Remembering Esiaba Irobi: at the International Research Centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin, 2009–2010

Abstract

ESIABA IROBI ARRIVED IN BERLIN in September 2009. He came as a sick man determined to fulfil his mission. At the time of his arrival we knew nothing of his illness or his mission - although the latter shone through the abstract of the project he was going to pursue during his stay as a Fellow at our International Research Centre interweaving Performance Cultures'. Despite his illness, he devoted all his time and energy to this mission - be it in his research, at conferences, or in teaching. Esiaba's research project, entitled 'There Is a Thief in All of Us: The Politics and Aesthetics of International Performance in the Age of Globalization', was meant, as he stated in the project description,to highlight the complexity and uniqueness of the 'interweaving' contributions that practitioners, communities, and societies from my part of the world, namely the African continent and its diasporas, have made to contemporary, global theatre practice and theoretical discourse.Through the planned book resulting from his stay he hoped to bring to the awareness not only of our international Fellows but also of the whole community of theatre researchers, practitioners, and audiences that in African societies new forms of theatre were being developed through interweaving, which he described as appropriations, borrowings, adaptations and graftings. Moreover, he succeeded in demonstrating to his interlocutors that these new theatre forms entail new theories, that they are exemplary models of a theatre which, through its means, develops its own theory, thus taking seriously the shared etymology of'theatre' and 'theory'.When Esiaba talked about this subject, he did so with the passion of a man possessed by the necessity of convincing others but who is also afraid of running out of time. He found it completely unjustified that the works of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkinc, Robert Lepage, or Robert Wilson, to name a few, are not only better funded but also regarded as more prestigious in international theatre circles than those of Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Femi Osofisan, Alvin Ailey, Ralph Lemon, Bill T. Jones, and others, whose theatrical creativity he deemed aesthetically much more innovative in their use of interweaving than the much-praised works of their white, often European, postmodern contemporaries. He relentlessly fought for the international recognition they deserve. Over and over again, Esiaba emphasized that their innovative approach is not adequately described in terms of aesthetics alone but that it is by its very nature highly political in itself.This inextricable interpenetration of the aesthetic and the political was also at the heart of Esiaba's contribution to the Dahlem Humanities Centre's workshop on Identity Politics. In his paper, which, as he put it, was meant to be as provocative as possible, he reframed the question of the workshop 'Who are we?' by asking about the task of artists and intellectuals in today's society. He was explicit in his answer: The task was to transform society, to turn it from an intransitive into a transitive one. Proceeding from Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, Esiaba explained how identity-politics always begins with you read and do not read, whereby reading referred not only to literature but also to dance, film, and painting along with all the other arts. By contrasting Invisible Man to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, still the most popular novel in the USA, and quoting some of its passages in which the narrator describes slaves as creatures of intelligence, small children running wild, with no place in the political structure of the USA, Esiaba confirmed Toni Morrison's assertion that racism is a form of education, as well as his own statement that identity-politics begins with what you read. Going through the history of African Americans from the first arrival of Africans on the new continent to Hillary Clinton's statement that Barack Obama is unelectable, and taking recourse to Carlyle's, Hume's, and other 'enlightened' philosophers' opinions on black people, Esiaba unfolded his talk as an ardent plea for an identity-politics that is not malignant: i. …