Ten Fragments on Lawful Storytelling

Abstract

In this essay, I describe the movement of an affidavit across different sites – from its first manifestation in a legal submission before an appellate court in India, to my own rewriting of the story in theatrical form, to its subsequent adaptation by a different set of theatre practitioners. Multiple acts of translation take place here, the genre of the affidavit changing to accommodate the shift in each site. The lawyers in the first instance translate life into law; I translate that legal form into a theatrical form; my theatrical form is once again translated into a different kind of theatrical form. My description of these translations takes the form of a story, albeit a fragmented one. I start with a particular understanding of translation, one where I worry about what might be lost when law attempts to capture life. As the story proceeds, I find myself shifting towards thinking about what might be found and made possible in translation, about how these different genres of the affidavit might allow for different visions of law and life to flourish.

Keywords: repair, translation, theatre, jurisprudence