He.

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Hamlet

The force of this post is to ask a question which, in an odd way would have been less controversial or more absurd sounding one hundred years ago than it is today. The question is this: What if the line we were looking at here was not "He," suggesting that Bernardo was a man--a human being of male gender--but, instead "she."

Just as it makes historical sense that two people living in Denmark a thousand years ago might well have used the long life of the king as way to identify one another, that same history suggests that someone guarding a castle late at night would be a man, not a woman. And yet if art can imagine anything--Hulks and singing lions and kid wizards--it could certainly imagine women guards. (Wonder women?)

I want to get into something delicate here, which is how language makes us who we are and how systems of pwoer and systems of thought inter-relate because of how language works. But it may do, before saying more about that, to be direct on a few subjects like gender first.

As you know, the roles of women and men are a hot topic nowadays, far more so than when I went to school. On your campus, I would say the most heated and uncomfortable conversations were, first, the existence of God and, second, the role of gender. Many of the boys told me that women

and so let me preface this by talking directly about the

It will not surprise you to learn that when I taught at your school many of you called me "Sir" or "Mr. Ted." I wanted you to call me "Ted" but almost all of you refused and those of you who insisted on calling me Sir struggled when I asked you not to do so.

You said calling me "Sir" was a sign of respect and courtesy. This I appreciate to a degree. I don't mind having the respect of people around me if it is deserved and I think courtesy and manners have their place. I would rather you call me "Mr. Ted" then, for instance, "shit head" or "Mr. Jerk."

And yet calling me "Sir" in the context of you being a student and my being a teacher differs presumes I deserve respect for what I am not for who I am. In a sense, even before we can re-know one another you have decided to know me as someone above you or, in the classroom at least, with authority over you. Perhaps that is fine. Perhaps like the person asking for passports at the airport, that authority makes sense. Still, as in the airport, the system simply told you that older men who come into a classroom where you were a student are to be called by a designation of respect. It is noteworthy too that after many of you rolled your eyes at my odd teaching methods, you still called me "Sir." While I don;t think any of you actually wanted to call me "Mr. Jerk" I feel sure plenty of you wanted me to get serious and that whatever respect "Sir" was meant to connote had long since been lost.

Again, as with someone checking your passport at the airport, the power I have over you as teacher and the way word "Sir" points to that may only be a function of the stage we are on--the airport or the classroom--together.

But let's imagine a different stage for a moment. You pass me in the street and see that I have dropped my keys. Kindly and politely you say to me, "excuse me sir, I think you dropped something." In this case you do not know my name nor, really, what your relationship should be to me. But the stage, and your own kindness tells you what to do.

That is true because I am old and have white skin and you are young and have dark skin. Such markers are of great importance in our every day and, as I have already tried to suggest (and as you would know anyway) in the history that may shape how we see each other--how we recognize or "re-know"--those we share the world with and who appear on the stage of our lives.

f you look back you will see that I have not used any gendered pronouns in relationship to Bernardo or Fransisco. Sometimes causing odd articulations, I have not written, "When he asks, who's there? Bernardo . .. "

Given that I am from the land of the plays future, this might be odd. After all, I was willing to use the names Bernardo in a way only someone who had already arrived at the fourth line could know, why not draw on the knowledge of the fifth line too?

But--and I know this will annoy some of the boys out there--I want to suggest that

I want here to raise a few of the thorny issues of identity and gender but also, if possible, distinguish those from

that have been much more part of the cultural conversation in the last fifty years than they were before that.

Fifty years ago it would have been odd to see a black man play either of these charachters. Now, not so much. Odder still to see a women play these characters? Maybe less "historically" accurate, but if ALA were preforming Hamlet no one would get upset if were playing a male role. Again, just as the authority of pretend prevents us from joining the people on stage, it also allows Hulk's and Simba's to appear or woemen to play men, men play women.

But for all that, the way I want to get to he is as a second stake in knowledge, and not one of history, but one of language and identiy.

Bernardo, is that you . . . .

Rather than saying "yes, it is me" it is enough (and everything) to say "he."

It woudl be no less defining to say "she."

Now I imagine that if you asked every person on earth to get to this point in the play, before this line, almost all would say: "Bernardo is a dude." And if you asked them again, which gender do you think people expect this Bernardo character to be. an even higher percentage would say: Bernardo? A guard of a castle? In the Denmark of 1000 years ago? That's definitely going to be a man.

All true, all fair. Like the argument I made suggesting that Bernardo is more likely to be frightened than Simba, all our evidence--historical, cultural, experiential--would have led us to expect that Bernardo and Fransisco would be men.

But art has its own rules.

First of all, sometimes people set Shakespeare's plays in contemporary settings. And while male guards may still outnumber female guards, if the set we saw behind us were not a castle but rather ALA's campus, it might be conceivable that one or both of these characters were female.

Secondly if Hamlet were a different kind of play--one more like Wonder Women, women would have to be the guards.

Three points at least should be made here: First, these placeholders of who we are always impacting how we relate to and understand everything--think of what you presume if you walk into a room of woman rather than of men or if you know everyone around you is from your country or no one is--and

But back (or forward? ) to the first line of Hamlet, that question: "Who's there?" A question which, again, differs from, "Who are you?"

Who are you implies a kind of continuity: At the dance, in biology class, on the pitch, you are always Houcine or Melanie or Nduta.

Who's there? Well, that could be anyone. Anyone could be there at the party, there in class, there on that team.

The party includes the suave and the cool (like you) or some others, the uncool say, like your teachers or parents. The class includes your friends or strangers, the team fields the skilled or the novice.

In the right fashion or outfit or uniform, you can fool someone who does not know you into thinking you belong someplace you otherwise do not. How do you sneak into the fancy party? Wear a ball gown or a tuxedo. How would some friend of yours who decided, for whatever reason, to pretend to be an ALA student for the day or a week? Well, it will help to have a uniform.

People in armies, to give another example, recognize each other primarily by their dress. A major knows to obey a general solely because of the general's uniform. That understanding does not require any previous history between the two of them, necessitates no knowledge about who they each "are." In the right uniform, you can sneak into a place you do not belong and cause chaos, as often happens in spy movies.

If your friend sneaks into ALA and pretends to go to school there I hope they will cause love rather than chaos.

It seems true that if you answer "Whose there?" In a particular way, you can fool people about who you are. We want people to see us "there" in a particular way. How wonderful to be the cool person, the best player, the general in charge? While that might be fun in a spy movie, in life it is more treacherous because we often fool ourselves as much as those with whom we interact, feel that the right outfit does not make us cool, winning the game stamps us only so well, being in charge a kind of charade. Even if we can answer: who's there? With the honest response of "the cool" or "the winner" or "the leader," that does not guarantee we are those things, does not ensure we feel we are.

In the last post that the play is about division and solidarity (which was sort of true, sort of a lie, since the play is really about everything and nothing) and also said that we are not each other. I have called this post "Who's there #1 because we will keep returning to how we are two people at once: the role we play and the person we are playing that role. Because life is often an affair of this division, we imagine ourself chasing unity when really we are many people, one person in the "there" of class, another, say, when we are "there" at the party. Often we think that being the same person--being authentic--is the goal. We dislike 'players' who show up as act only and who are two-faced in one way or another.

And yet it is also true that we cannot help but be "there" differently not only in different settings but almost from moment to moment. This reality is not one to which we can always pay attention. If every moment of every day we asked ourselves, "who am I here?" we could never get out of our rooms. Still, in some philosophical sense that is what we must do, what the world demands because--at the philosophical level at which everything is always about everything and nothing and is always happening all the time--you can see the world always saying to us: "who's there?"

In one sense, we can say that being 'who's there' and also being who we 'are' is both a way to be divided and solid, as if dividedness and solidness both come from knowing that whomever I see in the mirror as Mr. Ted, I do not see there Jimcale or Melanie.

And yet . . .

More next time.

In a sense, what's happening is that those on stage are becoming more solid as other people and we are becoming more solid as ghosts.

If you can imagine such a person you might think you have the perfect person to "play" Bernardo. After all, this person is exactly like Bernardo in every way.

And yet Bernardo must not and cannot know we, the audience, are "there," must be divided from the person pretending to be Bernardo in this if in nothing else.

Can Bernardo imagine a world that looks like Denmark but is actually a universe of ghostly people watching everything people guarding a castle do? Maybe. After all, what constitutes any individuals knowledge, and where that knowledge becomes--by the nature of imagination--silly or insightful is a tough thing to determine.

But we have reason to believe that Bernardo is less likely to think the who that is there is The Hulk or an audience than it is some as yet unidentified person.

And that reason to believe comes from where? From our spending time on the stage of our lives in which, over and over, when we ask some version of "who's there?" we do not get answers from Marvel characters or from ghosts who appear out of nowhere. We know nothing about Bernardo but because we see a human form in front of us we make assumptions based on our experience about how this figure thinks and lives.

We are not each other.