Madama Butterfly: Giving Voice to Those Unheard

This season past, Madama Butterfly opened in a production by Opera West in Santa Fe. The town's iconic classical music scene glittered. Gracefully costumed geisha girls twirled their parasols and evocative gongs clanged as Puccini's score, in the hands of a fabulously gifted director, designer, conductor, orchestra, and cast, unfolded to envelop the audience in waves of beauty that left them weeping, at last, at the fate of their beloved heroine.

The opera did God's work. It softened its viewers hearts to see an individual human tragedy and be moved by it--often to the point of imagining that if they had been somehow part of the story, they would have done something to avert the heartbreaking ending. However, how often do we see such a story and play our role well when the same scenario appears before us in real life?

 
Madama Butterfly is so beautiful, and its music romanticizes its subject so well, that today, when we have adopted a practice that most composers never foresaw--that is, listening to the drama in a language we don’t understand--we can miss a critical reality about which it can enlighten and soften our hearts. One can be moved by the opera and follow the general outlines of the story without fully apprehending its core premise. Puccini’s tragedy unfolds around sex trafficking.

The character of Pinkerton, the American John of the story, sings about his delight that in Japan, he is able to purchase a temporary “marriage” to a girl he barely knows in an arrangement he is free to terminate at whim. Goro, the broker of the transaction, markets his services even to the American Consul, bragging that he sold Miss Butterfly especially cheaply at only ¥100. Even if he’s singing his offer in the finest of tenor voices, Goro is a pimp.

The story gets even grittier when Butterfly arrives and is asked her age. The sympathetic Consul first guesses that she is ten years old, but she admits being fifteen--an age she realizes is already a bit old, presumably among Goro’s typical offerings. She tells the story of her family, once wealthy, being brought low by her father’s suicide, after which she was forced to work as a geisha to survive. Pinkerton’s passions are fanned at the idea of a doll-like child who expresses herself in such adult terms, while others jovially celebrate fifteen as a carefree age meant for games and candy.

Horrifying, right? If we miss any of this, we miss the verismo reality Puccini addresses through the power of his art. In the same way, we also tend to miss this reality around us. How can we change this?

The first step is to educate ourselves. We often witness human trafficking as clearly as we witness the sale of young Butterfly without recognizing it. According to the 2021 Sex Trafficking in America report by the Guardian Group, 1 in 6 runaways will become trafficked, and almost half of trafficking victims have been in the foster care system. That is, like Butterfly, they often suffer the loss of parents, whether through death or legal separation.

Other sources frequently report that 1 in 3 runaways are approached by a trafficker within 48 hours of leaving home, and leaving home is often a child’s best defense against an abusive, addicted, or dangerously neglectful environment. 85% of victims in the Guardian Group report described a “close relationship” with their trafficker. Again, like Butterfly, tragic circumstances beyond their control create most children’s vulnerability to trafficking and many, like Butterfly, at first believe that in their entrapment, they have found the love denied them elsewhere in life.

Madama Butterfly tells not an exclusively foreign story but the story of our own children. Sex trafficking is reported in every US state. Its lucrativeness is comparable only to drug and arms trafficking, but it is much easier to hide from authorities and has an astoundingly lower rate of prosecution. Whereas products can only be sold once, a person can be sold over and over. What profit-minded criminal wouldn’t see the attractiveness?

When we realize that suffering like Butterfly’s surrounds us, we become more inclined to take action. Experts recommend programming the National Human Trafficking Hotline (1-888-373-7888) into our phones or calling 911 when we see a situation that may be dangerous or dire. Because any one of us may be a child’s only chance, if a circumstance feels wrong, like a young person appearing fearful or controlled around an age-inappropriate “boyfriend” or non-relative, it is worth taking the time to carefully observe the details and quietly report them.

This step however, is more difficult and demanding than this first one. It requires us to embrace an outlook essential to our Catholic Faith, and frequently, this outlook can be especially encouraged by art--even secular art like Madama Butterfly. It is to recognize our common humanity, especially with the victimized, so that we are more naturally moved toward their protection. That’s what the combined talent and effort of everyone involved in Opera West’s production ultimately accomplished.

They helped the audience love Butterfly as a “real” person (albeit a character), because they gave her a voice. Insofar as the audience could feel her emotions through the music and hear her thoughts in song, she became human, and thus, real to them. They could empathize with her suffering and desire to prevent it.

Atrocities like exploitation can flourish only when we objectify others, and we do this by silencing that voice with which they cry out their genuine humanity. Most of us would be incapable of cruelty to our neighbors and swift to their protection if, as our Faith teaches, we believed them to be real thinking and feeling persons--souls perfectly equal in their priceless value to our own. However, when we reduce one another to consumable bodies, as the industries of pornography and prostitution encourage, we cease to see one another as anything greater than a collection of “parts.”

Another example from the opera illustrates this point. Still recently in my memory, I stood backstage at the final dress rehearsal, having worked over a year in preparing the role of Suzuki, Butterfly’s lifelong servant and only friend. I shook silently remembering what the costume mistress, an expert from Japan, had told the cast. She said that women whose kimonos would not lay flat because of the size of their paipai (you guess the meaning) were the sort who sought the wrong kind of attention from men, probably for profit. (I paraphrase in kinder terms than those she used.)

Her words began to reduce my person to parts, and soon her actions followed. I’m an opera singer. My voice is well-suited to Italian music because it is produced from a body made in the Italian mold. Translation: No kimono is going to lay flat over my paipai. To point this out, the costume mistress assaulted me. She grabbed my chest in two hands, crushing hard in the “honk-honk” gesture, and proclaimed to everyone that my paipai were too big.

As a Catholic woman who has come to value modesty and treasure chastity, this action and its implication shook me. As a survivor of child sex trafficking, as so many people we encounter in our daily life may be, my memory leaped to the nightmarish terror that those with PTSD will understand. However, I worked hard to reclaim my humanizing voice and used it when the costume mistress approached me again. “Please do not touch me,” I managed to say firmly.  “Please leave me alone.”

I had arrived extremely early to rehearsal after studying feverishly to learn the difficult origami-like folds of the kimono and obi so that I could dress without assistance. Other castmates and even the director noticed the harassing costumer hounding me regardless and told her to keep her hands off. Still, just before I was to make an entrance, she slid behind me and undid the tie of my obi, the closure of my garment, leaving me feeling violated and utterly exposed.

I re-secured in moments a kimono that had taken half an hour to tie. When I walked on stage and opened my mouth, however, I found to my horror that my voice had left me--not because of any physical or vocal trouble, but because something else had happened. It was as if a hidden hand closed around my throat, strangling every breath and silencing every note to a whisper. I resigned from the production and left the role in colleagues’ capable hands, because everyone had worked too hard to have the opera affected by a silent Suzuki, and I could not imagine ever being able to put on those kimonos again.

Thus, Madama Butterfly again made very clear the power of humanizing or dehumanizing one another. When we give a “voice” to others, as it lies within the power of art and especially opera to accomplish, we can hear them and treat them as the neighbors Christ calls us to love. The opposite is also dramatically true. I was reduced to mere parts, and at once, I could not find my voice. I have found it again, however, by writing here in defense of our world’s “Butterflies” and celebrating the fact that an opera goes on that gives them all a voice!