		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Nidal Al-Ashqar And while she was away, she collected memories of Beirut and its people, and treasured it all. She saved words, plans and projects, hoarding them in preparation for her return, saving them like riches to be squandered by the prodigal daughter

photo: Thierry Gicquel

Nidal Al-Ashqar:

Urban warrior

On bare boards, with determined innocence

Profile by Mona Ghandour

Born into a family steeped in politics, the baby girl was given a boy's name: Nidal. That name, which means "struggle," was to determine her role in life, it seemed.
Nidal Al-Ashqar was born in the village of Dik Al-Me'di. Even there, the walls of the family house echoed with the poems and ideas of such artists and literary figures as Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, Nazik Al-Mala'ika and Onsi Al-Hajj. Al-Ashqar realised that there was more to the world than the village, but also that what lay beyond its narrow confines shared many of its characteristics. She came to identify with the people of the Arab world, and expressed this identification in the way she knew best. Gifted in the arts -- drama and poetry in particular -- her work shows her deep concern for the Arabs' plight. She is described as "a woman of fire," and her name -- which suits her perfectly -- epitomises her self-assigned mission. Such remarkable vigour and resilience prompt many to believe she is best compared to a city -- and to what city but Beirut could we compare Nidal Al-Ashqar?
At the Royal Academy for the Dramatic Art in London, Al-Ashqar specialised in acting and directing. Joan Littlewood was one of her instructors. Before the civil war broke out in Lebanon, she had established her experimental dramatic company. Her contribution was rich and varied: writing, acting and directing. She took the lead role in various dramatic works produced for several Arab television networks, among them Women in Love, Shagarat Al-Dorr and Harb Al-Basous.
The war aborted this vanguard experiment, but Al-Ashqar was not one to be easily discouraged. She set up a troupe in Jordan, Al-Mumathiloun Al-Arab (The Arab Actors), which traveled around the world performing a play called One Thousand and One Stories in Suq Ukaz.
She speaks of the theatre in rapturous tones; her remarks sound like confessions of love. She is overwhelmed by her passion. Speaking to her, one would think she is clutching a hot coal, which scorches her hand without burning the flesh.
"Theatre is my greatest passion, because the stage is the place where life and death unfold, and because audience and stage represent a fierce encounter where fraud and hypocrisy cannot exist and where communication is live and genuine," she begins. "I have deposited all my experiences, from the theatre or simply from everyday life, in my dramatic work. I have converted it all into energy to lay bare the negative in life."
She chooses the work she will interpret not according to an abstract aesthetic ideal, but for reasons that cannot be escaped when one lives where she does, as she does. She liked Three Tall Women, for instance, because "I wanted to expose to the public what hypocrisy and fraud are all about. In our society, parents raise their daughters to comply with a formula that will secure them rich husbands. Honour and virginity are the bait by which the daughter of a less privileged family can catch a rich husband who is out to find a commodity never consumed before. In my dramatic work, I try to focus on the romanticism that dominates the dreams of young girls. They fabricate images of male chivalry, which they then confer on the world of men and come to believe their own creation."
The contradiction between ideal and fact is a fatal one, she believes. The man adored through a haze of romanticism does not correspond with the choice dictated by the would-be bride's calculating mind. Her heart is in one place, Al-Ashqar asserts, while her choice of spouse is anchored in such down-to-earth considerations as social status.
"Women therefore tend to lie to themselves, to their husbands and to society. The three women in the play are a single woman, depicted at different ages: old age, middle age and youth. Each mirrors another and strips herself in moments of truth, of falseness and of betrayal.."
In this as in other works, Al-Ashqar's approach is seen as daring. She recognises virtue but not modesty. How does she walk the tightrope without falling into vulgarity?
"It is certainly a difficult equilibrium. I love beauty, and its sublime principles seem to protect me from the abyss of vulgarity. The aesthetic values in my work are the safeguard of my bold and daring discourse. They cover my naked words. This is the fine line. I accommodate material beauty to serve the ends, the essence of the work, or meanings I wish to convey. And there is truthfulness, which I uphold absolutely. Truthfulness means to strip off your skin and to offer your living flesh to your audience, who comes to your theatre for a feast of communal celebration."
To call things by their names -- to call a prostitute a prostitute and not a "woman of ill repute" -- this is the theatre of life, Al-Ashqar says, and the stage on which she works. This theatre does not recognise cosmetic alterations of the truth; it refuses to mask reality. "It is the contrary of a consumerist theatre, where emptiness and the void are embellished by splendid decoration. A true dramatic work is one that satisfies the many faculties of man: mind, heart, conscience and sex, which all work together to reach the spectator."
Her approach, she freely admits, is one that pulsates with life, and is characterised by "my lack of any inhibition in dealing with facts of life. Many Arab theatrical experiences are more similar to museum theatre: the discourse is preserved in a can and the actors move like corpses in narrow spaces; scenes are a dreadful repetition..."
For this reason, she dislikes "Italian-style drama," the closed theatres where spectators feel like pupils in a classroom. She loves street theatre and open spaces, unbound and imposing no limits. She also has an almost Luddite mistrust of technology, which she describes as an ogre: "It has reduced individuals to stereotypes. People contact one another using advanced technology, but fail to communicate. The café was at one time an area pulsating with life, a place where people met. But cafés today have lost their raison d'être. The storyteller has been cruelly banished, to be replaced by television."
Eschewing special effects, Al-Ashqar returns to the elemental: the body. "I work on the actor's body to produce the expression sought, a technique that is not common in Arab theatre. I use Western techniques, but my spirit is purely Arab. The body -- not words -- is the means to express happiness, pain, longing, apprehension, desire. Words follow the whims of the flesh. What we lack in Arab theatre is the element of surprise."
A woman who has always identified with the idea and practice of a common Arab experience, Al-Ashqar is reluctant nevertheless to pay lip service to the clichés of Arab unity. "The common element between my work and other experiences of the sort in the Arab world is the universal human theme: love, death, betrayal and pain. All our writing, acting, singing -- any artistic expression -- revolves by necessity around such themes. The differences have to do with circumstances of time and perspective, or the approach of the artist."
Her initial approach to her work is as instinctual and raw. She will fall in love with a script only if it is relevant. The role of art, she believes, is to establish a perspective on the future by tying it to both past and present. Her choices are also determined by values that have served as constants in her life. She comes from a family with a long history of political activity. Raised "in a legacy of struggle," she experienced the pain of deprivation when her father was imprisoned for the principles he upheld: freedom, pan-Arabism... These values still determine her choices, in her work and in her life.
Al-Ashqar once asked her father -- a historian as well as an activist -- how he wrote history. He replied: "First, I select the characters, I spread them before my eyes, and when they start moving and life stirs within them, I start writing about them. I live with them. The plan I set forth on paper seems to come to life, as armies, battlefields, people and houses fill the scene."
"I am like my father," she says simply. "The text dominates my mind. I dig up references and sources, to compare, eliminate and analyse." She is presently engaged in this arduous process, possessed, as it were, by a work titled Munamnamat (Mosaics) by Saadallah Wannous.
The play is set at the time of Tamerlane's entry into the Levant, in the fourteenth century. Wannous has Ibn Khaldun represent the intellectual in cahoots with the regime -- the invader in this context. Thus he raises the question of the relation between intellectuals and authority, focusing on love, hatred, rebellion and submission. "Connivance?" Al-Ashqar asks sweetly, "or opposition?"
Wannous depicts the attitudes of each class: the merchants, who offer their city to the enemy to save themselves; and the masses, who opt for resistance and rebellion.
"The theme of the play," she explains, "is almost identical to the situation the Arabs are in today. The enemy's name, the regime's structure, the composition of the influential classes and the discourse of intellectuals may vary, but in the final analysis it is the population's resistance that shapes history."
Al-Ashqar must speak from experience. The fall of Beirut put an end to her work there. But when life returned to the city, she returned too, more determined than ever. "Is Beirut the source of my inspiration to be silent, or to speak so creatively?" she muses.
She had come to Beirut from a small, obscure village, and was trapped by the city. She fell in love with Beirut -- the good and the bad. During the war, she left her friends behind. Many were crushed by the war. In Amman, where she had moved with her family, she found security and was offered the chance to work. "But I lived an endless nightmare, trying every day to breathe into myself some illusory force," she insists. "I took the life the war had stolen from me, I carried it to wider vistas outside Beirut, and disseminated it far and wide from the platforms I stood on in Arab theatres."
And while she was away, she collected memories of the city, news of Beirut and its people, and treasured it all. She saved words, plans and projects, hoarding them in preparation for her return, saving them like riches to be squandered by the prodigal daughter. "Imagine..." she says slowly. "I longed so much for those who had died, or had died in part, for all those who had left. I felt like a village widow, counting the dead."
The bombs reduced Beirut to ashes, but Al-Ashqar feels she is participating in the reconstruction efforts. She is trying to reconstruct the city of her thoughts; but this, too, is an arduous task. "Beirut today is changing, and it is very different from the image I so patiently and lovingly envisaged, fuelled by my aspirations for what Beirut would be in the future." Once again, she fears, the past is repeating itself. Once again, the city is adrift. "Our officials today are those of yesterday. They have changed their skins and their names, they sell themselves to the people in a different guise, but in essence they are the same."
As a nation, Al-Ashqar argues, Lebanon is built not on the coexistence of people of different confessions but on Lebanese citizenship, which transcends divisions. Its true wealth consists of its pluralism, its mosaic of cultures and minorities. Its diversity, she states passionately, is a source of power, not weakness. Its citizens can develop as Arabs endowed with great cultural and spiritual diversity. The city, however, is still confused about its own contradictions, and what is happening on the ground today "must be perceived as the continuation of an old nightmare."
But the Arab world awaits her, its horizons stretching further than the eye can see. In Egypt, Al-Ashqar feels at home; and Egypt, it seems, returns the compliment. Invited to give a poetry reading by Samir Sarhan, Al-Ashqar remembers being "scared stiff" by her first encounter with an Egyptian audience; but the warmth her listeners showed dissipated all her fears. "I love Egypt," she cries impulsively, "because the people are genuine and sincere, and are great admirers of art. They are appreciative, with a sophisticated yet spontaneous response to good art. An Arab for me is a splendid person. I love Arab society in its entirety. I have so much energy, and I want so badly to share it."
Honoured at the Cairo Theatre Festival in 1994, and again in 1999, she already had a long acquaintance with the Egyptian theatre scene. Visiting in 1980, at the invitation of Samiha Ayyoub, the head of the National Theatre then, she had soon extended the circle of her acquaintances, striking up several fruitful collaboration efforts. Jewellery designer Azza Fahmy, who created the accessories for Saadallah Wannous's Tuqous Al-Isharat wal-Tahawulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations), is working with Al-Ashqar on costumes and accessories for the forthcoming Munamnamat.
Only her deep concern for Beirut's fate could chip away at this irrepressible woman, because her family and her artistic roots are so profoundly anchored in the city's life. "Every day I ask myself, where did our generation go wrong? How did we drag the city through so much degradation? What have we done to our beliefs and our dreams? How can we save ourselves?"
To protect herself from possible despair at such dark thoughts, to defend what she describes as the "innocent, child-like qualities of my art," she will allow only a trusted few to glimpse her soul. "I reinforce myself with a wall, built of the people I love. Some see me as strong, aggressive and authoritarian, but those are only straw defences. My soul is quite transparent. I am always afraid it will be blemished. I will allow nothing to tamper with its innocence. From such innocence, trees and thorns have grown."

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