Editor’s note: The following commentary contains spoilers.
The difficult subject matter of Vera Starbard’s recently debuted play “Our Voices Will Be Heard” has been duly noted. Sexual abuse and suicide are the major topics of discussion. Interestingly, these elements remain strictly in the background of the performance; we never witness either of them directly. What we do witness, however, is what happens when they are left in the background unattended. Starbard certainly took a risk in representing not only the themes of sexual abuse and suicide, but also sensitive and complex Tlingit concepts, the ḵu.éex’ being the most notable. The ḵu.éex’ or “potlatch” is perhaps the most significant of all Tlingit institutions. One of its essential functions is the removal of grief associated with deceased clan members. It also includes important religious, social, economic and political dimensions, one being the giving of ancestral clan-owned names to individuals, which the play’s audience members witness and participate in.
The opening scene offers what is likely one of the most anti-romantic, and genuinely tragic, treatments of the ḵu.éex’ imaginable. The character Jinaháa steps to center stage and announces to the guests of the ḵu.éex’ (the audience) that we have “put an end to our grieving” and that there are “no secrets here.” The character’s Tlingit name speaks volumes about his public claim: Jinaháa, “fate: terrible fate; a terrible fate waiting to fall upon a person or people for violating custom, and it may take generations to arrive.” The perverse meaning of his statements falls back on us when we later learn that Jinaháa has been repeatedly molesting his niece and nephew, that this is common knowledge among his clan, and that the general response has been silence. While Jinaháa outwardly avows the successful “healing” function of the ḵu.éex’ he indirectly calls for the secrecy and grief which has been terrorizing his clan to be coldly internalized and carried forth into the future. What is most striking to me about this scene is that it takes place in the context of a ḵu.éex’. The ceremony has been totally inverted: rather than the removal of grief, we witness its crippling repression.
Starbard’s careful use of her cultural heritage is one of the play’s greatest strengths. The play is not really “about” Tlingit culture. That is, it is not intended to give anyone a glimpse into the way life really was for Tlingit people in the late 19th century. Rather, a singular Tlingit clan becomes the form through which a drama of truly universal caliber unfolds, posing questions about responsibility, justice, trans-generational trauma, and human agency which are absolutely inseparable from our current social conditions. With this, Starbard stages something that I don’t believe our community as a whole has come to terms with: the Tlingit culture, language, and institutions are more than capable of articulating sophisticated and timely responses to the challenges faced in the 21st century.
Ḵutaan (“summer”) is a young girl who suffers abuse at the hands of her uncle Jinaháa. Examining her name bit more closely, the verb in ḵu-taan appears to be implying “fish jumping.” We might imagine her erratic behavior (seemingly unprovoked weeping, screaming, and recoiling from men) as discrete revelations of a massive life force building up beneath the surface. But then again, maybe this is just speculation. We learn that Ḵutaan keeps a mutilated doll hidden in a bentwood box. Ḵutaan’s mother Lítaa (“knife”) is the only one who seems ignorant of the fact that Jinaháa has been abusing Ḵutaan. Upon discovering the doll, Lítaa almost immediately concludes that someone has been hurting her, reflecting the pervasive atmosphere of abuse.
When the truth explodes into the open that Jinaháa has been abusing Ḵutaan, Lítaa (“knife”) “cuts” herself and Ḵutaan off from their community, liberating them from the traumatic cycle of abuse and secrecy. But that liberation is a failed, or, at least, an insufficient one. She and Ḵutaan remain haunted by their past and eventually return to the village, but only due to a deeper devastation. After being caught abusing a young girl, Ḵutaan’s cousin Sagú (“Happiness”), who was abused as a young boy by Jinaháa as well, has thrown himself off a cliff. The suicidal death of “happiness” brings us back to something important said by the “storyteller” figure in the opening scene. The storyteller seems to exist in a different time than the story proper, occasionally emerging to joke about the demanding Tlingit grandmothers ordering him around the kitchen, and to tell fragments of a story about “Wolverine Woman.” He tells us in the opening scene that his grandmother once said to him, “If you’re looking for happiness in a story, Stop!” Happiness, Sagú, is dead. We learn later, as the storyteller holds a baby girl in his arms, that she will receive his grandmother’s name: Ḵutaan.
The storyteller’s “Wolverine Woman” story and the play itself mirror each other closely. When the main characters dance onstage in the opening seconds of the play, they suddenly freeze. Here, the storyteller emerges and is the first person to speak to us, noting that he will tell us a story and mentioning advice he learned from his grandmother, who we’ve discovered to be Ḵutaan. He also repeatedly mentions the “Tlingit grandmothers” in the kitchen. Ḵutaan is in the kitchen making frybread. What appear to be two disjointed temporal positions (a late 19th century Tlingit village and a storyteller speaking directly to the audience) are in fact a single unified event: the story being told by Ḵutaan’s grandson. The embodied, visceral, flesh-and-blood performance we see unfolding before us of a late 19th century Tlingit clan’s internal struggle is nothing other than the true content of the storyteller’s narration, that is, what we see before us is the storyteller’s voice “being heard.” When the storyteller breaks the narrative to make a witty joke or speak to us directly in some other way, we see the storyteller and not the story. At these moment, the play freezes and goes dark in the background and his story begins to sound like a somewhat ridiculous mythical fairy tale. That is the classic colonial mis-recognition of Native literary genius. But during those moments when the storyteller literally brings the characters into being, we bear witness to the material truth of the Tlingit storytelling tradition.
It is through this dimension, I think, that we should understand the declaration “Our voices will be heard.” Voices have been hidden away, perhaps beginning about a century ago. How can the truth of these voices be brought forth before us, embodied, alive, breathing? This is not a question to be handed off in silence to the future.
“Our Voices Will Be Heard” is decisive. I don’t think we can overestimate it.
•••
Tlingit language information in this article was taken from tlingitlanguage.com, a free online dictionary.
• Will Geiger grew up in Juneau and is a graduate student studying philosophy and the Tlingit language.
