Stories from under occupation: Performing the Palestinian experience

Theatre Journal

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 15-37

  Nassar, Hala Kh ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149542858     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2006.0083     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. "There are many different kinds of Palestinian experience, which cannot all be assembled into one. One would therefore have to write parallel histories of communities in Lebanon, the occupied territories, and so on. That is the central problem. It is almost impossible to imagine a single narrative: it would have to be the kind of crazy history that comes out in Midnight's Children, with all those little strands coming in and out." Edward Said, "On Palestinian Identity, A Conversation with Salman Rushdie," New Left Review 160 (1986): 63-80
2. For an extensive bibliography on Israeli and Palestinian popular culture, see Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, "Popular Culture, Relational History, and the Question of Power in Palestine and Israel," Journal of Palestine Studies 4 (Summer 2004): 5-20
3. and Stein and Swedenburg, eds., Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
4. "We are arguing that the question of popular culture in Palestine and Israel is fundamentally one of politics and power. We further suggest that the marginalization of popular culture within progressive scholarship on the region is symptomatic of the conceptual and methodological limits that still define much of this scholarship." Stein and Swedenburg, "Popular Culture," 6
5. Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, Contemporary Palestinian Literature under Occupation (Birzeit: Birzeit University Press, 1976), 10
6. On the lack of professional Palestinian actors in general, see Salim Tamari, "The Predicament of Palestinian Cultural Production," Palestine-Israel Journal 2, no. 4 (1995): 89-100
7. M. M. Badawi, ed., Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
8. and Friederike Pannewick, Das Wagnis Tradition Arabische Wege der Theatralität (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2000)
9. Reuven Snir, "Palestinian Theatre: Historical Development and Contemporary Distinctive Identity," Contemporary Theatre Review 3, no. 2 (1995): 29-75
10. and "The Emergence of Palestinian Theatre after 1967," Theatre Survey 46, no. 1 (May 2005): 5-22
11. Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958)
12. On cultural life in the Palestine region under the Ottoman Empire, refer to Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
13. Mattityahu Peled, "Annals of Doom, Palestinian Literature 1917-1948," Arabica, tome 29, fascicule 21 (1982): 141-83
14. For more information about theatre activities in Palestine before 1948, see Nasri al-Guzi, Tarikh al-Masrah al-Falasteny 1918-1948 [The History of Palestinian Theatre 1918-1948] (Nicosia: Sharq Press, 1991)
15. Snir, "Palestinian Theatre"; Dov Shinar, Palestinian Voices: Communication and Nation Building in the West Bank (Boulder: L. Rienner, 1987)
16. Shinar, Palestinian Voices, 138
17. Snir, "Palestinian Theatre," 46
18. On the Israeli theatre adapting a Palestinian play featuring both Israeli and Palestinian actors, see, Ilan Pappe, "A Text in the Eyes of the Beholder: Four Theatrical Interpretations of Kanafani's Men in the Sun," Contemporary Theatre Review 3, no. 2 (1995): 157-74
19. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory (London: Routledge, 1995)
20. On the historical role of the storyteller in the Arab world, see Pannewick, "Redemptive Narrating: The Hcombining dot belowakawā tī in Contemporary Arabic Theatre," in Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature, ed. A. Neuwirth, B. Embaló, S. Günther, and M. Jarrar (Beirut: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1999), 337-48
21. According to Pellat, two distinguishable forms of storytelling exist in the Arab world: "The tales of the supernatural, the ancient asmār which correspond to the German Hausmärchen, are told by women, especially old women, while the heroic tales and historical legends are the province of men." Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), CD-ROM, s.v. "Hikaya."
22. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 240-41
23. Mark J. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law (New Brunswick: Transaction Publications, 1997), 19. Emphasis in the original
24. Pannewick, "Redemptive Narrating," 341
25. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 168
26. George Ibrahim, interview with author, 25 January 1999; Jamal Abu-Ghosheh, interview with author, 26 January 1999
27. For a detailed analysis of representations of Palestinian women onstage, refer to Hala Kh. Nassar, "Transcribing Roles: Female Body and the Palestinian Stage," Kalimat 21 (March 2005): 22-27
28. See Judith Sudilovsky, "Act II: Toward Stagecraft," Jerusalem Post, 5 May 1995, 30, regarding female students and their battles to persuade parents to allow them to enroll in Ashtar's school
29. Sudilovsky, "Act II," 30
30. "The girls are yet not being pressured to get married, or not to perform in public. The boys are also more open to new ideas." Ashtar cofounder Edward Muallem, interview with Annette Kramer in "Creative Arts," Aramco World (July/August 1995): 24
31. For more on the Palestinian National Charter and the status of Palestinian women, see Joseph Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism," Middle East Journal 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 467-83
32. Surveying current Palestinian theatre and its historical development, one finds traces of earlier productions that also attempted to deal with collective memory. The best-known performances were staged in Israel by the famous Palestinian director, Riad Masarweh: al-Mauja at-Tssia (The Ninth Wave/De La "Neuvieme Vogue" [1988]) and Suhmata (Suhmatah Village [2000]), adapted for the stage by Edward Mast and Hanna Eady for al-Maydan Theatre
33. The play Fatimah is based on the short story "Fatimas Träume," written by Khalil Abd Rabbo (1994). The play was first performed in Berlin at Haus der Kulutren der Welt on 6 October 2000, directed by Awni Karoumi and featuring actor Samia Qazmouz al-Bakri. (The author worked on the production crew.) See also Nassar, "La questione palestinese e i tabù delle società arabe," Teatri delle diversità: Catarsi 17 (March 2001): 15-16
34. On The Melody of the Rocking Chair see Awni Karoumi, "Der Frieden braucht eine andere Weise des Denkens," Inamo 23/24 (Fall/Winter 2000): 85-88
35. Karoumi is an Iraqi Christian who fled Baghdad to Jordan after the Gulf War in 1990; in 1996, for political reasons, he fled Jordan for Berlin. Karoumi still has strong ties with the Palestinian theatre. See Karoumi, "Ein Regisseur über arabisches Theater," in "Theater Der Welt, Theater Der Zeit," special issue, Arbeitsbuch 2 (1999): 189-96
36. On 29 September 2000, I saw the play at the Palast Theatre in Berlin. This passage points to the issue of replacing the Arabic place-names with Hebrew ones in an attempt to erase past identity. On the aspect of time-traveling in the play, refer to Nassar, "The Invocation of Lost Places," The Open Page 7 (March 2002): 36-39
37. A translation of The Alley appears in Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Northhampton: Interlink Books, 2003). Since the English edition omits some key scenes, I also reference the original manuscript in Arabic. The above quotion is my own translation based on that manuscript (16)
38. For more on this topic, see Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Errinerung und politische Identitätin frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), especially the section " Erinnerungslandschaften. Das 'Mnemotop' Palästina," 59-66
39. Ted Swedenburg, "The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier," Anthropology Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 1990): 18-30
40. See also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), in which he dedicates a whole section to the legendary topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land
41. Swedenburg, "Palestinian Peasant," 19
42. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, 18
43. The Alley, in Short Arabic Plays, 113
44. Fanon, Wretched, 246
45. Elizabeth Williams, "Arts and Ideas works hard on 7th edition," 19 April 2002, http://www .yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=19076 (accessed 16 October 2005)
46. See Robert Hurwitt, "Palestinians tell their side in 'Alive,'" San Francisco Chronicle, 9 July 2002
47. A Palestinian favorite breakfast. "Zaatar [Za'tar], a herb that grows profusely on the mountain slopes of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon and is made into a breakfast dish by pounding the leaves, mixing them with such ingredients as summaq (for its sour taste) and roasted sesame seeds, and eating it with olive oil and bread. Za'tar, like the orange and the olive, has become a symbol of Palestine particularly in literature." Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 725
48. Playbill, Alive from Palestine: Stories under Occupation, 2002
49. Graham Usher, "Children of Palestine," Race and Class 321, no. 4 (1991): 10
50. Playbill, Alive from Palestine
51. The number of Israeli checkpoints in the northern part of the West Bank alone is 197, according to the statistics given by the Applied Research Institute and the Land Research Center, http://www.poica.org/casestudies/After- Aqaba-Summit%20-24-09-03/ (accessed 13 July 2004 and 7 November 2005)
52. Khaled Omer, the representative of the Palestinian American Congress for the Connecticut Chapter. I conducted interviews with the sponsoring committees and organizations at the 26 June performance
53. Playbill, Alive from Palestine, 2002
54. Playbill, The Wall, 2005