Sojourn with sonorous ghosts, words from those w*men who do not wish to speak about themselves, but about a missing person who was better than them, or about un- named friends, or of the names of f*male fighters, who leave no written trace of themselves, who sometimes write on the others, those w*men who during revolutions have kept the secret, the provisions, the morals, the wounded alive, the archives, the olive trees, education for all, help for victims, rescue for prisoners, those w*men who prepare or repair the bodies, move without revealing anything, almost without breathing, who give birth and are/are not separated from their children for the struggle, and who then are set aside from the movements and the historic change which they themselves initiated, constructed, kept alive. 

There are their common points. For the rest, they are from 3 generations and 4 revolutions, all very different. What history owes to the w*men and young girls is not easy to picture, because revolution has often over-exploited them, and their resistance, their own way of doing war, is in opposition to the soldierly statues, gallantly demonstrat- ing their readiness for sacrifice. Infiltrating places of resist- ance dominated by men, and changing the deal; love and educate comrades; “not only offering one’s life, not only offering one’s heart—there is that song ‘Who said all was lost? I have come to offer my heart’ 1 —not only one’s heart, nor one’s death, but offering one’s daily life, that’s the most difficult thing” as confided to us by Maya, formerly a fighter with the Mexican FLNs.

Working reflections

After working on the perspectives of European artists more or less embedded in Palestine, I have observed that it was not just the rhetoric of propaganda that had to be deconstructed, but also the mechanisms of an active deafness, strategies applied by certain people in order not to hear and understand, that had to be breached. I have tried to tackle the action-of-not-hearing in the show Labo - ratoire Poison, making physical this action, not as some - thing “clean”, like being swept under the carpet: showing it rather as a physical blow against a person, by discrediting them, belittling their reasons to be alarmed, or sending them back to the administrative labyrinth, towards legal hazards, or false complaints offices which simply calm the claimant down and fill up the rubbish bins.

Is documentary theatre one of those dead ends, where the cries of the world come to be wiped out and disappear? How can we collectively stay in contact, outside the walls of the theatre, when it is impossible to be calm, calm, calm? Draw, strike back faster than the repression, it was an energy like that.

Then there were our meetings with revolutionary w*men, former fighters in the liberation struggles of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, then Palestine, Zapatist w*men from the years before the Chiapas uprising, and finally the Tunisian w*men who have experienced one or more revolutionary periods in Tunis. A desire to contra-write, as one carefully contradicts someone admired, to write for them, and against ourselves, delicately questioning official political transforma -  tions and intimate lives. Three things have had to be radically transformed:

– I have fallen into the habit of distrusting shows based on testimony alone, or accounts of personal exploits and suffering, rich in sentiment but poor in historical context, in meaning. 

– I have fallen into the habit of distrusting shows made to please a community, or the representatives of a struggle. I think my audience is largely indecisive, a group potentially linked to my political enemies, and towards whom I must direct at least some stings. 

– I have fallen into the habit of considering silence about the conflicts within resistance movements, and the issues of loyalty sealing the mouths of w*men, as being submission, a refusal to draw lessons from history and pass them on.

In a context of decolonisation, all these comments wit - ness to the whiteness and masculinity of my training. Oral history and intersectional anti-racist feminism at the heart of work, with the non-white perspectives of members of the team, without whom I can no longer conceive this work, have turned the tables.  13  Finally, it took me at least 5 years to write a show, and its running time could be longer than 4 hours. I no longer have the patience or the desire for this type of performance, because there is an on-going genocide in Palestine.

Transformations Opéra Radio bears witness to a contra- dictory desire to create a gentle place, and to be in a worse  mood than a knife; to move fast and do things softly:

– pull stories out of disguised rubbish bags in theatres,  to imagine them spreading outside the walls (the ra- dio, the song);  

– welcome these w*men into a collective intimacy and the comfort of listening, worthy of the solid feminist utopias of which they have defended;  

– quote the words of songs, or sing chronological land- marks, arranged by Iris Therasse, drawn from conver- sations we have had with the militants;  

– artificially restore audio documents, with their out- standing features and their vague memories, com- posed by David Stampfil, drawing inspiration from  descriptions, and documents said to be original—see the poem by the Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha: What you will find hidden in my ear.  

Thank you to the whole team, for their patience and  huge creative strength. 

Adeline Rosentein, April 2025 

Translated by Joanna Waller