Response to Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Centre of the Earth, by Ashtar Theatre

We meet a boy – Yamen – who fantasises about being able to make people and animals whole again, by stitching body parts from one to another. Frankenstein bodies. More than human. Able to move in ways that they never could before. His brother – dead. And talking with him in his imagination (or for real). I hope it’s for real.

Yamen is reclaiming the sickening term that Israeli leaders gave to Palestinians and have repeated throughout the most recent escalation of genocide, describing us as ‘human animals’. Yamen’s fanastical human animals are a clear reflection of Picasso’s painting Guernica, but this is not where the allegory ends.

We meet a girl- Yara – killed in an attack on a building that pours rubble down upon her body and suffocates her. She’s a surfer and in her afterlife, she imagines she can surf the rubble of Gaza, amazing all the people who watch her in awe. Her father remembers her as a child. How soothed she was by the sound of the waves. Unlike Yamen and Hamza, Yara and her father aren’t able to speak to one another; they don’t occupy the same space – they are lost and searching for one another. At the end of the play there’s this glimmer of hope that the spaces they each occupy are thinning and blending – that they are crossing back into each other’s paths. Perhaps this is a theatrical device for articulating the integration of deep loss?

And we meet the last beekeeper of Gaza. His beehive buzzing with life is mirrored in the buzzing of the drone (the zanana) above his head. Constantly forcing him to move. The dwindling of bees is matched by the killing of children in Gaza. The bees are crucial for the future pollination of food. The children are also crucial, to the future of Palestine. One reference in this play to the verse about The Bee in the Qur’an (Surah an-naHl) has a deep meaning about the power of the humble bees, from which sweet healing nectar comes, as a result of very simple, humble labour. My mind goes to the many videos of Palestinians in Gaza building homes, engineering simple machines, and keeping on living within the worst possible circumstances.

The beekeeper is not only there to tell us about the meaning of bees; he is a person with precious skills that are at risk of being lost as the numbers of beekeepers and their hives drop. He is trying to keep the bees alive, and we are hoping that he himself can stay alive. To pass on the knowledge his aunt gave to him. This point, about lost art, reminds me of the tradition of storytelling of the hakawati – so relevant to Ashtar’s own lineage. In Guernica, Gaza, we hear many many stories; these are, like the bees, important to preserve. As is the role of the storyteller and the precious ways in which stories have always been told across Bilad ash-Sham.

This play, describes the Palestinian condition of survival in Gaza. It raises the horror and indignity of IDF attacks, and the relentless processing of grief. It also blends the worlds of life and death, articulating in a way that is only possible through this artifice of theatre the possibility of always being close with each other – even after death – through the resonance of terrible experience of violence, and of unending love. Through the collective movement of Palestinian bodies getting up everyday and living. 

Written by: Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi 

Directed by: Emile Saba 

Assistant director: Hadil Khaled 

Sound design:  Motasem Siam 

Visual and light design: Yasmin Omari 

Voice and Movement: Konrad Suder Chatterjee 

Technicians: Yasmin Omari and Konrad Suder Chatterjee 

ASHTAR Theatre: https://www.ashtar-theatre.org/