Indigenizing Cassandra: Resisting Colonizing Readings in Marie Clements’ Age of Iron View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Aara Suksi  

Marie Clements is a Métis playwright and media artist living in British Columbia. Her 1993 play Age of Iron is an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women. Clements dismantles Euripides’ text, fragmenting its temporal and spatial structures, and re-combines these fragments with stories of the trauma, loss, and resilience of Indigenous peoples who, like the women of Troy, have had their own children, lands, and culture taken from them and whose voices, like Cassandra’s, are not heard or believed. As Sheila Rabillard observes, “Through the alien and indigenized imagery of Troy, Clements asserts a homeland which is also a place of exile.” Acknowledging my own position as a white woman privileged by colonialist culture, and deeply implicated in the propagation of the western Classical canon, I explore how Clements’ play responds to the question of how it might be possible to resist colonial culture even while speaking the language and mobilizing the myths of the colonizer. I focus particularly on Clements’ character Cassandra, who suffers Apollo’s rape as part of her traumatic experience of residential school and relives it while institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. This leads into a consideration of the reciprocity of influence between the two texts. How does a reading of Clements Age of Iron transform our understanding of Euripides’ Trojan Women?