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Inside Fateh Azzam's Baggage: Monologue and Forced Migration1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2007

NICHOLAS O. PAGAN
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Abstract

The work of Palestinian playwright Fateh Samih Azzam arises from his experience growing up as a refugee and from his strong commitment to human rights. His latest play, Baggage, is set in a crowded airport where a lone Traveler re-enacts the Catastrophe of 1948 and its consequences. This article begins by positioning Azzam's work in relation to post-1948 Palestinian theatre. It then looks in detail at how Baggage, written as a monodrama, incorporates a number of devices including airport announcements and other voiceovers to imbue monologue with dialogue. The question of the relationship between monologue and dialogue is examined in the context of the emergence of the ‘political’ in performance and especially in relation to Jon Erickson's recent contention that dialogues facilitate the representation of conflicting world views whereas monologues tend to be ‘vehicles for the overarching world view of the playwright’. Next, it discusses a recent staging of Baggage in Famagusta, North Cyprus, focusing in particular on the way in which the production was able to embellish and extend devices contained in the written text of the play to facilitate a movement from monologue to dialogue. In its conclusion, the article returns to the prevalence of monologue in Palestinian drama and to Erickson's idea that monologue involves partiality to one side of a dispute. The article contends that productions of Baggage, which, like the one in Famagusta, accentuate the dialogical, will make it clear that the play is not just a memory play for Palestinians, but that it also cries out for all those forced out of their homes and into what Edward Saïd has called ‘the trauma of exile’. Furthermore, it argues that the Traveler's monologues need to be heard and should initiate dialogues, which in some parts of the world have not yet even begun. Finally, it suggests that the universal appeal of this and other Palestinian plays could be even more striking were the heavy use of politically oriented symbolism counterbalanced by a more minimalist Beckett-like aestheticism.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 16 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2006

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References

NOTES

2 See Chomsky, Noam, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, rev. edn (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 96–7.Google Scholar

3 Urian, Dan, ‘Introduction: Palestinians and Israelis in the Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 3, 2 (1995), pp. 3–14, here p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See also Allen, Roger, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 208–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Jayussi, Salma Khadra, ‘Palestinian Identity in Literature’, in Abdel-Malek, Kamal and Jacobson, David C., eds., Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 167–77, here p. 173Google Scholar.

6 It is difficult to find a shrewder observer of developments in Palestinian theatre than Reuven Snir. He mentions The Wedding in ‘Palestinian Theatre: Historical Development and Contemporary Distinctive Identity’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 3, 2 (1995), pp. 29–73, here p. 51.

7 Ibid., p. 58.

8 Ibid., p. 56.

9 On al-Masra al-Nahi see Snir, ‘The Emergence of Palestinian Professional Theatre After 1967: al-Balalin's Self-Referential Play al-[ayin] Atma (The Darkness)’, Theatre Survey, 46, 1 (May 2005), pp. 5–29, here p. 7.

10 Ibid., p. 12; original emphases.

11 Azzam later became the director of the first Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq. In September 2003 he became the director of the Center for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo.

12 Interview with the author. I recorded an interview with Fateh Azzam at his home in Cairo on 2–3 February 2005. This interview, ‘Theatre and the Experience of Dispossession: Fateh Azzam in Interview with Nicholas Pagan’ is being published in three successive issues of Studies in Theatre and Performance, 27, 1 (January 2007), 27, 2 (June/July 2007), and 27, 3 (October/November 2007). Hereafter cited as ‘Fateh Azzam in Interview with Nicholas Pagan’.

13 Baggage and The Alley have been published in Jayussi, Salma Khadra, ed., Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology (New York: Interlink, 2003)Google Scholar The former is subsequently cited in this edition as Baggage, plus the page number. Betty Shamieh's Tamam is in Lane, Eric and Shengold, Nina, eds., Talk to Me: Monologue Plays (New York: Vintage, 2004)Google Scholar. A House of Madness was staged in 1991 at the Acre Festival for Alternative Drama and, to my knowledge, has not been published.

14 See Shipley, J. T., ed., Dictionary of World Literature (Totowa, NJ: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1968), p. 272Google Scholar, quoted in Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. John Halliday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 127; original emphasis.

15 Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, pp. 127–9. Here Pfister draws upon Jan Mukařovský, especially the chapter ‘Dialogue and Monologue’ in The World & Verbal Art: Selected Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

16 Kennedy, Andrew K., Dramatic Duologue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 33Google Scholar.

17 Jon Erickson, ‘Defining Political Performance with Foucault and Habermas: Strategic and Communicative Action’, in Davis, Tracy C. and Postlewait, Thomas, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 156–85, here p. 178Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 Baggage, p. 65.

20 Rushdie, Salman, ‘On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 166–84, here p. 174Google Scholar.

21 Baggage, p. 67.

22 E-mail to Raziye Nevzat, 28 October 2004.

23 Baggage, p. 66.

24 Ibid., p. 68. Azzam has explained that this kind of interrogation is based on actual personal experience. He spent eleven years in Ramallah in the West Bank, and even though he was, he says, in his own country, he had to live as a tourist and every three months was obliged to renew his tourist visa. This meant going out through the airport, and every time he was asked the same or similar questions to those that appear near the beginning of the play (‘Fateh Azzam in Interview with Nicholas Pagan’)

25 Kennedy, Dramatic Duologue, pp. 19–20.

26 Baggage, p. 69.

27 Erickson, ‘Defining Political Performance’, p. 175; original emphasis.

28 Baggage, p. 69.

29 E-mail to Raziye Nevzat, 28 October 2004.

30 Baggage, p. 75. My emphasis.

31 See Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, p. 128.

32 Baggage, p. 77.

33 Viswanathan, Gauri, ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (New York: Pantheon, 2001), p. 450Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 451.

35 Baggage, p. 80; original emphasis.

36 Erickson, ‘Defining Political Performance’, p. 178.

37 This paradox is captured by Said in Reflections on Exile when he describes the experience of the person living in exile both as ‘a solitude experienced outside of the group’ and as entailing ‘an exaggerated sense of group solidarity’. See Said, Edward W., Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 177–8Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 182. Said describes how exile can become ‘a practice that distances [the exile] from all connections and commitments’.

39 Baggage, p. 72.

40 Ibid., pp. 66, 67, 68, 79.

41 Ibid., p. 77.

42 Ibid., p. 78.

43 See Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 186. Said claims that most people ‘are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this. . .gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal’.

44 See Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Lavars, Annette and Smith, Colin (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

45 Blau, Herbert, ‘Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame’, in Gontarski, S. E., ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press), pp. NN–NN, here p. 256Google Scholar.

46 Alan Schneider, ‘Working with Beckett’, in S. E. Gontarski, ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, pp. NN–NN, here p. 243.

47 E-mail to Raziye Nevzat, 28 October 2004.

48 E-mail to Raziye Nevzat, 11 November 2004.

49 I am a mix of English and Scottish; the director is Irish; Haney N. Berhan, who played the Traveler, is from Eritrea; Suzzanah Mirghani, who provided the voice of the Woman, is a Sudanese-Russian; one of the voices for Announcement was provided by a Jordanian and the others were Turkish Cypriot and English. Although most audience members were from the local community of Turkish Cypriots, there were also a substantial number of mainland Turks and a considerable array of other nationals.

50 See Viswanathan, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, p. 319.

51 Baggage, p. 76.

52 Said also links the state of exile to the denial of a person or a people's identity, and he draws attention to the famous Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, whose poem ‘Identity Card’ (1965) has become emblematic of the Palestinians’ lack of identity. See Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, pp. 175, 179.

53 See Sean Loughna, ‘What is Forced Migration?’ Forced Migration Online: A World of Information on Human Displacement, available at http://www.forcedmigration.org (accessed 25 January 2005).

54 The first performance of the Famagusta production was followed by a lengthy discussion between playwright and audience. Many audience members were visibly moved by the occasion, including an elderly African-American gentleman and a young Turkish Cypriot who broke down and sobbed while asking their questions. The international appeal of what had happened was later further brought home to me by the playwright when he suggested that Berhan (the Traveler) could take the carpetbag and the soundtrack with him and perform the play as a one man show all over the world.

55 Erickson, ‘Defining Political Performance’, pp. 175–6.