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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Books Interview Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Off the boards
By Nehad Selaiha
Two months ago, a bright-eyed young woman in a softly coloured, flowered skirt walked into my office at the Academy of Arts carrying a big black volume and placed it gently on my desk. I raised my head from the thick pile of abstruse official papers, reports and letters I had been trying to negotiate my way through for hours, all the while cursing the day I had the honour of being appointed dean thrust upon me despite my violent, candid protest that I was a hopeless administrator and completely out of my depth when it came to rules and regulations. I was glad of the interruption, asked her to sit down and ordered two coffees. I did not know what she wanted, or what scholarly dilemma she came to lay at my door; but anything was infinitely preferable to that grim, soulless pile on my desk. "Intisar El-Shanti," she said, flashing a confident smile at me. It did not ring a bell, and noticing the blank look on my face, she added, putting the thick, leather-bound volume, "the thesis... Mou'in Bessisou. We spoke on the phone." Of course! She was that Palestinian student from Gaza who had rung up to ask if I would be willing to be on the board of examiners in the viva of her MA thesis on the plays of Bessisou. She had studied at the Institute of Arabic Studies founded in Cairo by the Arab League and worked on her thesis there under the supervision of prominent Arabic scholar Salah Fadl. The institution is renowned for its high academic standards and has on its teaching staff some of the most illustrious names in the field. The student before me looked and sounded both knowledgeable and intelligent and the subject was enticing; it would be a chance to revisit the fiery dramatic world of Bessisou and reassess his art and political thought with the benefit of hindsight.
I was quite willing, I said; but since I was already devilishly busy and about to be hurled into the merciless vortex of the CIFET preparations, not to mention preparing for the new academic year entrance exams at the beginning of September, it all depended on when she wanted to take her viva. "My scholarship ends in August and I have to be back in Gaza," she explained; but she could stay a week or two longer if it was absolutely necessary since she was keen to have me as examiner and thought we were kindred minds. "But, please, not beyond the middle of October," she disarmingly pleaded. A lot of her family would love to attend her viva, so would I please tell her as soon as I agreed on a date with her supervisor and other examiners. She was a very persuasive young lady and it was finally decided that her viva would take place in the second week of October. Her family were duly informed and for a few brief weeks their hard and cheerless existence, living literally next door to a Jewish settlement, was brightened by the prospect of the trip and the joyous occasion. But now, with Gaza and the West Bank plunged in bloody violence, and over 100 Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and the Gaza Airport closed, I seriously doubt that Intisar's viva will be witnessed by any of her relatives, and the prospective event has already taken on a completely different meaning.
I little thought as we planned for this peaceful scholarly affair that suddenly, as if by eerie design, the turbulent dramatic world of Mou'in Bessisou would jump off the pages of the dusty and long forgotten volume of his collected plays I fished out of my library and uncannily materialise as a brutal, searing reality on the stage of the world.
Leisurely or detachedly pursued in the shelter of the study, his six plays -- The Tragedy of Che Guevara, Black Uprising, Samson and Delilah, The Rock, Sparrows Build their Nests between Toes and Fingers and The Trial of Kalila wa Dimnah (collected in one volume published by Dar Al-Awda, Beirut, 1979) -- could provoke you to speculate on the double nature of violence as both aggression and resistance, on the ideologically controversial issue of the status and viability of politically committed art, or the pervasive and seminal influence of Bertolt Brecht on modern Arab drama since the 1960s. You may conclude his skillful manipulation of the vast resources of the stage to body forth his ideas in vivid concrete theatrical metaphors, and his talent for forging startlingly fresh poetic imagery, his symbols, verbal and visual, are often too transparent, his tone occasionally far too loud and savagely bludgeoning, and his impassioned, raw portrayal of the Palestinian tragedy allows little room for complex characterisation or profound inquiry into the paradoxes of human emotions. His plays have the colour of blood and the sound of thunder and seem designed to sweep you headlong on a tidal wave of pain and anger.
Mou'in Bessisou
This was perhaps inevitable given Bessisou's fiery spirit, wild, restless temperament and personal and national history. Born in Gaza on 10 October 1927 to a middle class, politically active family, his imagination as a child was fired by the story of his uncle, Asem, who had been arrested and executed in Istanbul in the early 1920s for issuing a political, anti-Ottoman-rule publication called Al-Muntada Al-Arabi. At 10, Bessisou found his mother smuggling arms to the Palestinian resistance against the British and his father risking his life on a dangerous trip to save one of its wounded leaders. But the really decisive experience in Bessisou's life and writing career was the 1948 Nakba. From that time on, and until his death in London in 1984, writing, for him, could never be a matter of "recollection in tranquillity". He was buried in Egypt where he had come to study in 1948, joining the department of literature at the American University, published his first collection of poetry, joined the communist party, was twice arrested and deported, appointed editor of a cultural section in Al-Ahram in 1969 (after splitting with the communists and making his peace with Nasser's regime), and had two of his plays (Black Revolt and Samson and Delilah) successfully performed in 1970 and 1971.
Bessisou's career as a playwright came to a virtual end when he left Cairo in 1972 to join the active Palestinian resistance and put his pen in the service of the PLO, ghost-writing, with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, many of Arafat's public speeches and letters to the occupied territories. The best-known of those was Arafat's address to the United Nations in 1974 which opened with the sentence: "I come to you with an olive branch in one hand, a rifle in the other." Now that the olive branch, more than ever, seems about to fade into an illusion, will the rifle ultimately gain the upper hand? Will the recent tragic events in Palestine give new credence to the grim message of Bessisou's plays that blood will have blood, that the only road to justice, freedom and human dignity must lie through piles of corpses, mass graves and blood baths? Are we ultimately to believe with Byron that history is a game of mutual homicide and that humanity, like nature, is red in tooth and claw?
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