Intimate encounters

Lina Mahmoud

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Borrowing its name from the title of a poem by the late vernacular poet Fouad Haddad, Al-Misaharati group draws on Haddad's notion of the misaharati (the man who wakes up Muslims to eat before dawn in Ramadan) as someone who also performs a consciousness-raising role waking people up from historical slumber. The group started in 1989 as a workshop for theatrical techniques directed by Abir Ali.

The idea behind the Misaharati group is to mirror daily life, Ali explains, so each member of the troupe may introduce an anecdote or situation that took place in his or her family or daily life -- or one that they heard the taxi driver recount the day before. Research would then begin, involving the collection of vast amounts of data: group members visit houses, record conversations and seek out interesting stories and folk songs. Eventually a text is written, the basis for extended improvisations.

"The idea is to take a critical look at our social history and our reality," Ali explains. "There is an official, a politically safe version of history written down, but much social history goes unrecorded. We try to put that other history right in front of our eyes and to read it differently, so as to see the beauty and ugliness of our own behaviour," she says.

Marriage as a social arrangement and a cheap means to sex, religion as a tool of power, economic disinheritance, obsession with masculinity, non-confrontational, fantastical means of dealing with an oppressive reality and double standards are all recurrent themes running through the group's performances -- carefully linked to the narratives presented and dealt with in relation to our present-day lives.

"The idea of a haramlek (harem quarters) is relevant in this show because in that space the women are imprisoned, while the men guarding the haramlek are eunuchs," Ali says. "We want to say that both men and women are oppressed, and if women are more oppressed it is not because men are evil, but because of the unjust society that acts to enslave both men and women," she explains.

Despite Ali's best intentions, Hakawi Al-Haramlek lacks the necessary critical edge for it to become a feminist interpretation of the harem. Folkloric elements are borrowed lock, stock and barrel, often in a nostalgic manner that seems to be looking back with admiration to earlier happy days. The scene where one woman sings Yana yammak (Either me or your mother) is an example. Ali does not agree "We borrowed the song from the 1920s, the age of 'awalim, to emphasise social double standards because its our belief that folklore reflects our present-day psyches."

"Part of the agenda of the group is to look back at our social heritage," Fairuz Karawya, the music director, explains, "including the songs. Old and new. We borrow things that meet our needs. Many of our songs are bits and pieces made up of more than one song. Also we work on the music of the songs," she goes on. "We emphasise our vision through stresses and pauses in the rhythms. Also the way we perform the songs and the instruments we play help to clarify our vision. These songs became part of our consciousness during preparations for the show. They were crying out to us, persistent in our memory."

"I was concerned with the words," Karawya goes on. "I made the music, the singers and the actors concentrate on the words. Very often audience members would comment that it was as if they were hearing that extremely familiar song for the first time in their life."