Dislocation and Repossession in O Navio dos Negros, Jorge Silva Melo’s Theatrical Reading of Benito Cereno

Comparing Navio dos Negros, Jorge Silva Melo’s adaptation of Benito Cereno in 2000 (Lisbon, Culturgest) to Melville’s narrative, several plots of dislocation and repossession emerge. In Melville, the core tale of the Atlantic slave trade initiated by the Iberian diasporic experience sustains the plot of the slaveholder’s ambiguous claim to oppression and protection and interferes with the American narrator’s exegetic endeavors. Social identity mapping becomes problematic in a comedy of errors that multiplies possible readings and foregrounds the trappings of authority and authorship. In fact, though the “Spaniards” may be taken as a synecdoche for the colonizer, the Portuguese are relegated to the social and linguistic margins, namely in the passage of the text where a revelation of (some) mystery is hinted at but remains encrypted in a foreign language. The play by Silva Melo expands and disrupts the semantics of diaspora by creating a contemporary parallel narrative in which the Portuguese are consigned to the role of oppressors of modern-day immigrants from Eastern European countries and from the former Portuguese colonies. However, the political message of guilt and victimization is upset by the deceptive layers of storytelling that the stage director takes from Melville, thus foregrounding the narrative’s textual fabric. With a minimalistic set-design, where the few props are constantly being reassembled as the storytellers interweave the narrative, the actors (Silva Melo’s Artistas Unidos) are both readers and narrators, who invite the audience to question authoritative interpretations