My Room My Rum Analysis

In a country where longing for the past qualifies as a dominant cultural trope - saudade, fado and the long wait for The Desired, D. Sebastian of Portugal are examples of this – the performance My Room / My Rum, premiered at the Condominium Festival, in Lisbon, explores and further unsettles the dynamic between memory and identity. Accordingly, collecting and archiving as necessary means to assert identity are subject to evaluation. It turns out that they both prove unable of determining one’s place in the world, merely disclosing loose traces of life experiences instead. It is fragmentary, non-linear and, altogether, unsatisfying. Seemingly, at a collective level, the Portuguese, still dwelling on the significance of overseas expansion

Yet, the narrative structuring the performance, although about a woman, is in the third person, not in the first. It is about a ‘she,’ not an ‘I’. This unfolds as a strategy to evoke a ‘we.’ The subject matter of the narrative is threefold: identity, memory and archiving. There was this woman who collected postcards with the goal of finding out more about herself, namely if she preferred to leave or come back. The increasing number of postcards in her collection corresponded to a decreased number of memories. While she lost memories, she acquired scattered traces of her life that increasingly inhabited her intimacy and made her more self-aware. As the past and the present overlapped, memory fainted. Fully embracing the ambiguity noted above, the woman offers to help the audience/ collaborator overcome whatever problem of insomnia they might have. So, on the one hand, she tells the audience a story that ends up being illustrated by the postcards on the walls of her room, but, on the other hand, she offers to help, singing to us and checking if we are already asleep. The effect is different from the announced. I was not at rest, instead I felt wary and uncanny, as my mind kept flying from my own memoirs to the goals, doubts and fears that connect us all. The ‘we’ imposes on the audience/ collaborator. Differently, lying in bed, getting cosy and even ready to fall asleep is just what it takes to break with the world outside “my room,” namely with the linear order of past, present and future. It is as the woman said, just before leaving the room: “Leave everything behind, leave nothing unsaid, since the moment ahead is already