Daddy SS and Mummy Cool

A naked girl is tied with wire to a bed-frame in the basement of a deserted shop, her face and body carbonised with a blowtorch. When she went missing the family search was joined by her friends and then the whole community. The French police arrest her killer, the emir who had issued the final warning for her revealing clothing, her bright hair, and the boys—especially the infidels. The imam calls the community to join a rally in his defence and issues a fatwa against those who do not attend: “Lacking solidarity with a brother in Islam aggressed by infidels is the biggest of sins.” When Muslim boys, friends of the murdered girl, fantasise about taking on the Islamists before they turn the housing estate into an extermination camp, their voices are pessimistic: “There is nothing to do, they are everywhere, the bearded ones have the money, the lawyers, the weapons, the networks, the friends in high places, the ambassadors …” The Islamisation of the Paris banlieue in the mid-1990s occurs in Boualem Sansal’s 2008 novel Le village de l’Allemand (“The German’s Village”)—the English translation is published in America as The German Mujahid, and in Britain as An Unfinished Business.

As they fantasise about resistance the boys stumble over the words. Should their protest be anti-Islam or anti-Islamist? “Islam is my parents’ religion, it’s the best in the world.” “My mother prays, she wouldn’t kill a fly.” They turn to a dictionary for help. It doesn’t. Though it is published in 1990 the word Islamist isn’t there.

Sansal’s novel assembles the journal entries of two brothers in Paris after the death of their parents in a massacre in a small and unimportant Algerian village. No one is quite sure who was responsible. The government and the rebel Islamists blame each other. The young men, Rachel and Malrich, had an Algerian mother and German father—their own unusual names are combinations of their German and Algerian first names. Their father had volunteered during the war of independence and after that was achieved had stayed in the country and married. With each other the young men act as cautious strangers. There is a fourteen-year age difference between them and at the age of seven or eight each boy had been sent away to live with an elderly Algerian couple in France.

The novel, written in French by the Algerian author, is not a story of French Algeria but of Algerian France. Rachel is well educated and successful. He is married and holds a decent job with a multinational company. Malrich is less well educated, works in a garage and still lives in the same high-rise housing estate with the old couple—with whom there is little real engagement.

The family tragedy sends Rachel briefly back to civil war Algeria. In the small village of Aïn Deb amongst his father’s few belongings he discovers old photos, German military medals, and his father’s service record. For the first time he learns that his loving parent had been in the SS and served as an engineer of death in places like Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald. A post-war photo, smiling in front of the Pyramids, suggests he fled Europe to Egypt before joining the Algerian struggle in the late 1950s. After independence he taught in the new Algerian military college before falling out with the new government and disappearing into the lost village of Aïn Deb, somewhere near Sétif. For anyone who remembers the Algerian dictator of the 1960s and 1970s Sansal has an absolutely perfect description of Boumediene smiling as though he has toothache.

Behind Daddy SS there is a germ of reality. In the early 1980s, in more peaceful times, Sansal had driven into an unusually tidy and well-ordered small village somewhere in the Algerian south. He discovered that this order was due to the influence of a German resident who had served on the Algerian side during the war. It seems both the French and the Algerians had their own ex-SS.

Rachel is shattered by what he has found out about his father. He does not share the information with his wife or brother but researches for himself and then travels in his father’s footsteps to make sense of what he has learnt. His marriage crumbles. The young man assumes the guilt of the past, and in retribution for his father’s actions he gases himself with the exhaust of his car.

His brother Malrich is a victim of the present. One brother dies because of the Nazi past, Malrich lives in an Islamist fascist present—this is how he sees it. He records the arrival of the Islamists in the housing estate as an interesting and exciting development in otherwise boring lives. The initial seduction is a trap which shuts around them with unbreakable bonds, leaving open only a single path which leads towards hatred, fanaticism and martyrdom. The hangover of the zealots, drunk on religion, is death.

Elsewhere Sansal has written of a similar scenario played out all over Algeria before the civil war. The world he is describing is the world before the rise of the internet Islamist seducers.

The final pages of Malrich’s journal are devastatingly bleak. His community has been destroyed and remade, every action now watched and controlled: “Only lacking are the gas chambers and the ovens for moving on the mass extermination.” He feels absolutely alone. You imagine the author himself speaking to us. His books are banned in Algeria, where he lives under high security, detested both by the Islamists and by Algeria’s gangster military government. In August this brave man published a new novel, 2084, which sees the future world as an Islamic totalitarianism.

In the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation he re-examines Camus’s The Outsider from the Arab point of view. Last December a Salafist imam accused him of blasphemy and issued a fatwa calling for his death—on Facebook. He lives in Algeria and receives no protection. Michel Houellebecq, France’s leading contemporary novelist, published his new novel Soumission the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre. His book looks ahead to a submissive Islamic France. He now lives under police protection. It is not a danger that worries Australian writers and playwrights. In our theatres the reality is never spoken: the times favour collaboration, not resistance—to a danger many intellectuals will not even admit exists.

The American play Grounded by George Brant deals with the current Middle East wars and has been presented in Australian theatres. The eighty-minute monologue has played internationally and been acclaimed by both audiences and critics. It is a well-written showcase for the dynamic talents of thirty-something actresses surrounded by creative and sometimes spectacular staging. The unnamed woman centre stage is a US Air Force pilot. She is grounded and leaves the service when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Several years later she returns to active duty but the Air Force has changed and she is again grounded when assigned to the “Chair Force”—piloting drones flying somewhere in the Middle East from an Air Force base in Las Vegas. Amongst other commendations and awards Grounded won the left-wing Smith Prize for Political Theater in America: “a powerful story of the psychological toll of modern warfare on today’s soldiers”.

The published text—shorter than many Quadrant articles—is set out like poetry with a single phrase per line, without punctuation. There are few stage directions. The open approach encourages directors to introduce their own free-flowing staging built around the solitary performer. The text at the base of the applauded productions makes surprising reading.

Outwardly it is a performance piece with feminist values, written by a man, but the strong sexuality that runs through it is a male sexual fetish fantasy—unsurprisingly shared by feminists. It seems elitist audiences on both sides of the aisle salute girl power über alles when the character is a hot PC Barbarella. The American drones and Muslim body parts offered for intellectualocrat, bi-gender disapproval are a bonus.

The performance begins with the actress centre stage in a sexualised military uniform: a US Air Force flight suit, lace-up military boy boots and Ray-Bans—an image somewhere between Madchen in Uniform and Barbie joins the USAF. The sexualisation of the uniform is not a director’s bright thought or a critical interpretation, it’s in the text. The suit is referred to twenty-one times, almost twice as often as the unsexy drones. There are very few stage directions but the costume is compulsory—a military onesie with zips—and it’s in the very first words the Pilot speaks:

I never wanted to take it off

Staring at myself in the mirror

Myself in this

I had earned this

This was me now.

From this association of self with uniform the object quickly becomes identified with sex, power, rock and roll. It’s an image of self, never of country or patriotism.

Returning home on leave with other pilots, the virile woman meets and mates with softie “Eric who works in a hardware store the family store”. A dominant/submissive, alpha/beta sexual attraction is immediately turned on:

Most guys don’t like what I do

Feel they’re less of a guy around me

I take the guy spot and they don’t know where they belong

But not this one

This one’s eyes light up

This one thinks it’s cool.

She takes him home, they make love, once. Then the uniform comes out of the closet: “First time’s okay / Then he asks me to put my suit on”. Maybe behind Eric’s closed eyes he’s flying into Top Gun with Tom Cruise—or replaying The Night Porter.

Far away and back at work, bombing things, she misses Eric. The liquid George Brant has put into his creation’s veins gurgles more like diesel than aero fuel: “Like some 50s movie / I’ve got my little woman at home”. Though she “graduated top of her class and [has] a well-rounded education”, a couple of months later she is astonished to learn that she’s pregnant.

Grounded because of her pregnancy she returns to civil life, and kinky Eric from the hardware store. They meet at his place. He cries a bit when he sees her, and then asks, “Please”, that she put the suit on for a photo—she must have had it in her handbag: “Can’t zip up the front / Naked tight belly spilling out”. The image goes onto his computer’s screensaver. Then, in his incompetent beta-male way, he drops to his knee:

That’s not how I want it

This is how I want it

And I throw him on his single bed

And I get on top.

In that one happy-family fumble there is a feminist fantasy of motherhood and power and a male fantasy of kinky mommy loving. Reverse the raped-by-a-dominant-pregnant-woman scenario and the feminist praise machine would rapidly crank into reverse. The fetish uniform is what links the couple: it is the symbol of their relationship, and her dominance. It’s an interesting take on women in the military.

The suit is cosy:

I’m naked

Cold

I slip on my suit and get back into bed.

The suit is hot: “I still have my suit on but I ask him if he wants to take it off”. The suit is cool: “Eric opens me up / Every zipper every one”.

The baby is born, named Sam (sounds strong), short for Samantha. The couple are living together and when she rejoins the Air Force they move to Las Vegas. Her life is regular and scheduled, flying drones, and he gets a job in a casino: “The threat of death has been removed from our lives”—but not from the people she is daily exploding. Should the day go well and she kills a few bad people she wears the suit home, “Eric sees the suit / He gets it”. But now come the personal problems integrating the business of killing and the business of being a family. Drones target individuals, “personality strikes”, the spy cameras show her the aftermath of what she has done, and then she has to assume a normal life as mom and mate.

Hard to go home tonight

The desert isn’t long enough

Still have bodies in my head.

The fictional sentiments of a fictional soldier are an unsteady base for a non-fiction discussion of drone warfare. They go to counselling, which doesn’t go well—she suspects Eric may be interested in the female counsellor. His attitude to the uniform mirrors his feeling towards her. The game-playing is unsatisfying when one of the players stops playing: “Eric tells me to at least take off the flight suit to please take it off before I come home / I tell him no”. For her, improvement in the state of their relationship is linked to the fetish: “A flicker of sadness as he sees I still have the suit on but I ask him if he wants to take it off my husband who I love wants to take it off”. A relationship based on an untimely daughter and a fetish military onesie has not proven to be a strong base for their marriage.

What reads like a parody of feminism must, given the positive reviews, seem real in performance, though unconscious parody can still be found in the commentary. A female director gives praise to the Pilot for taking on a male gendered role: “she embraces it, she becomes it. She is a woman warrior … she’s a pilot because she can’t not be a pilot.” Unspoken is the clear message, woman warrior good, male warrior bad.

The monologue is silent or confused about the war or wars being fought. The drones are up to date but the idea of the conflict is very last-century. A rational discussion is buried under emotionalism. Not a word about terrorism, or Islamism, or Muslim totalitarianism, or Muslim immigration into Western societies: “Iraq is done … different desert same war.” She is a warrior without a reason—uninvolved and entirely self-obsessed. Why is she killing? Is the writer expressing a truth about the lost direction of Obama’s America, or making a statement about women in the military, or, like Himmler fussing over the feelings of his killers, worrying about the effects of killing on the ones who do the killing? Surely there must be more than nice writing and exciting staging:

I’m in the blue for a reason

I have missiles to launch

I have Sidewinders

I have Mavericks

I rain them down on the minarets and concrete below me

The structures that break up the sand

I break them back down

Return them to desert

To particles

Sand

At least I think I do

I’m long gone by the time the boom happens

Tiger [her plane] and I are on to another piece          of sky.

The minarets suggest the author’s confusion—like the boys’ in Sansal’s novel: is Islam or Islamism the problem? Or, in this case, is it the usual villain—white, male, America?

The monologue finally swings left into a cul-de-sac of sentimentality and melodrama. The chair-based pilot spends days tracking a car in a faraway land. In the back seat is man who may be their target, he is only named as the Prophet. The watching Americans aren’t sure of his identity as, fearing a drone attack, he never leaves the vehicle—which seems a little far-fetched. Finally, the car pulls up outside a house. A very young girl runs towards it and its rear door opens as the man leaps out to protect the child. One-eyed and limping, he is immediately identified as the Prophet. At this climactic moment the technology provides a close-up and in the girl’s face the Pilot sees the features of her own daughter—and aborts the shot. But, she hasn’t been trusted and there is another fighter above her who takes over and fires and destroys the man and child. If they had simply waited several minutes for the car to drive on, no doubt the problem would have been avoided.

After this collision of female sensibility and male power only female victimhood remains. The pilot is cruelly punished for her humane action. The text’s short journey has taken the audience from warrior woman to female victim of patriarchy. It is now revealed that the pilot has been talking to us from her prison cell, her “court-martial home”:

Grounded
they must have taken my suit
but I still see it is still here.

The fantasy lives on. Real women who serve in real Western armies deserve better.

Screen beauty Anne Hathaway played the Pilot role in America. In an interview she underlined the supposed serious intent of the work, suggesting we need to discuss what the use of drones does to the soldiers who deploy them and “how it affects the people that we are targeting”. Bang.