Sleepless in Nablus

At 2:30, Friday morning, I had slept little when I heard the knock: "Al, are you asleep?"  It was Khitam.  She couldn't sleep either - loud traffic, uncomfortable bed and a few other complaints.  She was ready to move.  So we left the guest house and drove to a hotel not far from there.  It was on the third floor of a five story building.  We climbed the three flights, the night clerk calling "Welcome" down to us.  He checked us in, showed us our rooms, both clean, with firm mattresses and away from the street in a quiet neighborhood.  I got into bed, checked my watch - 3:30 - and turned off the light.

Not so early Friday morning, Khitam knocked: "You awake?"  We went to breakfast, a combination of a typical Arab breakfast and a western picnic: warm hardboiled eggs, Arabic bread, hummus, white cheese, labneh, zatar, olive oil, two kinds of jam, olives, tomatoes and cucumbers; and also sandwich meat, American cheese slices separately wrapped, canned olives and to drink, hot water, Lipton tea bags and instant coffee.  You could order Arabic coffee.  When Khitam asked about the western additions to a traditional breakfast, the clerk said many of their customers seemed to like those choices and canned or sealed foods last.  Could it be some of them aren't real food?

So, we had slept and breakfasted well for just over $40 each.  We had enjoyed our conversation with the owner of the guest house, but this little hotel allowed both of us to sleep.  We'll spend one more night there Friday, when we return to Nablus for the Cultural Festival.

We went back to the center of the city to get some kanafeh.  Khitam had discovered there was a place in the old city known for the best kanafeh in Nablus, which is saying something because Nablus is the kanafeh center of the universe, or so say the people of Nablus, and I've heard few counter claims.  Inside the old city, we asked for directions and discovered the shop didn't open till 1:00 o'clock when we would be on our way to Jenin.  So, we went back to the center of town to the second choice, a sweets shop near where we had parked.

An Arab sweets shop is not a small candy store.  Arab sweets are prepared on large rectangular or circular trays.  They cover a lot of space and there are a lot of them.  My last blog includes a picture inside the shop where we had our kanafeh: a long counter covered with large trays of Arab sweets with others stacked near to be baked or dressed with crushed pistachios or a sweet syrup.  We each had a serving of kanafeh and it was, as I remembered, delicious!  Then we were off to Jenin, to visit The Freedom Theatre.

Approaching Jenin Refugee Camp

When you get to Jenin, a medium size busy city north of Nablus, you ask someone directions to The Freedom Theatre and you are directed to Jenin Refugee Camp.  Soon you're driving on a narrow road crammed with two and three story buildings on either side of the road.  Children walk and ride bikes along the street, cars drive and honk by, and a small space opens on the right, the entrance to The Freedom Theatre.  We parked on the street and walked down a short two-car wide entrance to the theater complex.

Complex may give the wrong impression, a suggestion that The Freedom Theatre is something grand along the lines of Lincoln Center in New York.  This theater complex is in a Palestinian refugee camp where people are crammed together with little or no empty space.  That this theater even exists is a wonder.  But here it is, with the six actors performing Return to Palestine, the show we were going to see, hanging out with friends who also act or have studied there or are connected in another way.  To the right is the entrance to the theater; upstairs a rehearsal space on one side and on the other, the theater itself with sloped seating for about 200 and a bare open stage.

In front of The Freedom Theatre

Rana, a member of the ensemble performing Return to Palestine, came over to hug Khitam who had interviewed her as part of her Ph.D research.  After meeting her, we talked with Milad, an actor who trained at a theatre school in Ramallah and is now an itinerant actor, finding work around Palestine.  I asked him what his dream was and he answered: "To act and be with my girlfriend."  He has acted with The Freedom Theatre but is not in this production.  His girlfriend was there, so it seems he's close to his dream!  We also talked with Mustafa, the Managing Director while his five year-old son sat silent and probably bored until Khitam got some colored clay from her can and started making flowers and strange creatures with him.

Nabil al-Ra'ee, the Artistic Director, joined us for the few minutes he had before hurrying back to the stage for a final sound check.  Nabil is tall and slender, with dark curly hair and dressed in black collarless shirt,  black pants and sandals, Birkenstocks, I think.  I noticed the sandals when he gave a short curtain speech that included, "Turn off your phones.  Turn off your phones.  Turn off your phones."  Then someone in the audience said: "Bil Arabi!"  (in arabic)  In the few minutes we had to talk he spoke of working with Juliano, son of Arna Mer Khamis, who founded what is now The Freedom Theatre as a program for children in the camp.  In 1993, Arna was awarded The Right Livelihood Award, sometimes referred to as "an alternative Nobel Peace Prize."  With the award money, she built a theater for children, which was destroyed by the Israelis during an invasion of the camp but was rebuilt by Juliano, who succeeded his mother as the theater's director, and volunteers. It stands today as a tribute to his commitment, and his mother's, to art, culture and freedom.

Nabil and Khitam after the performance

Nabil worked with Juliano for several years.  After Juliano was assassinated by an unknown or unrevealed killer in 2011, Nabil was asked to take over as artistic director and agreed.  He has led the theater since then, with a hiatus of one year, after which the theater's board urged him to come back.  He did.

Nabil speaks with a calm passion about The Freedom Theatre as an educational program, a theater, a cultural center that offers training in other arts and as a leader of cultural resistance.  "There will be another intifada," he said.  "I don't know when.  I hope when it happens it will use cultural resistance, not violence or passive resistance."  He went on to talk about the arduous path to creating and nourishing such a theater program, a long path but one which he believes requires taking first steps first and moving forward step by step.  "There are many levels to our occupation," he said, and went on to list them, then he had to go.  I look forward to our next conversation.

Return to Palestine is less than an hour long and has been developed from conversations in refugee camps and in Gaza.  The actors originally took stories they heard from their audiences in the camps and Gaza and "played them back," that is, acted them on the spot.  They have since turned those stories into a unified piece, developed with a director by an ensemble of three men and three women in a small confined space on a bare stage.  In his introduction, Nabil mentions this, saying,
"...performed in a small space, like Palestine."  The plot is the visit of Jad, a Palestinian-American, to Palestine for the first time.  It is fast paced, dynamic with the actors playing everyone and everything.  It is funny, sad, tragic, goofy and moving.  In the end, after losing a new friend, Jad decides to stay in Palestine.  My guess is no one in the audience of Palestinians, Americans and Europeans thought that was the wrong decision.