HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014
27 July 2014
On the 25 July Hossam sent this photo with the message:
Did I not tell you that we love life whenever we can!
Thinking about war and peace:
A couple of days ago I asked Hossam and Jamal from Theatre for Everybody in Gaza, how they felt now, in the midst of the current military violence, about our plan to develop a stage production of War and Peace in Gaza.
We’ve been working in partnership with them since 2002 and since 2009 we have committed ourselves to sustaining a creative cultural exchange called GAZA DRAMA LONG TERM. This has been through a number of phases: Gaza: Guernica, Gaza: Breathing Space, Gaza: Opening Signs. Much of the work so far has been focused on work with young people and those whose lives have been adversely affected by organised violence.
When the border crossing with Egypt was opened during Morsi’s presidency we thought we could undertake a closer collaboration and we decided to undertake a project that could engage a wider section of Gazan society. With the army takeover that has led to Al Sisi’s presidency in Egypt we had to admit that our Gazan partners would not be able to get out and we would not be able to get in to Gaza. So we started planning to develop the production by holding parallel events here, in London, and in Gaza. When the move towards a unified government was undertaken by Hamas and Fatah things looked even more propitious for work of this kind of scope. So we are working towards a video link up event at Rich Mix here in London and the Institut Francais in Gaza on Sunday 14th September.
Hossam responded: “Regarding War and Peace, for the time being the only thing I can say: I believe in doing it now more than any time before”
For the time being we are sticking to our plans. But the question remains for us too. How does it feel to be continuing to work for this production of a unique Arabic stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s great romantic and philosophical novel?
We have been using the brilliant stage adaptation by Erwin Piscator and colleagues at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in the mid-1950s. Hossam has created an Arabic translation of this adaptation and it will be this text that will be the starting point for the work on the Gaza production. In London we have also engaged with a number of writers: Hassan Abdulrazzak, Caryl Churchill, Ahmed Masoud and Haifa Zagana, asking them to make responses to this work. These new texts will be given staged readings on Sunday 14th September along with a new Arabic translation of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children that Hossam Madhoun in Gaza and Hassan Abdulrazzak in London have undertaken!
When we conceived this phase of our project we thought it would be inspiring for audiences in Gaza (and elsewhere!) to see what stage artists in Gaza made of this epic novel about themes that those artists would be thoroughly experienced in. Also we had noticed that artists in Gaza were generally asked to make art directly about their situation. We thought the optic offered by Tolstoy’s description of the war between the French army led by Napoleon against the Prussians and the Russians, the second movement of which involved the occupation of Russia, the taking of Moscow and the French army’s subsequent defeat would, through reflection, enhance thinking about the current situation. And of course the love story that drags apart and draws together the three main characters Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov would be recognisable in all cultures.
We were particularly encouraged when we saw how Tolstoy’s attempt to create a portrait of a whole human society through descriptions of family ‘mini-cultures’ was so relevant to the family-based character of Palestinian society. Also, the intergenerational scope of the novel, set over a the opening years of the Nineteenth century, involving two wars and two ‘peaces’ touched on current themes in Palestine. The contour of the events described by the book felt similar to the movement from the First Intifada (1987) to the return of the Palestinian Authority after Oslo (1995-6) and the second Intifada (2000) without the similarity being anything other than comparable. Somehow these perceptions brought to our minds the kind of movements of history that Tolstoy is so keen to evoke in his novel.
We started, in our conversations, to consider how Tolstoy’s book draws out a distinction between different types of warfare, between the ‘set piece’ battles of the Moravian campaign climaxing with the Battle of Austerlitz and the formal peace treaty that followed, based on the mutual acceptance of the outcome of the battles, and the subsequent war involving the Napoleonic army’s occupation of Russia with its eventual defeat by ‘guerilla’ detachments. This new kind of people’s war was also encountered by the French in their invasion of the Spanish peninsula (about which Goya produced his Disasters of War) and these two campaigns, and to some extent the campaign in Prussia, was the basis of Carl von Clausewitz re-theorisation of military strategy that has had the most profound impact on thinking about these matters.
We started to think about the kind of perspectives that this historical overview could give. The situation for the Palestinians seemed to be characterised by an occupation that was constantly disclaimed, by a power that itself had undertaken terrorist armed resistance against the former imperial power, Britain. The process of occupation and colonisation was continuous. The war was called pacification. The peace seemed like the pursuit of war by other means. War and peace merged into one another.
Apart from the novel being a deep exploration of the human spirit it couldn’t achieve this without raising broad questions about the nature of conflict and different types of military activity.
Of course, we can’t really predict the outcome of the current intensification of armed violence in Gaza and our partners’ lives are being reshaped in circumstances that are being transformed but we are committed to continuing this deep cultural, artistic exchange that is now thoroughly permeated by love and friendship.
Our effort is to create a space where thinking and the imagination can dance together creatively. That’s theatre.
Note by Jonathan Chadwick
Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next.