Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

BRUCE KING – WHISPERS FROM THE OTHER SIDE - 1984

This play is about Indian heritage and how it haunts the present. It is a metaphor of what happens when you forget, lose or reject your heritage, be it moral or ethical, cultural or religious, or simply human. The scene at the beginning of the abduction of women by some kind of raiding party, four women actually, but only three are brought back to the tribe, the fourth one being used, raped, and dismembered by one of the raiding party, is there toshow how Indian “justice” worked beyond all lies and escapes.

Jacob Nightowl is the being from the other side, the side of the dead, who comes back after the culprit and forces him to some kind of self-justice. But this episode is there to show Indian society had rules and that these rules could not be broken. To abduct women was part of these authorized actions but to rape and kill, what’s more dismember one of the captured women goes against the respect you owe them since they are going to be integrated in the tribe to bring new blood into the descendants. In other words the practice was one way to “exchange” blood and DNA.

The guilt is transmitted to modern day Indians and it is amplified by the fact that in modern American society Indians have lost, rejected and forgotten everything about old morality, about old practices and customs, about the ways and rules of the old times especially since old timers are gone now. Some have sunk in alcoholism. Some have gotten caught up in promiscuity. Some have been converted to some new religion that has no value whatsoever for Indians, in this case Christianity. One point is common among them: they have cut off their roots and a tree without roots cannot grow.

But the past heritage, the beliefs of the old days, the reality of Indian mythology and ethical existence always come back and haunt new generations who have betrayed their own origins. The genial part of this metaphor is that it is not really something material you can actually touch or see. It is something mental that works your mind into insanity. You start having visions, hearing voices and drum music, seeing an owl who is the messenger of old Indian heritage, of the other side of this modern society of superficial and virtual reality.

It is all the easier for Jacob Nightowl to manipulate these younger generations because they are all alcoholics and they are all promiscuous. Note the play remains within the dominant gender and sexual orientation. But the drinking binges of males with males is not far from a sublimation of the unrecognized, unaccepted and unacknowledged other alternative gender and sexual orientation. It is both a way to do it without doing it and a way to hide it behind itself. It makes that other gender and sexual orientation subliminal, and that’s the rub of the story.

It is this subliminal door that brings in Jacob Nightowl. He uses the fear of men in front of this unconfessed subliminal desire, the substitute activity of binging all the time in alcohol, the fear of women to be unwanted, to be pushed aside by the promiscuity of their own men, the urge of these women to take advantage of this promiscuity to love around which is in fact nothing but have sex around, this Jacob Nightowl uses all these non-Indian practices and degenerative behaviors to bring them to breaking point, not the point when they are going to brake on their unacceptable life styles, but when they are going to break down and commit the irreparable, to just plainly kill one another to the last survivor, if there is any survivor. The last one realizing the situation at some point will bring himself down.

It just take some whispers from the other side, some drums, some songs, some recollections from the past for the present to be erased, dispatched onto its road to perdition and eternal roaming.

You can never negate forever and freely your own heritage that comes from millennia ago.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU