On Performing Absence
From “Performing Absence: The Limits of Testimony in the Recovery of the Combat Veteran”
by David Read Johnson, PhD, BCT-RDT.
David Johnson, PhD, RDT/BCT, is one of the foremost theoreticians and practitioners of drama therapy and a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association for Drama Therapy. He graduated from Yale University with a double major in theater and psychology. Johnson is an Associate Clinical Professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, Co-Director of the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, CT and Director of the Institutes for the Arts in Psychology in New York, NY.
On the War Experience:
Armed conflict is the scaffolding of history: it creates, transforms, and destroys nations; its victories raise up great leaders, its defeats bring them down; it gives rise to grand memorials, precious holidays, simmering fears, and deep resentments. Borders are re-drawn, peoples displaced, and economies shattered. At heart, our sympathies lie with the innocent victims. Our feelings for the innocent victims are pure, for they have no responsibility for the war. Unfortunately, in practice, it is very hard to find victims who are entirely innocent. In war, the women and children who stay home may be working hard in factories producing weapons for their loved ones. In some countries, the young boys are recruited to be soldiers. In others, such as Vietnam, the children were strapped with explosives and used as weapons. In most wars, the civilian population is forced to collaborate with whoever has power over them…
The entrance into war is a confrontation with meaninglessness and chaos: in an ambush hundreds of bullets are thrashing through the air, some will hit, most will miss, but those whose bodies are hit cannot be predicted from any combination of measurements, most certainly that of the value of their lives.
On Absence and the Combat Veteran Experience:
What does healing mean for those soldiers who may have volunteered, and then were trained, to defend us and attack them? What horrors did they see? Did they commit? Soldiers have been coming home from war since the beginning of civilization and have had to face the confusion, the ambivalence, the quiet, and the memories disturbing their days in peace. It is not a coincidence that the modern emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder occurred among soldiers coming back from a war they did not win. Defeat laid bare the bones of the disorder.
Of the many types of experiences veterans have after an armed conflict, one of the most important is absence. Now absence is not loss exactly, for loss is something valuable that has gone away and is not retrievable. Neither is absence nothingness, for one expects nothing of nothingness; nothingness has never been. In fact, many veterans desire nothingness, sleep, death…. Veterans are haunted by absence, by shadows of things not present but which cannot be buried or laid to rest…. It is memory that refuses its status as memory, that seeks to rise up, come alive again, that calls out to be found, that is missing….No generation of soldiers has been more haunted than those of the Vietnam War. Over three million men and women served during that decade of conflict (1965-1975), which ended with 57,000 dead, 153,000 wounded, and 150,000 with psychological disabilities. Unpopular at home, subject of intense public protest, the war created an uncertain and at times hostile homecoming for many veterans, who sometimes chose to hide their own participation….
In 1976, shortly after the final withdrawal, accusations were made that the US government had intentionally left behind a number of the Missing in Action, or MIA, (that is, those whose bodies had not been recovered, and were therefore dead, imprisoned, or possibly defected). There are still 1,742 listed. The persistence of interest in the MIA issue from the Vietnam War is fueled in part by this sense that something or someone is missing or absent, but should not be. The intensity of distress over the 1700 MIAs from Vietnam seems out of proportion when compared to the much higher numbers of missing in other wars [74,384 Americans missing from WWII and 8,051 from the Koran War]. The anger about MIAs in Vietnam was linked to the accusation that the US government intentionally left these men behind, because they did not care. Being purposefully left behind is a difficult narrative of war…Until the uncertainty can be resolved, the person is not yet dead or gone, and therefore we cannot mourn. One waits for them to come in through the door someday….
On Trauma Narrative:
How can the signs of trauma: the open mouth, the silent scream, the pain with no message, be effectively dramatized without importing some familiar story structure recognizable to the audience? The aim, then, appears to somehow be able to perform incomprehensibility, rather than trying to be comprehensible; to show absence through mime, gesture, tone, and stillness, rather than only to tell the story through word.
Theatre is itself a space that calls forth the absent. Like all art forms, theatre lies across the boundary of the seen and unseen, the symbol being a bridge that allows the imaginal and luminal worlds to reveal themselves. Theatre makes the absent present, whereas trauma makes the present absent. Trauma in fact may be viewed as the antithesis to theatre or art: trauma sucks the present into the unseen. Just as the trauma victim in a flashback cannot differentiate the event from a memory of the event, a “true act” in the theatre will lead to a moment where the audience cannot tell if the actors are acting, where the promise made by theatre that “all is pretend” is betrayed, and their fear is triggered.
Without some confrontation with the unbearable absence – the hidden perpetrator – in the trauma testimony, applied theatre may have only illusions of healing and repair to offer. We leave the theatre solaced by the victims’ resilience and satisfied with our attention to these issues, as the conditions and people that gave rise to the horrors swirl around us, unabated.