Try again. Fail again. Fail better:

Sacred & Profane installation, October 3, 2009

This weekend, my partner —Galen Richmond— curated his fourth Sacred & Profane, an annual performance and installation event held in a former U.S. military fortification on Peaks Island, Maine. I’ll be honest: this event has always made me uneasy. The first time I attended, in 2001, coincided with my second-ever panic attack (the first being in Lisbon, Portugal, when I accidentally stepped in the path of a large parade, complete with brass instruments and giant puppets).

Sacred & Profane kicks off each year with a procession (see: parades) and ends at Battery Steele, an enormous gun battery built during the Second World War to protect Casco Bay and the Maine coast. Buried in the swampy middle of the island in a thicket of bittersweet, it has been home to numerous abandoned cars, burnt mattresses, traveling Vegan punks, and—I’m sure—all sorts of late night shenanigans. It is one of the most challenging performance spaces imaginable: no light, no power, lower levels flooded with polluted water, etc.

Abandoned hulk though it may be, however, it is still a military installation. This is a point on which Galen, a lover of non sequiturs and chaotic noise, raised by back-to-the-landers in rural Maine, and I —raised in a military family, and used to formality and order—differ. When he stepped in to curate his first S&P, in 2009, my uneasiness became the impetus for action: I felt I had to make a statement—I asked to make a piece.

Full disclosure: part of my rationale was my feeling that the political significance of the site had been papered over by an annual arts Bacchanal. And part was, of course, my desire to be one of the revelers contributing; I’ve been interested in creating works that cross disciplinary boundaries, and shy about doing so, for years. But the last of it was, I’m loathe to admit, envy. Galen’s role as curator, and his complete absorption in the task, made the tension between my fascination with the site and the reality of my own risk-averse nature unbearable. I decided I would make a piece that deliberately went against the grain of the event.

(Oh, waiting for my ugly emotions and hubris to boomerang and whack me in the nose? Don’t worry, they will!)

As it happened, I had a topic that suited; a topic in which I had a personal investment: the U.S. and British governments forced deportation of the inhabitants of a small island in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia, a part of the Chagos Archipelago. My father had been stationed there for a year without my mother and me in the mid-70s, during the period when the island was being turned into a giant airstrip, its naturally deep lagoon made home to destroyers and supply ships. Needless to say, none of this was discussed at the dinner table; I didn’t learn about what happened on Diego Garcia until early 2009, when, in a moment of curiosity, I googled the island’s name.

Here is one version of the story (in my words):

In the late 1960s, the United States government made a secret deal with the British: the Crown agreed to “lease” a small, strategically located island — Diego Garcia, a part of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean — to the U.S. for the purposes of creating a military base. Located within less than a day’s travel from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Pakistan, and other potential targets, Diego Garcia was selected as an ideal site for supporting U.S. military operations in the Middle East and East Asia.

At the time, the island was populated with nearly 2000 people, the descendants of freed slaves and Indian indentured servants who had worked the coconut plantations in the British Indian Ocean Territory. As part of the sale of Diego Garcia by the English to the United States, it was agreed that the Chagossians, as the islanders are called, would have to go.

Initially, islanders who visited neighboring Mauritania to get provisions or seek necessary medical help were not allowed to return. Then, food supply ships were diverted from the island. British soldiers rounded up the islander’s pet dogs and livestock and killed them en masse. Finally, all of the remaining people on the island were forced onto boats, and taken to a prison on Mauritania. Months later, they were released without provision for housing, work, or food.

Since that time, the Chagossians have lobbied Parliament unsuccessfully for restitution, access to ancestral burial grounds, and permission to return to their home.

And here is another version (also in my words):

In the late 1960s, the United States government made one in a series of strategic, forward-thinking moves that would allow the U.S. military to maintain a strong presence in the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean territories. Anticipating social unrest and economic instability in the Middle East, India, and East Asia, the United States government sought a viable base from which to safeguard critical Western interests in the region.

After extended analysis aimed at finding a site with minimal population and favorable environmental conditions, the U.S. settled on the island of Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago. A former colony of the British, Diego Garcia was leased to the United States through a confidential diplomatic exchange.

Once the small population of islanders was transferred to neighboring Mauritania, the U.S. set about transforming the largely undeveloped site. Over 2000 “Seabees” — the Navy’s construction battalion — were deployed to construct a facility for arming and supplying aircraft carriers, submarines, and maritime air patrol squadrons.

Diego Garcia has been instrumental in supporting U.S. military efforts in the war on terror, and the continued maintenance of the site is vital to our national security.

My concept was simple: in the first room inside Battery Steele, I would set up a processing station, manned by two sentries, the actors Ted Homer and Kristina Balbo. The dank room, battle-scarred, graffitied walls, and dim light contributed (in my mind) to the kangaroo court sense of an irrational and unjust system of decision making. Each person who entered the processing station would be assigned a “rank” and given a white kerchief designating them to be “military personnel,” or an orange kerchief that indicated they were “islanders.” They would then receive a green card with an explanation of the situation as outlined above, depending on their designation, with this additional warning:

All military personnel must wear white kerchief according to guidelines below. Any personnel exhibiting sloppy or inappropriate attire at any point during operation hours are subject to disciplinary action. OR: All Chagossian Islanders/dependents must wear orange kerchief. Any Islander/dependent found on the installation without proper identifying dress during operation hours is subject to fines and/or incarceration.

And now for the backfire, the bounce back, the ricochet:

I had assumed that the Sacred & Profane audience, provoked by being ordered around by people in uniform, and mystified by what the different kerchiefs signified, would seek out the other side of the story. Yes: I’d imagined that over 500 people entering a pitch dark public space in anticipation of a wild free-for-all were going to READ. Not just read, but engage in a thoughtful discussion about what they’d read.

To make matters worse, the way I’d set it up, there were more green cards with the military version of the story. This was connected to my initial visual image of the project: I envisioned hundreds of people wearing different colored kerchiefs, so many that the orange would be overwhelmed by white. I wanted the “ganging up” of the white kerchiefs to be felt by the people in attendance, to force them to question what was going on.

Instead, it was a big muddy blur. People in homemade party hats cavorted by. A guy with a “pull my finger” electrode thingamajig took photos. Half-naked go-go dancers trotted by in feathers and face paint. Somebody inside the Battery’s main tunnel was skronking on a saxophone, trying to murder all sound.

But the most difficult aspect of the piece’s failure to communicate was my own inability to view the story of Diego Garcia in what I felt was the RIGHT way. As a military brat, I felt torn, as ever, between two understandings:

What happened on Diego Garcia was (and continues to be) a deliberate evil perpetrated by the U.S. and British governments against a people with no voice and no recourse to justice. They will never be allowed to return home, in spite of repeated appeals to Parliament, public outcry, and recently, a documentary and a book about their plight. Their island is no longer a tropical paradise; it is a heavily fortified base, just a five-hour flight from Baghdad.

And yet, from a military, strategic perspective, seizing Diego Garcia was (and continues to be) a brilliant move. My dad, a career naval officer, sacrificed a year in the life of our family to being stationed on DG —the year I entered kindergarten—because he’d received an order from his commanding officer. We see things very differently, my Dad and I, but he is nonetheless my father, and I respect him.

As the Sacred & Profane performance unfolded, I felt literally torn in two — a creature of two worlds: one governed by my sense of humanity, and one governed by my understanding of strategic intelligence. I could find no way to make these two understandings co-exist. The fact that I had made twice as many cards outlining the military version of events made me feel keenly that the “wrongness” of my two-sided understanding was writ large. I felt exposed, a pretender to the liberal sympathies I espouse.

I am unable to find a tidy conclusion to this essay; it is clear that I still have a tremendous amount of work to do with this material. But there are two things that stay with me: the need to take more, and greater, creative risks, and the need to be ever on the alert for just how powerful language is in manipulating our perceptions. The true moment of discovery in creating that piece for the 2009 event was this:

In the my “pro-military” version of what happened in Diego Garcia, the seemingly benign word “transferred” masks a terrible reality outlined in the “pro-islander” version:

Initially, islanders who visited neighboring Mauritania to get provisions or seek necessary medical help were not allowed to return. Then, food supply ships were diverted from the island. British soldiers rounded up the islander’s pet dogs and livestock and killed them en masse. Finally, all of the remaining people on the island were forced onto boats, and taken to a prison on Mauritania. Months later, they were released without provision for housing, work, or food.

The Chagossian people continue to fight for reparations, for a return to their homes, and for their voices to be heard. For a well-researched and passionately political response to their plight, refer to the book Island of Shame, by David Vine, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C.

Read. Discuss.

Thank you to my excellent actor friends Ted Homer and Kristina Balbo, to Allen Baldwin for attempting to film the mayhem, to Allie Munier and Heidi Killion for invaluable help assembling costumes and sets, and to Jon Donnell for the excellent photographs. Your contributions were an unqualified success.