Catherine Filloux: Staging "Lemkin’s House"

We spoke with Catherine Filloux, an award-winning French Algerian American playwright and librettist whose work has engaged human rights, war, and mass atrocity for more than three decades. Her plays and operas have been produced internationally, including in New York, Bosnia, and Cambodia, and she has written extensively about genocide, post-conflict memory, and the moral responsibilities of law and witness.

In this conversation, we focus on her play Lemkin’s House, a surreal and deeply human exploration of Raphael Lemkin in the afterlife. We discuss the invention and political life of the word genocide, the tension between law and realpolitik, the burden of “never again,” and how theater can illuminate memory, survivor’s guilt, and moral responsibility without reducing them to simple messages.

Catherine reflects on staging genocide for a broad public, on the role of women in conflict narratives, and on how art can function not as instruction, but as a prism through which audiences confront complexity for themselves.

00:00 — Opening and Introduction

02:22 — Catherine Filloux’s Background and What Drew Her to Writing About Genocide

07:15 — How Do You Portray Lemkin’s Complexity for a Broad Public Audience?

17:31 — How Does the Play Expose the Legal and Political Controversies Surrounding the Word “Genocide”?

23:36 — How Does Lemkin’s House Weave Law, “Never Again,” and the Tension Between Memory and Forgetting?

29:21 — Is Lemkin a Hero or a Political Instrument? Humanizing Law, Power, and Realpolitik

36:40 — Why Include Dark Humor, Like the Termites Scene, in a Play About Genocide?

39:28 — When Suffering Competes: What Does the Play Suggest About Comparative Victimhood?

42:21 — How Do You End a Play Set in the Afterlife of Raphael Lemkin?

Transcript

0:00

With Lemkin, I found a personal hero. I found somebody who I deeply identified with, one of the reasons being that he invented a word, which is such an extraordinary thing. Another thing being that he is a lawyer. And I write oftentimes about law because I feel that after so many years of writing plays where there are lawyers in them, I can say that law gives me hope in many ways. So Lemkin came to me as a yearning to not write a biography, but to write a kind of surrealistic look at what it means to feel responsible as a human being. Today we speak with Catherine Filloux, an award-winning French Algerian American playwright and librettist whose work has engaged questions of human rights and genocide. Her plays and operas have been produced internationally, including in Bosnia and Cambodia. In this episode, we focus on her play Lemkin’s House, a theatrical exploration of Raphael Lemkin in the afterlife. We discuss the invention of the word genocide, the political struggle behind its recognition, and how theater can illuminate memory, law, and moral responsibility. Lemkin’ s House received the 2006 Peace Writing Award from Omni Center for Peace and was produced by Body Company at the McGinn-Cazale Theatre, and at 78th Street Theatre Lab in New York City. In 2005 it was performed in the Bosnian language at the Kamerni Teatar in Sarajevo, Bosnia. It also received a reading at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2005. Catherine, tell us about your background, your experiences and what motivated you to write so extensively on genocide as a playwright? Thank you so much, Sabah. It's a pleasure to be here with you and Luis. I am the child of immigrants. My father was from the center of France and his part of the country was occupied by the Nazis. And my mother is from Algeria. So one of the things that my background holds is war. And my grandfather actually fought in World War I and in World War II, I was a child of immigrants and was very involved in human rights from an early age. I think based on my background with my family and also my personality. And I began to write about genocide when I started a story about women who suffered from psychosomatic blindness after what they witnessed during the Khmer Rouge regime. And that play that I wrote is called “Eyes of the Heart”. I'm a playwright who has now been writing about human rights for 30 years. I'm also a librettist who writes operas about a variety of themes. So when I started writing about the Cambodian genocide, it was when we were starting to learn stories of survivors. And much of my work has focused on women. I did an oral history project with a group of Cambodian women refugees in the Bronx, which lasted for about five years. I kept on trying to understand the Cambodian genocide, and that led me to Cambodia, where I did much work in terms of revitalization of the arts. I wrote four plays about Cambodia. My second play was “Silence of God”, which was about Pol Pot,“Killing the Boss” was a play about a playwright, much like myself, going to a country much like Cambodia and killing the head of state. It was a dark comedy. And then I had two operas, “Where Elephants Weep” and “New Arrivals”, as well as “Photographs From S-21”, which has to do with Tuol Sleng. So that particular micro look at genocide, where I really looked deeply into U.S. complicity, PTSD, survivors, led me to Lemkin. And With Lemkin, I found a personal hero. I found somebody who I deeply identified with, one of the reasons being that he invented a word, which is such an extraordinary thing. Another thing being that he is a lawyer. And I write oftentimes about law because I feel that after so many years of writing plays where there are lawyers in them, I can say that law gives me hope in many ways. So Lemkin came to me as a yearning to not write a biography, but to write a kind of surrealistic look at what it means to feel responsible as a human being. And my play “Lemkin’s House” takes place in the afterlife, when Lemkin has died, and into his life comes Proxmire, the senator who gave 3,000 speeches on his behalf. And from there goes on to the Rwandan genocide and to the Bosnian genocide. So the focus of our interview today, and this is the first time we're actually welcoming a playwright on the platform, and we're very excited about that is, we are focused on “Lemkin’s House”, which was one of the plays that you worked on genocide. Now we've heard you speak about looking up to Lemkin as a personal hero. But what I like is, although you said that, when I read the play, I felt that you did not just portray him as a hero. You also brought out the darker sides of humanity and his darker side as well, which I was able to understand or grasp very quickly because I'm a genocide studies scholar. But my immediate question then is that while my audience usually consists of scholars in the field or students in the field and therefore they already have a mastery of the basics, you are dealing with a wide public, with a public made of different people with different backgrounds, different sensitivities, different sensibilities. And so how did you manage and this is for me the most important question, how did you manage to be able to capture all of these different nuances, which we will speak about later during the interview, But how did you manage to like, face this challenge of capturing all these nuances, knowing that your audience is going to come from so many backgrounds? Thank you. That's a great question. So I'm an artist and that is the first answer. I create something which is generative work of art that comes from my imagination and I create it like somebody would make a house, I think very carefully about how I'm going to create it so that it exists on stage. And so some of the layers of what happens is that I do a lot of research. I read everything that I can read, but I also talk to a lot of people. I remember along the way, I have had the great pleasure of talking to David Scheffer, Elizabeth Becker, Craig Etcheson, who has always been so helpful. My many Cambodian friends, Mu Sochua, and Theary Seng, who in fact is in prison right now in Cambodia, and Chivy Sok. And so the most important image that I can think of for you, Sabah, is a prism. These are plays that cast lights in different ways for different people. I write a story and that is the other important thing to say. It's a story. I have to tell a story that is not message based and that is not meant for anyone like a specific person. It's meant for everyone and always with my plays, people will come to me and say, just like you did, you know, this is what I took from the play. And also a very important factor in any play that I write is love. A love and a dedication to my characters, to knowing, for example, that Lemkin begged his parents to leave and that's in the play. And they said, no, our village will stick together. And they everyone passed away in the Holocaust except one of his brothers. And he carried survivor's guilt. Now, I think it's also important to say that these terms, like survivor's guilt or post-traumatic stress disorder can become tropes. You know, they can be throw in around very easily. I do not use the word survivor's guilt lightly. I think it's like a prism. It's got on many levels. Lemkin was not just suffering from survivor's guilt, but at the end of the day, at the end of my play, that is one of the things that I deal with. And I wondered if I could read just a small portion of the end of the play, because I think then I can tell you more specifically what I'm talking about. And the other thing is I think it's dangerous when one is an artist and a playwright to talk about the work because ultimately it really doesn't matter what I think. It's really more important what the play portrays. So I am going to read the very end of the play and Lemkin is in his house and he says, So, what this talks about is that Lemkin carried that guilt with him until this moment where he's finally able to commune with his mother, which he does in the play in the afterlife a lot. His mother homeschooled him, from what I understand. And he is finally able after Rwanda and Bosnia, and a constant attempt to try to get people to listen, to forgive himself for what we all have so much trouble with. And that is watching either our families or our friends or our loved ones, or sometimes human beings in general be murdered. And so the fact that he says my word became destructive is true because the word has had many reincarnations and meanings. And it bears a lot of responsibility and like a prism, also, it is very complex. And I think on that I remember a particular scene where you allude to the irony surrounding the term genocide, which is exactly what we were talking about, how people suffer all kinds of injustices, and yet it's not enough for it to be denoted as genocide. You use the example in that specific excerpt of the Rwandan genocide, where Lemkin speaks about the dismemberment of the Tutsis and Tutsi women sex organs hanging from trees, and yet it's not deemed sufficient to be genocide for the authorities. So you do a you do manage to reflect this complexity or these complications surrounding the term genocide and how, despite the suffering around us, how we are still bogged down and stopped in our tracks because of the legal complications surrounding the definition. And then we just say it's not just the legal complications, but the political ones. Everything that is legal is not just decided on the basis of legal considerations, but is very political. And this happens in the play in conversation with the character Jack, who says that the term “makes Security Council members nervous”. Lemkin then says, “If you open the dictionary genocide”, I love this part, by the way, genocide is an ensconced, my word, but you portrayed it in your own way. In the dictionary, genocide is ensconced between the terms genius and genome. And I thought that's brilliant, because again, it requires one to go and look for the term in the dictionary, in the encyclopedia, and then see what it means that in a poetic way that it is ensconced, it is between the terms genius and genome. So that's what I found to be very powerful in this excerpt where you managed to convey, as I said, this problem that we're still dealing with right now when we're talking about Israel and Gaza, where each side is saying, well, it is a genocide and they are basing themselves on all of these legal technicalities to use to aver that. What is the reaction maybe that you've had, if at all, surrounding this brilliant play that you've written and these complexities that you've raised surrounding the term genocide? I was going to also quickly comment on you mentioned the portion in the play that is about Rwanda. And I do want to maybe we can go back to this later to speak about the role that women have played, particularly in genocides, and that, for example, David Scheffer, talked about rape as a tool of war in Cambodia. And, you know, it's a much bigger topic. And then also my current feelings that women in a very blanket statement I can say I feel have been left out of human rights and that, that is something that I've spent my life writing about. In terms of the reaction to Lemkin’s House it was just actually translated into Polish. And people do something that. It would be interesting to compare what people do with the play to what people do in real life as well. They, of course, are thinking that this is going to be very dark and depressing, which could be understandable given the word genocide. And then they are surprised because the play is funny and the play is full of light. And the play is, like I said before, prismatic. And so they see that no message has been sent their way. And also my director and I, when we did the premiere of the play, which is a chance for me to do rewrites, the director, Jean Randich, and I talked a lot about not tying things up in a neat bow and I think that the play allows people to come out of it with their own abilities to think about what kind of action they will take next. And and The New York Times said in their review, it's a call to action. So I think that those are some of the reactions that happen. I do have to say that it was done in Sarajevo before it was done in the United States, and the people in Bosnia cut sections of the play, which for one thing, is not really allowed in the United States. But I've had my plays done all over the world in different countries, in different languages, and I completely understand the need to alter work. But I think that in the case of Bosnia, they felt that their genocide was the one that they would be more interested in focusing on. So that was one of the issues that happened. This ties up to what I said earlier, how we present or we talk about the genocide differs from country to country because politics are inextricably linked to law. And it's not just a neutral zone we get into whenever we discuss genocide. Now, I do want the audience to be able to follow what the experience that I had while reading the play. So I want to speak about different parts of it, like in the opening scene set farther down in time, when the term genocide was coined by Lemkin, you portray him as pleading to the Senator of the United States in a letter to say, “It’s more than a decade later, and the U.S. has still not ratified my law.” And this is Raphael Lemkin talking, and his law means the term genocide and what he was hoping for, the convention.“Only man has law. Law must be built.” This is what Lemkin says. Now, assuming that Lemkin coined the term in 1944, this specific scene would take place ten years later. So around 1954 or so, eventually you find out that the law does get ratified in the US. But only 1988. Following this event, Lemkin cheers to a drink with William Proxmire, and he's a senator from Wisconsin. And the champagne bottle says“Never Again”. Again, those who know would recognize it immediately as an allusion to genocide. And the mantra that so many of us repeat following the Holocaust. And another allusion to those who are familiar with the nuances in genocide studies is the mother of Lemkin keeps forgetting and blames it on old age. Now, again, the theme of remembering and forgetting is very crucial to genocide studies, because when we say never again, we keep talking about acts of memorialization. So acts to make sure that we remember whatever happened so that we don't repeat it. Is there anything that you'd like to add to how you basically embedded this concept of forgetting and remembering these concepts into the play? Well, because the play takes place in the afterlife. And by the way, he writes a letter that you mentioned right at the end of his life. The mother is dead and the mother is the victim of the Holocaust. And it's difficult to talk about this. It speaks about ashes and and burning and yet she is reconstituted just a little bit like the law is reconstituted at the end and she comes in and out. She's cooking. She's doing a variety of things. She's baking the bread and so I think for me, it would be absolutely natural that she would be forgetting things because she's very old now and she's dead and she's the survivor in a way, even though she's dead, she's appearing in front of us in the theater. And that's one of the great things that theater can do. It can it can actually revive people. And so she's almost like in process. And so that was that was one of the reasons why she was forgetting. Also, I think you beautifully make the case about the idea of memory, because, you know, I've often talked specifically when it was starting with the Cambodian genocide that I was speaking about, remembering as a revolutionary act. And I think that what is so important is that memory is the key. I mean, all of us right now are trying to remember her and to understand so that we can do better, so that we can learn, so that we can create laws that make it that these things don't happen again. And yet memory is one of the re-triggering aspects of PTSD. And so what these kinds of violences have done, what genocide has done is it has injured the person so that they suffer from something that they will then have to carry with them through their memory. And so it's almost like this double edged sword and this additional injustice, in addition to the fact that there was genocide, there's the PTSD element. And so all of that is present in in this idea of the mother. So I want to go back to something we touched on briefly earlier where we talked about, you know, the fact that Lemkin is portrayed as a hero, but not quite because he is also very human. And I make the difference because in a lot of writing and I'm thinking very specifically about Elizabeth Minnich, who's written a book called The Evil of Banality. And she says the problem with us is that we either make people out to be either heroes or villains. And so we're putting them on either side of the scale. And when we do that, we actually lose the chance to do ordinary good deeds around us. And I think that's a very powerful message. The idea is to remember or recognize that doing good and doing evil as well, doing bad is something we are all capable of. So once we become cognizant of that, we will stop thinking only heroes and villains actually do either. And that's why it's important to make it accessible to everybody. Having said that, I think in your play what really marked me as well, among other things, is the fact that Lemkin in one particular scene, Proxmire says,“Reagan couldn't look soft on Nazis. Your law made good press. I'm sorry.” In other words, Lemkin is being informed in this poignant scene that he was just an agent, an agent of politics. He was little. He was basically puppeted by the politicians here, we're talking about Reagan specifically, this is where Lemkin realizes that although he put his whole life and his heart into whatever he did at the expense of comfort, at the expense of luxury, at the expense of appreciating the little things around him, the beauty around him, he gave his whole life up to be this person, this agent who coined this word and fought for it. Let's not forget the miserable life that Lemkin led going from conference to conference, pleading to people suffering poverty, suffering all the inconveniences of being that scholar, of being that person or the lawyer who went around to lobby to different people, to politicians. And yet what he realizes in this moment is that Reagan acted out of pure selfish interests, what we call the Bismarckian concept of Realpolitik, which is where states act for very selfish reasons. I thought that was something I had to earmark while I was reading the play. And yes, I completely agree. He is not a hero. He's a human. And I think that he was a man obviously of great humanity. And what I think is interesting for me is that, like I said before, I've spent a lot of my life looking at the micro sort of context of, for example, Cambodian genocide, Bosnian genocide, femicide. And I can now say, having looked at all of that, that there is, yes, the micro and that that is very important, but that the macro I come to and I think that ties me again to Lemkin is that there are human rights violations that are significant across the board, no matter if we take away the culture and we take away the political context, and that is murder. Murder is something that can be defined, as we all know, as the killing of a human being. And I think of Lemkin as somebody who believed on some level in those kinds of pure ideas. And I think that for me, what helps me in times of fracture, because, certainly I've been approached about the current genocides that are happening, which are very incendiary sometimes is if we look at humanity and people let's say people of different religions or people of different cultures and ethnicities, and we see that we are every color of the rainbow and that even beyond color of the rainbow, you get to shades of gray. That we can only proceed, and let's bring Lemkin back into this by listening to all of that every single color, every single shade and that above that is the idea that we cannot murder each other. I mean, that we cannot kill each other. I think that that on some level was what Lemkin believed in. And now, of course, he talked about groups and he talked about if a group is being targeted, then it's a genocide. But at the core was a belief that came from pre-Holocaust thinking, which I believe that he was anticipating what was going to happen, certainly. And so I think that for me is where our salvation will come is with that understanding of the distinctions that we all have as different colors and different shades. And it's very difficult to listen. Especially if you're angry and I fully understand also the anger and the despair. And I've spent my life writing and about post-traumatic stress disorder and listening to survivor upon survivor. So I do understand. Very often when we become advocates of any cause, and we succeed in our endeavor, we become very quickly the target of critics. And I think, again, I saw that in the play where ironically, despite preaching and rather successfully how it's wrong to commit genocide and coming up with the ingenious idea that if one who murders is going to be penalized, how is it, therefore, that if one who murders millions is never penalized? And that was the basis of Rafael Lemkin’s endeavor to coin the term genocide, because that crime had to be prosecuted. And yet there is one scene in the play where Rafael Lemkin is trying to exterminate termites. Tell us more about that, because I think that's exactly what when you mentioned earlier that people see they come to the play thinking it's going to be very dark and then it has little moments of humor, very dark humor there. But do you have anything to comment on that? Well, I think that has to do with the playwright in the playwright's world, understanding that this is an old house, that this is a house that because he hears noises up above which end up being in the Rwandan genocide, people are hiding in the roof. There are all sorts of problems. Me, Catherine, knew that there would be some problems with the house, and so I think I humanized the story by putting in the termites because he is a homeowner. And to be honest, my parents lived in a house in California, and there was as with anybody that owns a house, there was some chronic problems. And one of them was termites, because termites are attracted to wood. So thank you for noticing that. Again, something poignant, something that really marked me, the moments when I thought you were trying to get at something deeper. And here is that moment, “When we suffer, we suffer alone and we think no one else does. Our suffering becomes central to our being. Our suffering is the only suffering that matters.” Lemkin’s mother having herself endured a genocide, cries in disbelief when she faces another woman who recounts her experience of this time the Rwandan genocide. This victim recounts seeing vaginas and breasts hanging on trees. Lemkin’s mother doesn't believe her, and again, this is another layer of complexity that is embedded in this play that you've written. And I would love to hear from you if you have more thoughts on this subject. I think that to a certain degree, it's taken at face value. I think that the mother cannot believe that particular kind of violence, that that is something that she does not have the ability to believe when it is presented to her. And it's a fascinating question that we all as human beings have, and that is our layers of compassion, our layers of resistance, our layers of disbelief, our layers of how we understand facts to be. And also, I think one of the things that you've alluded to that's very important is that throughout my work and throughout my listening to people in terms of my work, is this desire that human beings have to compare one thing to another.“Well, I went through this, but I didn't go through that.” And it's understandable. I mean, back to what you said about not being heroes, I mean, no, we can't understand everything. And we can't allow ourselves sometimes we just push back. What was your conception of how to end a play of this type where you are dealing with a fictionalized character? Because of course, we are dealing with Lemkin after death, in the afterlife. And Lemkin is having these conversations with his mother and with other characters. So the dramatic question to a certain degree is, will Lemkin rest? Will he be able to rest? And certainly the answer is no, he can't. And his inability to rest is so tenacious that even in the afterlife, he can't rest. And I think it metaphorically represents this sense that we all have with never again. You know, how can we in fact make “Never Again” mean something? And yet my play is going to end and I am going to answer that dramatic question by showing you that one day after this man's fight, his mother finally was able to come to him when she saw that he was going to burn his law. He was done. He was going to throw everything away and he throws everything off his desk and he and he bitterly says, “I loved gardens.” I never even got to have that. And his mother, who is a wonderful character in the play in terms of loving him and being a presence there as mothers often are. I mean, I think mothers come to us in the afterlife. And she's like, hold on a second. Let's look at what this really is. And she is able to show him how much he did for her at that impasse that where he's at, where he is saying,“I left. You stayed.” So therefore I betrayed you. And she's saying, of course not, of course you didn't betray us. There are choices. And that's the most heartbreaking thing of all, is to listen. Like when I listened to so many survivors of the Cambodian genocide, it comes down to I went to the right, all these other people went to the left. I survived. And she's saying it's, you did what you did. I did what I did. And this the piece of paper or the law is what you did for everyone. And I do still believe that just right now with all of the challenges we have in the world, the law often replayed, reworked, reborn, in a different way will help us. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest Catherine Filloux. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe, and stay tuned for more discussions.