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“Why Ishmael’s Daughters?”
On Islam and Theatre, Assia Djebar
Introduction
I noticed that in the last panel of this Islam Colloquium, the question of “privacy” or “private sphere” was posed for both literature and film. I have chosen to speak here about my experience in the theatre – both as author and director – in the year 2000, with “Ishmael’s Daughters in the Wind, in the Storm”, a musical drama in 5 acts, the action of which takes place in Medina just before and just after the death of the Prophet Mohammed.
Am I going beyond the perimeters of the topic, even though one could say that my theatrical material lies at the very core of Islamic culture?
In literature, the author – whether novelist, poet, or essayist – in some way speaks with him or herself as the starting point; or he invents characters who live their own unique story: and here “privacy” is truly the point of departure of the writing. To a greater or lesser degree, the readers, too, will be stirred in their private mental space. The book to be read always invites a one-on-one encounter.
In film, even if there are several writers (the playwright, the director, the screenwriter, the composer), the plot, the locations, or the actors in motion will all provide the cinematic space either by a compression of intimacy (a close-up of a face, a conversation between two people close together) or, in contrast, by the expansion into a recognizable setting (a street in the Medina of Fez, a crowd of demonstrators in Istanbul). But every spectator, either at home in front of a small screen or in the darkness of the movie theatre, always receives these images in isolation!
It is therefore in the “private sphere” that the reception of written and filmed works can touch, modify, and transform a viewer in the Islamic countries.
What about the theatre then, both in its writing and its production? Is theatre not both literature (through its narrative) and imagery, even though actors of flesh and blood and the simultaneous presence of spectators are there together?
Thus, the theatre becomes action with a magnified echo; it is a ceremony at the very center of the city.
That is why it seems to me to be the only art form that – by its power of transformation, but also by its need for a “presence” in the strongest sense of the word – belongs in the two arenas examined here: the public as well as the private. The effect of “catharsis” (or purification), which is its responsibility, causes the emotional reception that is aroused to be both aesthetic and political.
When I think of just the Arab world of the past two or three decades, I sometimes believe that rather than encouraging a truly theatrical production, it is unfortunately in the restricted and asphyxiating space of the chief, the “rais”, the leader of the one and only party, the dictator, that, what I would call an “uncontrollable need for theater” is overwhelming. This becomes sub-theater, in short an insidious drama, a sinister play.
My second comment, still dealing only with the cultural future of this same Arab world – in which great poets, novelists, and authentic filmmakers surely do exist – asks how a society or the religious pregnability that reinforces taboos and censorships of all kinds as well as authoritarianism can realistically be improved without developing any theatrical creativity? You might as well move forward in the dark and be blind in one eye! One of the main reasons for this barrenness, as I see it, lies in the escalation of a sexual segregation, at least south of the Mediterranean.
To conclude this first part – consisting of nothing but questions and doubts – I can only recall Nietzsche who emphasized to what extent the power of Tragedy is there to “stimulate” the life of a people. He added:
“Tragedy is like the mediator who establishes his reign by separating the dynamic qualities of a people from its most harmless flaws!”
Furthermore, I would like to keep in mind what the Argentine Borges developed in his famous short story, “The Quest of Averroes.” He images Averroes, the illustrious late twelfth-century philosopher of Cordoba who, as he proceeds with his commentary on Aristotle, runs in the words “comedy” and “tragedy” and does not understand them. Borges concludes and I quote, “I remember that Averroes, a prisoner of Islamic culture, never could know what the significance of the words “tragedy” and “comedy” was.”
Thus, Borges wrongly gave credence to the idea of a non-theatre that was supposedly inscribed into the nature of the Islamic culture itself. During the decades of 1170 and 1180 when he was working, the Arab philosopher lived or traveled just a bit father east in the Iranian Shiite world, he could have seen the “passion” that commemorated the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, which was presented annually in Kerbela.
These “taziyes” or popular theater of lamentation, both spontaneously at first, would later from the 15th to the 18th centuries, develop into a theatre that was almost sumptuous in its consecrated places and its repertory, an entire liturgy, in fact. We should add that the Shiite taziye continues to live on in today’s Iran!
II
In the second part of my presentation, I would like to mention my work as author and answer the question why I immersed myself two years ago in the writing of two musical dramas each dealing with a subject from Islamic history.
Earlier, in 1989 and 1990, I had already written and published a fictional narrative “Far from Medina” that recounts how, at the death of the Prophet Mohammed, a political dissent arose around the succession. However, in that historical evocation, which very closely follows the chronicles of Ibn Saad and Tabari, I inverted the point of view: indeed, everything is told from the perspective of the female witnesses, from the most famous to the most humble.
I began this book shortly after the troubles started in my country, Algeria. In October 1988, an uprising of young people was severely repressed at the very heart of Algiers. I was there. It was not difficult to foresee that the Islamists were going to return most aggressively to the political arena. My motivation as a writer was therefore also very much of a private order (I was extremely upset by the sight of tanks in the capital city and by the Islamists in the role of heroes). Thus, to go back to the roots of Islam with women, was my response to the caricature that today’s Islamists were making of those origins.
More than ten years after that book I returned, in 2000, to the same historical material – still following the Arabic chronicles – but this time, I wrote two musical dramas in the space of a few months. One was “Ishmael’s Daughters in the Wind, in the Storm”, in 5 acts, which was produced by the Teatro di Roma in September and October 2000. A second, “Aïcha and the Women of Medina”, a drama in 3 acts, was on the program in Rotterdam for January 2001 but not presented. I wrote these two dramas incorporating women who lived during the time of the Prophet’s life and death, in the choruses and in many characters of the plays. Among these women, I spotlighted two specific heroines, Fatima, the daughter of the Forefather, and a tragic figure whose suffering and rage in the face of being disowned we follow until her death. In the second drama, the action, more restricted in time, focuses on Aïcha, the Prophet’s young wife of fifteen years, who before our eyes relives what is known as the “affair of the necklace.” Let us remember that, faced with the attacks of the slanderers; the Prophet is momentarily very confused before he is able to clear his wife, thanks to the revelation in a Qu’rânic verse in which every Muslim woman is protected from slander.
The commission for these two plays came from abroad – from the largest theatre in Rome on the one hand, from an experimental Dutch company leaving me free to choose a subject dealing with Islam, on the other. I accepted and threw myself into the work, aware of the fact that I was entering a risky area. Risky in the first place because many people in the potential audience think, as does Borges, that theatre does not or cannot exist in Islamic culture. It was a double risk because a stage presentation puts sacred figures at play.
In “Ishmael’s Daughters in the Wind, in the Storm”, I did, however, succeed in bringing the roles of Aicha and Fatima to the stage, as well as the future caliphs Abou Bekr, Omar and Ali, and all this for 25 performances in Rome in the fall of 2000, plus 5 performances to open the Palermo Festival. All of these, then, were heroes of Islam reliving conflicts and passions known to the majority of Muslims, but in Italian with choruses and refrains chanted by one female and one male chorus.
The risk lay as much in the subject matter as in the staging, which I therefore took upon myself. I decided carefully and faithfully on the costumes, the headdresses – using Persian and Turkish miniatures as inspiration – and I chose to have the sacred figures – Fatima, Aicha, and the three future caliphs – wear masks. Only the character of the Prophet remained invisible. At the moment of his death on the stage, one sees his loved ones and wives by his bedside behind a semi-transparent curtain. Stage front are the women who keep watch, who wait, who evoke certain scenes from the Prophet’s life, and who at the crucial moment burst into tears.
III Conclusion
It is obvious that the very real strength, I would say the “documentary” strength, of the words of the Prophet’s daughter who challenges, and those of the Prophet’s wife who protests, suddenly resonates in us. In all of us, men and women, not only as a truth from the resuscitated past, but these words of women in action – because they come through the intervention of theatre – instantly question the present-day Islamic reality, that is to say the iniquitous status forced upon women.
All in all, the aim of such theatre is neither hagiography nor obviously liturgy with its lamentations, even in their lyrical heartbreak. It is a dry protestation, the record of the origin’s disruption that over the centuries has only become more pronounced. There is a gaping contradiction between the denial of justice suffered by “Ishmael’s daughters” of today – in Algeria, Arabia, Afghanistan, and so on – and a pseudo-fidelity to the origins, brandished in the name of masculinity. No, let us speak plainly: in the name of a terrifying Islamic misogyny, and this non-fidelity is, in fact, relived on stage in any of the world’s theaters and languages.
This theatre becoming a theatre of “gender” should be the only one of true commitment to living culture in Islamic countries.
Here is the rage and despair of the disinherited Fatima, on the verge of death, and the suffering of young Aïcha who resists with all the innocence of her youth, standing up to her slanderers, and protected in the end by Qu’rânic verse. On the stage, they clarify, concretely, and before our very eyes, the vulnerability and courage of every Muslim woman within her “privacy”.