“So much changed suddenly for my generation after 9-11”, says Aamir Aziz (1983). “I grew up in the eighties and nineties, a fairly quiet period in Pakistan. But in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, the world turned its gaze on my country and terrorist activity increased. We suddenly had to deal with bombings – violence was everywhere. One of my relatives, my sister-in-law’s husband, was killed in the suicide bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008. The War on Terror affected us personally and has made me what I am.
“When I was doing my Master’s in English in Islamabad, I took a course on American Literature. One of the works we discussed was The Crucible by the writer Arthur Miller, a play based on a true story of a witch hunt, and it really touched a nerve.
The play is set at the end of the seventeenth century, when British settlers were trying to scratch for a living in America. In 1692, in the little town of Salem, Minister Samuel Parris’s daughter and niece suffered fits and severe spasms. The girls, racked with pain, crawled around on the floor, had demonic visions and seemed to speak in tongues. They said that had been touched by the “hand of evil” and blamed some of their fellow villagers.
Then other women and girls started to display strange behaviour. The superstitious community panicked: it had to be witchcraft. A period of mass hysterics followed and thirteen women and six men were eventually sent to the gallows. Two other residents of Salem died in goal. And just to be certain, two “demonic” dogs were hung too. When an elderly man refused to confess, heavy stones were piled on top of him and he died after two days.
How could a play written 1953 affect Aziz so much? “Something like this witch hunt occurred in my country too. When the War on Terror reached its climax and Pakistan had become a front line, all sorts of people were arrested in the streets for no reason and thrown into Guantánamo or another illegal prison.”
That is exactly the subject of his research: how a work can suddenly become relevant again due to social and political developments.
“Miller used an event from the past to criticise the society in which he lived. When I found out why he had written the play, I felt a really huge shock. The Crucible is really about the Red Scare in America in the forties and fifties of the previous century. A wave of fear of communism swept across the nation. Of course, the Cold War was the main reason, but much more was going on. After the Second World War, a new middle class appeared, which consisted largely of immigrant groups that had arrived in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the newcomers had progressive ideas and challenged the establishment. The conservative forces violently resisted that development. Communists were the standard-bearers of all that was new, wrong and more particularly, all that was un-American. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator was the most rabid of the Communist haters and he instigated a hunt against anything that had a merest whiff of the Red Peril.”
A special committee of senators held hearings in which people who were suspected of Communism, including many artists, were prosecuted and sentenced under the gaze of the entire nation.
“McCarthy really turned the whole thing into a spectacle. He knew how to create fear and people just swallowed it.” Miller also appeared before the committee and was given a very hard time indeed. “He had supported the Communist party in the forties, but later distanced himself from it due to Stalin’s cruelties. However, that didn’t stop him writing a play in which he took on McCarthy and his supporters. He challenged the witch hunters, deflating the Red Scare spectacle with literature.” The committee asked Miller to name his colleagues and friends, but the playwright refused. “He only wanted to explain about his own connections with the Communist Party, saying ‘I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.’ He was taking a huge risk; they gave him a year’s suspension in prison and fined him five hundred dollars. By then, he had already paid forty thousand dollars in legal fees. However, he appealed and was acquitted.
“He was what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls a parrhésiast: someone who put his life in the balance to speak the truth. In The Crucible, Miller compared the McCarthy trials with the witch trials and that connection was clear to everyone: back then, the local leaders were the manufacturers of panic, feeding it and using it as a weapon. That produced a fertile ground for persecution and the same thing, more or less, happened again three centuries later.”
When The Crucible opened, it was regarded as a satirical revolt against McCarthy’s inquisition. However, later versions lacked the impact and the 1996 film, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, fell flat. “In 1953, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a film script for an obscure Eastern German/French/Belgian co-production, but that Marxist version failed too.”
However, the mood changed after 9-11: “The play was very successfully performed on Broadway in 2002. The hunt for terrorists, the illegal kidnappings and the restriction of freedom following the Patriot Act rendered The Crucible a topical work again. The fear of others has returned. It’s a play that needs an opportunity and that opportunity arose with the war on terror. Since Obama’s presidency, there has been less interest in The Crucible. “The Democrats don’t have a reputation for witch hunts, although the play does suit the NSA espionage operations, the fleeing of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange’s situation.”
Having obtained his doctoral, Aziz has returned to Pakistan to teach and do research. “But I’m still inspired by The Crucible. I’ll never be a kind of an amateur Christ, but I will oppose any persecution and people who sow fear.”
Arthur Asher Miller (1915-2005)
Arthur Miller is perhaps the best known playwright ever produced by America. He was born in New York and studied journalism and English at the University of Michigan, writing his first play, No Villain, while still a student.
Miller did not immediately achieve success. The 1940 play The Man Who Had All the Luck was torched but he hit the big time on Broadway seven years later, receiving a Tony Award, the “Oscar” for plays, for his play All My Sons.
His most famous play, Death of Salesman, premiered in 1949 and soon emerged as a monument in theatre history. Miller received the Pulitzer Prize and other awards for it.
After challenging McCarthyism, the persecution of American communists, in his play The Crucible in 1953, he had to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He told them that he had flirted with the Communist Party but refused to name anyone else. He was sentenced and blacklisted.
In 1956, he left his first wife and married Marilyn Monroe. He wrote the script for the film The Misfits in which his wife was to play the principle character. The marriage fell to pieces even before the film reached the cinemas and Monroe died a year later.
In 1964, Miller worked with director Elia Kazan, producing After the Fall. It was unexpected because Kazan had betrayed a number of people to HUAC in 1952, which cost him his friendship with Miller at the time. Nonetheless, after ten year of not speaking to each other, they decided to get in touch.
Miller wrote the script for the film version of The Crucible in 1996. The last play he wrote was the Finishing the Picture, which premiered in 2004.