Narrating Violence: Chances and Constraints of Transforming the Subject in Relation to History in Sivan Ben Yishai's Play “Wounds Are Forever (self-portrait as the national poet)" (2021)
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | "There is so much violence/ In constructing a singular plot/ So much blood/ In insisting on one narrative" (Ben Yishai 2021: 35) – this is how the collective voice of murdered Klezmorim comments on the (hi)story in Sivan Ben Yishai's "Wounds Are Forever (self-portrait as the national poet)". Grounded in Shoah trauma the play unfolds in several 'fractals', switching between roles, time layers, locations and voices. The story echoes the 20th century violence, weaving together different perspectives, showing the ruptures in the story as well as in the subject - ultimately asking: How can the (hi)story of violence that keeps (re)producing itself be stopped, reflected, transformed in the act of narrating? Through disrupting narrative structures and dismantling the pictures we know, Ben Yishai sets out to open new rooms of thought inside the dialectic of determination and emancipation, that resides in subject, history and narration. In exploring Ben Yishai's play our contribution wants to trace this relationship of unavoidable tension. |
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