1Mohammed ben Abdallah’s play The Trial of Mallam Ilya (1982; henceforth The Trial) and Gerald Vizenor’s novel Waiting for Wovoka: Envoys of Good Cheer and Liberty (2023) employ the transculturally complex art of puppetry as practiced traditionally and currently in both Ghanaian and Native American culture and literature. In the two works historical and present-day injustice is countered by “scenes of native mockery” (Waiting for Wovoka 26) with carnivalesque, ironically critical puppet parades and performance. The Trial presents the warring tribal, governmental, and religious factions of Ghana’s 1970s, not unlike a satirical market-square puppet show despite the diverse tragic outcomes. The play enacts flashbacks to (fictionalization of) the 1960s presidency of Kwame Nkrumah—anagrammatically named Kumrahn—subsequent to Ghana’s independence in 1957. The Native Anishinaabe puppeteers of Vizenor’s novel undertake an improvised “road trip” from Minnesota through Indigenous sacred lands to the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, a journey that encodes the history of Native spirituality and lifeways steamrollered by the economic/industrial growth celebrated in most of the World’s Fair exhibits. The pilgrims’ globally relevant puppet parleys display discourse between incongruent figures such as “Whitey Dwighty” (Dwight Eisenhower) vs. black Résistance warrior George Dukson or Chief Seattle vs. Robert Frost, critiquing Federal and tribal governments as well as institutionalized and personal racism and exploitation.
2Abdallah’s emphasis on what he terms abibigoro or African theater aesthetic does not clash with a metalevel of transculturality or trans-Indigeneity. A key scene in The Trial, for instance, can be viewed as applying a ritualistic Native American tradition of puppets within (human) puppets: in some American Indian cultures, a masquerading human actor can have “flaps that open, revealing an inner image hidden within its chest” (Straub; cf. Kruger for an image of a similar double-puppet in African ritual 318). Abdallah’s puppets within puppets (within puppets) exhibit sharp criticism of colonialism with its layers of economic and sexual exploitation: “The first actor is dressed and made up as Henry the Navigator …. The actor holds the strings to a puppet dressed as a buccaneer who makes love to the gold-plated figure of a naked African woman when the strings are pulled” (117, italics in original).
- 1 The trilogy consists of Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (2014), Native Tributes: Historical Novel (20 (...)
- 2 Helstern discusses the healing capacities of the mute child and his puppets.
3Vizenor reaps “intracanonically” from his own novelistic tradition of puppetry in his published oeuvre. For instance, the principal puppeteer in Waiting for Wovoka, Dummy Trout, unable to speak except through the inverse ventriloquism of her puppeting, is a mentor of the protagonists in Vizenor’s recent Blue Ravens trilogy, Aloysius and Basile Beaulieu, the brothers who founded the subversive “Blue Puppets” troupe in occupied France.1 Dummy’s puppeteering silence was preceded by that of the abandoned mute boy with two blue, chattering puppets in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991).2
4Forlornness of a young generation infuses that earlier novel, Heirs of Columbus, as well as the two works under study. The Trial delineates the confusion of Malwal, a youthful revolutionary, one of many who has served as a “play-piece” (151) in opaque power struggles that sweep through the African land in waves “like a forest fire” (127). In Vizenor’s Waiting for Wovoka the desperation of many reservation children mistreated in the boarding schools of the 1950s is affectively foregrounded, underlined by the polyvalent motif of fire. Both works evince multiplex intertextuality with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the Indigenous peoples on both continents “waiting” at certain historical moments “for their hero to earn his name,” as Abdallah puts it (142). This intertextuality broadens and simultaneously deepens the juxtaposition of puppetry in the selected Indigenous artworks.
- 3 The quotations are from a dream song on pages 43-44 of the manuscript of Waiting for Wovoka, which (...)
5The two literary works of different genres draw skillfully on traditional Indigenous forms of puppetry and storytelling as creative decolonizing strategies, both with material puppets on stage and in the narrative, as well as with metaphorical applications of puppeting imagery. In respect of genre, the immediacy of the grotesque on-stage puppeting in Abdallah’s play is balanced by the imaginative descriptions of the wildly custom-made puppets and their unusual dialogic parleys in Vizenor’s novel. But whereas the climax of Abdallah’s play is a dramatic realization of main figure Ilya’s earlier insight that “we are all [helpless] puppets” (133), Vizenor’s novel embodies the author’s notion of proactive survivance as the puppeteers craft “spirited hand puppets” to “scare away the snow ghosts”3 of hegemonic and individual oppression.
6The paper is divided into six sections. It begins with a theoretical consideration of “Trans-Indigenous Juxtaposition,” then looks at puppetry as a case study of such juxtaposition in the section “From Ritual to Satire: Transcultural Puppetry.” Analysis of Abdallah’s play follows in “’We are all puppets’: Puppetry in The Trial of Mallam Ilya,” subsequently an interpretation of Vizenor’s novel in “’Overturn[ing] manners with [. . .] bounce of wood, cloth, contrived debris, and the paper heads of hand puppets’: Puppetry in Waiting for Wovoka.” The essay closes with “’I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him’: Colonizers, Clowns, and Uncertainty in Waiting for Godot,” which explores the intrinsic relationship of the two works at hand to Beckett’s iconic play. I conclude with “Not Just Child’s Play – Puppetry as Mockery and More.”
- 4 The artwork is also the centerpiece of Allen’s contribution to The Cambridge History of Native Amer (...)
7For at least the past decade the concept of “trans-Indigenous” investigation has been espoused. One of the main theorists is Chadwick Allen whose Trans-Indigenous Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (2012) has been an influential source on the subject. Many of his case studies focus on connections between North American Indigenous and Maori texts. He admits that his task can be taken for granted, as it were, when a sculpture or poem explicitly links the two broad cultures, as with his stellar case study of Maori artist Fred Graham’s mixed-media work featuring a carved, diving whale that travels the Pacific.4 Allen encouragingly opens the door for a metalevel of comparison, however, with his multivalent term “juxtaposition”: “Indigenous juxtapositions place diverse texts close together across genre and media, aesthetic systems and worldviews, technologies and practices, tribes and nations, the Indigenous-settler binary, and historical periods and geographical regions” (xviii). Eight years later Allen energetically reinforces his call for comparison across categories:
- 5 Eric Cheyfitz instrumentalizes the term “correspondence” in trans-Indigenous studies, specifically (...)
We have barely begun to imagine … purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions, which prioritize reading across and through multiple, diverse, and distinct Indigenous texts and contexts, rather than endlessly re-centering the colonial legacies and Indigenous-settler binaries of particular nation-states. Opportunities for reading abound. When we center our work in Indigenous methodologies and conversations, Indigenous histories and cultures, Indigenous technologies and performances, we both reveal and illuminate complex worlds of past, present, and future Indigenous presence. (Allen, “Charting Comparative Indigenous Traditions” 463)5
8To cite a European example of trans-Indigenous academic exploration, Mita Banerjee points out in her introduction to the edited volume titled Comparative Indigenous Studies (2016) that the essays are transnationally “correlated in thematic terms” (14), thus opening up the possibility for “correlation,” like Allen’s juxtaposition, to “testify to the productiveness of comparative indigenous studies as a framework for cultural analysis” (14). Banerjee is the director of the Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies at the University of Mainz/Germany, founded in 2011, which seeks to draw connections among “indigenous cultures in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and Africa” (CCNIS homepage). Despite Banerjee’s sophisticated political argumentation regarding the tension between pan-Indigeneity and nation states over justice for Indigenous peoples, and though she quotes Allen extensively in her Introduction, in his review of the volume he criticizes what he sees as a Eurocentric bias in its failure to include Indigenous contributors and a dearth of “contemporary Indigenous scholarship” in some of the essays (Allen, “Review” 419). His critique attests to the minefield dangers of non-Indigenous academic treatment of trans-Indigenous correlation.
- 6 Abdallah’s great-grandfather was Sherif Ali, an ally of leaders of the opposition to French colonia (...)
9Rebecca Macklin in turn critiques Allen’s “potentially exclusionary definition of indigeneity” (36). In placing Native American fiction, specifically Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, in correlation with black South African author K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams on the basis of Indigenous concepts of “relationality,” she notes that every (post)colonial society has its own complex narratives of originary and historically migratory peoples. In South Africa, for instance, the Bantu peoples, who migrated from west and central Africa thousands of years ago to the space now called South Africa, were viewed by the colonial powers as non-Indigenous intruders in order “to delegitimize the Bantu groups and, with them, their claims to land” (Macklin 35). Macklin fears that Allen’s “proposed trans-Indigenous framework … risks excluding groups that do not typically associate to this category” of Indigeneity, groups beyond Allen’s “designation Native North American, Māori New Zealand, Hawaiian, Indigenous Australian or other large-scale groupings” (Allen 2012, qtd. in Macklin 36). Macklin pleads for “recovery of non-Western epistemologies,” for correlating literature that encodes “shared textual decolonial impulses and strategies, written in response to specific geopolitical conditions of colonial and capitalist exploitation … a shared struggle against a global system that is rooted in a logic of coloniality—the survival of which is dependent on the continued exploitation of humans and nonhuman forms” (50). Although she does not use the term, Macklin’s approach might be labeled as “trans-subaltern”—possibly an overstretching of the vexed notion of Indigeneity, but certainly valuable. My selected texts show the difficulty of applying a clear concept of the Indigenous as landed primacy to Ghana: Muslims, for example, migrated to the area of Ghana in the 10th century and waves of migration continued at various phases of its history. Can the Muslim author Abdallah be considered “Indigenous”?6 At any rate, his play The Trial, which includes the Muslim faction as just one of the pre-EuroWestern competing groups for postcolonial power, foregrounds Macklin’s program.
10In a nuanced 2022 study of trans-Indigenous relations in Australia, Kaiya Aboagye of the University of Sydney, who self-identifies as “an Afro-Indigenous Oceanic person,” “a Blackfulla with Akan heritage writing from [her] own social location” (Aboagye 10, 6), presents theoretical considerations potentially applicable to a Ghana-Native America trans-Indigenous juxtaposition. She focuses on what she calls “cross-cultural knowledge translations” (7) arising from “pre-colonial epistemologies, rituals, traditions, and philosophies of our ancestors” (7), concretely the correspondence between Akan/Asanti philosophical paradigms of Sankofa and Australian Aboriginal adherence to “Dreaming cosmologies,” both of which contrast with a mainstream Western concept of temporality (8). Aboagye advocates “cross-read[ing]” (8) between geographically separate Indigenous cultures without positing a direct path of influence. Although her sociological discourse frequently separates “Black” from “Indigenous,” she obviously views Africa-based peoplehood as “Indigenous”; indeed, she ambitiously sees her approach as a tool for pan-decolonization, one that can “reveal and advance joint strategies or shared notions of progress, justice, healing, and divestment from colonialism” (7).
- 7 Of course countless further relevant puppetry traditions, transcultural with roots in what could be (...)
11It can be posited that puppets are generally associated with child’s play and entertainment: hand, finger, and rod or stick puppets; string marionettes; shadow puppetry; and movable dolls. For example, the popular Kasper puppets and performances, called “Kasperltheater” in German-speaking countries, with origins in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte, are a staple of contemporary kindergarten activity. The dialogic interaction of the puppet with co-puppets (actually, of course, the puppeteer speaks with other performers) or with the audience is part of the imaginative play. The standard figures of “Kasperltheater,” such as the adventurous and witty Kasper, helpful Gretel, outrageous Wizard, and insidious Devil, support the stereotypical, though clever, plots and strategies.7
12A perhaps unlikely cultural link between these current performative stereotypes for children and the fixed rituals of Indigenous peoples can be found in the function of puppets and animatable objects unearthed by archeologists or studied by ethnologists. In Ghana “proto-puppets” such as Ashanti and Fanti doll figures were carried on women’s backs to induce fertility. Manipulable figures were employed to heal “at a distance” or to perform exorcism of harmful spirits. Large body puppets and elaborate masks were “danced” in ritualistic masquerade festivals, a tradition that survived after the materials were “burnt and banned by missionaries in the first quarter of the twentieth century” (all quotes Peretu).
- 8 The latest novel by enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Mona Susan Power, A Council of Dolls (...)
13Similarly, in Native North America ceremonial puppets and masks served sacred and social purposes: “Historically, shamans used masks and puppets to aid their role as liaisons to the spirit world, to influence the spirits, or to convey an illusion of magical powers” (Straub). Among the Anishinaabe, spiritual leaders widely animated so-called “juggler dolls” to prove their occult abilities (Lenz 86).8 Northwest Coast groups mounted totemic animals on the masks of dancers, who skillfully manipulated them with hidden strings. The Hopi still conduct elaborate performances with activatable kachina (spirit) figures grinding corn in a fertility ceremony, or in a water-bringing ritual, fighting water serpents. Ritual puppetry is not without humor, as the presence of kachina clown dolls, who perform antics and parody the audience, demonstrates.
- 9 I could easily have chosen a case study from Native American/First Nation circles as well. As exemp (...)
14The humor of slapstick and parody—which both reinforces the perception of child-appeal and addresses an adult audience—can offer an entry into the complex transculturality of contemporary puppetry. A case study is presented in a documentary film about an acclaimed Ghanaian puppet artist. “J.C. Abbey, Ghana’s Puppeteer” (2016) was produced by the Anyaa Arts Kollektif, founded in Accra in 1990, and the film is meritoriously available in English, Ga, Ewe, Fante, Twi with English, French, and Italian subtitles, with a YouTube trailer. The puppetry of Joseph C. Abbey (1945-2017) reveals not only “the richness and complexities of individual marionettes and rod puppets” (Coester and Matzke 235), but also a spectrum of remarkable aesthetic and social resources in puppetry, from ethnic to global. Particularly in his work for the Ministry of Education and the Arts Council of Ghana, Abbey supported the “tradition culture,” one of the thrusts in Nkrumah’s Ghana, with attention to diverse “regions and peoples the country has struggled to integrate,” through national and educational projects such as literacy campaigns, as well as through pan-African ties (Coester and Matzke 236). Abbey’s 1977 stipend for the highly reputable Jan Malik Puppet Studio in Prague opened up a further international window, especially with regard to the European specialty of marionette puppetry, which he then individualized, with additional strings for fine-tuned eye and mouth movement. Furthermore, Black Atlantic connections, in particular through music that accompanied his popular puppet performances that combined amusement and pedagogy “with their quirky movements and expressions” (Coester and Matzke 237), came to the fore. Abbey moved successfully into the realm of satire by daringly crafting and maneuvering puppets of politicians for a satirical show on TV Africa. The climax of the documentary film is a masterly synchronization of Abbey’s puppeting with a video sequence of James Brown, honoring Abbey’s achievement as a transcultural, versatile, and engagé artist appealing to all generations.9
- 10 For his MFA at the University of Georgia in 1976, Abdallah submitted a version of The Trial of Mall (...)
- 11 The most detailed biographical outline of Mohammed ben Abdallah that I have located is Aidoo and Gi (...)
15Mohammed ben Abdallah (born 1944) founded the Legon Road Theatre in Ghana in 1970 “to create a local, indigenous African theater that is paradoxically both traditional and contemporary” (Gibbs et al 33). He produced his first major play, The Alien King, in 1971. After obtaining degrees at the Universities of Georgia and Texas,10 Abdallah held cabinet positions under Jerry Rawlings, who led Ghana during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 2003 Abdallah became the Director of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana in Legon. 11His averred dramatic influences are Efua Sutherland, in particular her concept of anasegoro (ananse = traditional trickster spider; agoro = play) that encourages Ghanian theater based on Indigenous folktales; William Shakespeare’s characterization and word scenery; and Bertolt Brecht’s epic approach – thus a mix of drama culture and eras. A number of Abdallah’s plays were highlighted at the National Theatre in Accra during the “Ghana@50” festivities in 2007. His account of his life captured in interviews shows that his dramatic, academic, and political success was far from a matter of course. Raised strictly as a Muslim in the Kumasi Zongo migrant community, he did not live a privileged life. As a 15-year-old, he could not afford the fees to attend an urban grammar school, although he surreptitiously participated in rehearsals for the school’s play; in fact, he was awarded a scholarship after his maverick but excellent performance as Macbeth.
- 12 Comparisons to Brecht and Brechtian methods appear not infrequently in interviews with Abdallah and (...)
16In his preface to The Trial of Mallam Ilya and Other Plays (1987), Abdallah outlines his program for decolonization of African theater, which is based on, among other strategies, traditional griot storytelling; onstage cultural totalization combining “rituals, dances, music and folklore of our people”; “elements of African religious practices and techniques of African playwrights”; self-critical perspectives: “Our theatre must mirror to us what in our culture we must keep and improve upon and what we must reject and discard”; and a conscious and differentiated adaptation of Western conventions: “We must not be ashamed to take out of the examples of the Western world what will help us in our bid for progress and development while at the same time we must learn not to repeat their mistakes” (Abdallah vii-viii). In other places he calls his program for decolonization abibigoro, meaning “black theatre or theatre of African people” (Asiedu 370), which involves the elements listed, as well as an Indigenous African plus Brechtian meta-theatricality that works against a directly mimetic or naturalistic presentation, even when historical material is dramatized.12 His choice for the subject matter of The Trial of Mallam Ilya is an actual trial during the Nkrumah regime. The performative levels of Abdallah’s play, however, move it far beyond a narration of reality. The meta-theatricality can be explicit, as when revolutionary leader Malwal calls for Ilya to play his version of past events: “Brothers, I suggest that we help Mallam Ilya to defend himself and to re-enact his famous exploits. Take your places, Brothers” (85). Some of Malwal’s men set up the stage props for a past scene while others take seats in the onstage audience with Malwal. The militants interrogate Ilya’s re-enactments, giving instructions (“Be brief,” 85) and even calling for him to re-play key scenes with a different spin. The actual theater audience is also encouraged to pose questions. Furthermore, the on-stage performance of elaborate religious rituals such as the marriage ceremony with singing, drumming, miming, and provocative dancing deliberately impedes the forward dramatic movement. Most important for my analysis here, the subversive anti-colonial and anti-governmental puppet performances, with diachronic and satirical digressions through the material puppet figures, also serve to starkly divert the dramatic momentum.
17The opening scene of The Trial, in which the militants arrest 72-year-old Ilya and cruelly stab his wife Halima as she attempts to defend him, takes place in total darkness, symbolic of the murkiness of loyalties, motivations, even deeds during the course of the play. Different groups debate whether Ilya should be punished as a traitor because he “failed to let the lessons of history shine through him” and “did not use [his honor as a hero] for the benefit of the people who thrust it upon him” (82)—or whether he was indeed a hero who upheld the Muslim religion as caretaker of the Grand Mosque of Angah (anagram for “Ghana”). It remains unclear whether Halima’s child Malwal is the son of Kumrahn (anagram for the historic leader Nkrumah, as already mentioned) or the product of rape by Ilya before marriage. At any rate, Malwal’s revolution is overwhelmed by the next insurrection because of his attention to the histrionics of Ilya’s trial; it is implied that Malwal views Ilya as his failed father. The playwright deliberately constructs his play on postmodern uncertainty, on the impossibility of establishing a stable historiography. The meta-theatrical thrust of the play underlines this uncertainty—hero or traitor? How can the differing versions of past and performed events ever reveal a truth? The very project of decolonization is endangered when the freedom movement “saviors” become violent, unscrupulous dictators, caricatures of wise leaders.
18Kumrahn’s council could be promising for the agenda of uniting the diverse groups of a newly independent country. The stage instructions describe the elders as exhibiting all shades of black, diverse religions and tribal groups. The exact descriptions contain cartoon-like exaggerations, however: “Bawa Samburu is a strong, jet black Fulani man of medium height with very low cut grey hair, huge, blood-shot eyes, a small greying beard, a bull neck and a barrel chest,” wearing “the long sleeveless Fulani gown and toubalajo” (92). As observed later, this choleric Samburu could easily be one of the grotesque, parodic puppets crafted by Dummy Trout and her troupe in Vizenor’s novel.
19The counsellor Kouyate is a priest of Indigenous religions and seditiously stages critical events in remote villages “in the heart of the forest region” with “a group of priests, acolytes, dancers and masqueraders who went about performing obscene masques that made fun of Kumrahn and some of his rather corrupt elders” (117). Puppets play a central role in these events. The first actor, costumed as Henry the Navigator as has been described above, operates a puppet within a puppet to expose the European economic and sexual exploitation of Africa beginning in the fifteenth century. Two further masqueraders emphasize religious and political oppression:
The actor on the second stump is dressed as David Livingstone holding the strings to a puppet dressed as an African christian [sic] preacher who hits the carved figure of a traditional African priest on the head with a Bible when the strings are pulled. On the third stump, an actor dressed as Queen Victoria operates the puppet of Cecil Rhodes dancing on the fat belly of a carved African chief labelled ‘Chaka’ [“Chaka the Zulu” (1787-1828) … “The Black Napoleon … as white men call him”]. (117-18, italics in original)
20On that “second stump” in the remote village, the triple puppet construction of missionary-explorer Livingstone, converted African preacher, and traditional African priest literalizes the nineteenth-century Christian penetration of Africa when the marionette repeatedly slams a Bible on the head of the Indigenous priest. In the third constellation monarch Victoria pulls the strings of the political imperialism that disempowered the African tribal leaders, with the presumably heavy Cecil Rhodes marionette merrily “dancing” on the prone body of the African chief. The slapstick reinforces the judgment on colonialism. What leads to the immediate arrest of the masqueraders, however, is a fourth actor in the center of the circle who directs the others like a lion trainer with a whip; although he is dressed interculturally in “black tights, cowboy boots, Chinese tunic and Russian astrakhan,” he is irreverently “made up facially to look like a cartoon of Kumrahn,” “yelling and cursing inaudibly” (119), comically conducting the circus of colonial and post-independence developments.
21The vivid burlesque performances of the ringmaster and puppeteers in the “underground” of the forest far from the capital city are metaphorized in the discourse of the personages involved in controlling politics of the (fictive) African state. Halima is forced by two of the counselors to make a public (and false?) confession, a situation that she describes in terms of puppet theater and ventriloquism: “That night, when those two old vultures had me brought up in the middle of the night and confronted me with those horrible alternatives, I knew I was standing before a pair of puppets. I knew that the master puppeteer was in full control. When they spoke, it was Kumrahn’s voice I heard” (133). A foreign princess, whom Kumrahn marries for strategic purposes, refuses after his death to continue to be a puppet or, as she phrases her insight to Halima, “You and I have been play-pieces in a mighty game” (151). This realization does not prevent her from haughtily treating Halima like a pawn or a marionette, however: “I intend to move, Halima, and when I move, you move with me … whether you like it or not” (151, ellipsis in original). The “mighty game” played by leaders in power takes on religio-mythological dimensions when Ilya insults Kouyate, furiously viewing him as the devil’s disciple or puppet: “You serpent! You infidel! You puppet of ‘Shaitaan!’ You! [Shaitaan = the devil] (158).
22Ilya and Kouyate seem to agree, however, on the ineffectiveness of the series of often self-serving puppet-revolts against the puppeteering powers-that-be. With cynicism Ilya assesses the rebellion that overthrew Kumrahn: “It achieved its purpose …. Rock the boat and change the captain. Provide opportunity to make use of rusty weapons. Give restless warriors the chance to burn out pent-up energy. And in the confusion of revolt, line your pockets and get rid of dangerous upstarts” (136). Kouyate rails against the senselessness and unethicalness of the chain of rebellions:
We live in a crucible where the horror of the past are [sic] smelted with the violence of today to be forged into the monster of tomorrow …. ever since the warrior Patapa led the rebellion of warriors that toppled Kumrahn out of his seat of power and plunged us deeper into chaos, we have seen several more revolts … successful and abortive … prominent among them Akoto’s rebellion, Katakyi’s rebellion … and Amankwa’s rebellion …. For how long shall our people be squeezed through the fingers of one generation of leeches right into the open palms of another? (141-43)
23The play ends as yet another revolt sweeps destructively through the country “like a forest fire” (127). Ilya has claimed earlier, with resignation, that “We are all puppets. We cannot escape it, so we must live with it” (133). This resignation is not shared, however, by all interpreters of the play. The Trial was staged twice in Bengali (2014, 2016) by the Bangladesh troupe BotTala that “represents the voice of the masses,” as it postulates. BotTala chose Abdallah’s drama because “with its gripping narrative, the play articulates the semiotics of revolution” that must constantly be aimed against resignation by avoiding the pitfalls of power (qtd. in “The Trial,” Daily Star, Dhaka).
- 13 Wesleyan UP provides an impressive bibliography of Vizenor’s publications: <http://geraldvizenor.site.wesleyan.edu/biographical-information/books-writings/>
- 14 The corpus of works includes a published play, Ishi and the Wood Ducks (1995). See Hochbruck’s essa (...)
- 15 “Fugitive Puppets,” a chapter excerpt from the sequel (at that time in progress) to Waiting for Wov (...)
24Vizenor’s literary and theoretical works reveal a lifetime project of decolonizing Native American literature, of overturning, unsettling, disrupting fixed “manners” and stereotypes, “rescu[ing] natives from the curse of cultural models that were roughed out with blood quanta by government agents and anthropologists” (Waiting for Wovoka 99). Vizenor (born 1934 in Minneapolis) has created a vast oeuvre13 of bold genre mix that inscribes his influential, still developing semiotics of Native literature.14 In his autobiography Interior Landscapes (1990) he movingly and poetically “stories” his precarious childhood in urban tenements, his recoupment through connection to his White Earth Anishinaabe culture and through literature, read and self-written, along with military travel to Japan and academic education, and his subsequent professorial posts. Like Vizenor in his experimental novels, the renegade travelers in Waiting for Wovoka create “native back talk” (72) with their poems, their storying, and their audacious puppet parleys. In his oeuvre, Vizenor transculturally intertwines his own Anishinaabe background and its continuing struggle against imperial racism with other historical horrors of dominance and war: slavery, the Holocaust, and nuclear bombing. One of his tools for accomplishing this in a number of his novels, particularly Waiting for Wovoka, is ironic puppetry which, I contend, also places Vizenor in dialogue with Abdallah.15
25As Abdallah does with his meta-theatrical diversion of direct dramatic development, Vizenor goes against the grain of a naturalistic narrative presentation with the insertion of often extensive quotations from culturally significant or controversial books or from transcribed speeches, with historical digressions, deliberate repetitions, and “dream songs.” The puppet plays break up the diegesis and add the theatrical element of an audience within the narrative. The reader is beguiled thus indirectly into the skills of puppetry as practiced by the Native outcasts, in which ragtag, available materials such as a Maxwell coffee tin-can are artfully crafted and manipulated: “only the slightest gestures and the easy sway, jerk, and bounce of wood, cloth, contrived debris, and the paper heads of hand puppets” (98) can command an ironic allusion. The precise and simultaneously symbolic description of the modeling of the “Trickster of Liberty” puppet attests to Vizenor’s novelistic puppet-crafting. One of the renegade youths, Bad Boy Aristotle, concocted—for the upcoming ceremony to welcome home the Native contingent from Paris—a “secret puppet” with “remnants found in a trash heap”:
a creative portrayal of the Trickster of Liberty fashioned from a tin cone of Red Wing Premium Beer. Two great red wings decorated the cone and framed a romantic image of a native figure with a full headdress. Bad Boy painted with red lipstick the word Trickster between the words ‘Premium’ and ‘Beer’ and dressed the trickster in a black tuxedo with a crisp white collar. The blunt yellow fingers of the beer cone trickster were pencil stubs. (45)
- 16 The word indian, lowercased and italicized, is Vizenor’s term for the stereotypical Native American (...)
26The parody emerges more fully when the reader knows that Red Wing Beer was a brand popular in Minnesota in the 1950s, sold in unusually shaped cans called “cones,” boasting the logo of a stereotypical head-dressed plains indian,16 with a red wing on either side. Such a cone is currently available for sale on the Internet for $7,980! Bad Boy’s motley puppet is further ironic in multiple ways. Readers of Vizenor’s Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage and other works know that he views the trickster emerging from traditional oral tales as a discourse phenomenon: “Tribal tricksters arise in imagination, a comic discourse and language game” (Trickster x). The leftover “pencil stubs” of Bad Boy’s trickster puppet might hint at the trickster’s transition from oral performance to the novelistic, and they contrast sharply with the smooth magician-like tuxedo costume. The physical puppet wondrously and humorously reifies the “word game” of tricksterism as a countering response to (post)colonial domination.
27The eclectic, comic flotsam-and-jetsam puppets are concrete items, but their dialogues and their embedment in the narrative intermesh them with earnest themes and motifs—as with Abdallah’s masquerading post-colonial puppets. The connections to young-native suicides, fire, and ashes are introduced in this essay, as well as the inseparability of the injustices of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, intertwined with the Holocaust, atomic fallout, and destruction of the environment.
28Dummy Trout’s band of youthful puppeteering “stowaways” (passim) have sought sanctuary with her to escape destructive conditions, particularly in the harsh boarding schools of the 1950s. One pupil has succumbed to the “snow-ghost” temptation of suicide and others are deeply at risk. The runaway children find solace and healing in the storying, artwork, and performances encouraged by Dummy and later by the “Blue Puppeteers” of earlier novels, who re-immigrate from Paris to the White Earth reservation. Vizenor has consistently built up to this puppeteering solace and healing in his canon.
- 17 Prometheus, the classical “pirate of fire” (53) is also the name of the Frisian character Prometheu (...)
29The haunting of the cold snow ghosts is paradoxically linked with images of blazing fire that sweep through the reservation, corresponding to the “forest fire” of successive power struggles in The Trial. Dummy traumatically lost her lover and her voice in the “firestorm” (4) of the historical Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, and an “arsonist” “blaze of books” (11, 71) destroys the reservation Library of Nibwaakaa. However, fire can also serve cathartic purposes, as when the children ceremonially burn snow-ghost effigies in a “funeral pyre” at the cemetery (28) and perform a healing “fire circle parley” with handmade puppets (48).17 Out of the hot ashes of the destructive library fire the children pull half-burnt books and imaginatively reconstruct the discourse in the tomes, activating these texts in their puppet parleys.
30Of course ashes are inevitably associated with death. This poignantly emerges in the puppeteers’ encounter at the World’s Fair in Seattle with veterans diseased by the “radioactive ashes and mysterious white rain” (62) of the nuclear blasts in the 40s and 50s. The “ashes of children” and their families in Hiroshima (82) gruesomely recall the destruction wreaked by the Great Hinckley Fire, in which “entire families were burned to bone bits and ashes” (4), as well as the ashes produced by the gas chambers of the Holocaust and even the chemical poisoning of the environment shockingly revealed in the year of the World’s Fair (1962) in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Thus, the technological developments celebrated internationally in the colossal “Space Needle” and “World of Science” pavilion of the Seattle exhibition inextricably coalesce with unconscionable genocides and destructive horrors of modern times. In their biting puppet parleys exposing culpable figures such as the parley starring Edward Teller, a chief developer of the hydrogen bomb with its sad refrain of “ashes of death” (92-93), the puppeteers honor the children and families “forsaken in … history” (4).
31Atomic radiation of the mid-twentieth century is also specifically intertwined with the physical and human-social injustices of the centuries-long enslavement of African Indigenes and their descendants, as well as the echoes of this thralldom in present-day racism. The young puppeteer of Native and African American descent, ironically nicknamed “Master Jean,” particularly objects to honoring (the hand puppet of) Noah Le Gros or “Chief Seattle,” whose large statue dominates a plaza near the World’s Fair, because Le Gros owned Native slaves. Jean is supported in this stance by one of the nuclear-diseased veterans: “‘Yes, the curse of slavery lasts forever, and the curse of nuclear poison carries on in stories of blood and bone’” (85). While creating “native back talk version[s]” (72) of passages from books during their road trip, the renegade puppeteers cite African American James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961) on race discrimination and relate it to Native experience. Their admiration for Baldwin’s protest writings leads the renegades to stage, in their camp at the edge of the sacred Kootenai River Falls, an unusual puppet parley between Baldwin and Aristotle. A paddle is held upright and covered with a paper bag, on one side of which is drawn a caricature of Baldwin and on the other a caricature of Aristotle. During the parley dialogue, the paddle is spun around 180 degrees to show the relevant speaker to the audience. Baldwin’s statement to Aristotle (actually a quotation from Nobody Knows My Name) about the relationship between white and non-white takes on additional wrinkles of significance when the Black essayist is transiently the other side of a double-faced paper bag manipulated by a Native puppeteer: “Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other” (75).
- 18 Beckett wrote the play in French in 1948-49, and it premiered in Paris in 1953; the first English l (...)
32Baldwin’s insight that white and non-white peoples are “bound together forever” in postcolonial societies could easily be applicable to the clown or puppet-like figures of Vladimir and Estragon or Lucky and Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed play on the cusp of the postmodern literary era, Waiting for Godot.18 The deep uncertainty of Beckett’s play, based on waiting, waiting for change, for improvement, for a savior, underpins both of the works analyzed in my essay. In particular, in Waiting for Wovoka, there is explicit intertextual reference to Beckett’s work, beginning with the title. The Paiute Wovoka’s vision in 1889 prophesied resurrection of the Native dead and Native ways of life in North America, along with the disappearance of the white society, if the Natives performed the Ghost Dance and lived peacefully and righteously. Wovoka’s prophecy positively energized the desperate Native communities, but the massacre of the ghost dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 by the US American army, widely considered to be an epitome of hegemonic cruelty, sadly showed the futility of “waiting” for an imminent disappearance of the white society. Vizenor’s puppeteers label Godot “a snow ghost” (102) and Vizenor’s novel, along with Abdallah’s play, appear to critique any inaction of passive Indigenous “waiting,” be it for a hero or a messiah, or even for productive change.
33The dialogue of the characters in Waiting for Godot has common denominators with Abdallah’s and Vizenor’s works, such as misunderstandings caused by various forms of cross-talking, violation of discourse rules, semantic doubleness, and, especially in Vizenor’s puppet parleys, parallel talking with no conversational connection between the utterances other than through the listeners’/readers’ mental participation. Waiting for Godot’s clownish comedy, stumbling and falling in turns, outlandish outfits, and caricatured appearance suits Abdallah’s council members, masqueraders, and puppets, as well as Vizenor’s hand puppets in performance, supported by the ubiquitous, clamorous antics of Dummy Trout’s sentient chorus of mongrels. Abdallah’s Court Crier, not unlike a Shakespearian fool or jester, is permitted to utter bawdy or fecal insults or comments: “One glance from you [Kumrahn] will start an earthquake in the bowels of your enemy! …. A fart may be a gush of wind but it can never feed a fire, it only smells” (96). Estragon and Vladimir also exhibit this type of humor par excellence. Telling differences emerge, however. Beckett’s characters frequently converse about committing suicide, jokingly considering leaping “hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower” (7b) or posing such rhetorical questions as “What about hanging ourselves?” (12a). Having provided refuge to suicide-endangered youths in her “Theater of Chance,” Dummy decisively “denounced the easy chitchat surrender to suicide by Estragon and Vladimir” (Waiting for Wovoka 102).
34Pozzo can be interpreted as a grotesque paradigm of the colonizer/enslaver, pointedly caricatured in Abdallah’s triple puppets. Pozzo arrogantly claims the land as his own; abuses, whips and demeans Lucky; and hypocritically twists the relationship to present himself as benevolent rather than slave-marketing: “Instead of simply kicking [Lucky] out on his arse, in the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him” (21b). Pozzo’s insight into his egregious behavior deliberately sounds only self-satisfied: “I am not particularly human” (19b).
- 19 A five-line Japanese poem is often called a “tanka,” in contrast to the three-line haiku; the dream (...)
35The caricature is fractured by Estragon and Vladimir’s suddenly poetic interchange about the dead speaking and rustling like leaves, like sand, like ashes (40b). The reader of Waiting for Wovoka immediately thinks of Vizenor’s inserted dream songs, mainly composed as handwritten five-line haiku19 by voiceless Dummy, and the murmuring of the dead calls up the Ghost Dance resurrection of Native ancestors, with the whispering of ashes educing the omnipresent imagery of hegemonic genocides. In a double ironic twist, the irony of humorous but biting puppetry is transformed into lyrical, respectful mourning. Beckett’s famous existentially static conclusion to both acts of his play is not entirely shared by Abdallah and Vizenor, however. Beckett writes:
- 20 The interchange is punctuated with a comma rather than a question mark after “Well” at the end of A (...)
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.20
- 21 “Survivance” and “transmotion” are key concepts in Vizenor’s Native philosophy. Survivance is proac (...)
36In Abdallah’s play, the freeze frame of Ilya and Malwal staring at each other, seeking mutual recognition, surrounded by bodies littered on the stage, victims of the latest coup d’état, is overlaid by the final jeremiad of the Brechtian-epic Court Crier, who warns against deleterious hubris in the temporary conqueror, be it colonist or Indigene: “Sooner or later, the machine owner will arrive … While the one who will rub your nose in the mud has not yet come, you say ‘No one can beat me!’” (169). Rather than the image of Godot as “machine owner,” Vizenor offers the trace of a resistant Wovoka, manifested in Vizenor’s concepts of survivance and transmotion.21 A reviewer of Vizenor’s novel considers those concepts realized in the parleys through creative openness to a dialectic of old and new ways, and via beneficial discursive fluidity: “A fluid escape from pain, [the parleys] are a safe place where the gains and losses of tradition and adaptation can be fully examined” (Carls). After a parley including the puppets embodying Dummy and Beckett, the puppeteer Dummy feels buoyed, “secure in the spirit of silence and carried on with a sense of courage” (107). She and the Native renegades do not wait statically, but, following their liberating performances, rest salutarily and poetically: “The grand spirits of native chance shimmered in the early seasons of the night and then leaned into the easy shadows of natural motion” (109).
37Whether with the Cold War underpinning the World Fair in Vizenor’s novel or the hot wars of postcolonial history in Abdallah’s play, whether ritual or improvised performance, whether Native American or African, the spectacle of puppeting combines viewing pleasure with interrogation in manifold ways. From the giant puppets of Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater present at worldwide demonstrations, to the silent human puppets of Germany’s Familie Flöz group exhibiting an astonishing range of emotions; from prehistorical ceremonial dolls to the satirical puppets of the Indigenous works at hand; elaborately crafted or spontaneously ragtag, puppetry as handicraft and as conveyor of critical, symbolic, or philosophical stances is far more than children’s play.
38The juxtaposition of puppetry in the two selected works of theater and novelistic genre by Abdallah and Vizenor responds, at least modestly, I maintain, to Allen’s call to “illuminate complex worlds of past, present, and future Indigenous presence,” corresponds with Banerjee’s interest in deploying “correlation” to support the “productiveness of comparative indigenous studies,” supports Macklin’s belief that trans-subaltern literature can “create spaces of co-resistance,” and reinforces Aboagye’s “cross-cultural knowledge translation” to further “shared notions of … divestment from colonialism.” The transculturality of inherited and contemporary puppetry, vividly embraced in The Trial of Mallam Ilya and Waiting for Wovoka, provides a powerful tool to interrogate, to mock, to combat the continued injustices facing Indigenous peoples.