Djali is Esmeralda’s goat in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and a delightful feature in the animated Disney version of this story. Our version plays at Meridian Theatres. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time or the resources, or the patience to work with a real goat on stage.
Nevertheless, audiences will be buzzed by our SK8goat Djali accompanied by its own recurring musical theme or leitmotif B-A-A-A and be laughing and singing along. All this hilarity and goat play masks a much darker theme in Victor Hugo’s classic tale.
Esmeralda the gypsy girl is targeted by Old Simone as the cause of all the problems in 1482 Paris. She is blamed for everything from dead babies to the corruption of justice to Frollo’s disorderly behaviour. She is tried, tortured, and convicted for talking to Djali, a sign of her so-called witchcraft, and sentenced to the hangman’s rope. Like many outcasts before and since, she is unfairly blamed and punished for the mistakes or wrongdoing of others B-A-A-A-A-A.
A fake solution is offered but the real problem is not solved. So the problem arises again and another scapegoat has to be found.
Scapegoating has existed in most societies for thousands of years. The word originates from the biblical ritual described in Leviticus 16, where one goat is symbolically killed as a sacrifice to the Lord and a second goat is symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and sent into the wilderness never to return. The community feels some relief. A fake solution is offered but the real problem is not solved. So the problem arises again and another scapegoat has to be found. Over time, the goat was replaced by individuals or groups of people who were expelled from the community based on the central idea that someone must pay a price for society’s problems.
These problems are what the majority of people at times don’t want to acknowledge, usually a truth that is hurting them physically, socially, economically, even spiritually. At other times, it’s a smaller group of people at the top of society (such as nobles, elites, or government leaders) who believe their privileged position in the social order is threatened.
While it may provide short-term relief or cohesion within a group, scapegoating often perpetuates harmful stereotypes, injustice, and division in the long run.
Scapegoating allows the persecutors to believe or imagine that the cause of their problems has been dealt with. It feels good because it’s a way of protecting ourselves from having to suffer for our mistakes, for our bad habits of thinking or doing or, in religious terms, having to suffer for our sins. Scapegoating also forms group identity for the persecutors. So, throughout history, whenever there is acute social disorder, there is most likely to be a scapegoat. Here is a SK8goat parade of some notorious examples throughout history B-A-A:
- Thousands of Jewish people were murdered in pogroms across Europe accused of poisoning wells and unleashing the Black Plague during the Middle Ages. The Holocaust of WWII is, of course, one of the most extreme examples of scapegoating.
- During times of social unrest, famine, or disease in the 16th & 17th centuries, women in Europe and colonial America were blamed and executed as witches.
- During WWI, the Ottoman government in Turkey blamed the Christian minority of Armenians for many of its military losses and internal problems and 1.5 million were killed in a genocide.
- Japanese citizens in Canada and the USA during WWII had their property expropriated and were imprisoned accused as spies and agitators.
- Shortly after WWII, fears of communism were heightened and thousands of people in government, entertainment, and academia, were accused of being communist sympathizers during McCarthyism.
- More recently, the "unvaccinated" during the Covid-19 pandemic were blamed for the transmission of the virus, and many citizens and professionals who opposed public health measures were arrested, censored, or persecuted by all levels of government.
Scapegoating also forms group identity for the persecutors. So, throughout history, whenever there is acute social disorder, there is most likely to be a scapegoat.
Scapegoats tend to be people who deviate from the societal norm. They break some taboo. For example, Esmeralda is a gypsy or Romani, a group of people that were banned in many parts of Europe, accused of being thieves, criminals, fortune-tellers. Even today, gypsies are marginalized because their language, nomadic lifestyles, and cultural practices (such as living without formal identification or citizenship) resists assimilation into the dominant culture—which has led to a persistent sense of “otherness” for all Romani.
When Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda from the gallows, he gives her sanctuary in Notre Dame. This is a symbolic act that has been famously explained by French philosopher, Rene Girard, in how Christian tradition subverts the scapegoat mechanism. Jesus was a troublemaker for the elites and leaders of his day, calling them out for their tyranny, hypocrisy, and injustices. They dumped their shame, blame, anger, and anxiety onto Jesus by having him crucified outside the city of Jerusalem (in the wilderness so to speak) at the place of skulls or exclusion called Golgotha. Good the revolutionary is dead--that’s the first half of the scapegoat mechanism. But it’s the unhealthy way to form community because the community remains with all the shame, blame, anger, and anxiety that has been exposed by the truth-teller. Empires create community according to who they exclude or kill. If you keep excluding millions of people, then you undermine a society’s ability to build sustainable community and sew only hatred and division B-A-A-A.
...it’s the unhealthy way to form community because the community remains with all the shame, blame, anger, and anxiety that has been exposed by the truth-teller.
When Jesus is resurrected and returns to the city—he does not stay in the wilderness—he subverts the expectations of the scapegoat, he comes back from Death by Exclusion. He comes back to the community with love, forgiveness, hospitality, and an invitation to repent. He offers an alternative moral code and a new way of forming healthy communities…which then spreads over the following centuries to influence the shaping of Western civilization. Notre Dame is a symbol of a better way of forming community, the way of Jesus--that’s the ideal but, as we know, it is so very difficult to achieve because the easier way is to find a scapegoat to blame and persecute rather than deal with the “real” problems of the community.
While it may provide short-term relief or cohesion within a group, scapegoating often perpetuates harmful stereotypes, injustice, and division in the long run. Long live the SK8goat leitmotif B-A-A-A!
GEORGE DUTCH is Associate Artistic Director for 9th Hour Theatre Company, and is part of the directing team as Dramaturge and Associate Director for The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The show opens October 3rd and runs until October 13th in the west end of Ottawa. Go to the SHOW PAGE for more information, tickets, and showtimes.
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