Conextualizing Homebody/Kabul Essay -- Essays Papers

Conextualizing Homebody/Kabul In the aftermath of the bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11 th, Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul has received remarkable acclaim from its opening in New York City in December of 2001. Written â€Å"before September 11th, before we began bombing,† Kushner’s play is a startling look into Kabul, Afghanistan, a world once ruled by sharia hudud and strangled by poverty, violence and the world’s apathy (Homebody/Kabul 144). It chronicles the story of one middle-aged British woman, the ‘Homebody,’ and her life-changing encounter with an Afghan refugee in an import shop in London, her subsequent flight to and disputed death in Kabul, and the stories of her daughter and husband who travel to Kabul to recover her. Brushed with dark humor and realism, this play offers a haunting glimmer of the ignorance the West to war-torn countries of this world. The Homebody only appears for the opening monologue, an excerpt of which I have selected to perform, yet her character sets the plot for this entire award winning drama. Throughout her monologue, her speech is lyrical, loquacious to the point of being ridiculous, and in moments, magnificently contrived to illumine connections between her life and the sorrow of others. As the play opens, she is seated in an armchair on stage, a guidebook to Afghanistan in her lap, which she proceeds to read aloud, interrupting herself with tangent thoughts that spiral and twist away from any tangible organization of ideas, save that of relying the story of the man in the hat shop and the imaginary world she creates from this encounter. The excerpt I have selected is remarkable for the gravity of feeling the Homebody relates, and the sensitivity she exhibits, empathizing with ... ...bombs rendered them. In preparing the delivery this monologue, I have learned much about Islamic extremism and my own ignorance of the suffering of the Afghan people, women in particular. As an avid advocate of reading and writing for every person, I found the restrictions placed on Muslim women in particular to be hideous. Through this drama, I have learned that extremists of a faith to not constitute the spirit of a faith, and that Islam is a religion as equally misinterpreted by the public as Christianity is today. Wherever people are permitted to let their own political and cultural philosophies override the truth and tradition of sacred scripture, there is a crookedness of reality; Afghanistan was one such nation, and its pain depicted in this play is real and running with living blood today. I hope to do justice to this depiction in the delivery of my monologue.