Disgraced - A Comedy - An Operatic Tragedy About Racism

Juan de Pareja, Diego Velázquez, 1650, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

On Wednesday, September 23d, my Rosemary and I attended the opening of the Arts Club Theatre production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning (2013) Disgraced. Disgraced was directed by Janet Wright.

I could write on how we enjoyed it or that the directing was able and tight. I could use that staple expression of theatre critics (I am not one of them, I am an amateur blogger) that Disgraced was “thought provoking.”

But I am not.

To anybody who has gotten this far I will forewarn them that this will be long-winded and opinionated. The play is central to two facts and one painting. Of the former it is about India before partition in 1947 and about racism. The latter about Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar’s magnificent portrait of  his assistant/slave Juan de Pareja.

But let me digress first.

Since I was a little boy in Buenos Aires I was surrounded by an awareness of social classes, religious intolerance and out and out racism.

Very much like in the United States and even Canada, Spanish colonizers of Argentina and then the leaders of the young nation in the 19^th century pushed the native “indios” West and South with armies. The few that remained became in the 20^th century “cabecitas negras” or little black heads. The upper social classes, traditionally the Catholic Church, the armed forces and the wealthy landowners looked down on the working class.

My Spanish-born grandmother told me that the Jews had killed Christ. I had a terrible time reconciling that with the fact that my best friend, Mario Hertzberg, who lived across the street, was Jewish.

In one of my trips to Buenos Aires in the late 80s, one of my nephews asked me if blacks (negros in Argentine Spanish) smelled differently. Much later he asked me how I could tell the difference between the Chinese and the Japanese. I told him (perhaps in jest, perhaps in my own confusion) that it was very easy and you knew right away. When there was doubt the person was Korean. And since my mother was from the Philippines I added that Filipinos and Malaysians were Malays and not Chinese at all.

In my years in Texas in the mid to late 50s Latinos were not yet Latinos. Texans who were not of that extraction simply called them spicks or Mexcans (without that i). So people of that extraction would anglicize the pronunciation of their names (much as they still do today with Latino baseball players). Reyes was Reys. And none of the people of this extraction (particularly my fellow students in my boarding school in Austin) would have ever been caught talking Spanish or admitting they could speak it.

In Mexico, where I lived for many years we often read that the biggest difference between pure blooded Native Mexicans and Spaniards was the abundance of facial hair in the latter. Thus until most recently dark-skinned Mexican policemen wore large moustaches and women sported unshaved legs beneath very nice sheer stockings.

When my Canadian wife and two Mexican born daughters arrived in Vancouver in 1975 I was astounded to notice that Native Canadians did not have red skin and that they looked very much like the Native Mexicans but could not speak Spanish.

It was later in the 70s when going to Saturday evening parties seemed to be in vogue that my Rosemary and I would get into our Rabbit and I would turn on the radio to a CBC Radio program that fascinated me. It was called Our Native Land. The music was splendid country and western but when that music “devolved” to chanting my wife seemed uncomfortable. Being a rude Latin American (not yet a Canadian) I would tell her, “This is the music of the people of your country. What is your problem? " This invariably made her angry and she would turn off the radio. To the detriment of the CBC I have always wondered why they canned this informative and entertaining program.

Also in the late 70s while printing in my Burnaby darkroom, one of my fave radio programs was the CBC’s Doctor Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show which starred two of the funniest men on earth, Bill Reiter and Norm Grohmann. One routine that was outrageously funny (it could not possibly run in 2015) was that of the Lone Deranger and his Faithful Friend Toronto. Toronto was played to perfection by Norn Grohmann with an extreme Punjabi accent. At the time there was a large influx of immigrants from what we used to call the Indian Subcontinent.

Stand-up comedians and jokes on the street made fun of the “Pakis.” The jokes were no different and no less cruel that the Jew jokes of the past centering on a perceived Jewish penchant for frugality. These immigrants became Canadians and one of them almost became Prime Minister but did manage to be a Premier of BC and a Minister of Parliament.

In the late 70s and 80s I took photographs for CBC Television and Radio. I noted that the only Native Canadian within the corporation was an actor in The Beachcombers. I never saw any as stagehands, cameramen or anywhere else.

An early job renting cars for Tilden Rent-A-Car came with instructions not to rent to anybody with the surname of George or John. When I asked I was answered, “Don’t rent to Indians.”

By now you must be getting my drift about my exposure to racism and my possible difficulty to be free of sin or able to cast that first stone.

When the folks from Hong-Kong started arriving in the 80’s the East Indians were forgotten. This influx was different from others. In San Francisco they called them Yacht people. That first wave was practical. They purchased Volvos. Don Docksteader made a mint.

In the 90s and in the beginning of the 21^st century I noticed that the Hong Kong Chinese did not talk to the Taiwan Chinese and that the Mainland Chinese avoided the Hong Kong Chinese and the Taiwanese. I was clued in by an older Taiwanese neighbour that the Mainland Chinese considered them unclean in that they had learned Japanese during the WWII occupation of Formosa.

This much newer batch of wealthy immigrants, simply because they come to a new world where they can begin anew, puts them in a situation where they are unlikely to want to communicate with their neighbours to which they refer as Caucasians. To me that use is almost no different from that unsavoury “Paki.” In my neighbourhood that is mostly populated by these immigrants I feel alienated. If it has taken me all these years to finally feel part of this city and this country I now have doubts about fitting in. As a joke (a terrible and perhaps even in bad taste) I tell my Argentine relatives that I want to go for an extended visit to Patagonia so that I will again feel at home, a home free of  BMWs and Mercedez Benzes.

But there is hope. Hope must be assimilation. We all know that sooner or later a second generation will adopt some of the ways of the locals like Tim Horton’s doughnuts and the clothing at Mark's Work Wearhouse.  But until that happens I believe that we in Vancouver are sitting on a smoldering and festering dose of out an out racism that goes (is this a new feature?) both ways.

I remember taking photographs, many times of Lieutenant Governor David Lam (1988-1995). We became friends. To me he did a splendid job of doing everything possible to bring the Caucasians and the Chinese together. I have not seen much of an attempt to keep working at that since. Articles on the expensive real estate in Vancouver in our daily newspapers seem to fan these flames which I believe will finally erupt.

All the above came to my head as I watched Disgraced. To those who are under 30 they might not understand the protagonist’s problem. His parents had been born in the Indian Subcontinent before 1947. They were Indian. After partition (and many have forgotten) there was India which was separated from the more Muslim population of West and East Pakistan. Can you imagine creating a country that is divided by another? Have we forgotten that East Pakistan became a hapless Bangladesh that seems to be at the mercy of monsoons, storms, flooding and famine?

So our protagonist, who wants to be upwardly mobile and mostly succeeds at it by calling himself an Indian even though he was born in a contemporary Pakistan. India, East Indian, even Hindu (or that Kipling Hindoo) has a better ring than Paki. And so Amir, played to perfection by Patrick Sabongui, like a red-egged Humpty Dumpty has a great fall.

A similar watering down of one's perceived heritage, used to avoid typecasting, is the Iranian immigrants in our city who call themselves Persians. To my knowledge there is no such country as Persia. 

The rest of the cast, Amir’s blonde wife, Emily (Kyra Zagorsky dressed to perfection by Costume Designer Barbara Clayden), the idealistic nephew Abe (Conor Wylie), Amir’s acquaintance but Emily’s artistic consultant and art show organizer Isaac (Robert Maloney) and his really upwardly mobile and black wife Jory (Marci T. House) is excellent.

I would like to congratulate Mr. Millerd, who is ahead of the pack in choosing Disgraced. My NY Times has informed me that his play will be the most produced play in the US this year.

Disgraced is a comedy that ends in tragedy like a good opera. But this is an opera with a biting reality that we who live in Vancouver should take heed of and try and work at it so that we, too, might not, be disgraced.

Velásquez’s painting of his household slave, and helper Juan de Pareja whom he freed is the inspiration for Emily who paints her Amir as such a man. It is perhaps appropriate that while Juan de Pareja’s features are negroid it is not known in fact if he was that or if he was a Muslim (was he a mulatto or a morisco?) Why appropriate? Some in the audience might have opined that Patrick Sabongui’s features weren’t …..enough. I am pleased his skin was not darkened. 

Doctor Bundolo was funny? Were many people offended? Is there an equivalent TV or radio show lampooning (Oh so gently! Please!) what is happening in Vancouver now? Would it make the situation worse? 

I believe that we must learn to laugh together. I believe we must persuade Bill Reiter and Norm Grohman to unretire. I believe that Disgraced is a warning.