Theater of the Oppressed to Take Circus to West Bank for October Olive Harvest

By Pat and Samir Twair


	An ethnic Uighur watches the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games on a big screen in the main square of Xingiang’s famed Silk Road city of Kashgar, Aug. 8, 2008 (AFP photo/Peter Parks).

VIVIEN SANSOUR spent many a sleepless night in California pondering how she could bring culture and encouragement to her fellow Palestinians. The answer came last November, when she saw a massive papier maché head of a Guatemalan massacre survivor at a demonstration in front of the infamous School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. She was taking part in a Theater of the Oppressed protest.

The imagery of the giant headed puppets, stilt walkers, jugglers and musicians caught her imagination. What if they could do the same on the West Bank at olive harvest? Sansour asked the activists, and they agreed.

Everything sounded great—except that Sansour would have to come up with $25,000 for travel and lodging expenses.

The eight artists—accordian-playing stilt walkers, puppeteers, cyclists and percussionists—live on the East Coast and in Canada, where they have been staging fund-raisers for the olive harvest project. In Southern California, Sansour and her partner, Hector Aristizabal, gave a July 26 benefit at the Northridge home of Ayelet Cohen.

Sansour, who comes from Bethlehem, and Israeli-American Ayelet belong to the Healing Circle, a group of 10 Palestinian and Israeli women who meet monthly for frank discussions on how to reconcile narratives ingrained in them from early childhood.

“We will go dumpster diving while in the West Bank and make our huge headed papier maché puppets out of discarded materials, then teach the Palestinians to craft them and to make stilts,” Sansour explained.

Interjected Aristizabal: “Maybe we can teach the harvesters to walk on stilts so they can pick olives without ladders.”

In addition to conducting performance and puppet-making workshops, the performers will act out skits in pantomime to break the language barrier.

“We’ll be taking our circus to villages around Bethelehem and Ramallah during the last two weeks of October,” Sansour stated. “The whole idea is to bring hope and nonviolent solidarity to the Palestinians who are being deprived of access to their fields by the apartheid wall.”

At the July 26 event, a small stage was set up beneath a 70-year-old olive tree. Here, Aristizabal, a former torture victim of Colombian right-wing militants, performed an emotional enactment of his ordeal. A psychotherapist by profession, he closed by having the audience members shout and yell out hostile emotions.

So far, The Olive Tree Circus has raised only half the finances needed. For more information, visit <http://imaginaction.org/projects/the-olive-tree-circus> or e-mail Sansour at <vivien.sansour@gmail.com>.

Nakba Trip Revelations Told


Shakeel Syed at AFSC (Staff photo S. Twair).

From the minute they stepped foot in Israel last May, 31 members of an Interfaith Peace Builders tour were as much as told: “You don’t belong here and we’re watching you,” recalled Shakeel Syed at an Aug. 13 presentation he gave at the American Friends Service Committee offices in Los Angeles.

The group initially viewed the Wailing Wall, the executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California explained, then the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Holy Nativity Church of Bethlehem before visiting al-Aqsa mosque.

Syed showed slides of the apartheid wall and illegal hilltop Jewish settlements in the West Bank which are funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. One poignant photo was of Fatima Abdullah, who has refused to leave her modest house as a settlement was built around her property. Her electricity and water were cut, but she bought a generator and brings in water supplies.

Even though Jewish friends told him it was a waste of his time, Syed talked to leaders at the hard-line settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron. He asked more moderate Zionists like Rabbi Erik Asherman and Jeff Halper why they prefer to live in Israel instead of their native U.S. Neither gave him a concrete answer. Someone flippantly told him it’s their “blue DNA” (in reference to the blue and white Israeli flag).

In Qalquilya, he met Eve, an Irish woman who was counseling Zahra, a young Palestinian grieving over the loss of her firstborn. The driver of an ambulance rushing her to a hospital was arrested by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. Unattended, Zahra gave birth in the ambulance, and her infant died.

Stating that he has no preference between a one-state or two-state solution, Syed explained: “If human dignity is not recognized in both people there will be no justice and no peace.”

As the group prepared to depart from Ben-Gurion Airport, the Shin Bet singled out 15 members of the group, including Syed, who answered the customary questions of who he’d talked to and where he’d been. Ten minutes before departure, Syed was the only one still being detained, but his 30 companions refused to board the British Airways carrier without him. At the last minute, he was released by Israeli authorities.

“I was aware of what is happening in Palestine,” he said, “but bearing witness there empowers me to speak out. I’ve lost two Jewish friends who don’t want to believe what I saw, but it is incumbent on all of us to speak out.”

And so he has. Syed even took his PowerPoint presentation to Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA).

PAS Memorializes Mahmoud Darwish


	Speakers at Aug. 30 Mahmoud Darwish Memorial (l-r) UCLA’s Dr. Gabriel Piterman, emcee Samir Twair and Cal Poly Pomona Prof. Mahmood Ibrahim (Staff photo P. Twair).

A large photo of Palestine’s legendary lyricist, Mahmoud Darwish, covered the podium at an Aug. 30 celebration of his life and works in the Glendale Library Auditorium. Nearly 150 people gathered for the event hosted by the Palestine Aid Society.

A special tribute was offered by Dr. Nabil Azzam, who premiered his “Elegy for Mahmoud Darwish” on the violin. He had invited the poet to Los Angeles, Dr. Azzam noted, where his Multi Ethnic Star Orchestra would perform music set to the poet’s lyrics. Only weeks earlier, in Nazareth, Dr. Azzam recalled, he learned Darwish’s health was failing.

Egyptian-American actor and activist Nasser Faris read “Identity Card,” one of Darwish’s signature poems. Filmmaker (and former Washington Report staff member) Nizar “Ragtop” Wattad read Suheir Hammad’s poem, “Tribute to Mahmoud Darwish.” Hip-hop star Omar “Offendum” Chakaki read Darwish’s “On This Earth” in Arabic and English.

Prof. Gabriel Piterberg of UCLA recalled how he and fellow Israeli historian Dr. Ilan Pappe enjoyed talking with Darwish, musician Marcel Khalife and Prof. Edward Said. Remarking that both Said and Darwish died at age 67, he asked, “How many Palestinians must die before they see justice?”

Algerian-American Prof. Hamoud Salhi noted that Darwish’s poem “Identity Card” held special significance to Algerians, who fought so long for their liberation from French occupation, and for Berbers today who seek their identity in Arab Algeria.

The Economist aptly defined Darwish as the “Voice of Palestine,” noted Prof. Brice Harris, who said he used Darwish’s poetry so his Occidental College students could appreciate the torment of exile or of living as an alien in one’s own country.

In closing, Prof. Mahmood Ibrahim explained that he became familiar with Darwish’s work in the late 1960s in New York as he was searching for his own identity as a teenager. He realized he was Palestinian—not Jordanian, as he had been told in Jordanian schools.

“Few people experience exile firsthand as Darwish did,” Professor Ibrahim said, “and were tormented by the estrangement, departure and banishment as he was. A Palestinian writer can’t be a tourist in other lands so much as a walking cause.”

Professor Ibrahim concluded by quoting lines from a poem Darwish wrote at age 9 dedicated to a Jewish child:

You have a house while I have none

You have celebrations while I have none.

Why can’t we play together?

A DVD has been made of the Aug. 30 service, and a book of the event is also being prepared. Both will be sent to the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, where Darwish wrote. For information on obtaining the DVD, please contact the AET Book Club at (800) 368-5788 ext. 2 or <www.middleeast books.com>.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.