How beautifully Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, is
placed here, with Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (a Cuban-born
abolitionist and advocate for the poor and immigrants, not a name I
knew) behind her... but it's the walking shoes in the foreground that
took my breath away, including those a weary walker has taken off to
rest. It's a wonderful, and sadly all too timely, shrine to the kaleidoscopic wonder that is a nation of immigrants.
But there's another side to everything, and I experienced it this evening at the new(ish) Perelman Arts Center at the World Trade Center, where the Under the Radar Festival presented the stunning Aboriginal play, "The Visitors," Jane Harrison's witty and profound imagining of the conversations Aboriginal elders will have had about what to do when Captain Cook's ships sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788. What are these people's intentions? Should we welcome them, as is our custom, or drive them away? What might we exchange with them, learn from them? They look unwell, surely we can heal them. Besides, they're visitors, and visitors leave - their own country must be calling them back - right?
There is much more humor and pathos in it. As the elders seek consensus, following fussy but effective protocols for discussion, hilariously updated into Aboriginal English, strange weather sends disturbing warnings. And a young man who had snuck up close enough to one of the big boats to be sprayed by someone's spittle, sickens. The performance was preceded by a land acknowledgment. We find ourselves in the unceded country (in the Aboriginal English meaning of that term) of Lenapehoking whose land and waters are, as they have always been, a place of exchange and encounter.
