Feeding minds is better than feeding mouths: Freedom Theatre's Nabil Al-Raee on doing theatre in Palestine

Life in a refugee camp is a surrealistic nightmare. All nightmares, at some point, come to an end.

But when you are made to feel like a refugee in your own homeland, the nightmare becomes a Sisyphean struggle where you are forced to push a giant boulder up a mountain and then roll it down to repeat the exercise over and over again. Imagine setting up a theatre group in such a locale.

Or don’t. The story of the Freedom Theatre that operates from the Jenin Refugee Camp on the West Bank is both heartwarming and heartrending, in equal measure.

The Palestinian theatre group has been putting up plays for more than a decade under intense and patience-testing circumstances. It has been a hard-fought struggle for them, losing friends and colleagues along the way. This is where the concept of cultural resistance has come to help them, shore up their morale, and making their resolve steelier by the day. The more the pressure, the better their performances will be. The group’s latest offering, Return to Palestine, is a cogent example.

On March 17, the Freedom Theatre landed in Karachi to take part in the International Theatre Festival organised by the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa). They performed Return to Palestine on March 18 to a packed hall. Icon sat down with the leader of the group Nabil Al-Raee (husband of Micaela Miranda who directed the play and could not come to Pakistan) for an interview during a rehearsal session. Excerpts follow:

Tell us about the Freedom Theatre. When and how was it formed?

Nabil Al-Raee: The Freedom Theatre has a lot of history. It was established in 2006. Before that there was the Stone Theatre. Stone, because the first Intifada, the first uprising of the Palestinian people, happened with stones against the Israeli occupation. And even before that there was an initiative called ‘Care and Learning.’ It was a Jewish woman’s idea. Her name was Arna Mer Khamis. She was married to a Palestinian. She was one of the freedom fighters who believed in the Palestinian cause, our struggle, our rights.

Arna came and worked on the streets of the Jenin Refugee Camp. In the beginning people suspected her — a Jewish woman coming to a refugee camp, what for? Until one day a woman, Samira Zubeidi, from the camp saw her working. She welcomed Arna and invited her to work from her house. From then on, it became a movement. Arna won the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award) for her work with the young people.

After money started to come in, they built their first theatre — the Stone Theatre. They set it up above Samira’s house. The Stone Theatre continued to work until Arna died of cancer. Then the second Intifada started and Samira Zubeidi was killed by an Israeli sniper. Her entire family suffered a lot at the hands of the Israeli occupation. One of her sons, Zakaria, was the most wanted by Israeli forces.

Then Arna’s son Juliano came to the fore to carry on with his mother’s work. During the second Intifada the Israeli army invaded the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002 and killed a lot of people. There was only one survivor, the son of Samira Zubeidi, Zakaria. After the carnage, a great deal of solidarity came from around the world and by coincidence a guy from Sweden, Jonathan Stanczyk, ran into Zakaria and talked about the role of culture in life. They met with Juliano and decided that they would come back and open the theatre that was working before. That’s how the Freedom Theatre was established [in 2006].

Juliano was also killed. Who killed him?

NAR: We don’t know who was behind the killing. The killer ran away.

Why would they get intimidated by an art activity like theatre?

NAR: If you feed minds, [it] is better than feeding mouths. If you try to bring in the concept of resistance and to establish a culture of no-fear, then you are more dangerous than a guy with a gun.

You are still operating from the Jenin Refugee Camp. How difficult is that?

NAR: It’s very difficult. We are facing different kinds of pressures, starting from the Israeli occupation up to the [Palestinian] Authority itself. If you go against oppression in general, then you are targeted. We are also facing the agenda of foreign aid. And then, of course, our own society which finds it hard to understand the role of art.

"When a young boy or girl comes to me and says ‘Thank you because the play is talking about me’, I say no, it’s talking about us. This is the role of art, which is why we do plays such as Return to Palestine for the Palestinians."

But you are doing a favour to you society.

NAR: The conservative segment of society looks at us from the [lens of the] forbidden, you know boy and girls working together ….

Do students come easily to your school? What’s the process of enrollment like?

NAR: We pay the price for it. We teach three courses — acting, devising and cultural resistance — for three years. Sometimes we approach the families [of students] and say to them that your son or daughter is doing something great, you have to trust us. Some families trust you, some don’t. This is one side.

The other side is that I have all the respect for those who die fighting for their rights resisting with guns. But that’s not the only way to resist. We resist through art and culture as well. It is very important to project the image of Palestine to the whole world for a different perspective because the world sees us through propaganda.

The Zionist propaganda works so hard to say they are the victims, that they are chased and killed by the Palestinians. When I perform in Jenin or anywhere else in the world, I see that mindset. After the play, people come to me and say ‘Oh my God, you are like us.’

Do you sense a change coming about through your efforts, your cultural resistance?

NAR: Yes, there’s a big positive change happening on the ground through our work and other people’s work. The Freedom Theatre is not the only one. There are so many groups and organisations that believe in the role of theatre, bringing in the new reality of accepting cultural resistance integrated into our society as part of the revolution. Our results are small, but very precious.

Precious?

NAR: I mean when you see young boys and girls believing in the role of art saying theatre has given me direction in my life. When a young boy or girl comes to me and says ‘Thank you because the play is talking about me’, I say no, it’s talking about us. This is the role of art, which is why we do plays such as Return to Palestine for the Palestinians.

"We are facing different kinds of pressures, starting from the Israeli occupation up to the [Palestinian] Authority itself. If you go against oppression in general, then you are targeted. We are also facing the agenda of foreign aid. And then, of course, our own society which finds it hard to understand the role of art."

Can you talk a little bit about Return to Palestine?

NAR: It’s very physical. There’s no set at all. There’s a platform of one by one-and-a-half metres. Six actors are on it who come up with different kinds of scenes by creating different situations. There’s also a little bit of text.

The research process for the play took us three to four years. We do a Freedom Ride, a freedom bus, which goes to several places in Palestine, especially to places that are directly under military occupation. That ride helped us collect stories from those places. After collecting the stories we did a storyboard. The play basically talks about the Palestinians who are born outside of Palestine. At the heart of it is a Palestinian guy whose name is Jad, who was born in America. He has a romantic idea about Palestine, but when he comes to Palestine and meets people here, all his ideas change.

The plays that the Freedom Theatre has put up are pretty eclectic. Among them are Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland. How do you pick and choose dramas? A newspaper report suggested you got into trouble for doing Alice in Wonderland.

NAR: Actually we read the social and political environment that’s created in a play. We don’t do theatre for the sake of theatre. We do theatre to point our finger at [read: to identify] problems that are around us. We chose Animal Farm because at the time [when we did the play] a peace process was happening on the ground along with security collaboration between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis. So we asked [as one of the questions that George Orwell puts in his book], is this where we’re going? Is the maximum we want to achieve is to establish a security collaboration with the Israelis? What for? Who does it serve?

What kind of audiences do you get for your plays?

NAR: Juliano used to say it’s always difficult to create actors but it is much more difficult to create an audience. We used to go to the streets and say ‘come see our theatre.’ We used to knock on doors.

Are you familiar with the work of any of Pakistani artists?

NAR: I once a met a few Pakistani artists in America. I haven’t seen their work though.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, March 26th, 2017