Abstract
Black Earth Rising includes only one brief reference to Hamlet, albeit in a decisive moment concerned with unearthing the covered grave of forgotten parents whom the protagonist has only just begun to remember. It is thus a highly self-reflexive moment in which the link to a hitherto neglected antecedent is introduced, a link that invites viewers to reconsider the action of Black Earth Rising in the light of Hamlet. This chapter discusses how the series translocates Hamlet’s detection of a hidden political crime to post-genocide Rwanda in its international relations. It focuses on the tension between remembrance, revenge, and reconciliation, on the ghostly apparitions of the dead father, on the different endings of the revenge tragedy and the series, and on the meta-adaptational plant imagery in Black Earth Rising.
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Notes
- 1.
As Alexandre Dauge-Roth points out, all cinematic representations of the Rwandan genocide so far have also been addressed mainly to Western audiences (2010, 170).
- 2.
Recently, de Grazia has emphasised the importance of (the loss of) the realm for Hamlet, too. De Grazia’s phrasing is interesting with regard to the fabric metaphor of Black Earth Rising: “the importance of the realm to Hamlet […] does more than give substance to his state of dejection at the play’s start: it knits him into the fabric of the play. The play opens with threatened invasion and ends in military occupation. Framed by territorial conflict, it stages one contest over land after another”; “The language of the play itself upholds the attachment of persons to land, human to humus. Flesh and earth repeatedly coalesce through overlaps of sound and sense” (2007, 2; 3).
- 3.
In the Folio edition, Hamlet explicitly acknowledges this correspondence before the catastrophic finale: “But I am very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (F 5.2.75—78; Appendix I, 502; see Levin 2002, 222).
- 4.
As de Grazia has pointed out in her reading of Hamlet, “[e]very burial service performed in compliance with Elizabeth’s Book of Common Prayer served as a reminder of this elemental affinity: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ the priest is instructed to say after the body has been laid in the earth and as earth is cast upon it. So, too, the formulaic wording of last wills and testaments, after commending the soul to God, consigned the body to ‘the earth whereof it is made” (2007, 32).
- 5.
As Robert Stockhammer’s study Ruanda: Über einen anderen Genozid schreiben has shown, the Rwandan genocide is habitually analysed as the ‘other’ genocide with reference to the Holocaust (2005, 66). In an article on the fate of tragic art in modernity, the philosopher Jay Bernstein has argued that social agreements on what counts as absolute evil provide a moral compass that had previously been provided by tragedy. In the course of his argument, he comments on the paradox that emerges when a unique historical event like the Holocaust is used as a point of reference for other unique events: “[b]y becoming exemplary, the Holocaust hence becomes a bridging metaphor for understanding major historical events—the extermination of the Herero people, the evil of Stalin’s gulags, the Armenian, Cambodian, and Rwandan genocides, and so on. The Holocaust’s presumed uniqueness is, precisely, what engenders new terms of moral comparability, and so its nonuniqueness” (2009, 90).
- 6.
Stockhammer notes that Levi is the most frequently quoted author in texts about the Rwandan genocide that refer to the Holocaust (2005, 163).
- 7.
Like Hamlet, Ophelia suffers from the loss of her father, whose death is obscured, and, like Hamlet, she either acts mad in order to communicate truths she otherwise cannot utter or has actually lost her mind. The play also emphasises the gendered differences in their response to loss, however, including Hamlet’s turn to revenge and Ophelia’s self-harm (Aronson-Lehavi 2014, 72; Tassi 2011, 90).
- 8.
See Steward (2008, 177–78) on the relevance of sharing drinks as a sign of establishing consensus and the fear of poisoned drinks in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda.
- 9.
The fact that viewers get closer to the apparition than Kate herself can be seen as a remediation of the Globe’s theatrical situation, where “[h]aving been lowered via the trap door, the actor playing the Ghost would be standing literally on the same level as the groundlings. His descent leaves him about five feet below the stage, with only thin panels separating him from the lowest members of the audience” (de Grazia 2007, 42).
In both Hamlet and Black Earth Rising the corpse’s apparition literalises the racial categorisation of the father. Whereas the half-decayed hand of the series’ revenant is deep black, in Hamlet, the father’s whiteness is exaggerated as part of the play’s “association of whiteness and vulnerability” (Erickson 2002, 210): “there is the metamorphosis of the former ‘fair and warlike form’ (1.1.47) into the ‘very pale’ countenance of his current state (1.2.230–33). This paleness, however, is soon further transformed by the Ghost’s graphic disclosure of the physical process of his death. The action of the ‘leprous distilment’ results in a whitening that is both internal—‘And with a sudden vigour it doth posset / And curd, like eager droppings into milk, / The thin and wholesome blood’—and external—‘And a most instant tetter barked about, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, / All my smooth body’ (1.5.64–73)” (Erickson 2002, 210).
- 10.
In its emphasis on the continuous possibility of an innovative blossoming in new plots, such an adaptation strategy differs from Cartelli’s idea that “reenactments could be said to alter their own reproductive DNA in ways that block or discourage replication” (2019, 5).
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Wald, C. (2020). Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots. In: Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV . Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4_4
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