BEIRUT: Since his death at the age of 36, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani has become something of a legend. Journalist, literary critic, novelist and spokesman of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he produced an extraordinary body of work in his short life.
Born in 1936 in Akka (Acre), Mandatory Palestine, Kanafani fled to Lebanon in 1948. After time spent in Syria and Kuwait, he settled in Beirut in 1960, where he married the Danish-born Ani Kanafani (nee Hoover), who still controls the rights to Kanafani’s works.
Before his assassination by car bomb in 1972, in an explosion presumed to have been carried out by, or for, Israeli intelligence, Kanafani published what would become one of his best-known and loved works, the novella “Return to Haifa.” As Ani Kanafani, who still resides in Beirut, recently told The Daily Star, “it is one of his essential works.”
A stage play of “Return to Haifa” begins a nine-night run at Beirut’s Babel Theater Saturday evening. Theatrical adaptations of “Return to Haifa” have staged in France, Belgium, Italy, and Israel – but never before in Lebanon.
“Return to Haifa” tells the story of Said and Safiya, a Palestinian couple who fled Haifa in 1948, leaving their baby son Khaldun behind. As the title suggests, they return to Haifa in June 1967, to find their son alive and living in their house.
He is now called Dov, having been adopted by Israeli Jews of Polish origin, and he is a reservist in the Israeli Army. The reunion with his birth parents provokes feelings of anger, resentment, and political consciousness within both Khaldun/Dov and Said.
Ani Kanafani chose Beirut-based veteran Lina Abyad for the daunting task of adapting Kanafani’s work for the stage. Having recently directed Beirut productions of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s “The House of Bernardo Alba” and “Kafka,” Abyad is no stranger to adapting difficult material for the Beirut stage.
That said, adapting “Return to Haifa,” as Abyad told The Daily Star, has been an especially trying experience. “With a text that is so difficult and so well known you have the impression that, no matter what you do, you are going to betray it in one way or another.
“It has been a very moving and difficult play to work on, because there is the personal level of [Said and Safiya]… and then it echoes in the political situation [of the Palestinians].”
Abyad is forthright about the many challenges of adapting Kanafani’s text for the stage. “The text is quite dry [in how] it is written,” she says. “There is a huge difference between the written and the oral style. And we tried as much as possible … to make this talking humid, to make it everyday. So we did lots of improv about this.”
The adaptation is highly conscious of the politics of movement, and Abyad and her cast have carefully chosen the actors’ every gesture.
“Are we going to have the Israelis sitting down, or standing up? Are they going to sit at the same table or not? Even something that is as simple as that, in any [other] play you would put … [a] Palestinian and this Israeli sitting together around a table and discussing. In this play, it immediately goes somewhere else.”
This production of “Return to Haifa” will be as much Palestinian as it is Lebanese. All of the actors save Hussein Nakkal (Khaldun/Dov) are Palestinian and the characters will speak in Palestinian dialect. “It is quite strong to hear [Palestinian dialect],” Abyad notes, “because we hear it and we associate it with different things.”
After the play’s nine-day run at the Babel, it will be performed for one night at the UNESCO Palace for an audience from Beirut’s Palestinian camps. “There are lots of artistic activities in the camps but they are only toward the camp,” Abyad continues. “Lebanese people are not involved in these activities. They are very much secluded or elitist and it is very interesting to have these Palestinians telling their story.”
“It is very important that [Palestinians] attend the performance,” says Kanafani. The show will also tour in the camps of the Bekaa and the north and south of Lebanon.
At the end of “Return to Haifa,” Said calls for his other son Khalid to take up arms and become a fida’i [fighter]. Abyad herself is “against any sort of armed struggle.” She says the play is “not a call for war but a call for awareness … what kind of struggle this is [now], is the new question.”
In part to make it clear that Kanafani’s work is a product of a particular time, Abyad has taken pains to make her play very much a period piece – the action takes place on June 30, 1967. With costume, set and props designers Claire Meshref, Hana Fakhouri and Ghina Sibaii, Abyad has found clothes and items that she hopes will place the play in its appropriate time and context.
In Abyad’s interpretation, Kanafani’s text is as much about failure as it is about struggle. Said and Safiya return to Haifa after 20 years, having lost their son, their home and their country. When they leave Haifa, they no longer have the illusion of Khaldun – they know he has become the Israeli Dov.
“You’ve spent 20 years crying,” the son angrily tells Said and Safiya. “Is that what you have to say to me now? Is that your pathetic broken-down weapon?”
This depiction of the failure of the Palestinian cause was vivid for readers in 1970. The passage of time – during which calls for a “just peace” have mutated into today’s perpetually stalled “peace process” – has only made it more so.
Ani Kanafani scheduled Saturday’s staging to correspond with the anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
Passed December 11, 1948, nearly seven months after the state of Israel was created, Article 11 states “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
This has been widely interpreted as acknowledging Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.”
Kanafani’s work is a political animal in itself, but performing it on this day will surely give it deeper resonance.
“We believe it is very much necessary,” Ani Kanafani says of staging her husband’s work here after so many years. “It is very much appropriate. It’s a must.”
“Return to Haifa” continues until December 19 at the Babel Theater. For more information, call + 961 1 744 033.
'Return to Haifa' at the Babel Ghassan Kanafani’s novella will speak to its Lebanese audience in Palestinian By Annie Slemrod
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&article_id=122414#ixzz17zn6hfrD (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
