12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Put out the light
Nehad Selaiha goes round Cairo with eyes firmly closed after watching Jibran Khalil Jibran's The Blind
In Clowns -- the title story of a collection of short stories by Sanaa Seleha (GEBO, 2000) -- a severely myopic little girl is given a pair of eye-glasses one day and ordered to wear them to improve her sight. She does, and is suddenly confronted with a different, alien world, thoroughly ordered and off-putting -- a world of harsh, unyielding lines, stark contours, and stiff divisions. Her world before was a throbbing conglomeration of blurred masses, hazy shapes and shifting shadows, constantly swimming in a soft sea of fluid light that kept changing its intensity and colours.
The experience was novel and disorienting. For a while she enjoyed the stability, firmness and geometric clarity of this new world; but it soon began to bore her. It was too sober, too predictable, devoid of mystery and fun. It held no surprises. Before she had the spectacles, she never knew exactly what lay ahead of her beyond a few yards; it could be anything. And although that was frightening at times, and often embarrassing (since she could not see anyone who greeted her across the street, or at a distance, and looked as if she was deliberately ignoring them, which earned her an unfair and painful reputation for discourtesy and arrogance) it was, all the same, thrilling and exciting; it kept her guessing all the time, trying to puzzle out the identity of things and people. With the specs too, she began to lose the habit of identifying things partly by their feel and smell, of holding them close to her face, to her eyes.
What she missed above all, however, were the little clowns that used to frisk among the leaves of the tree facing her window, or suddenly leap onto her father's forehead and start dancing whenever he argued with her mother or sounded angry. They even popped up in the classroom every time the teacher called her a dunce for failing to read what was written on the blackboard. It made her laugh to see them jumping up and down the teacher's mouth, which always made the teacher raise her voice and call her a moron. (It was after a phone call from the teacher to her father that she was taken to a doctor and given the specs.) She equally pined for the curious, big creatures that used to race high above every time the light dimmed and water dropped from the sky and her mother ordered her to stay inside. She would ignore her mother and sneak out onto the balcony to feel the strong wind buffeting her, while everything around whirled and danced in an ecstasy of motion. The fact that she got better marks at school now and people stopped scolding her for dropping or bumping into things or getting nearly run over by cars, and never called her ill-mannered again, never consoled her for the loss of the lovely clowns and flying creatures.
Jibran Khalil Jibran's The Blind, one of two forays into drama by this enormously popular Lebanese- American émigré poet and painter (1883-1931), originally written in English and recently translated into Arabic for the first time and performed at Al-Salaam theatre (the Youssef Idris hall) -- strongly reminded me of the myopic girl in Clowns. It seemed to continue the same argument, but in a more extreme form and in the rich mystical vein characteristic of all Jibran's work. In both, what is universally regarded as a defect, a handicap, is viewed from a new, startling perspective and presented, not as a lack, a deficiency impairing human consciousness but, rather, as a special quality yielding an alternative perception and a different mode of being. Indeed, both works seem to argue that this different perception is superior to the ordinary -- richer, more poetic and intense. Jibran goes a step further and claims for his blind hero not only exceptional intuition and insight, but a direct link with heaven. This takes the form of a guardian angel who is seen watching over the hero throughout the play, occasionally making profound remarks.
But Jibran's spirituality here is pantheistic rather than abstractive; it does not see spirit and matter as irreconcilable opposites, locked in eternal conflict but, rather, as one field of energy in which the spirit manifests itself in the motion of matter and matter becomes a living organism, a world, when penetrated by the spirit. It is a fervent spirituality of the mystical type which often inspires a feeling akin to sexual passion. Through Ann, the blind hero's step-daughter who adores him and voluntarily shares his sightless world by shutting her eyes and living as a blind person, the play suggests that the intense physical intimacy of the blind with the world -- its material shapes, smells, textures and sounds -- provides them with the kind of knowledge the Buddha meant when he advised his disciples to shut their eyes (literally) to the outward aspect of the world and listen intently to apprehend the truth, or, to use Jibran's words, "to get into the heart of life." With the Buddha one remembers Tiresias, Cassandra and a host of other mythical and fictional figures, for this view of blindness is not uncommon in literature. What distinguishes Jibran's treatment of it in this play, however, is, curiously, the powerful sensuality with which it is invested. Ann's love for her step-father is deeply spiritual, a kind of mystical union; but the ardour which imbues her words and confessions, together with the intense physical closeness of the two -- inevitable, since blind people, or those who act as if they were, have to identify and help each other mostly through touching -- produces, especially in performance, a definite erotic impact. Ironically the mother's jealousy of this intimate friendship between her daughter and her husband and the daughter's unveiled hostility towards her -- though meant to condemn the mother (who carries on a secret affair with a younger lover) as a vain, superficial, mean-spirited and earth-bound libidinous creature -- help to focus this erotic undercurrent and foreground it in the spectator's mind.
On the realistic level the play seems like a sordid tangle of incest and adultery, with the five characters forming two interconnected amorous triangles. This explains why the play (published with his other play, Lazarus and his Beloved in Dramas of Life, 1981) was not translated into Arabic earlier. Presumably Jibran's intent in this was to juxtapose two kinds of love -- physical lust and spiritual passion -- and to argue that the latter was stronger even than blood ties, traditional allegiances and social taboos. But it was a risky proposition; were he a lesser poet, such sleazy stuff could have easily sunk the play into the sexually titillating. Whatever success he had in carrying out his plan was solely due to the luminous transparency of the dialogue, its poignant lyricism, and the intricate interplay of the metaphors of light and darkness. The physical presence of the angel on the scene helps too, since neither couple is ever alone to enjoy complete privacy.
For a group of young actors to choose this play, in these repressive times, is an act of courage; to present it so well and movingly is an artistic feat. Realising the challenge these young people were taking, the translator, Maher El-Battuy, who lives in New York and works for the UN, waived his translator's fee to help them get the go-ahead with the production from the State Theatre Organisation. The actors and artistic crew (with Mohamed Ibrahim directing) -- all friends and students or graduates of the Theatre Institute -- were paid next to nothing; and the set (by Ahmed Abdel-Aziz), a simple wainscoted study, with a desk, a rocking chair and a fireplace, was unobtrusively elegant and cosy, and very cheap to execute. It was obvious in every detail of the performance that everyone who had a hand in it loved it and was inspired by it. Husam El-Shazli, as the blind hero, was simply entrancing, drawing everyone on the tiny stage and in the small auditorium into a magical circle of light, spun out of darkness -- the light Jibran meant, a light never seen on land or sea. His performance set the tone and tempo and all the actors joined in. Marwa Abdel-Moneim (as Ann), Liqa Swidan (as her mother), Ahmed Safwat (the Angel) and Amr El-Qadi (as the lover) strove valiantly to capture and body forth every feeling and nuance, however subtle and elusive. They kept us under Jibran's spell for 35 minutes, the duration of the play, and, afterwards, I found myself shutting my eyes tight and trying to feel my way out of the theatre.
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