ‘this way, if one day their families come in search of their close ones, there will be a chance of finding them’. Viewed from Visniec's European perspective, the drowned bodies demonstrate border control's twin politics of biological detection and political abandonment. Indeed, Visniec's anonymous Greek island is a nod to the now common tendency to view such border zones as representations of biopolitical space par excellence, often with allusions, as Sanyal notes, to the historical paradigm of the Nazi camp.Footnote 47
When viewed from an Aegean perspective, however, Visniec's image of a Muslim graveyard on Greek soil triggers alternative histories. Specifically, this convergence of refugee crisis management, biological signifiers and international law calls to mind the Greco-Turkish population transfer that followed the Lausanne Treaty (1923) and literally swapped Muslims from Greece and Greek Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor. Aslı Iğsız argues that the forced migrations of 1923 encapsulated ‘the racialized alignment of different groups with designated geographies of belonging’, and set a significant legal precedent for the exchange and resettlement of populations in the postwar period.Footnote 48 My point here is not that Migraaaants's translation into Göçmenleeeer necessarily blocks these alternative memories from view, although such an argument could be made: in this instance, the paradigm of the European refugee crisis might run the risk of stifling other histories of migration, if not obscuring forms of biopolitics that do not coincide with the reigning image of the border zone/internment camp. However, the larger point here is that producing Migraaaants in Turkey effectively authorizes a shared European memory, and imagines a continental public sphere populated with persons with ready access to its symbolic resources.
If we feel wary in the face of such an expansive claim, recent scholarship in memory studies has framed precisely such moments as evidence of memory's ‘multidirectionality’.Footnote 49 Focusing on the emergence of Holocaust memory as a paradigm for remembering other sites of historical trauma, Michael Rothberg has notably suggested that key episodes of political injustice can come unmoored from their historical contexts to trigger a broader range of recollections. Alison Landsberg in particular has noted that modern technologies of mass culture, like film, and experiential sites, like museum exhibits, can generate prosthetic memories that, however inauthentic, are nonetheless ‘worn on the body’.Footnote 50 Such practices of affective immersion, promoting a ‘real experience’,Footnote 51 surely find their theatrical correlate in the interactive, immersive scenes of the kind chronicled in this article's opening anecdote. Erkal returns to the trope of audience members as refugees throughout Göçmenleeeer, with members of the passage mafia periodically addressing the spectators, and, in one climactic scene, asking for volunteers to be thrown overboard to balance the sinking boat. These immersive strategies clearly cultivate identification, substituting the small, densely populated space of the theatre for the claustrophobic interior of the passage mafia's vessel. In her recent work, Landsberg has accounted for the fraught nature of such identification by underlining a ‘distracted mode of engagement – one that never fully slips into absorption or identification’, but remains powerful in its capacity for recognizing difference.Footnote 52 Erkal's stylistic choices resonate with Landsberg's distracted engagement: the director uses these immersive strategies intermittently, rapidly moving between scenes that incorporate audiences, and those that release them, reinstituting a clear fourth wall.
What if, however, the problems were less with the degree of the identification, and more with its kind? One of the most striking scenes in Göçmenleeeer features a trade show exhibiting the latest in anti-immigration technologies. The product being advertised is a heartbeat detector and the show includes recordings of different frequencies registered by the device. The audience listens to the palpitations of an Afghan family captured in Calais, the heartbeat of a child crawling through barbed wire along a Balkan border, and ultimately the imagined sounds of their own collective heartbeat, as the actors hold the detector out towards the spectators. Moments such as these are meant to elicit the audience's empathy, but the target of their compassion is unclear: having inherited decades’ worth of accession anxieties, are Turkish audience members to imagine their heartbeats as extensions of those beating at the borders of European territory? Or are they to imagine themselves wielding these ghastly surveillance technologies from a privileged position of biopolitical power? Memories are indeed multidirectional, and immersive theatrical strategies likewise cross borders with relative ease. But equally flexible is the continuum of identification that runs from a sense of complicity and responsibility, to dispassionate witnessing, to a misplaced sense of one's own, prosthetic, victimhood.
Mobile crises, flexible victimhood
My reading of Göçmenleeeer thus far has suggested that migration, both past and present, is a malleable symbolic resource. What makes the paradigm of the ‘European refugee crisis’ particularly flexible is the longue durée of migration's crisis-laden language. ‘Searching the Factiva database, which catalogues over 8000 news sources, with the phrase “refugee crisis”’, Cox and Wake write in their 2018 special issue, ‘produces 748 English-language articles from 2008 and 36,069 English-language articles from 2016’.Footnote 53 They note that this increase of ‘4722%’ is nonetheless selective in how it identifies emergency: whereas the EU is often portrayed as the geographic epicentre of the crisis, seldom pronounced is the fact that the top three refugee-receiving countries of 2018 were Turkey, Pakistan and Uganda, and that Lebanon hosted by far the largest number of refugees relative to its population, one in six.Footnote 54 Göçmenleeeer is instructive, however, as it demonstrates that countering the notion of a ‘European’ crisis with the empirical realities of global migration does not automatically produce alternative representations. Rather, what Göçmenleeeer reveals is that crisis, a historically and politically particular way of seeing, is continuously reproduced in newer territories, where it can both foreclose and ultimately produce local meaning-making.
But exactly what kind of disposition is implied by crisis consciousness? Film scholar İpek Çelik would argue that the trope of heightened urgency underlying Europe's latest ‘refugee crisis’ is nothing new, as it has long plagued the temporalities assigned to refugees, migrants and minority communities in European cinema and news media. These representations often fluctuate between stasis and rupture: Europe's ‘others’ are either depicted stagnating in situations of social crisis that signal an ‘impending violent eventfulness’ or experiencing a full-blown outburst that requires urgent intervention.Footnote 55 Twenty-first-century representations, Çelik notes, have increasingly favoured the latter, with the discourse of clashing civilizations routinely denying migrants and minorities a shared temporality with Europe's ‘natives’. This prolongation of migrant crisis into an ongoing circumstance is but one example of what Janet Roitman calls ‘crisis as a condition’, an enduring state.Footnote 56 Roitman builds on Reinhart Koselleck's work on the concept to argue that this transformation collapses the necessary distance between crisis and our understanding of it. In Critique and Crisis, Koselleck associates the notion of crisis with the political utopianism of the Enlightenment, which, he argues, produced a bourgeois philosophy of history that saw the future as fundamentally moral and just.Footnote 57 In turn, the self-certainty of these critical thinkers removed the need for political solutions to authoritarianism, resulting in widespread depoliticization and an avoidance of political upheaval.Footnote 58 Roitman notes that what Koselleck identifies in Enlightenment criticism is a specifically modern way of thinking about politics, a sensibility that recognizes a ‘discrepancy between how things are … and how they ought to be or how they could be’, and that positions critique as the practice that identifies this discrepancy.Footnote 59
What happens to our ability to pause and conceptualize how things ‘ought to be’ when crisis is rendered into an enduring state? When the criteria by which we diagnose discrepancy in the first place remain unquestioned? However critical they are of the EU's border regime, theatre and performance practices can often join a range of cultural products that take crisis itself as a given. In fact, one of Migraaaants's climactic scenes exemplifies the historical consciousness of which Koselleck speaks. The scene begins with stage directions calling for documentary footage featuring a field being traversed by thousands of pairs of feet. ‘The people must remain invisible’, Visniec writes; ‘it is the traces left behind by their steps that matters’.Footnote 60 The scene, meanwhile, consists of fifteen unnamed migrants stating their national origins and announcing that they have ‘doubts’:
migrant 1: I come from Pakistan. And I have a doubt.
migrant 2: I come from Sri Lanka. And I have a doubt.
migrant 3: I come from Afghanistan. And I have a doubt …
Eventually, it is revealed that they doubt whether there is life after death, and offer this grim projection as the rationale behind migration:
migrant 2: And it is because of this [doubt] that we want to live fully this life …
migrant 3: Or at least try to enjoy it a little bit …
migrant 4: And it is because of this that we come here …
migrant 5: And it is because of this that we will continue to come here …
migrant 7: Because of this doubt … of a philosophical order, you see …
…
migrant 4: We are pushed by a force that overwhelms us …
migrant 5: Really, we don't want to bother you, but it is larger than us.Footnote 61
This is an odd vignette, and my hunch is that Visniec himself was not entirely sure how to incorporate it; indeed, it is not included in the play's thirty-one scenes but rather among a group of six additional scenes that Visniec titles ‘reserve’ material for later productions to pick and choose from. In this scene, Visniec portrays contemporary migratory movements as the result of a progressive, historical trend towards secularization. In other words, these migrants are tempted to seek new homes because they are increasingly sceptical of the rewards of an afterlife, and they desire safety and security in this existence. The European refugee crisis is taken as a representation of this historical shift, and migration emerges as a temporal marker through which Visniec renders history itself meaningful. Contemporary refugees, therefore, like Koselleck's Enlightenment thinkers, represent ‘expectations for world-immanent justice, or the faith that history is the ultimate form of judgment’.Footnote 62
Erkal ends Göçmenleeeer squarely with this scene. He and the other Dostlar Tiyatrosu actors reproduce a shortened version while sitting downstage and addressing the audience. In a nod to Visniec's stage directions, documentary footage featuring abstracted silhouettes hovers over them as they speak. This choreography already signals a climactic moral exchange, but Erkal's central presence only cements the scene's authority. The production features six professional actors, but it is the veteran performer who portrays the key characters: the lead smuggler, the French president, the Greek gravedigger, a representative of the organ mafia, and a human trafficker. At a sprightly seventy-nine, Erkal's stage presence is formidable, threatening to break free of the production's diegetic flow, and render his lengthy monologues into the material of a spontaneous master class. In the final scene, therefore, the ensemble's direct address, led by Erkal, cannot but function self-reflexively: both as the summons to moral obligation intended by Visniec, and as a vindication of theatre's ability to deliver that summons.
That so tall an order would require a local idiom is not lost on Erkal, and he thus ends the performance by departing from Visniec's script. As the scene concludes in the original, two anonymous migrants state,
migrant 2: We and you, we are all in the same boat.
migrant 3: And we must navigate the sea of our differences, our hatreds, our contradictions, and our dilemmas.Footnote 63
Ultimately, Migrant 7 concludes by stating, ‘at least you cannot place barbed wire amidst the waves’. Erkal's version ends with a slightly different but deeply familiar environmental metaphor:
anonymous migrant: In the end, we are all in the same boat.
anonymous migrant: (played by Erkal) As a famous poet once said, ‘to live as a tree, singular and free, and as a forest, together, in fraternity’. This is our longing. Can it not be?Footnote 64
When I attended a performance of Göçmenleeeer in autumn 2017, audience members immediately recognized this classic excerpt from Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet, whose famous lines had only recently been evoked by activists during the Gezi Park Protests of 2013. They joined Erkal in chanting Hikmet's hallowed lines and broke into thunderous applause that recognized Hikmet's iconic anti-authoritarianism as an allusion to their own oppositional politics. Watching from my vantage point towards the back of the auditorium, I found myself joining my fellow spectators, wiping away the tears that had gathered at the corners of my eyes.
It is in moments such as these that we can witness the paradigm of the ‘European refugee crisis’ transforming, producing not only Turkey's own migration emergency but another perceived crisis altogether; that is, Turkey's steady drift into political turmoil and infrastructural collapse. As ‘crisis’ moves, shifts and transforms, so too do its victim-subjects. If Göçmenleeeer's crisis claims ‘evoke a moral demand for a difference between the past and the future’,Footnote 65 the entity in whose name this demand is being articulated begins to blur: whose crisis is at stake? That of Syrian refugees? Or of Turkish citizens? One reviewer deftly combines the two groups: moved by Göçmenleeeer's suggestion that audience members could themselves one day end up in that iconic lifeboat, this reviewer argues that Turkish citizens alienated by the current regime cannot afford to ignore the Syrians’ plight, as it illustrates the probability of their own future exile and displacement.Footnote 66
Sanyal places such moments at the ‘dangerous intersections’ of travelling memory, ‘where difference is eclipsed into sameness, where identification leads to appropriation’.Footnote 67 As judgements, affects and connections thus move, Sanyal adds, they hold both ‘unpredictable power and peril’, and indeed the Turkish case exemplifies precisely this dualism. In the increasingly erratic moral–political landscape that has emerged in Turkey following the 2016 Refugee Deal, the failures of global governance are frequently ascribed to European Islamophobia and contrasted with Turkish ‘hospitality’.Footnote 68 At the same time, such lofty announcements rarely generate proposals that might end the permanent state of limbo induced by Turkey's temporary protection regime, if not the widespread exploitations it has engendered. Nor does there appear an end to the (often racialized) logic by which Syrian refugees come to exemplify the growing violations exercised by Turkey's rulers, violations that are currently wreaking havoc in the lives of citizens and refugees alike. What Göçmenleeeer does is translate these complexities into the imagined space of moral clarity that is the ‘European refugee crisis’. Audiences can thus condemn what Seyla Benhabib calls ‘the supreme historical irony’ of Europe's border regime,Footnote 69 assuming a moral position fed by long-standing ambivalences that characterize Turkish perceptions of Europe. As such, the production can demand world-immanent justice for both Syrians and Turks, redeeming both communities with one, flexible, crisis.
Conclusion
Where does Migraaaants/Göçmenleeeer leave us with regard to the possibility of a transnational theatre of migration, one that is able to mount a global political resistance to anti-immigration policies? My reading of Göçmenleeeer appears to suggest that as theatrical products like Migraaaants travel across our global landscape, their cosmopolitan claims extract a cost: discourses, images and principles that we take to be paradigmatic representations of migration, like the European refugee crisis, risk obscuring forced displacement's specific contexts. At times, we forget to ask how transnational idioms of resistance come about in the first place.
This critical frame, however, presumes that in a parallel aesthetic universe somewhere, alternative productions of Migraaaants could successfully halt the global spread of crisis claims, remain attuned to local complexity, and discover historically neutral affective triggers that are critical yet nonetheless endowed with an unending capacity to cultivate empathy and recognition. Such an expectation often ends up faulting individual intentionality (e.g. the production's faults are Genco Erkal's own), and at times concluding the analysis by delivering a moral judgement. This, in turn, risks reproducing the very contradiction that Koselleck identified amongst Enlightenment intellectuals: faith in the power of perpetual critique (in this case, critical–political art), but absent the kind of self-conscious reflection necessary for identifying the sources of one's own power to judge. I write these sentences from within a political context where theatre artists rarely enjoy the luxury of making aesthetic choices unhampered by severe financial limitations, a dissolving cultural policy infrastructure, and a political culture deeply hostile to freedom of aesthetic expression. Insisting on autonomy amidst such conditions seems – well – misguided, at best.
An alternative critical frame might suggest that Göçmenleeeer deserves our attention not because it fails to endow Syrian migration to Turkey with its own, original aesthetic representation, its own temporality and its own call to historical judgement, but precisely because it demonstrates how seamlessly the concept of crisis is able to eradicate the need for such multiplicity. Ideally, Roitman notes, crisis claims require a distance on the part of those exercising their judgement, and differentiating between the world as it is and as it could be. Crisis as a travelling narrative construction risks collapsing precisely that distance, and producing representations in advance of the very questions that critique ought to be able to pose. Perceptions of emergency thus come unmoored from their political circumstances and evolve into archetypal representations of migration. Rather than merely push other representations out of the way, however, they produce them in their image. We might then ask: how do cultural products like Göçmenleeeer resist but also simply negotiate and live with the hegemony of crisis? What aesthetic and political configurations result from this process?
In the end, Göçmenleeeer demonstrates that it is precisely when aesthetic paradigms travel that we are able to recognize contingency, and the context-specific meanings of otherwise global phenomena like forced displacement. In turn, it is precisely such moments that are rich with the possibility of what Benhabib calls ‘new constellations’; that is, new forms of public speech, new principles, the circulation of new meanings.Footnote 70 ‘To recognize such newness, however’, Benhabib notes, ‘we must present the universal and the particular in a novel constellation since the new is only new against a recognizable background of the old, of what has been taken for granted’. In terms of Turkish theatre, this means that we need to explore aesthetic languages for addressing forced displacement in Turkey by first recognizing the paradigmatic role that tropes like the ‘European refugee crisis’ have played in creating/delimiting its field of possibilities. In terms of theatres of migration more generally, this means that we need to think through the capacities we attribute to critical–political art by first identifying the crisis claims that inform our calls to historical judgement.
