“We know you’re not Somalia”: Radical Performance and Canadian-American Exile in Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil

Abstract

“Are you ready Mogadishu? Butt out your cigars and wipe the buckets of sweat from your really black black brows, put your stumps and prostheses together and give a GREA1’ BIG CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WELCOME TO ALI AND ALI!” (Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai: 11-12). The opening lines of The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil by Canadians Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai neatly package grotesque orientalist images of third-world abjection and suffering together with the rhetoric of the War on Terror and the clichés of cornmodified Western pop culture. A brutally funny metatheatrical satire, the play ridicules in equal measure the American response to 9/11 and Canada’s own hypocritical embeddedness in the ideology and misadventures of the new American imperium. But the play’s setting is not Mogadishu. “We know you’re not Somalia”, Middle Eastern exiles Ali and Ali admit to the audience. “We know where we are” (12). Where they are is within the “utopian cartographies” of Guillermo Gômez-Pena’s Fourth World, “a conceptual place where the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas meet with the deterritorialized peoples, the immigrants, and the exiles” (Gômez-Pena 1996: 6, 245). It is at one and the same time a Canadian theatre, a refugee camp — ” a vaguely tent-like structure [… with] laundry (socks, some underwear) drying on the set” (Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai: 11) — and that border zone on the margins of American imperial power where Canadian politics and Canadian theatre are always already engaged.

An earlier incarnation of this chapter was published under the title “Bombing (on) the Border: Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as Transnational Agitprop”, Modern Drama 51 (Spring 2008): 126-44. My thanks to Modern Drama for permission to publish this revised version here.