MIXED EMOTIONS

The Great Yes, The Great No

William Kentridge

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

For some people the day comes

when they have to declare the great Yes

or the great No. – Cavafy

Cal Performances presented the Bay Area premiere of William Kentridge’s new collaboration, The Great Yes, The Great No, on a recent chilly, rain-sprinkled March evening, to a standing ovation in a warm, dry, and packed Zellerbach Hall in the “People’s Republic of” Berkeley.

Truly, it was manna to the baffled left these days of a monstrous politics. And a stimulus and wonder even to skeptics of both progressives and reactionaries; echoes of Cavafy, Dante, and Carlyle were clearly not unintended. Even of Coleridge and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; even of the Narrenschiff – the “ship of fools” of the Middle Ages and Katherine Anne Porter’s bleak, modern fable.

The work, co-commissioned by the ever-questing Cal Performances for its Illuminations series (the theme this year is “Fractured History” – a timely phrase, as we threaten to crumble into a humblingly fractured present), is the latest in the South African artist’s theatrical undertakings, culminating most recently in Berkeley with the amalgam of fantasy and prophecy Sybil two years ago.

In Kentridge’s new work, we are introduced to a cargo ship repurposed for refugees, ploughing the seas of midcentury on a voyage to escape a Nazified Europe for temporary asylum in the New World. In March 1941, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle left Marseilles for the Caribbean French colony of Martinique, bearing several hundred refugees, including luminaries such as “the pope of Surrealism” André Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, novelists Victor Serge and Anna Seghers, and the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss: a ship of geniuses, culture avatars, and anti-imperialists fleeing a continent of psychopaths for the utopia of the irrational, of “revolution,” of “freedom.”

A curious but relevant fact about Martinique: it was the one island Napoleon allowed slavery (according to the libretto) when he abolished it throughout the Empire – and why? Because of Europeans’ insatiable desire for the sugar Martinique was known for and could not produce “economically” without its slaves.

Kentridge haunts his ship with figures from multiple eras binding the imperial center to the tiny Antillean island: the Martinican poet, and father of anti-colonialist theories of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and his wife Suzanne; the fellow Martinican sisters Nardal, whose Parisian salon incubated negritude with the Césaires and African writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas; and other relevant phantoms: Napoleon’s beloved Martiquinaise Joséphine Bonaparte and the Martiniquais, and future revolutionary theorist, Frantz Fanon.

We were treated with Kentridge’s characteristically virtuosic blend of spoken word, dance, dream scene and song, surreal cartoon and reversed film sequence, liberated signifiers, extravagant costumes and portrait masks for each of the avatars, dancing tools and animated utensils (including one of his signature mottos, a twitchy, goofily animated typewriter), in this modern version of classic singspiel.

It took off on a wildly surrealist ride across time and geography, with a collage libretto combining quotations from the figures named and such notable subversives as Bertolt Brecht. Narrative is not Kentridge’s strong suit, and his attempts in that direction usually run aground on pancake-flat characters and prosaic plots (he has yet to quite realize that a story without logic (his explicit pet peeve, in this work, being reason and all its affiliates) is like a decalcified hippo: somewhere between a glob and a blot. He is at his best when indulging his imagination and letting poetry suggest where prose merely deafens.

At the head of the ship stood its captain, an African version of the classic Greek Charon, boatman of the underworld ferrying souls to their final ends. The captain (a brilliantly insouciant Hamilton Dhlamini) dropped many of the evening’s most provocative lines. Another performance especially shone; Nancy Nkusi as Suzanne Césaire, whose recital of the verses of her spouse Aimé, from his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, provided much memorable imagery. Not least was her haunting appearance in a black-and-white film scene, crawling across a banquet table surrounded by tuxedoed gentlemen with the heads of coffeepots and the cannibalistic appetites of all empires.

A constellation of quotations were projected or spoken or sung, or all three, across the magic lantern–like astrolabe that backed the stage: “The Dead Report for Duty,” “The Boats Flee, But to Where?” “The World Is Leaking.” “These Are My Old Tears.” “The Women Are Picking Up the Pieces.”

And a Chorus of Seven Women sing, dance and comment on the mystico-political voyage throughout, translated into the native languages of the singers: Sepedi, Setswana, siSwati, isiZulu, in the music of Nhlanhla Mahlangu.

A small, tight musical ensemble accompanied the proceedings throughout, led by the percussionist and composer Tlale Makhene.

For all the cornucopia of imagery, word wonder and music, my feelings about the evening were obstinately mixed. What I loved were the endlessly inventive visuals Kentridge can always be counted to magic out of the bricolage of his imagination, the 360-degree projections of the ship, the gimcrack costuming, the slants of film and dashes of music, the rich, sly humorous poetry, both visual and verbal, that illuminates, in flash after flash, as much as it entertains.

But there was also an element of agitprop, of heavy-handed prose hectoring and editorializing as it blundered into the show – the poetry, singing, told us endlessly more than the political prosing, shouting, which performed the bizarre act of shipwrecking itself. And when there are positive references to such monstres sacrés as Trotsky and Stalin, I, for one, am out. An artwork makes a poor editorial: when it trades poetry for slogans, it thrills only a few converts.

There is, unhappily, an even more serious point to make. Something about the enterprise rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Late winter 2025 on planet Earth hardly seems the best time and place to be celebrating “the irrational.” Whatever we are facing, politically, historically, it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a “tyranny of reason” or the authoritarianism of the bourgeoisie. In the current moment, I, and I suspect many others, feel trapped inside a global surreal nightmare from which we may not be able to escape. A surrealist fantasy celebrating unreason seems perhaps not the most appropriate message for a world on the verge of shipwrecking on the reef of insanity.

Those of us cursed with a reflexive skepticism may not care much to embark (without security guarantees) on so dubious a journey. For every “Great Yes,” there is sometimes a small but potent “no.”

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.