Page 120 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

the felt perception that our own individual deaths might leave us part of an ever-

cycling web of life. And though we will all ultimately be lost to our particular

consciousness, such intense lyric exchanges remind us that what we were is still

to be a part of life wondrous and whole, and we owe therefore to the coming

memories of ourselves a full embrace of the endangered natural world. This,

then, is a ritual language whose purpose is to address the violence of the now

and to mediate the fear of individual death by bonding us more securely to the

endless round of life. Surely, this is kin to the experience of the initiates into the

Eleusinian Mysteries; surely, kin to the worshippers of Dionysus as his ritual gave

birth to drama, tragic, comic and the satyr play for which celebrants became

audience/participants. Such a theater embodies an ecofeminist ritual experience.

The Beekeeper’s Daughter was written and performed during the Bosnian war,

1993-95, and revived in a June 2016 production in recognition of the plight of

current refugees. The play is structured as a mystery in which the celebrants

(here I include the author/director, actor/characters and audience) must enter

deeply into the dark, delving down into the reaches of their unconscious minds,

there to relive dangerous secrets of the flesh and soul that might annihilate were

they not grasped in communion with one another. Inside this play, mass rape is

exposed, its lethality defused, and that which threatens to destroy becomes a

story whose telling and hearing allows for movement through trauma into a

created life.

Rachel, a human rights worker, brings Admira Ismic, a pregnant victim of a

Bosnian rape camp, to her ex-pat poet father’s idyllic Adriatic island home to ask

for help from her Aunt Sybil, a beekeeper, who raised Rachel after her poet-

mother’s suicide. Sybil bears a terrible secret about the circumstances of the

death of her own child that has left her with deep sight. She understands

immediately what fearful journey into her own psyche will be asked of her if and

when Admira is to survive. It takes more than half the play to arrive at Sybil and

Admira’s shared song in the forest. Everything Admira relates about the rape

2