"...the bass can kill you..."
"...just like Beirut..."
...just a few phrases that echo from Urban Theatre Project's new production, (not) exploring 'the C word', opening in November 2008:
stories of love and hate
How many articles, short films, theatre works, books have been produced since December 2005? How many meetings, seminars, symposia, conferences?
UTP's new work is beautifully restrained through the passage of time, experience and patience, in the almost three year aftermath. I rejoice in the absence of some all too common nouns, verbs and icons, within the show's story-streams and synchronicities.
Although it is very different from some theatre productions of the recent past (1) [the shows of the funding-that-we-had-to-have], stories of love and hate still feels the need to invoke elements of the now-legendary violence, through verbatim stories of witnesses. Lest We Forget? While such theatre is bearing human witness, why do i have to relive that nauseous pain of the long summer of 2005/6? (2)
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(1) Community performance 101: compare and contrast the following:
a. A pseudo-epic number performed at the Opera House; a so-called co-production by two youth theatre companies, one White City and one Brown South-West.
b. An outdoor number in a southern plaza, that had promised cities carved of ice, yet offered a cool fantasy on different tribes, where almost no spoken language eluded the cliches of the season.
c. This current number, editing and crafting 65 interviews, requiring the four actors to swallow the sounds, pauses and stammers - (swallow the violence?) - then, like human PA's, channel out for our listening.
d. Other numbers, that i consciously avoided, that displayed lines in the sand, various flags and life-saving caps.
(2) I have always had discomfort about simulated torture and violence in theatre, never relaxed with those 1980s genres... my boringly incessant questions of who is speaking? ...writing? ...who is listening? ...who is hurting whom? But, that's another story, eh.
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Although i did have expectations of a certain level of intimacy in the new UTP production (facilitated by the headphone performance technique, which makes the actors appear as if they are lyrically channelling personal stories of the interviewees), stories of love and hate touched my heart in unexpected ways - in love and in sadness - within some of its subconscious layers and internal linkages, possibly even unintentional through the artistic direction.
Reflections of both the young surfers and the elderly swimmers invoke an everyday spirituality, a Rumi-like Love relationship of the Human Body to the Greater Ocean, linking my minds-eye further south-west, down the Hume Highway to Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, to Phil George's surfboards painted with diverse and intricate Islamic designs (Borderlands exhibition 2008/9).
I think about our Sydney suburban relationships to land and sea, a combination of class, acquired wealth or generational good luck, providing much-valued access to 'The Water'. My immediate family lived in Kingsford and Cronulla in the first three years of my life, before moving to (north) western Sydney (away from their many Lebanese networks in Redfern). My Mother (tow'l amr'ha) still lives in that same house since 1961. Apart from the backyard in that house, my favourite places in Sydney have always required treks much further east.
stories of love and hate shares a few current-generation stories from the south western side, where Localised Love in Punchbowl is expressed through knowing Your Neighbourhood, Your Car, Your Mall. However, most people do feel a sense of their own humanity in being near the water. I love how the sea breathes, eternally in and out. And though it is moving water, the Burramatta River is just not the same.
Inside another layer in my mind, i remember the imposed claustrophobia in Ramallah, in the West Bank, where the Israeli Military Occupation of Palestine made the sea inaccessible, a million miles away, and not the proverbial stone's-throw-away that it really was. But i am not making comparisons here.
To be honest, one of the (minor) characters in the show who unexpectedly moved me, was 'the Arab Father' (tow'l amr'hu). Here lays an inner tragedy, hidden within this show. His relationship with Lebanon. His relationship with his son.
The L Word.
Not the cult American TV series about glossy lean lesbians.
The L Word.
Lebanese. Lebanon. Leb.
The very word 'Lebanon', what has it become?
The very word 'Lebanese', what has it become?
Here, for us.
Within us. About us.
Such love and belief.
Such nausea and filth.
Simultaneous.
Parallel universes.
The Arab Father inhabits past and present.
Simultaneously. No problem.
Love and Hate?
Is this about how we need to learn to love ourselves, as Ghassan Hage has been speaking in recent years, as Racism and Whiteness has taught us to hate our very selves? (And this is not just metaphorical... a half a century, and this racialized body is still not relaxed at the beach.)
Lebanese.
The dirtiest word in NSW over the last ten years.
Not just post-Cronulla. (The C-word, not a TV series.)
I remember in 1998, Premier B. Carr with his Daily Telegraph pin-up, wannabe-crim-kids, bought off with free pizza. He solidified the vernacular of demonizing 'The L Word'. (And 'Gangs'.) He led the wave of the racialization of crime. He rode the wave of the criminalization of 'ethnicity'.
We had to use our L word in a different way now, after having coined and popularised the term 'Arab Australian' during the Islamaphobic race-war-at-home, during the First Gulf War of 1991.
Some of us were of the Lebanese not denying our Arabness, now needing to reclaim our Lebaneseness.
1975. 1982. 1991. 2001.
December 2005... to name but a few loaded years.
(Some numbers develop their own heavy weight. Ask any Palestinian: 1948? 1967?)
How many articles, films, theatre works, books have been produced? How many meetings, seminars, symposia, conferences?
These days, my long-term memory is better than my short-term memory.
Anne Monsour has written about racialization and criminalization of 'Syrian / Lebanese' before and after Australian Federation. Since the late 1800s there have been generations and massive diversities of Arabs in Australia. stories of love and hate only reflects one of those moments, and does not pretend otherwise. But yep, legislated as 'Aliens' in 1901, at the turn of the C.
But back to 'the Arab Father' in stories of love and hate.
What if my own Father (Allah yer'hamu) could channel into my headphones from The Other Side? What would he say about what has become of our own, our private L Word?
He emigrated in 1950, never to return. One generation later he laughed at my adult attempts at re-learning Arabic, many schizophrenic years after my home language had become poisoned and swallowed. He reminded me that we had laughed at his English.
Then almost half a century after he had departed, i wanted him to travel to Lebanon with me, for my very first visit (after doing time in Palestine). He said: "Inti rouh'ee bi mahal'ee..." (You go in my place...). I was conscious that i felt blank at the time of that much-awaited first landing.
Maybe it was better for him that he passed over to The Other Side in 1999? So many racialized landmarks since then, in our own backyard and beyond.
The L Word.
He was My Lebanon.
Mythical and tangible.
Stories of Love and Sadness.
Hey, do you wanna see photos of me and my Bob(a) on Cronulla Beach when i was three years old?
