Latest on the Department of Homeland Industrial Relations Security: the following is for Deborah, in our ongoing conversation about nationalism and the labour movement; it’s from “Face to Face With the Monster of the Week”, a whacky science fiction play I wrote a few years ago about the racist terror of liberalism’s civilising project, amongst other things (e.g. faciality, “asian inscrutability”, the cultural politics of emotion, etc.).
INTERROGATOR: You know, sweetie, it says here that industrial relations are getting worse in this country.
MONSTER (sighing): All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: But what about over in China? Over there, you guys make political prisoners do everything. Everything’s made by a political prisoner, over there. No feelings for human rights. No feelings. (Looks accusingly at Monster.)
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: Things look pretty okay here. Except here it says that there’s a three-hundred thousand “outworkers” in Australia — y’know, those women who sew clothes at home for big companies. Says they get paid crap.
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: But why don’t they just quit and get another job? Or join a union? Nobody’s stopping them. It’s still legal. Why don’t they say anything?
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: It says here that most of them don’t know any English. Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? They don’t know about human rights. Here, there’s human rights. It makes us look bad when they’re ignorant.
MONSTER: All bad all sad.
INTERROGATOR: It says some of them are scared of getting abused or raped by the contractors if they don’t work enough. That’s a bit full on. Why don’t they go to the authorities or anything? Probably ’cause they’re cheating the tax system, huh? Not like honest Australian workers…
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
It’s one of the few bits of (false) “normality” in the middle of a mass of pulpy, “bad English” dialogue, like: “The information — you have it in your fingernails, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”. Besides being a joke, the latter was an attempt to perform a kind of “decomposed” language — the colonial humanist Interrogator has an inbred, “collapsed” and weirdly elliptical version of English that can never keep up with his character’s own appearances of desperate majoritarian properness, to the point where it ironically begins to resemble the stereotypical “broken English” ascribed to non-Anglo migrants and “the natives”. (I was imagining a ruling class white South African judge reading mistranslated Heidegger, full of twisted, passive clauses. In a way, it was an exaggeration of the worst aspects of my own “normal” writing.) Looking back, I just feel sorry for the actors who had to mouth it all, word perfect. At least they got to have fun shoving huge amounts of barbequed pork down each other’s throats on stage, night after night…
[ tags: industrial-relations, internationalism, labour, labour-movement, language, nationalism, race, theatre, unaustralian, unions ]
greetings, ben. & thanks.
a couple of years ago this great artist, tracey benson, exported the un- concept (to a project in amsterdam) & made (for anyone who asked her at the time) t-shirts and/or big fat badges proudly declaring the wearer to be UNSURINAMSE or UNDUTCH or UNBELGIAN which refreshed the utter absurdity of the notion, for me, and was stupidly hilarious.
And I wish I’d seen your play!