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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Living Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters By the waters of Babylon
By Nehad Selaiha
Coming Back From the Future (Oman)Oman is a land of magic and mystery -- all the more so because it seems utterly unpopulated. A hellish spot where the combination of heat and humidity make it a travesty of paradise. The rugged mountains sweeping majestically to the deep blue waters of the gulf, the many ancient castles, the sumptuous palaces, the quaint mediaeval market place in Nizwa (120 kilometres outside Masqat), and the many white villas dotting the landscape like white pigeons perching there for just a moment, are all breathtakingly beautiful. It makes for an enchanting vision that reaches you through the firmly closed windows of an air-conditioned limo or Mercedes that speeds madly through deserted roads and leaves you vexed, tantalised, frustrated and with a disturbing sense of unreality.
In May Oman dissolves in a mist of heat and shuns the company of mortals. For five months or more, the plain-dwellers are doomed to their hi-tech iceboxes unless they choose to migrate to the mountains and cool hill tops. There it is different, even now, said my car driver; you would need two blankets to keep warm, he added. What was he doing here in humid, sultry Masqat ferrying the guests of the Sixth Gulf States Theatre Festival from one stately mausoleum to another, I asked.
He had just come back from a two day walk with friends across Al-Jabal Al Akhdar (the Green Mountain), he had told me, dwelling with sensuous relish on the coolness of the mountain springs and streams and the delicious, mystical sensation of utter solitude. He had no interest in theatre whatsoever and no curiosity about the event which had drawn so many foreigners to his land. As far as he was concerned, we were indulging in a very expensive game for reasons he could not construe. He was there only for the little money he could make out of the occasion.
What age was this thin wiry white-bearded Nasser? I wondered. He switched on the radio and listened with the profound, tolerant cynicism of ancient sages to some professor expounding in highfalutin language his vision of the future and the challenges facing Oman in the third millennium. I began to wonder, not for the first time, if time as concept and process was the same for everybody, and whether it moved at the same pace in all countries. For six days we were catapulted between images of a past, dimly remembered, richly mythologised and decked out with folds of nostalgic wrappings, and a future thickly shadowed with a pervasive sense of anxiety and clouds of doom and gloom. It was difficult to reconcile those images with the luxurious surroundings of the gorgeous Bustan Hotel where performances took place, and it needed a tremendous leap of the imagination to sympathise with the various plights of the characters portrayed on stage.
More disturbing still was a tenuous elusive entity -- another elaborate theatrical pageant. Not surprisingly the most dramatic event in those six days in Oman had nothing to do with theatre or the festival. On the last day long after the closing ceremony, when all the excitement caused by the announcement of the awards had abated, the news that Netanyahu had conceded defeat in the Israeli elections ran like an electric current through the hotel, causing all the Arab guests to rush out of their rooms and jubilantly embrace in the corridors and lobby. The sheer vicariousness of that overwhelming sense of victory -- a victory for democracy scored by another nation -- put Arab reality in its true perspective. Suddenly the vague feelings that had been worrying me for days, the nagging sense of unreality, became focused in one question: if theatre is all about pretending, how long can it survive in a world where what is passed off as reality is mere pretence?
There we were, perfectly sane people from Europe and the Arab world, spending hours each morning discussing intricate intellectual issues and technical questions relating to theatre, and watching and analysing performances every night when we perfectly knew that the basic condition for the existence of theatre -- the freedom to ask and act -- was nonexistent or, at best, severely, limited in the majority of Arab countries. I do not know about other guests, but for me it was a great effort to mentally adjust to the fact that The Death of the Singer, a lyrical elegiac piece that mourns the passing away of traditional Arab music, came from Saudi Arabia -- a country where there are no public theatres and women are banned from the stage. More credible, but barely so, were Qatar's The Songs Of Shamali, which revived an old legend about the man who first invented the sail to cast the present in a most unfavourable light, Bahrain's production of Sadallah Wannous's A Day from our Times which predictably excised the most shockingly outspoken scene in the play, reducing it to sentimental mush, and Kuwait's Oh, Ya Mal (the opening of a traditional ballad) about the exploitation of poor fishermen in the past by rich merchants. The United Arab Emirates entry (from Dubai) was more cunningly relevant, featuring a hero who lives off the glories of his ancestors and ends up losing his wife and home -- an obvious parable about the loss of Palestine. But by far the most daring was the Omani Coming Back From the Future where the tower of Babel was the dominant metaphor, superimposed on oil drills and electricity towers and where the inhabitants of the Arab city of the future were portrayed as babbling idiots.
You may have gathered that what I have written here is prompted by a real sense of crisis, a gruelling awareness of the schizophrenic nature of most of our cultural practices, and a pressing need to hold on to my faith in theatre and my profession. If it sounds pessimistic, I have no apologies.
