Nineveh

In 2011, I set off on a hunt that would take me around the world to work with ex-soldiers and ex-combatants on theatre projects dealing with homecoming and the return to civilian life after war. For months, I sat in rehearsals listening to the stories of these wounded men, without a clear picture of what it was I was looking for. Most of their tales were trauma narratives, set on an ever-softening loop, like a stuck record fading slowly towards the eventual peace of death. ‘The pit I dug to bury my enemy in cement.’ ‘The day I lost my limbs and sight.’ ‘The cell where they tortured me.’ Hearing these stories again and again, I got the sense that the men telling them were shedding a small piece of their past with each retelling. Change was occurring, but it was the slow and limping healing of a lifelong injury, and not the total transformation of a poetic rebirth.

Between each project I would come back to Britain to sit down with playwright Julia Pascal and unpack the dense months of material collected. Julia had the difficult task of synthesizing my fractured year into a new play; a play that I was beginning to fear would be as grinding and nonsensical as the painful memories that were quickly becoming a discordant stream of world-weary Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu and Kashmiri voices.

Then I went to the Rwanda Demobilization and Reintegration Commission’s Child Rehabilitation Centre in Musanze, where a recently demobilized child soldier told me this story:

Once upon a time there was a boy named Chance. As a child he was made to fight, and lost his hands and his arms in the war. When Chance returned to his family, they saw he had no arms, and that he could not work, and so they threw him in the river, where he was swallowed by an enormous fish. When the fish spat him up, Chance had grown both of his arms back. He met a boss-man who taught him to fly a plane. He returned to his family who saw he was rich and able-bodied. They begged to have him back, but he rejected them, and set off into the world in his airplane.

Somehow, intuitively, this 16-year-old boy – placed precariously between a tumultuous past of fighting in the Congolese jungle, and an uncertain future in a civilian society which may or may not accept him – had managed to hit upon my own unarticulated question and its answer: what is the moment of total healing, of hope, in all of these painful histories?

‘Chance’ was reminding me that hope must be sought in the poetic realm of myth and magic, where severed arms can regrow, and salvation can be found by riding in the intestines of a leviathan.

Julia Pascal was as moved by the boy’s fairy tale as I had been. ‘It’s Jonah,’ she said. ‘Jonah and the whale.’ We breathed a shared sigh of relief as we realized we had finally hit upon a theatrical context that could actually unite our multi-lingual cacophony into a single coherent voice and vision.

Lights up (fade). Three soldiers from three countries are sitting in the belly of a whale…

*****

London-based physical theatre company Theatre Témoin presented Julia Pascal’s ‘Nineveh’, an exploration of the trauma of combat and the hope that comes afterwards. Inspired by true stories told by ex-combatants from across the world; collected during a year of creative work in Kashmir, Israel, Lebanon, and Rwanda, ‘Nineveh’ ran at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London from 16 April to 12 May, 2013.

La Dernière Ligne (Lebanon)

“Au revior," I call as I hop out of the car, “Et, merci… il faut du temps pour…” I trail off and gesture vague circles with my hands. “Digérer.” Assaad finishes for me.

It’s true: after talking with Assaad I always have many thoughts to digest. His ideas are lucid and his direction clear. Often it feels like he has a deeper understanding of my own project than I do.

Let me rewind: that morning we meet with Roger Assaf, Artistic director of Dowar Shams, a theatre in Tayouneh, to get his thoughts and advice. I sit listening as Roger and Assaad chat about the fact that they have crossed paths once before (‘67? No, ‘66. Assaad took a course under Roger, maybe he remembers…). The whole meeting, this banter included, is conducted in French for my benefit.

Then Assaad and I stay in the foyer upstairs to keep discussing the project.

We have definitely 3, maybe 4 ex-combatants of different parties onboard. Our aim is to create a storytelling piece that addresses the young generation and can tour to schools. The 2 new participants both feel the same about the process—the writing they are excited to be on board for, the performing is a bit beyond their scope. Good, understandable. So the brief has changed a bit: the actors we’ll sort out later, our job now is to write. 22 schools have signed up to receive whatever we come up with. So now we simply get to work…

It is dawning on me that my biggest creative task at the moment is to figure out how I, a non-Arabic speaking foreigner, can best contribute my artistic expertise to the creation of a text-based storytelling piece in Lebanese, about Lebanon. I think of other projects I’ve done in similar contexts and realize they were entirely body-based. Sure I devised a show in a language I don’t speak, but what I was looking at was rhythm, relationship, physical dynamics. Bodies in the space. Right now our collaborators are telling Assaad that their comfort zone is in language, not in movement. I have to honor that. I have to start there.

Getting a Lebanese writer is crucial. I have two weeks to do that, and CVs are trickling in now so that's good. Many of these questions about process will be answered, together, then. But there is another enormously potent question that my friend Erin asked me about a year ago, that keeps cycling through my mind: “Ailin, you spend so much time worrying about what you want to do, but I think you should start asking yourself what you have to give. What do you have to offer? What is needed that you have the skills to provide?” The deep wisdom of this question has been slowly making itself clearer in the time since Erin asked it.

Assaad and I have questions too. We compile a list. I start simple: What do the participants want to communicate to the youth? What do the youth want to know?

You’d be surprised, Assaad tells me. They want hero stories. They want to know how many people you killed, and how. They are submerged in the logic of war. He re-frames my question in a better way: What do we want the youth to take home from this piece?

Then we start to talk about the rehearsal process, and Assaad’s questions pour out in a confident stream:

What was the atmosphere that preceded the war?

How did you self-identify before the war?

What was your foreign affiliation? Who did you want to be like?

Who were the enemy, or other?

When did you decide to politically or militarily associate yourself with a group?

What was the reaction of your parents?

What was the exact moment or incident that pushed you to take up arms?

As I scramble to write these down, I think to myself how funny it is that Assaad is always telling me: “In terms of the artistic side of things, that’s your realm, I have no idea…” His pointed provocations alone could fuel a three-play trilogy. He’s a wellspring of theatrical creativity, he just doesn’t know it yet.

Question 8 is stated with the same matter-of-factness as the others: What was your journey from feeling fear, to feeling hatred, to enacting violence, to finally feeling nothing?

The question is “how did it happen for you, specifically.” But the trajectory is assumed. The trajectory is a fact.

I add, “And when did you start feeling again?” Assaad shakes his head, “Non, ça c’est la dernière ligne.” That’s the last last line. We’re not even close to getting to that question yet.

I understand why Assaad is such an inspiration. He knows exactly what he has to give. He sees his world and he sees the problems it faces and he sees very clearly how he fits into them. He’s also very trusting, and patient with me as I wrestle to define my own place in all of this. He knows we’re on a journey, and he knows I’ll get us there eventually.

At we reached the end of our meeting with Roger, Assaad looked to me and said in English, “What else, director?” I smiled to myself, wondering who was directing who.

Ugly American (Lebanon)

So I’ve had fun playing the foreign clown. Some of the slip-ups have been pretty run-of-the-mill tourist things, e.g. taking a “bus” instead of a “service,” hugely overpaying the driver, and getting dropped off miles from home without any kind of map. Other faux pas were a bit more daft in hindsight—like my assumption that everyone in Lebanon is fluently trilingual, just because all the people I met in the first week (through Sabine) happen to be.

We get such a kick out of my Americanisms that I find myself intentionally disregarding the little taboos (“You can’t buy only two tomatoes at a time!”) to provoke the benevolent ribbing that ensues. I’ve learned that the humor in these situations is directly proportional to the rigidity of the rule being broken, so it makes perfect sense that I’m met with the biggest chuckles when I start to describe my project, and what I hope to do here.

I get it. After a week here, I get the joke perfectly. I don’t know if I can articulate it—the punchline might get lost in translation—but I’ll try.

The Lebanese civil war lasted 15 years between 1975 and 1990. There is very little unanimous agreement as to what it was about or what started it or even what exactly happened at each stage. Militia groups cropped up in every corner—split along religious lines, socio-political lines, class lines, and ethnic lines—and often these lines criss-crossed and overlapped. Some members of the oligarchical elite manipulated popular movements to steer the political situation in their favor. Some personally motivated, mafia-backed operations were coopted by social movements and grew sprawlingly out of any one person’s control. Organizations that took part as independent fighting entities include the LF, GC, KRF, Noumour, PSP, LCP, COA, SSNP, MB, SLA, LNM, LNRF, PLO, Amal, Hezbollah, LAF, PFLP, DFLP…

Get it? No? Okay, let me try again. Imagine you subscribed to an ideology as a kid. Maybe someone you knew got shot and it pissed you off and you wanted to get the bastards back. Maybe you were up to your ears in repeated injustice, and there was one organization out of all of them that genuinely had your people’s interest at heart; a beacon in all of the insanity. Maybe your big brother was a fighter and a family hero. It’s not hard to imagine, we all subscribe to ideologies.

Within and in addition to the 20+ national parties, there were both official and non-official interventions throughout the 15-year period from neighboring nations—notably Syria and Israel, as well as Iran and Iraq. Foreign involvement was so extensive that even the term 'civil' war is quite rightfully contested, as is the existence of any purely 'Lebanese' party. At some point or another, almost all of the parties were aligned with or fighting against almost all of the other parties. Because of the complexity of foreign involvement and strategic maneuvering, combatants frequently found themselves aligned with militias that didn’t share their ideological or religious views (at one point, Syria and Israel were both propping up the Maronite-dominated government, technically putting them on the same side, though for vastly different political reasons). Conversely, fighters also quite often found themselves in the position of—literally—firing at their brothers.

Imagine you lose sight of the ideology. Imagine the dust settles and no one can seem to tell you what the heck you’ve been fighting over the last 15 years. Or imagine that you still believe quite strongly in what you fought for. Either way, with 20+ parties in the mix, coming out as an ex-combatant for any one of them is statistically going to piss off 95% percent of your neighbors. And by “piss off,” I mean, “they might blame you for the death of their mother.”

Imagine that a polite amnesia grips your nation. Not a childish act of denial, but a rational—perhaps even wise—enforced attitude of quiet. There are things we won’t discuss for a bit. “Ideology” is kind of a dirty word. People are mourning. Let’s not enter into any kind of conversation that could stir things up; lead to more confusion and blame. The war we talk about, sure, unendingly. “We are bored with talking about the war.” Victims we can talk about, we are all victims. But combatants? Combatants fought for a party, and “party” is a dirty word…I won’t allow my children to support a party. Ask my children who they support, and they’ll tell you, “Brazil.”

It’s no coincidence that, in a 2009 documentary about the war, only 1 of the 6 ex-fighters interviewed chooses to remain anonymous; and of the 6, he’s the only one who expresses a continued belief in the stance of his party—the only one whose narrative doesn’t include “I feel manipulated and betrayed, and the war was a huge mistake.” I don’t think he’s actually a minority, by any means. I just think most ex-fighters wouldn’t go anywhere near a camera.

Now. Imagine that an American clown wanders into Beirut and starts to naively and systematically break all of the unspoken rules. She wears chunky foam flip-flops (more of an eye-roll than a laugh); she gets stuck in the elevator because she rides it just before the daily 6pm power-outage (okay, that’s pretty funny); she asks for plastic bags to take the dog for a walk (she wants to do what with the poop?!); and she’s planning to network with ex-soldiers—not just to talk with them about the war, but actually to do some sort of creative “art” thing together (hilarious. oh my god, hilarious).

Beirut Skyline (Lebanon)

Room with a view. I'm literally speechless as Sabine shows me into my new home. Her flat sits atop a ten-story apartment block. Like all of the homes I've seen here, it takes up the entire floor, with wall-to-wall windows on all sides giving the feeling that you're floating on air.

The lot of disused Army vehicles at the base of the apartment is a nice touch, although I wouldn't really call it a coincidence--they're just part of the standard landscape.

Dissecting the project with Sabine has made me consider and reconsider so much of the terminology that I've thrown around in the lead-up to this. Coming here I knew that the "home" part of the "homecoming" would be a huge point of focus. A journey is defined as much by its destination as its point of departure, and one of the questions I had coming here was "what is home to an ex-fighter in Lebanon?" This home is already too many things to put in a blog, and I've only been here a couple of days. Sabine has been working with another Lebanese artist, Chantal, to collect personal stories from towns and villages throughout the country, and has compiled them into a gorgeous storytelling piece. She performed it for me in Arabic and then translated it afterward, and I realized how much there is here, how specific and textured this place is, and how far I am from understanding what it would mean to come home to it.

There's also the issue of the journey. A Western soldier coming home leaves a physical space behind to return to a different geographical location. Not so here. It's interesting to note the way that a place's history so drastically affects and shapes language. "Veteran"--as a person in civilian society who has the special status of having lived through war--is almost a nonexistent concept here; there are soldiers and then there are civilians. All of them have survived the war.

But those words I had already mulled over; I expected I'd have to examine them. Here's one that caught me off-guard though: "creativity." I was probing about the likelihood of organizing an informal showing to share the work created, and after about five minutes of faffing Sabine came out with, "Ok listen, we can organize anything, we can do poetry or theatre or whatever. And people will come, definitely, because they're my friends. But everyone here is bored with talking about the war. We've done a lot of it already." Perfect! A creative challenge: what can we present that won't be boring, here, in this context, for this audience? That's what creativity is, right? Something untested, something new. I had never before considered the audience and context as such huge determinants in defining "creativity," but of course they are. Of course they are. And what's really thrilling about all of this is the fact that the audiences here are going to guide us in creating something that will be totally specific, totally born of this time and place. If I can manage to share even a piece of that with audiences in the UK, they're going to know much much more than if I just came back with interviews and news clippings to compile into something "creative" back home in London.