Story for performance #444
webcast from London at 07:34PM, 07 Sep 06

To hide one’s name. Scramble one’s face. To be hidden by a false name. To be covered with it. Thick with new paint. That new name. My false name.

This is a true story.

I was Catalina for a few months. She was a completely different young woman from the me now. She was Carmen Miranda’s younger sister. In gorgeous wide skirts, beaming, loud, maybe Mexican, not a movie star but a fantasist and a hanger-on. Catalina was a thin disguise but she was by no means Caitlin. Austere, grim, Celtic Caitlin, noble drinking, dappled Caitlin. This one name that I hid behind, this new name was a woman who rolled her rrr’s and wore neck-a-chiefs. Her name helped me survive the spell of being named after Dylan Thomas’s wife.

To be thick with newness, remade and recast as someone else. True.

This is a true story.

In the town of H. a woman named Gertrude was at one time the Mayor of the City. She was assigned the annual task of making people into citizens. People arrived by boat and plane from different countries and found themselves on a small island. These people with shining eyes were now finally ready to receive citizenship.

In the town of H., the old concrete whale is wheeled out for these citizenship occasions. Mayor Gertrude stands astride the concrete whale, a symbol of the small town. She stands on a platform sculpted into the whale-form and the whale-form is mounted on the flatbed of a truck. The Mayor is dressed to the nines in full regalia: handworked lapels, coin necklaces, draped in cloaks and silks. The small truck engine of the concrete whale grinds into action and becomes a moving pulpit. The whale drives along the seafront of the town drawing considerable attention to itself and arrives in an open carpark.

It is Australia day, in the weak southern sun over H. and Mayor Gertrude and the Whale are an image of port city life, beached in front of the soon-to-be citizens. Gertrude coughs to mark her beginning and unfurls a paper scroll. The microphone is running off the truck’s engine and is pinging in the wind that howls in from the ocean. Mayor Gertrude’s cloak is whipping around her body and her hair launches up in little sprays of black curls.

‘I will announce today…’ the formalities begin.

‘I am honoured to welcome…’ the Mayor intones.

‘I proudly welcome the new citizens:

‘Hu…..oc Tan….V (slow and unfinished)
Ti..ek Kim P…(deliberate and too soon given up)
Andreeee-ars Car–rey-ra (slow, full sounding but wrong)
Tat-eee-a TanoH’ (cough)

The Mayor is bluffing, her paper scroll is flapping and she is wincing at the names. She stammers over sounds and blushes. No-one had fucking-helped her get it right. No guide to how to say these new names. No guide to the true and difficult names of these new people.

Mayor Gertrude is defeated by the eyes, still shining at her up high on the concrete whale. The Mayor is defeated by the long list on paper and the complexity of the names she has yet to mouth.

‘Look’, she says as she drops the official scroll by her side, ‘You know who you are. I’m happy to pronounce you all Australian citizens and welcome you to this country. I hope you will be safe here.“

People’s eyes stay shining, looking at the woman, the city Mayor in her whipping robes. They hear the empty ping of a microphone getting too much sea air. The engine of the whale begins to growl. The driver below has a feeling for theatre, and when the theatre is over, he takes the whale crawling out along the dock front and back to the Council chambers.

To hide one’s name for shame. To hide a name for fear of death. To hide your name for fear of being eradicated as a human being. Through the intake of breath, crossed eyebrows, the burden of expectation, the name you can never live up to or live through, this is the name you will shed.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Caitlin Newton-Broad.