ABSTRACT
The second of the two historical plays Cixous wrote for the Théâtre du Soleil, L’lndiade ou I’lnde de leurs rêves—“Indiada or the India of Their Dreams,” first performed and published in 1987, concerns the final stages of India’s struggle for independence and the partition of India and Pakistan. The published play includes a series of Cixous’ “Ecrits sur le Théâtre”— “Writings on the Theater,” in which she outlines her view of theater and explains why it is important to her. In the text from the “Writings” presented here, “The Place of Crime, The Place of Forgiveness,” Cixous repeats her insistence expressed in the “Conversations” that accompany “Extreme Fidelity,” 1 for example, that the theater has provided her with an arena in which she has been able to move away from the self-preoccupation of the fiction to engage with others “much more and altogether other than Me.” Recalling the suggestion of “The Terrible But Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk King of Cambodia” that “truth lies concealed in all of us” 2 and only a return to the “inner pathways” Sihanouk, for example, has lost 3 can alter the course of human tragedy, Cixous argues here that theater is precisely the place where truth may be mirrored back to us, enabling us to “see what we do.” This mirroring is vital since, she stresses, history is the product of our individual struggles to perceive and act on what is true: “what causes wars, peace, massacres, heroisms—looking closely, pulling back the curtain, are tiny and powerful humans.” Reiterating the implication of her earlier fiction, 4 Cixous believes theater’s refusal to shy away from death—“this source of so much meaning”—is especially important in the mass-mediatized world of the present, in which human emotions and the fact of mortality are walled over.
