ARTicles vol. 6 i.1b: Lifting the Veil

In 2001 the writer and actress Adelheid Roosen performed in the Dutch incarnation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Although she enjoyed the performance for what it was, delivering what she describes as a psychologically “enabling” experience for mostly privileged audiences, she also was struck by its fundamental orientation to Western women, encouraging openness in questions of anatomy and sexuality among women already living in an open society. Roosen grasped the powerful cultural impact that Ensler’s piece had on middle-class audiences and was struck by the theatrical model it offered — but she also saw additional possibilities. Despite its title, The Veiled Monologues is not intended as a corollary or a corrective to The Vagina Monologues. It is an entirely autonomous work that carefully lays out its separateness. Indeed, as if to get it out of the way at the outset, the first speaker directly addresses the relationship of this performance to that of Ensler’s drama: “Two and a half years ago Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues toured the Netherlands,” reads the script (composed in 2003). “These monologues led to the idea of interviewing women with an Islamic background. The interviews were both tentative and passionate. A journey as a tourist in your own land.”

During 2002 and 2003 Roosen actually undertook this journey, traveling throughout the Netherlands with her collaborators, interviewing women who were born and spent all or part of their childhoods in Muslim-majority countries — Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey, Mali, Iraq, Iran — but who now reside in Holland. Roosen’s piece weaves their stories, rituals, and thoughts into twelve monologues ultimately configured for three performers from an Islamic background (two were born in Turkey but later moved to Holland; one is second-generation). A fourth performer plays the saz, a long-necked Turkish lute, whose sound colors the emotion, tone, and rhythm of the evening’s stories.

Each monologue is based loosely on the words of the women from Roosen’s interviews, but they are sometimes composite portraits rather than strict retellings. The first explains how one woman came to live in the Netherlands; how her father, a laborer, had lived in a boardinghouse until he was able to send for his wife and children; but then, how he began to gamble, drink too much, and fall into fits of rage; and finally, after running afoul of the police, how he returned to Morocco, leaving behind a family with no connection to their new country. Another monologue tells the story of a Dutch woman who met and fell in love with a Turkish man and later converted to Islam in response to both the intimacy of their lovemaking and the close community she finds in such acts as communal ritual washing. This woman wears a veil but says she does not understand “why Islamic women don’t use the Koran as a weapon against their oppression.”

The early monologues contain beautiful meditations on nakedness, love, and desire, but as the evening progresses, more painful, sometimes disturbing, realities intrude: forced marriages and marital rapes designed to provide evidence of a Moroccan bride’s virginity; women seeking reconstructive surgery in order to satisfy the anatomical requirements of sexual purity. In the monologue called “The Poem of the Twelve Little Bells,” one immigrant woman who resisted female circumcision comes to understand what the tradition means to her mother and her grandmother, thereby comprehending the power that later, more assimilated, generations cannot experience. Others acknowledge the beauty of sexual acts and desire while also lamenting the passing of traditions that suppressed their expression. And ever-present in these narratives, lurking and immutable, is the specter of male violence and domination.

The company adjusts the configuration of the performance for each venue and context. Sometimes the performers begin the evening by sharing cups of mint tea and sweets with the audience, and depending on the audience and the space, the event can take on a heightened communal spirit far exceeding the clinical qualities of a traditional “aesthetic” theatre performance. Since 2003 Roosen’s company has performed the monologues in large state theatre houses in Europe as well as at nontraditional performance venues of all sizes — for example, adjacent to a mosque in Deventer and in community centers before groups of Muslim women, their daughters and sisters and mothers. Roosen emphasizes that the piece was created primarily for Western audiences, despite her successes in other settings. One of her greatest triumphs came in spring 2005, when Roosen enlisted the help of women legislators from across the political spectrum — led by the Green Party’s Femke Halsema and Liberal Party MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and arranged a performance before the Dutch Parliament.

Halsema first met Roosen in the early 1990s, when the artist was invited to help mediate a political rift between two generations of women within the Social Democratic Party. Halsema subsequently switched to the Green Party, but she remembers how Roosen “forced us to listen to each other” and even asked the caucus to draw pictures together to bring about a culture change in the party. “She has a talent for getting people more interested in each other,” the MP observed. “Citizens who oppose their own totalitarian regimes, who are afraid of Sharia, who oppose the suppression of women — these are Adelheid’s friends. You can find them everywhere: humanistic, liberated people. I think she is seeking humanistic sense in her sometimes hysterical enthusiasm. That is why she goes to the community centers, to parliament, to Turkey.”

The result, Halsema says, was a magnificent demonstration of the power of theatre to change the terms of public debate. “In the end, Adelheid performed in the old parliamentary hall. It was very beautiful, and there were a lot of people — I think about three or four hundred. There was a debate following, and that was so interesting because you saw male politicians, very Christian, male politicians, who were so moved, you saw people crying. I think it’s her biggest success.”

The monologues have also been performed in Ankara, as part of a large international theatre festival, and behind closed doors for a private, invited gathering in Jordan. The performances often spark conversations afterward, and this, of course, is one of the goals of a piece trying to open new cultural spaces; this ideal translates into a practical concern for Roosen, who makes sure that performance venues are suitable places for these kinds of interactions: literally, that the piece will have someplace to go.

Although it has been invited to similar centers and festivals, The Veiled Monologues were created by, and for, Western Europeans, and Roosen says it reflects a strange kind of arrogance when Westerners sometimes presume that the piece is intended exclusively for Muslims. “I made this for the West,” Roosen told me, over and over again, “I am from the West.”

The Veiled Monologues is careful to affirm the place and importance of Islam in the lives of those who embrace it. The monologues make visible — live, in real time, in close physical proximity — women, emotions, and beliefs that are hidden from the non-Muslim world and, some would argue, often are confined within Islamic culture itself. On the streets of Utrecht, or Birmingham, or Queens, many Westerners see only observant women who conceal or hide their bodies from public sight; they know that most of these immigrant women live deeply private lives at home, with little interaction with their new nations, but for them these women remain invisible, veiled in more than one sense. For anyone who has wished to have a conversation, an exchange with someone so different, The Veiled Monologues lifts this veil temporarily, as if it were a stage curtain revealing a drama never seen before, not only bringing Muslim women’s sexuality — and the pain it can cause — into public view, but also making its visibility a point of happiness. Given the strictures of tradition and religion, does this act of exposure constitute a cultural intervention? Certainly the circumstances causing these women’s pain could be interpreted as underlining the criticisms of dissident Muslims, such as Hirsi Ali and the Canadian writer Irshad Manji (born in Uganda), who envision a reformation, or realignment, of Islam to make it compatible with twenty-first-century standards of human rights and social equality. But the humor of the monologues — which are careful to respect Islam — also emphasizes the women’s ultimate strength and capacity. Perhaps The Veiled Monologues could only have been created in the Netherlands, a country that is today both the international center for human rights and a home of sexual liberation.

Tom Sellar is editor of Theater magazine and a professor at the Yale School of Drama.

This article is excerpted from “World Bodies: Adelheid Roosen and The Veiled Monologues,” published in Theater, volume 37, number 2 (published by Yale School of Drama and Duke University Press). Copies can be purchased at www.theater.dukejournals.org, and will be available for sale at Zero Arrow Theatre during performances of The Veiled Monologues.

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